chapter 2 and 3 in research

How To Write The Methodology Chapter

Overview: The Methodology Chapter

• The purpose  of the methodology chapter
• Why you need to craft this chapter (really) well
• How to write and structure the chapter
• Methodology chapter example
• Essential takeaways

What (exactly) is the methodology chapter?

The methodology chapter is where you outline the philosophical foundations of your research and detail the specific methodological choices you’ve made. In other words, the purpose of this chapter is to explain exactly how you designed your study and, just as importantly, why you made those choices.

Your methodology chapter should comprehensively describe and justify all the methodological decisions involved in your study. For instance, the research approach you took (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods), your sampling strategy (who you collected data from), how you gathered your data, and how you analysed it. If that sounds a bit daunting, don’t worry – we’ll walk you through all these methodological aspects in this post .

Why is the methodology chapter important?

The methodology chapter plays two important roles in your dissertation or thesis:

Firstly, it demonstrates your understanding of research theory, which is what earns you marks. A flawed research design or methodology would mean flawed results. So, this chapter is vital as it allows you to show the marker that you know what you’re doing and that your results are credible .

Secondly, the methodology chapter is what helps to make your study replicable. In other words, it allows other researchers to undertake your study using the same methodological approach, and compare their findings to yours. This is very important within academic research, as each study builds on previous studies.

The methodology chapter is also important in that it allows you to identify and discuss any methodological issues or problems you encountered (i.e., research limitations ), and to explain how you mitigated the impacts of these.

Now, it’s important to understand that every research project has its limitations , so it’s important to acknowledge these openly and highlight your study’s value despite its limitations . Doing so demonstrates your understanding of research design, which will earn you marks. 

Need a helping hand?

How to write up the methodology chapter

Before you start writing, it’s always a good idea to draw up a rough outline to guide your writing. Don’t just start writing without knowing what you’ll discuss where. If you do, you’ll likely end up with a disjointed, ill-flowing narrative . You’ll then waste a lot of time rewriting in an attempt to try to stitch all the pieces together. Do yourself a favour and start with the end in mind .

Section 1 – Introduction

As with all chapters in your dissertation or thesis, the methodology chapter should have a brief introduction. In this section, you should remind your readers what the focus of your study is, especially the research aims . As we’ve discussed many times on the blog, your methodology needs to align with your research aims, objectives and research questions. Therefore, it’s useful to frontload this component to remind the reader (and yourself!) what you’re trying to achieve.

Section 2 – The Methodology

The next section of your chapter is where you’ll present the actual methodology. In this section, you need to detail and justify the key methodological choices you’ve made in a logical, intuitive fashion. Importantly, this is the heart of your methodology chapter, so you need to get specific – don’t hold back on the details here. This is not one of those “less is more” situations.

Let’s take a look at the most common components you’ll likely need to cover.

Methodological Choice #1 – Research Philosophy

Research philosophy refers to the underlying beliefs (i.e., the worldview) regarding how data about a phenomenon should be gathered , analysed and used . The research philosophy will serve as the core of your study and underpin all of the other research design choices, so it’s critically important that you understand which philosophy you’ll adopt and why you made that choice. If you’re not clear on this, take the time to get clarity before you make any further methodological choices.

While several research philosophies exist, two commonly adopted ones are positivism and interpretivism . These two sit roughly on opposite sides of the research philosophy spectrum.

Positivism states that the researcher can observe reality objectively and that there is only one reality, which exists independently of the observer. As a consequence, it is quite commonly the underlying research philosophy in quantitative studies and is oftentimes the assumed philosophy in the physical sciences.

Contrasted with this, interpretivism , which is often the underlying research philosophy in qualitative studies, assumes that the researcher performs a role in observing the world around them and that reality is unique to each observer . In other words, reality is observed subjectively .

These are just two philosophies (there are many more), but they demonstrate significantly different approaches to research and have a significant impact on all the methodological choices. Therefore, it’s vital that you clearly outline and justify your research philosophy at the beginning of your methodology chapter, as it sets the scene for everything that follows.

The next thing you would typically discuss in your methodology section is the research type. The starting point for this is to indicate whether the research you conducted is inductive or deductive .

Inductive research takes a bottom-up approach , where the researcher begins with specific observations or data and then draws general conclusions or theories from those observations. Therefore these studies tend to be exploratory in terms of approach.

Conversely , d eductive research takes a top-down approach , where the researcher starts with a theory or hypothesis and then tests it using specific observations or data. Therefore these studies tend to be confirmatory in approach.

Related to this, you’ll need to indicate whether your study adopts a qualitative, quantitative or mixed  approach. As we’ve mentioned, there’s a strong link between this choice and your research philosophy, so make sure that your choices are tightly aligned . When you write this section up, remember to clearly justify your choices, as they form the foundation of your study.

Methodological Choice #3 – Research Strategy

Next, you’ll need to discuss your research strategy (also referred to as a research design ). This methodological choice refers to the broader strategy in terms of how you’ll conduct your research, based on the aims of your study.

Several research strategies exist, including experimental , case studies , ethnography , grounded theory, action research , and phenomenology . Let’s take a look at two of these, experimental and ethnographic, to see how they contrast.

Experimental research makes use of the scientific method , where one group is the control group (in which no variables are manipulated ) and another is the experimental group (in which a specific variable is manipulated). This type of research is undertaken under strict conditions in a controlled, artificial environment (e.g., a laboratory). By having firm control over the environment, experimental research typically allows the researcher to establish causation between variables. Therefore, it can be a good choice if you have research aims that involve identifying causal relationships.

Ethnographic research , on the other hand, involves observing and capturing the experiences and perceptions of participants in their natural environment (for example, at home or in the office). In other words, in an uncontrolled environment.  Naturally, this means that this research strategy would be far less suitable if your research aims involve identifying causation, but it would be very valuable if you’re looking to explore and examine a group culture, for example.

The next thing you’ll need to detail in your methodology chapter is the time horizon. There are two options here: cross-sectional and longitudinal . In other words, whether the data for your study were all collected at one point in time (cross-sectional) or at multiple points in time (longitudinal).

The choice you make here depends again on your research aims, objectives and research questions. If, for example, you aim to assess how a specific group of people’s perspectives regarding a topic change over time , you’d likely adopt a longitudinal time horizon.

Another important factor to consider is simply whether you have the time necessary to adopt a longitudinal approach (which could involve collecting data over multiple months or even years). Oftentimes, the time pressures of your degree program will force your hand into adopting a cross-sectional time horizon, so keep this in mind.

Methodological Choice #5 – Sampling Strategy

Next, you’ll need to discuss your sampling strategy . There are two main categories of sampling, probability and non-probability sampling.

Probability sampling involves a random (and therefore representative) selection of participants from a population, whereas non-probability sampling entails selecting participants in a non-random  (and therefore non-representative) manner. For example, selecting participants based on ease of access (this is called a convenience sample).

The right sampling approach depends largely on what you’re trying to achieve in your study. Specifically, whether you trying to develop findings that are generalisable to a population or not. Practicalities and resource constraints also play a large role here, as it can oftentimes be challenging to gain access to a truly random sample. In the video below, we explore some of the most common sampling strategies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSmedyVv-Us Video can't be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Sampling Methods 101: Probability & Non-Probability Sampling Explained Simply (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSmedyVv-Us) Methodological Choice #6 – Data Collection Method

Next up, you’ll need to explain how you’ll go about collecting the necessary data for your study. Your data collection method (or methods) will depend on the type of data that you plan to collect – in other words, qualitative or quantitative data.

Typically, quantitative research relies on surveys , data generated by lab equipment, analytics software or existing datasets. Qualitative research, on the other hand, often makes use of collection methods such as interviews , focus groups , participant observations, and ethnography.

So, as you can see, there is a tight link between this section and the design choices you outlined in earlier sections. Strong alignment between these sections, as well as your research aims and questions is therefore very important.

Methodological Choice #7 – Data Analysis Methods/Techniques

The final major methodological choice that you need to address is that of analysis techniques . In other words, how you’ll go about analysing your date once you’ve collected it. Here it’s important to be very specific about your analysis methods and/or techniques – don’t leave any room for interpretation. Also, as with all choices in this chapter, you need to justify each choice you make.

