ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a proposal for a scientific approach to housing research. Many housing researchers are focused on a housing problem and coming up with an immediate practical solution to this problem that they are largely unaware of the internal processes of research, do not take account of them or set them aside. More fundamentally housing researchers operating within this common-sense approach to housing presuppose the adequacy of their internal processes. Kemeny urges housing researchers to take conscious control of the research agenda and acknowledge, and take a stand on, the inevitability of their involvement in the social construction of housing issues. Asking questions in the context of everyday living is very different from asking questions in a scientific context. For Blaikie, social research can pursue one of a set of eight objectives explore, describe, understand, explain, predict, change, evaluate and assess social impacts with the first five being characteristic of basic research and the last three of applied research.