With the key methodological choices outlined and justified, the next step is to discuss the limitations of your design. No research methodology is perfect – there will always be trade-offs between the “ideal” methodology and what’s practical and viable, given your constraints. Therefore, this section of your methodology chapter is where you’ll discuss the trade-offs you had to make, and why these were justified given the context.

Methodological limitations can vary greatly from study to study, ranging from common issues such as time and budget constraints to issues of sample or selection bias . For example, you may find that you didn’t manage to draw in enough respondents to achieve the desired sample size (and therefore, statistically significant results), or your sample may be skewed heavily towards a certain demographic, thereby negatively impacting representativeness .

In this section, it’s important to be critical of the shortcomings of your study. There’s no use trying to hide them (your marker will be aware of them regardless). By being critical, you’ll demonstrate to your marker that you have a strong understanding of research theory, so don’t be shy here. At the same time, don’t beat your study to death . State the limitations, why these were justified, how you mitigated their impacts to the best degree possible, and how your study still provides value despite these limitations .

Section 4 – Concluding Summary

Finally, it’s time to wrap up the methodology chapter with a brief concluding summary. In this section, you’ll want to concisely summarise what you’ve presented in the chapter. Here, it can be a good idea to use a figure to summarise the key decisions, especially if your university recommends using a specific model (for example, Saunders’ Research Onion ).

Methodology Chapter Example

Wrapping up.

Also, remember the golden rule of the methodology chapter – justify every choice ! Make sure that you clearly explain the “why” for every “what”, and reference credible methodology textbooks or academic sources to back up your justifications.

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Chapter 2: Getting Started in Research

2.1 Basic Concepts 2.2 Generating Good Research Questions 2.3 Reviewing the Research Literature

Research Methods in Psychology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Here is the abstract of a 2014 article in the journal Psychological Science.

Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning. (Mueler & Oppenheimer, 2014, p. 1159) [1]

In this abstract, the researcher has identified a research question—about the effect of taking notes on a laptop on learning—and identified why it is worthy of investigation—because the practice is ubiquitous and may be harmful to learning. In this chapter, we give you a broad overview of the various stages of the research process. These include finding a topic of investigation, reviewing the literature, refining your research question and generating a hypothesis, designing and conducting a study, analyzing the data, coming to conclusions, and reporting the results.

• Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25 (6), 1159-1168. ↵

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HOW TO WRITE CHAPTER TWO OF RESEARCH PROJECTS

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO RESEARCH WRITING – CHAPTER TWO

Historically, Chapter Two of every academic Research/Project Write up has been Literature Review, and this position has not changed. When preparing your write up for this Chapter, you can title it “Review of Related Literature” or just “Literature Review”.

This is the chapter where you provide detailed explanation of previous researches that has been conducted on your topic of interest. The previous studies that must be selected for this chapter must be academic work/articles published in an internationally reputable journal.

Also, the selected articles must not be more than 10 years old (article publication date to project writing date). For better organization, it has been generally accepted that the arrangement for a good literature review write up follows this order:

2.0     Introduction

2.1     Conceptual Review

2.2     Theoretical Framework

2.3     Empirical review

Summary of Literature/Research Gap

2.0     INTRODUCTION

This serves as the preamble to the chapter alone or preliminary information on the chapter. All the preliminary information that should be provided here should cover just this chapter alone because the project already has a general introduction which is chapter one. It should only reflect the content of this chapter. This is why the introduction for literature review is sometimes optional.

Basically here, you should describe the contents of the chapter in few words

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2.1     CONCEPTUAL REVIEW

This section can otherwise be titled “Conceptual Framework”. It must capture all explanations on the concepts that are associated with your research topic in logical order. For example, if your research topic is “A study of the effect of advertisement on firm sales”, your conceptual framework can best follow this order:

2.1     Conceptual Framework

2.1.1  Advertisement

2.1.1.1        Types of Advertisement

2.1.1.2.      Advantages of Advertisement

2.1.2  Concept of Firm Sales

2.1.2.1        Factor determining Firm Sales

These concepts must be defined and described from the historical point of view. Topical works and prevailing issues globally, in your continent and nation on the concepts should be presented here. You must be able to provide clear information here that there should be no ambiguity about the variables you are studying.

2.2     THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

This can be otherwise titled “Theoretical Review”. This section should contain all previous professional theories and models that have provided explanations on your research topic in the recent past. Yes, related theories and models also falls within the category of past literature for your research write up. Professional theories that are most relevant to your topic should be separately arranged in this section, as seen in the example below:

2.2.1  Jawkwish Theory of Performance

2.2.2  Interstitial Theory of Ranking

2.2.3  Grusse Theory of Social Learning

But the most important thing to note while writing this part is that, apart from making sure that you must do a thorough research and ensure that the most relevant theories for your research topic is selected, your theoretical review must capture some important points which should better reflect in this order for each model:

The proponent of the theory/model, title and year of publication, aim/purpose/structure of the theory, contents and arguments of the theory, findings and conclusions of the theory, criticisms and gaps of the theory, and finally the relevance of the theory to your current research topic.

Best Research Writing eBook

Academic project or thesis or dissertation writing is not an easy academic endeavor. To reach your goal, you must invest time, effort, and a strong desire to succeed. Writing a thesis while also juggling other course work is challenging, but it doesn't have to be an unpleasant process. A dissertation or thesis is one of the most important requirements for any degree, and this book will show you how to create a good research write-up from a high level of abstraction, making your research writing journey much easier. It also includes examples of how and what the contents of each sub-headings should look like for easy research writing. This book will also constitute a step-by-step research writing guide to scholars in all research fields.

2.3     EMPIRICAL REVIEW

This can be otherwise titled “Empirical Framework”. This is usually described as the critical review of the existing academic works/literature on your research topic. This can be organized or arranged in two different alternative ways when developing your write up:

• It can be arranged in a table with heading arranged horizontally in this order: Author name and initials, year and title of publication, aim/objectives, methodology, findings, conclusions, recommendations, research gap. Responses for the above should be provided in spaces provided below in the table for up to 40 articles at least.
• The second option excludes the use of tables but still contains the same information exactly as above for tables. The information is provided in thematic text format with appropriate in-text references. Note that all these points to be included can be directly gotten from the articles except the research gap which requires your critical thinking. Your research gap must identify an important thing(s) the previous research has not done well or not done at all, which your current research intends to do. Although, you should criticize, but constructively while acknowledging areas of perfections and successes of the authors.

Note that every research you critically review must have evident/obvious gaps that your research intends to fill.

SUMMARY OF LITERATURE REVIEW/RESEARCH GAP/GAP ANALYSIS

This is the concluding part of every literature review write up. It provides the summary of the entire content of the whole Chapter. Sometimes, some institutions require that you bring the analysis of all the gaps of the existing literature under review here. Conclusions on the whole existing literature under review should briefly be highlighted in this section.

I trust that this article will help undergraduates and postgraduate researchers in writing a very good Literature Review for your Research/Project/Paper/Thesis, and will also meet the needs of our esteemed readers who has been requesting for a guide on how to write their Chapter Two (Literature Review).

Enjoy, as you develop a good Literature Review for your research!

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• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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Research Methods

Chapter 3 literature review, 3.1 introduction.

The literature review is often the weak part in master theses.

There are various reasons for this.

One is that doing a proper literature review is not an easy task, and time-consuming.

It is not easy because two things may happen. - Either there is so much literature that summarizing it all is a daunting task. - Or there is little or even none to be found.

Too much literature is a luxury problem.

The way to handle this problem is by using a mind-map approach.

If your topic is, say, university performance , then zoom in on those aspects that you think are especially relevant.

If you still want to stick to the broad topic of university performance, then you can limit your search to recent items. For example, in Google Scholar you can customize the time range in a search to the last 5 years, thereby reducing the number of hits.

Likewise, refined or advanced searches can be applied in e-libraries like Ebsco and Science Direct . Still, if your research is on historic thinking on your topic, you need to adopt an alternative strategy to narrow down the number of hits.

Obviously, your objective in searching from whichever databases you are using, is in detecting the most relevant items and filtering out irrelevant ones. It takes experience, trial-and-error and common sense thinking to come to good results.

Given the sheer endless of papers, reports, books, newspaper articles and other items that can be found on any topic, the probability that two researchers – equally brilliant – on the same topic will end up with identical reference lists, is zero. For that reason, it is good practice to explicitly state your search strategies at the beginning of chapter 2.

3.2 Search Strategies: Snowballing

One strategy that saves a lot of time, is snowballing.

The idea is that in a first step, you identify, say, three of four key articles which are recent, high quality (published in A or B journals), and relevant (in the sense of being very close to your topic).

Since the authors of these articles have dealt with the same challenge of finding relevant articles, you can select articles from their lists of references. Then the snowball starts rolling and growing, as the second-wave articles again will contain some interesting references.

In this way, you will quickly acquaint yourself with the relevant theories and empirical studies in your field of interest.

The disadvantage of snowballing is that, by definition, you will travel back in time. So, make sure to start with recent articles, published no earlier than two or three years ago.

3.3 Be Selective!

We cannot emphasize enough that the review has to be critical. Often, students tend to write their literature review in the fallen-bookcase style. That is, as a collection of summaries of things that various authors have said but lacking a clear structure, leaving the reader with a why-am-I-reading-this feeling.

The messages are: - Write with an objective in mind - Structure the review - Use your own words and interpretations - Make clear why and how the items reviewed are important to your study.

3.4 Structure

With regard to the structure of your literature review, there are various way to do it. As long as the structure is clear and deliberate, it will ensure that the literature review becomes a relevant part of your thesis.

Three main structures are:

3.4.1 Chronological

This is especially relevant if you want to describe the trends in thinking on the topic over time.

For example, the views on the role of labor continue to change.

Nowadays, robotization and 3D-printing are efficient substitutes for human labor. But already in 1995, Rifkin wrote about the decline of the labor force. What can we learn from the views on the matter, over time?

Note that the snowballing-technique might miss out this old item!

Rifkin, J. (1995). The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons

3.4.2 By schools of thought

It is possible that even today, there are differing views on a certain topic.

For example, while globalization is seen as a trend of converging cultures, many researchers from empirical evidence find that cultural differences between nations persist – and are even reinforced in the face of globalization. Here, it makes sense to group the arguments of both camps, rather than use a chronological structure.

3.4.3 By (sub)topic.

Especially if your topic is broad, like in university performance , it makes sense to break down your discussion by topics.

For example, you can have sections on:

• Student performance
• Citations of university publications
• Performance of private versus public universities

3.5 Critical Review

One indicator of a critical review, is your ability to summarize the various items that you have reviewed in your own words, and in relation to one another. Reviews in the style of Johnson (2010) said “[literal quote]”, and Peters (2017) claimed “[literal quote]”, leave it very much to the reader to give it an interpretation. The value added of the researcher, is more than just selecting or collecting a number of papers. Without structure, and without paraphrasing and interpretation, the review is simply not a critical review of literature.

3.6 Role of the Literature Review in your Research

The literature review is an input to both your research questions and the design of your study.

As we have said before, in the initial stages you start reading driven by your initial research ideas, and you refine your ideas based on reading. It is a creative, circular process – rather than a linear from-goals-to-decisions process.

But once this part of the process is done, a linear type of project appears on the horizon.

The end-point of the first stage is a research model plus methodology.

The research model, in a nutshell, contains all the variables on which you need data, and the relationships between these variables.

The methodology is the way you are going to collect the data, for example doing a survey with a number of respondents in this region and that period of time.

It helps to see the literature as the bridge between the creative process (what do I want?) and the research project (how to collect and analyze the data?). The research model is, in essence, that bridge. The elements of the model are based on your research questions and the literature. We would not expect to see variables in your research model that are not discussed in the review of literature. In the same vein, why would you discuss issues in the review of literature that are not included in the research model?

There are exceptions to this black-and-white view. In your research model, you may include variables that have not been described in literature, like for example country or organization specific actors that you think are of relevance to the solution of the problem at hand (remember: it’s applied research!). You can also deliberately exclude variables that are discussed in the literature as being relevant, on the grounds of the need to focus on the issues that you think are most prevalent. Adding more variables to your research, and questions to your survey, may have consequences for the time and resources available.

3.7 Beware of Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as:

• To use the ideas or words of someone else as your own
• To use someone else's work without crediting him or her
• To present as your new and original idea, a work that is derived from an existing source.

Plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.

All of following are considered plagiarism:

• Turning in someone else's work as your own
• Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
• Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
• Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
• Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
• Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work - whether you give credit or not.

Plagiarism can be avoided by properly citing sources.

Acknowledging that material has been borrowed and providing the reader with the information necessary to find that source is enough to prevent.

However, as indicated above, a soft form of plagiarism occurs if a substantial part of your thesis is based on ideas from others, and the added value in terms of discussion, interpretation and putting the reviewed items into the context of your thesis, is limited. Even if this soft form of plagiarism is not punished as such, then still the score on your literature review will be low – as it can hardly be called a critical review of literature.

3.8 Referencing

In referencing, it is mandatory to use the so-called APA-style. APA stands for American Psychological Association. A detailed overview of the APA-style can be found using this link .

Detailed information on referencing, using tools in MS Word and Mendeley is provided in the next chapter.

3.9 How To Write A Literature Review In Three Simple Steps

As a guideline, use the three-step approach:

• Step 1: Find relevant research
• Step 2: Log, catalog, & synthesize
• Step 3: Outlining & Writing up

Details on each of these three steps are in the video below.

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Doing Research in the Real World

Student resources, chapter 2: theoretical perspectives and research methodologies.

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29 Conceptualization in qualitative research

Chapter outline

• 15.1 Alternative paradigms: Interpretivism, critical paradigm, and pragmatism

15.2 Multiparadigmatic research: An example

15.3 idiographic causal relationships, 15.4 qualitative research questions.

Now let’s change things up! In the previous chapters, we explored steps to create and carry out a quantitative research study. Quantitative studies are great when we want to summarize or test relationships between ideas using numbers and the power of statistics. However, qualitative research offers us a different and equally important tool. Sometimes the aim of research projects is to explore meaning and lived experience. Instead of trying to arrive at generalizable conclusions for all people, some research projects establish a deep, authentic description of a specific time, place, and group of people.

Qualitative research relies on the power of human expression through words, pictures, movies, performance and other artifacts that represent these things. All of these tell stories about the human experience and we want to learn from them and have them be represented in our research. Generally speaking, qualitative research is about the gathering up of these stories, breaking them into pieces so we can examine the ideas that make them up, and putting them back together in a way that allows us to tell a common or shared story that responds to our research question. To do that, we need to discuss the assumptions underlying social science.

17.1 Alternative paradigms: Interpretivism, critical, and pragmatism

Learning objectives.

Students will be able to…

• Distinguish between the assumptions of positivism, interpretivism, critical, and pragmatist research paradigms.
• Use paradigm to describe how scientific thought changes over time.

In Chapter 10, we reviewed the assumptions that underly post-positivism (abbreviated hereafter as positivism for brevity). Quantitative methods are most often the choice for positivist research questions because they conform to these assumptions. Qualitative methods  can conform to these assumptions; however, they are limited in their generalizability.

Kivunja & Kuyini (2017) [1] describe the essential features of positivism as:

• A belief that theory is universal and law-like generalizations can be made across contexts
• The assumption that context is not important
• The belief that truth or knowledge is ‘out there to be discovered’ by research
• The belief that cause and effect are distinguishable and analytically separable
• The belief that results of inquiry can be quantified
• The belief that theory can be used to predict and to control outcomes
• The belief that research should follow the scientific method of investigation
• Rests on formulation and testing of hypotheses
• Employs empirical or analytical approaches
• Pursues an objective search for facts
• Believes in ability to observe knowledge
• The researcher’s ultimate aim is to establish a comprehensive universal theory, to account for human and social behavior
• Application of the scientific method

Because positivism is the dominant social science research paradigm, it can be easy to ignore or be confused by research that does not use these assumptions. We covered in Chapter 10 the table reprinted below when discussing the assumptions underlying positivistic social science.

As you consider your research project, keep these philosophical assumptions in mind. They are useful shortcuts to understanding the deeper ideas and assumptions behind the construction of knowledge. The purpose of exploring these philosophical assumptions isn’t to find out which is true and which is false. Instead, the goal is to identify the assumptions that fit with how you think about your research question. Choosing a paradigm helps you make those assumptions explicit.

Before we explore alternative paradigms, it’s important for us to review what paradigms are.

How do scientific ideas change over time?

Much like your ideas develop over time as you learn more, so does the body of scientific knowledge. Kuhn’s (1962) [2] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most influential works on the philosophy of science, and is credited with introducing the idea of competing paradigms (or “disciplinary matrices”) in research. Kuhn investigated the way that scientific practices evolve over time, arguing that we don’t have a simple progression from “less knowledge” to “more knowledge” because the way that we approach inquiry is changing over time. This can happen gradually, but the process results in moments of change where our understanding of a phenomenon changes more radically (such as in the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics; or from Lamarckian to Darwinian theories of evolution). For a social work practice example, Fleuridas & Krafcik (2019) [3] trace the development of the “four forces” of psychotherapy , from psychodynamics to behaviorism to humanism as well as the competition among emerging perspectives to establish itself as the fourth force to guide psychotherapeutic practice. But how did the problems in one paradigm inspire new paradigms? Kuhn presents us with a way of understanding the history of scientific development across all topics and disciplines.

As you can see in this video from Matthew J. Brown (CC-BY), there are four stages in the cycle of science in Kuhn’s approach. Firstly, a pre-paradigmatic state where competing approaches share no consensus. Secondly, the “normal” state where there is wide acceptance of a particular set of methods and assumptions. Thirdly, a state of crisis where anomalies that cannot be solved within the existing paradigm emerge and competing theories to address them follow. Fourthly, a revolutionary phase where some new paradigmatic approach becomes dominant and supplants the old. Shnieder (2009) [4] suggests that the Kuhnian phases are characterized by different kinds of scientific activity.

Newer approaches often build upon rather than replace older ones, but they also overlap and can exist within a state of competition. Scientists working within a particular paradigm often share methods, assumptions and values. In addition to supporting specific methods, research paradigms also influence things like the ambition and nature of research, the researcher-participant relationship and how the role of the researcher is understood.

Paradigm vs. theory

The terms ‘ paradigm ‘ and ‘ theory ‘ are often used interchangeably in social science. There is not a consensus among social scientists as to whether these are identical or distinct concepts. With that said, in this text, we will make a clear distinction between the two ideas because thinking about each concept separately is more useful for our purposes.

We define paradigm a set of common philosophical (ontological, epistemological, and axiological) assumptions that inform research. The four paradigms we describe in this section refer to patterns in how groups of researchers resolve philosophical questions. Some assumptions naturally make sense together, and paradigms grow out of researchers with shared assumptions about what is important and how to study it. Paradigms are like “analytic lenses” and a provide framework on top of which we can build theoretical and empirical knowledge (Kuhn, 1962). [5] Consider this video of an interview with world-famous physicist Richard Feynman in which he explains why “when you explain a ‘why,’ you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you are perpetually asking why.” In order to answer basic physics question like “what is happening when two magnets attract?” or a social work research question like “what is the impact of this therapeutic intervention on depression,” you must understand the assumptions you are making about social science and the social world. Paradigmatic assumptions about objective and subjective truth support methodological choices like whether to conduct interviews or send out surveys, for example.

While paradigms are broad philosophical assumptions, theory is more specific, and refers to a set of concepts and relationships scientists use to explain the social world. Theories are more concrete, while paradigms are more abstract. Look back to Figure 7.1 at the beginning of this chapter. Theory helps you identify the concepts and relationships that align with your paradigmatic understanding of the problem. Moreover, theory informs how you will measure the concepts in your research question and the design of your project.

For both theories and paradigms, Kuhn’s observation of scientific paradigms, crises, and revolutions is instructive for understanding the history of science. Researchers inherit institutions, norms, and ideas that are marked by the battlegrounds of theoretical and paradigmatic debates that stretch back hundreds of years. We have necessarily simplified this history into four paradigms: positivism, interpretivism, critical, and pragmatism. Our framework and explanation are inspired by the framework of Guba and Lincoln (1990) [6] and Burrell and Morgan (1979). [7] while also incorporating pragmatism as a way of resolving paradigmatic questions. Most of social work research and theory can be classified as belonging to one of these four paradigms, though this classification system represents only one of many useful approaches to analyzing social science research paradigms.

Building on our discussion in section 7.1 on objective vs. subjective epistemologies and ontologies, we will start with the difference between positivism and interpretivism. Afterward, we will link our discussion of axiology in section 7.2 with the critical paradigm. Finally, we will situate pragmatism as a way to resolve paradigmatic questions strategically. The difference between positivism and interpretivism is a good place to start, since the critical paradigm and pragmatism build on their philosophical insights.

It’s important to think of paradigms less as distinct categories and more as a spectrum along which projects might fall. For example, some projects may be somewhat positivist, somewhat interpretivist, and a little critical. No project fits perfectly into one paradigm. Additionally, there is no paradigm that is more correct than the other. Each paradigm uses assumptions that are logically consistent, and when combined, are a useful approach to understanding the social world using science. The purpose of this section is to acquaint you with what research projects in each paradigm look like and how they are grounded in philosophical assumptions about social science.

You should read this section to situate yourself in terms of what paradigm feels most “at home” to both you as a person and to your project. You may find, as I have, that your research projects are more conventional and less radical than what feels most like home to you, personally. In a research project, however, students should start with their working question rather than their heart. Use the paradigm that fits with your question the best, rather than which paradigm you think fits you the best.

Interpretivism: Researcher as “empathizer”

Positivism is focused on generalizable truth. Interpretivism , by contrast, develops from the idea that we want to understand the truths of individuals, how they interpret and experience the world, their thought processes, and the social structures that emerge from sharing those interpretations through language and behavior. The process of interpretation (or social construction) is guided by the empathy of the researcher to understand the meaning behind what other people say.

Historically, interpretivism grew out of a specific critique of positivism: that knowledge in the human and social sciences cannot conform to the model of natural science because there are features of human experience that cannot objectively be “known”. The tools we use to understand objects that have no self-awareness may not be well-attuned to subjective experiences like emotions, understandings, values, feelings, socio-cultural factors, historical influences, and other meaningful aspects of social life. Instead of finding a single generalizable “truth,” the interpretivist researcher aims to generate understanding and often adopts a relativist position.

While positivists seek “the truth,” the social constructionist framework argues that “truth” varies. Truth differs based on who you ask, and people change what they believe is true based on social interactions. These subjective truths also exist within social and historical contexts, and our understanding of truth varies across communities and time periods. This is because we, according to this paradigm, create reality ourselves through our social interactions and our interpretations of those interactions. Key to the interpretivist perspective is the idea that social context and interaction frame our realities.

Researchers operating within this framework take keen interest in how people come to socially agree, or disagree, about what is real and true. Consider how people, depending on their social and geographical context, ascribe different meanings to certain hand gestures. When a person raises their middle finger, those of us in Western cultures will probably think that this person isn’t very happy (not to mention the person at whom the middle finger is being directed!). In other societies around the world, a thumbs-up gesture, rather than a middle finger, signifies discontent (Wong, 2007). [8] The fact that these hand gestures have different meanings across cultures aptly demonstrates that those meanings are socially and collectively constructed. What, then, is the “truth” of the middle finger or thumbs up? As we’ve seen in this section, the truth depends on the intention of the person making the gesture, the interpretation of the person receiving it, and the social context in which the action occurred.

Qualitative methods are preferred as ways to investigate these phenomena. Data collected might be unstructured (or “messy”) and correspondingly a range of techniques for approaching data collection have been developed. Interpretivism acknowledges that it is impossible to remove cultural and individual influence from research, often instead making a virtue of the positionality of the researcher and the socio-cultural context of a study.

One common objection positivists levy against interpretivists is that interpretivism tends to emphasize the subjective over the objective. If the starting point for an investigation is that we can’t fully and objectively know the world, how can we do research into this without everything being a matter of opinion? For the positivist, this risk for confirmation bias as well as invalid and unreliable measures makes interpretivist research unscientific. Clearly, we disagree with this assessment, and you should, too. Positivism and interpretivism have different ontologies and epistemologies with contrasting notions of rigor and validity (for more information on assumptions about measurement, see Chapter 11 for quantitative validity and reliability and Chapter 20 for qualitative rigor). Nevertheless, both paradigms apply the values and concepts of the scientific method through systematic investigation of the social world, even if their assumptions lead them to do so in different ways. Interpretivist research often embraces a relativist epistemology, bringing together different perspectives in search of a trustworthy and authentic understanding or narrative.

Kivunja & Kuyini (2017) [9] describe the essential features of interpretivism as:

• The belief that truths are multiple and socially constructed
• The acceptance that there is inevitable interaction between the researcher and his or her research participants
• The acceptance that context is vital for knowledge and knowing
• The belief that knowledge can be value laden and the researcher’s values need to be made explicit
• The need to understand specific cases and contexts rather deriving universal laws that apply to everyone, everywhere.
• The belief that causes and effects are mutually interdependent, and that causality may be circular or contradictory
• The belief that contextual factors need to be taken into consideration in any systematic pursuit of understanding

One important clarification: it’s important to think of the interpretivist perspective as not just about individual interpretations but the social life of interpretations. While individuals may construct their own realities, groups—from a small one such as a married couple to large ones such as nations—often agree on notions of what is true and what “is” and what “is not.” In other words, the meanings that we construct have power beyond the individuals who create them. Therefore, the ways that people and communities act based on such meanings is of as much interest to interpretivists as how they were created in the first place. Theories like social constructionism, phenomenology, and symbolic interactionism are often used in concert with interpretivism.

Is interpretivism right for your project?

An interpretivist orientation to research is appropriate when your working question asks about subjective truths. The cause-and-effect relationships that interpretivist studies produce are specific to the time and place in which the study happened, rather than a generalizable objective truth. More pragmatically, if you picture yourself having a conversation with participants like an interview or focus group, then interpretivism is likely going to be a major influence for your study.

Positivists critique the interpretivist paradigm as non-scientific. They view the interpretivist focus on subjectivity and values as sources of bias. Positivists and interpretivists differ on the degree to which social phenomena are like natural phenomena. Positivists believe that the assumptions of the social sciences and natural sciences are the same, while interpretivists strongly believe that social sciences differ from the natural sciences because their subjects are social creatures.

Similarly, the critical paradigm finds fault with the interpretivist focus on the status quo rather than social change. Although interpretivists often proceed from a feminist or other standpoint theory, the focus is less on liberation than on understanding the present from multiple perspectives. Other critical theorists may object to the consensus orientation of interpretivist research. By searching for commonalities between people’s stories, they may erase the uniqueness of each individual’s story. For example, while interpretivists may arrive at a consensus definition of what the experience of “coming out” is like for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer, it cannot represent the diversity of each person’s unique “coming out” experience and what it meant to them. For example, see Rosario and colleagues’ (2009) [10] critique the literature on lesbians “coming out” because previous studies did not addressing how appearing, behaving, or identifying as a butch or femme impacted the experience of “coming out” for lesbians.

• From your literature search, identify an empirical article that uses qualitative methods to answer a research question similar to your working question or about your research topic.
• Review the assumptions of the interpretivist research paradigm.
• Discuss in a few sentences how the author’s conclusions are based on some of these paradigmatic assumptions. How might a researcher operating from a different paradigm (like positivism or the critical paradigm) critique the conclusions of this study?

Critical paradigm: Researcher as “activist”

As we’ve discussed a bit in the preceding sections, the critical paradigm focuses on power, inequality, and social change. Although some rather diverse perspectives are included here, the critical paradigm, in general, includes ideas developed by early social theorists, such as Max Horkheimer (Calhoun et al., 2007), [11] and later works developed by feminist scholars, such as Nancy Fraser (1989). [12] Unlike the positivist paradigm, the critical paradigm assumes that social science can never be truly objective or value-free. Furthermore, this paradigm operates from the perspective that scientific investigation should be conducted with the express goal of social change. Researchers in the critical paradigm foreground axiology, positionality and values . In contrast with the detached, “objective” observations associated with the positivist researcher, critical approaches make explicit the intention for research to act as a transformative or emancipatory force within and beyond the study.

Researchers in the critical paradigm might start with the knowledge that systems are biased against certain groups, such as women or ethnic minorities, building upon previous theory and empirical data. Moreover, their research projects are designed not only to collect data, but to impact the participants as well as the systems being studied. The critical paradigm applies its study of power and inequality to change those power imbalances as part of the research process itself. If this sounds familiar to you, you may remember hearing similar ideas when discussing social conflict theory in your human behavior in the social environment (HBSE) class. [13] Because of this focus on social change, the critical paradigm is a natural home for social work research. However, we fall far short of adopting this approach widely in our profession’s research efforts.

Is the critical paradigm right for your project?

Every social work research project impacts social justice in some way. What distinguishes critical research is how it integrates an analysis of power into the research process itself. Critical research is appropriate for projects that are activist in orientation. For example, critical research projects should have working questions that explicitly seek to raise the consciousness of an oppressed group or collaborate equitably with community members and clients to addresses issues of concern. Because of their transformative potential, critical research projects can be incredibly rewarding to complete. However, partnerships take a long time to develop and social change can evolve slowly on an issue, making critical research projects a more challenging fit for student research projects which must be completed under a tight deadline with few resources.

Positivists critique the critical paradigm on multiple fronts. First and foremost, the focus on oppression and values as part of the research process is seen as likely to bias the research process, most problematically, towards confirmation bias. If you start out with the assumption that oppression exists and must be dealt with, then you are likely to find that regardless of whether it is truly there or not. Similarly, positivists may fault critical researchers for focusing on how the world should be, rather than how it truly is . In this, they may focus too much on theoretical and abstract inquiry and less on traditional experimentation and empirical inquiry. Finally, the goal of social transformation is seen as inherently unscientific, as science is not a political practice.

Interpretivists often find common cause with critical researchers. Feminist studies, for example, may explore the perspectives of women while centering gender-based oppression as part of the research process. In interpretivist research, the focus is less on radical change as part of the research process and more on small, incremental changes based on the results and conclusions drawn from the research project. Additionally, some critical researchers’ focus on individuality of experience is in stark contrast to the consensus-orientation of interpretivists. Interpretivists seek to understand people’s true selves. Some critical theorists argue that people have multiple selves or no self at all.

• From your literature search, identify an article relevant to your working question or broad research topic that uses a critical perspective. You should look for articles where the authors are clear that they are applying a critical approach to research like feminism, anti-racism, Marxism and critical theory, decolonization, anti-oppressive practice, or other social justice-focused theoretical perspectives. To target your search further, include keywords in your queries to research methods commonly used in the critical paradigm like participatory action research and community-based participatory research. If you have trouble identifying an article for this exercise, consult your professor for some help. These articles may be more challenging to find, but reviewing one is necessary to get a feel for what research in this paradigm is like.
• Review the assumptions of the critical research paradigm.
• Discuss in a few sentences how the author’s conclusions are based on some of these paradigmatic assumptions. How might a researcher operating from different assumptions (like values-neutrality or researcher as neutral and unbiased) critique the conclusions of this study?

Pragmatism: Researcher as “strategist”

“Essentially, all models are wrong but some are useful.” (Box, 1976) [14]

Pragmatism is a research paradigm that suspends questions of philosophical ‘truth’ and focuses more on how different philosophies, theories, and methods can be used strategically to provide a multidimensional view of a topic. Researchers employing pragmatism will mix elements of positivist, interpretivist, and critical research depending on the purpose of a particular project and the practical constraints faced by the researcher and their research context. We favor this approach for student projects because it avoids getting bogged down in choosing the “right” paradigm and instead focuses on the assumptions that help you answer your question, given the limitations of your research context. Student research projects are completed quickly and moving in the direction of pragmatism can be a route to successfully completing a project. Your project is a representation of what you think is feasible, ethical, and important enough for you to study.

The crucial consideration for the pragmatist is whether the outcomes of research have any real-world application, rather than whether they are “true.” The methods, theories, and philosophies chosen by pragmatic researchers are guided by their working question. There are no distinctively pragmatic research methods since this approach is about making judicious use whichever methods fit best with the problem under investigation. Pragmatic approaches may be less likely to prioritize ontological, epistemological or axiological consistency when combining different research methods. Instead, the emphasis is on solving a pressing problem and adapting to the limitations and opportunities in the researchers’ context.

Adopt a multi-paradigmatic perspective

Believe it or not, there is a long literature of acrimonious conflict between scientists from positivist, interpretivist, and critical camps (see Heineman-Pieper et al., 2002 [15] for a longer discussion). Pragmatism is an old idea, but it is appealing precisely because it attempts to resolve the problem of multiple incompatible philosophical assumptions in social science. To a pragmatist, there is no “correct” paradigm. All paradigms rely on assumptions about the social world that are the subject of philosophical debate. Each paradigm is an incomplete understanding of the world, and it requires a scientific community using all of them to gain a comprehensive view of the social world. This multi-paradigmatic perspective is a unique gift of social work research, as our emphasis on empathy and social change makes us more critical of positivism, the dominant paradigm in social science.

We offered the metaphors of expert, empathizer, activist, and strategist for each paradigm. It’s important not to take these labels too seriously. For example, some may view that scientists should be experts or that activists are biased and unscientific. Nevertheless, we hope that these metaphors give you a sense of what it feels like to conduct research within each paradigm.

One of the unique aspects of paradigmatic thinking is that often where you think you are most at home may actually be the opposite of where your research project is. For example, in my graduate and doctoral education, I thought I was a critical researcher. In fact, I thought I was a radical researcher focused on social change and transformation. Yet, often times when I sit down to conceptualize and start a research project, I find myself squarely in the positivist paradigm, thinking through neat cause-and-effect relationships that can be mathematically measured. There is nothing wrong with that! Your task for your research project is to find the paradigm that best matches your research question. Think through what you really want to study and how you think about the topic, then use assumptions of that paradigm to guide your inquiry.

Another important lesson is that no research project fits perfectly in one paradigm or another. Instead, there is a spectrum along which studies are, to varying degrees, interpretivist, positivist, and critical. For example, all social work research is a bit activist in that our research projects are designed to inform action for change on behalf of clients and systems. However, some projects will focus on the conclusions and implications of projects informing social change (i.e., positivist and interpretivist projects) while others will partner with community members and design research projects collaboratively in a way that leads to social change (i.e. critical projects). In section 7.5, we will describe a pragmatic approach to research design guided by your paradigmatic and theoretical framework.

Key Takeaways

• Social work research falls, to some degree, in each of the four paradigms: positivism, interpretivism, critical, and pragmatist.
• Adopting a pragmatic, multi-paradigmatic approach to research makes sense for student researchers, as it directs students to use the philosophical assumptions and methodological approaches that best match their research question and research context.
• Research in all paradigms is necessary to come to a comprehensive understanding of a topic, and social workers must be able to understand and apply knowledge from each research paradigm.
• Describe which paradigm best fits your perspective on the world and which best fits with your project.
• Identify any similarities and differences in your personal assumptions and the assumption your research project relies upon. For example, are you a more critical and radical thinker but have chosen a more “expert” role for yourself in your research project?

Learners will be able to…

• Apply the assumptions of each paradigm to your project
• Summarize what aspects of your project stem from positivist, interpretivist, or critical assumptions

In the previous sections, we reviewed the major paradigms and theories in social work research. In this section, we will provide an example of how to apply theory and paradigm in research. This process is depicted in Figure 7.2 below with some quick summary questions for each stage. Some questions in the figure below have example answers like designs (i.e., experimental, survey) and data analysis approaches (i.e., discourse analysis). These examples are arbitrary. There are a lot of options that are not listed. So, don’t feel like you have to memorize them or use them in your study.

This diagram (taken from an archived Open University (UK) course entitled E89 ​- Educational Inquiry ) ​ shows one way to visualize the research design process. While research is far from linear, in general, this is how research projects progress sequentially. Researchers begin with a working question, and through engaging with the literature, develop and refine those questions into research questions (a process we will finalize in Chapter 9 ). But in order to get to the part where you gather your sample, measure your participants, and analyze your data, you need to start with paradigm. Based on your work in section 7.3, you should have a sense of which paradigm or paradigms are best suited to answering your question. The approach taken will often reflect the nature of the research question; the kind of data it is possible to collect; and work previously done in the area under consideration. When evaluating paradigm and theory, it is important to look at what other authors have done previously and the framework used by studies that are similar to the one you are thinking of conducting.

Once you situate your project in a research paradigm, it becomes possible to start making concrete choices about methods. Depending on the project, this will involve choices about things like:

• What is my final research question?
• What are the key variables and concepts under investigation, and how will I measure them?
• How do I find a representative sample of people who experience the topic I’m studying?
• What design is most appropriate for my research question?
• How will I collect and analyze data?
• How do I determine whether my results describe real patterns in the world or are the result of bias or error?

The data collection phase can begin once these decisions are made. It can be very tempting to start collecting data as soon as possible in the research process as this gives a sense of progress. However, it is usually worth getting things exactly right before collecting data as an error found in your approach further down the line can be harder to correct or recalibrate around.

Designing a study using paradigm and theory: An example

Paradigm and theory have the potential to turn some people off since there is a lot of abstract terminology and thinking about real-world social work practice contexts. In this section, I’ll use an example from my own research, and I hope it will illustrate a few things. First, it will show that paradigms are really just philosophical statements about things you already understand and think about normally. It will also show that no project neatly sits in one paradigm and that a social work researcher should use whichever paradigm or combination of paradigms suit their question the best. Finally, I hope it is one example of how to be a pragmatist and strategically use the strengths of different theories and paradigms to answering a research question. We will pick up the discussion of mixed methods in the next chapter.

Thinking as an expert: Positivism

In my undergraduate research methods class, I used an open textbook much like this one and wanted to study whether it improved student learning. You can read a copy of the article we wrote on based on our study . We’ll learn more about the specifics of experiments and evaluation research in Chapter 13 , but you know enough to understand what evaluating an intervention might look like. My first thought was to conduct an experiment, which placed me firmly within the positivist or “expert” paradigm.

Experiments focus on isolating the relationship between cause and effect. For my study, this meant studying an open textbook (the cause, or intervention) and final grades (the effect, or outcome). Notice that my position as “expert” lets me assume many things in this process. First, it assumes that I can distill the many dimensions of student learning into one number—the final grade. Second, as the “expert,” I’ve determined what the intervention is: indeed, I created the book I was studying, and applied a theory from experts in the field that explains how and why it should impact student learning.

Theory is part of applying all paradigms, but I’ll discuss its impact within positivism first. Theories grounded in positivism help explain why one thing causes another. More specifically, these theories isolate a causal relationship between two (or more) concepts while holding constant the effects of other variables that might confound the relationship between the key variables. That is why experimental design is so common in positivist research. The researcher isolates the environment from anything that might impact or bias the cause and effect relationship they want to investigate.

But in order for one thing to lead to change in something else, there must be some logical, rational reason why it would do so. In open education, there are a few hypotheses (though no full-fledged theories) on why students might perform better using open textbooks. The most common is the access hypothesis , which states that students who cannot afford expensive textbooks or wouldn’t buy them anyway can access open textbooks because they are free, which will improve their grades. It’s important to note that I held this theory prior to starting the experiment, as in positivist research you spell out your hypotheses in advance and design an experiment to support or refute that hypothesis.

Notice that the hypothesis here applies not only to the people in my experiment, but to any student in higher education. Positivism seeks generalizable truth, or what is true for everyone. The results of my study should provide evidence that  anyone  who uses an open textbook would achieve similar outcomes. Of course, there were a number of limitations as it was difficult to tightly control the study. I could not randomly assign students or prevent them from sharing resources with one another, for example. So, while this study had many positivist elements, it was far from a perfect positivist study because I was forced to adapt to the pragmatic limitations of my research context (e.g., I cannot randomly assign students to classes) that made it difficult to establish an objective, generalizable truth.

Thinking like an empathizer: Interpretivism

One of the things that did not sit right with me about the study was the reliance on final grades to signify everything that was going on with students. I added another quantitative measure that measured research knowledge, but this was still too simplistic. I wanted to understand how students used the book and what they thought about it. I could create survey questions that ask about these things, but to get at the subjective truths here, I thought it best to use focus groups in which students would talk to one another with a researcher moderating the discussion and guiding it using predetermined questions. You will learn more about focus groups in Chapter 18 .

Researchers spoke with small groups of students during the last class of the semester. They prompted people to talk about aspects of the textbook they liked and didn’t like, compare it to textbooks from other classes, describe how they used it, and so forth. It was this focus on  understanding and subjective experience that brought us into the interpretivist paradigm. Alongside other researchers, I created the focus group questions but encouraged researchers who moderated the focus groups to allow the conversation to flow organically.

We originally started out with the assumption, for which there is support in the literature, that students would be angry with the high-cost textbook that we used prior to the free one, and this cost shock might play a role in students’ negative attitudes about research. But unlike the hypotheses in positivism, these are merely a place to start and are open to revision throughout the research process. This is because the researchers are not the experts, the participants are! Just like your clients are the experts on their lives, so were the students in my study. Our job as researchers was to create a group in which they would reveal their informed thoughts about the issue, coming to consensus around a few key themes.

When we initially analyzed the focus groups, we uncovered themes that seemed to fit the data. But the overall picture was murky. How were themes related to each other? And how could we distill these themes and relationships into something meaningful? We went back to the data again. We could do this because there isn’t one truth, as in positivism, but multiple truths and multiple ways of interpreting the data. When we looked again, we focused on some of the effects of having a textbook customized to the course. It was that customization process that helped make the language more approachable, engaging, and relevant to social work practice.

Ultimately, our data revealed differences in how students perceived a free textbook versus a free textbook that is customized to the class. When we went to interpret this finding, the remix  hypothesis of open textbook was helpful in understanding that relationship. It states that the more faculty incorporate editing and creating into the course, the better student learning will be. Our study helped flesh out that theory by discussing the customization process and how students made sense of a customized resource.

In this way, theoretical analysis operates differently in interpretivist research. While positivist research tests existing theories, interpretivist research creates theories based on the stories of research participants. However, it is difficult to say if this theory was totally emergent in the dataset or if my prior knowledge of the remix hypothesis influenced my thinking about the data. Interpretivist researchers are encouraged to put a box around their prior experiences and beliefs, acknowledging them, but trying to approach the data with fresh eyes. Interpretivists know that this is never perfectly possible, though, as we are always influenced by our previous experiences when interpreting data and conducting scientific research projects.

Thinking like an activist: Critical

Although adding focus groups helped ease my concern about reducing student learning down to just final grades by providing a more rich set of conversations to analyze. However, my role as researcher and “expert” was still an important part of the analysis. As someone who has been out of school for a while, and indeed has taught this course for years, I have lost touch with what it is like to be a student taking research methods for the first time. How could I accurately interpret or understand what students were saying? Perhaps I would overlook things that reflected poorly on my teaching or my book. I brought other faculty researchers on board to help me analyze the data, but this still didn’t feel like enough.

By luck, an undergraduate student approached me about wanting to work together on a research project. I asked her if she would like to collaborate on evaluating the textbook with me. Over the next year, she assisted me with conceptualizing the project, creating research questions, as well as conducting and analyzing the focus groups. Not only would she provide an “insider” perspective on coding the data, steeped in her lived experience as a student, but she would serve as a check on my power through the process.

Including people from the group you are measuring as part of your research team is a common component of critical research. Ultimately, critical theorists would find my study to be inadequate in many ways. I still developed the research question, created the intervention, and wrote up the results for publication, which privileges my voice and role as “expert.” Instead, critical theorists would emphasize the role of students (community members) in identifying research questions, choosing the best intervention to used, and so forth. But collaborating with students as part of a research team did address some of the power imbalances in the research process.

Critical research projects also aim to have an impact on the people and systems involved in research. No students or researchers had profound personal realizations as a result of my study, nor did it lessen the impact of oppressive structures in society. I can claim some small victory that my department switched to using my textbook after the study was complete (changing a system), though this was likely the result of factors other than the study (my advocacy for open textbooks).

Social work research is almost always designed to create change for people or systems. To that end, every social work project is at least somewhat critical. However, the additional steps of conducting research with people rather than on people reveal a depth to the critical paradigm. By bringing students on board the research team, study had student perspectives represented in conceptualization, data collection, and analysis. That said, there was much to critique about this study from a critical perspective. I retained a lot of the power in the research process, and students did not have the ability to determine the research question or purpose of the project. For example, students might likely have said that textbook costs and the quality of their research methods textbook were less important than student debt, racism, or other potential issues experienced by students in my class. Instead of a ground-up research process based in community engagement, my research included some important participation by students on project created and led by faculty.

Conceptualization is an iterative process

I hope this conversation was useful in applying paradigms to a research project. While my example discusses education research, the same would apply for social work research about social welfare programs, clinical interventions, or other topics. Paradigm and theory are covered at the beginning of the conceptualization of your project because these assumptions will structure the rest of your project. Each of the research steps that occur after this chapter (e.g., forming a question, choosing a design) rely upon philosophical and theoretical assumptions. As you continue conceptualizing your project over the next few weeks, you may find yourself shifting between paradigms. That is normal, as conceptualization is not a linear process. As you move through the next steps of conceptualizing and designing a project, you’ll find philosophies and theories that best match how you want to study your topic.

Viewing theoretical and empirical arguments through this lens is one of the true gifts of the social work approach to research. The multi-paradigmatic perspective is a hallmark of social work research and one that helps us contribute something unique on research teams and in practice.

• Multi-paradigmatic research is a distinguishing hallmark of social work research. Understanding the limitations and strengths of each paradigm will help you justify your research approach and strategically choose elements from one or more paradigms to answer your question.
• Paradigmatic assumptions help you understand the “blind spots” in your research project and how to adjust and address these areas. Keep in mind, it is not necessary to address all of your blind spots, as all projects have limitations.
• Sketch out which paradigm applies best to your project. Second, building on your answer to the exercise in section 7.3, identify how the theory you chose and the paradigm in which you find yourself are consistent or are in conflict with one another. For example, if you are using systems theory in a positivist framework, you might talk about how they both rely on a deterministic approach to human behavior with a focus on the status-quo and social order.
• Define and provide an example of an idiographic causal explanation
• Differentiate between idiographic and nomothetic causal relationships
• Link idiographic and nomothetic causal relationships with the process of theory building and theory testing
• Describe how idiographic and nomothetic causal explanations can be complementary

As we transition away from positivism, it is important to highlight the assumptions it makes about the scientific process–the hypothetico-deductive method, sometimes referred to as the research circle.

The hypothetico-deductive method

The primary way that researchers in the positivist paradigm use theories is sometimes called the hypothetico-deductive method (although this term is much more likely to be used by philosophers of science than by scientists themselves). Researchers choose an existing theory. Then, they make a prediction about some new phenomenon that should be observed if the theory is correct. Again, this prediction is called a hypothesis. The researchers then conduct an empirical study to test the hypothesis. Finally, they reevaluate the theory in light of the new results and revise it if necessary.

This process is usually conceptualized as a cycle because the researchers can then derive a new hypothesis from the revised theory, conduct a new empirical study to test the hypothesis, and so on. As Figure 8.8 shows, this approach meshes nicely with the process of conducting a research project—creating a more detailed model of “theoretically motivated” or “theory-driven” research. Together, they form a model of theoretically motivated research. 

Keep in mind the hypothetico-deductive method is only one way of using social theory to inform social science research. It starts with describing one or more existing theories, deriving a hypothesis from one of those theories, testing your hypothesis in a new study, and finally reevaluating the theory based on the results data analyses. This format works well when there is an existing theory that addresses the research question—especially if the resulting hypothesis is surprising or conflicts with a hypothesis derived from a different theory.

But what if your research question is more interpretive? What if it is less about theory-testing and more about theory-building? This is what our next chapter covers: the process of inductively deriving theory from people’s stories and experiences. This process looks different than that depicted in Figure 8.8. It still starts with your research question and answering that question by conducting a research study. But instead of testing a hypothesis you created based on a theory, you will create a theory of your own that explain the data you collected. This format works well for qualitative research questions and for research questions that existing theories do not address.

Inductive reasoning is most commonly found in studies using qualitative methods, such as focus groups and interviews. Because inductive reasoning involves the creation of a new theory, researchers need very nuanced data on how the key concepts in their working question operate in the real world. Qualitative data is often drawn from lengthy interactions and observations with the individuals and phenomena under examination. For this reason, inductive reasoning is most often associated with qualitative methods, though it is used in both quantitative and qualitative research.

Whose truth does science establish?

Social work is concerned with the “isms” of oppression (ableism, ageism, cissexism, classism, heterosexism, racism, sexism, etc.), and so our approach to science must reconcile its history as both a tool of oppression and its exclusion of oppressed groups. Science grew out of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which applied reason and empirical analysis to understanding the world. While the Enlightenment brought forth tremendous achievements, the critiques of Marxian, feminist, and other critical theorists complicated the Enlightenment understanding of science. For this section, I will focus on feminist critiques of science, building upon an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Crasnow, 2020). [16]

In its original formulation, science was an individualistic endeavor. As we learned in Chapter 1 , a basic statement of the scientific method is that a researcher studies existing theories on a topic, formulates a hypothesis about what might be true, and either confirms or disconfirms their hypothesis through experiment and rigorous observation. Over time, our theories become more accurate in their predictions and more comprehensive in their conclusions. Scientists put aside their preconceptions, look at the data, and build their theories based on objective rationality.

Yet, this cannot be perfectly true. Scientists are human, after all. As a profession historically dominated by white men, scientists have dismissed women and other minorities as being psychologically unfit for the scientific profession. While attitudes have improved, science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and related fields remain dominated by white men (Grogan, 2019). [17] Biases can persist in social work theory and research when social scientists do not have similar experiences to the populations they study.

Gender bias can influence the research questions scientists choose to answer. Feminist critiques of medical science drew attention to women’s health issues, spurring research and changing standards of care. The focus on domestic violence in the empirical literature can also be seen as a result of feminist critique. Thus, critical theory helps us critique what is on the agenda for science. If science is to answer important questions, it must speak to the concerns of all people. Through the democratization in access to scientific knowledge and the means to produce it, science becomes a sister process of social development and social justice.

The goal of a diverse and participatory scientific community lies in contrast to much of what we understand to be “proper” scientific knowledge. Many of the older, classic social science theories were developed based on research which observed males or from university students in the United States or other Western nations. How these observations were made, what questions were asked, and how the data were interpreted were shaped by the same oppressive forces that existed in broader society, a process that continues into the present. In psychology, the concept of hysteria or hysterical women was believed to be caused by a wandering womb (Tasca et al., 2012). [18] Even today, there are gender biases in diagnoses of histrionic personality disorder and racial biases in psychotic disorders (Klonsky et al., 2002) [19] because the theories underlying them were created in a sexist and racist culture. In these ways, science can reinforce the truth of the white Western male perspective.

Finally, it is important to note that social science research is often conducted on populations rather than with populations. Historically, this has often meant Western men traveling to other countries and seeking to understand other cultures through a Western lens. Lacking cultural humility and failing to engage stakeholders, ethnocentric research of this sort has led to the view of non-Western cultures as inferior. Moreover, the use of these populations as research subjects rather than co-equal participants in the research process privileges the researcher’s knowledge over that from other groups or cultures. Researchers working with indigenous cultures, in particular, had a destructive habit of conducting research for a short time and then leaving, without regard for the impact their study had on the population. These critiques of Western science aim to decolonize social science and dismantle the racist ideas the oppress indigenous and non-Western peoples through research (Smith, 2013). [20]

The central concept in feminist, anti-racist, and decolonization critiques (among other critical frames) is epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice happens when someone is treated unfairly in their capacity to know something or describe their experience of the world. As described by Fricker (2011), [21] the injustice emerges from the dismissal of knowledge from oppressed groups, discrimination against oppressed groups in scientific communities, and the resulting gap between what scientists can make sense of from their experience and the experiences of people with less power who have lived experience of the topic. We recommend this video from Edinburgh Law School which applies epistemic injustice to studying public health emergencies, disabilities, and refugee services .

Positivism relies on nomothetic causality, or the idea that “one event, behavior, or belief will result in the occurrence of another, subsequent event, behavior, or belief.” Then, we described one kind of causality: a simple cause-and-effect relationship supported by existing theory and research on the topic, also known as a nomothetic causal relationship. But what if there is not a lot of literature on your topic? What if your question is more exploratory than explanatory? Then, you need a different kind of causal explanation, one that accounts for the complexity of human interactions.

How can we build causal relationships if we are just describing or exploring a topic? Recall the definitions of exploratory research , descriptive research , and explanatory research from Chapter 2. Wouldn’t we need to do explanatory research to build any kind of causal explanation? Explanatory research attempts to establish nomothetic causal relationships: an independent variable is demonstrated to cause change in a dependent variable. Exploratory and descriptive qualitative research contains some causal relationships, but they are actually descriptions of the causal relationships established by the study participants.

What do idiographic causal explanations look like?

An idiographic causal relationship   tries to identify the many, interrelated causes that account for the phenomenon the researcher is investigating. So, if idiographic causal explanations do not look like Figure 8.5, 8.6, or 8.7 what do they look like? Instead of saying “x causes y,” your participants will describe their experiences with “x,” which they will tell you was caused and influenced by a variety of other factors, as interpreted through their unique perspective, time, and environment. As we stated before, idiographic causal explanations are messy. Your job as a social science researcher is to accurately describe the patterns in what your participants tell you.

Let’s think about this using an example. If I asked you why you decided to become a social worker, what might you say? For me, I would say that I wanted to be a mental health clinician since I was in high school. I was interested in how people thought, and I was privileged enough to have psychology courses at my local high school. I thought I wanted to be a psychologist, but at my second internship in my undergraduate program, my supervisors advised me to become a social worker because the license provided greater authority for independent practice and flexibility for career change. Once I found out social workers were like psychologists who also raised trouble about social justice, I was hooked.

That’s not a simple explanation at all! But it’s definitely a causal explanation. It is my individual, subjective truth of a complex process. If we were to ask multiple social workers the same question, we might find out that many social workers begin their careers based on factors like personal experience with a disability or social injustice, positive experiences with social workers, or a desire to help others. No one factor is the “most important factor,” like with nomothetic causal relationships. Instead, a complex web of factors, contingent on context, emerge when you interpret what people tell you about their lives.

Understanding “why?”

In creating an idiographic explanation, you are still asking “why?” But the answer is going to be more complex. Those complexities are described in Table 8.1 as well as this short video comparing nomothetic and idiographic relationships .

Remember our question from the last section, “Are you trying to generalize or nah?” If you answered nah (or no, like a normal person), you are trying to establish an idiographic causal explanation. The purpose of that explanation isn’t to predict the future or generalize to larger populations, but to describe the here-and-now as it is experienced by individuals within small groups and communities. Idiographic explanations are focused less on what is generally experienced by all people but more on the particularities of what specific individuals in a unique time and place experience.

Researchers seeking idiographic causal relationships are not trying to generalize or predict, so they have no need to reduce phenomena to mathematics. In fact, only examining things that can be counted can rob a causal relationship of its meaning and context. Instead, the goal of idiographic causal relationships is understanding, rather than prediction. Idiographic causal relationships are formed by interpreting people’s stories and experiences. Usually, these are expressed through words. Not all qualitative studies use word data, as some can use interpretations of visual or performance art. However, the vast majority of qualitative studies do use word data, like the transcripts from interviews and focus groups or documents like journal entries or meeting notes. Your participants are the experts on their lives—much like in social work practice—and as in practice, people’s experiences are embedded in their cultural, historical, and environmental context.

Idiographic causal explanations are powerful because they can describe the complicated and interconnected nature of human life. Nomothetic causal explanations, by comparison, are simplistic. Think about if someone asked you why you wanted to be a social worker. Your story might include a couple of vignettes from your education and early employment. It might include personal experience with the social welfare system or family traditions. Maybe you decided on a whim to enroll in a social work course during your graduate program. The impact of each of these events on your career is unique to you.

Idiographic causal explanations are concerned with individual stories, their idiosyncrasies, and the patterns that emerge when you collect and analyze multiple people’s stories. This is the inductive reasoning we discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Often, idiographic causal explanations begin by collecting a lot of qualitative data, whether though interviews, focus groups, or looking at available documents or cultural artifacts. Next, the researcher looks for patterns in the data and arrives at a tentative theory for how the key ideas in people’s stories are causally related.

Unlike nomothetic causal relationships, there are no formal criteria (e.g., covariation) for establishing causality in idiographic causal relationships. In fact, some criteria like temporality and nonspuriousness may be violated. For example, if an adolescent client says, “It’s hard for me to tell whether my depression began before my drinking, but both got worse when I was expelled from my first high school,” they are recognizing that it may not so simple that one thing causes another. Sometimes, there is a reciprocal relationship where one variable (depression) impacts another (alcohol abuse), which then feeds back into the first variable (depression) and into other variables as well (school). Other criteria, such as covariation and plausibility, still make sense, as the relationships you highlight as part of your idiographic causal explanation should still be plausible and its elements should vary together.

Theory building and theory testing

As we learned in the previous section, nomothetic causal explanations are created by researchers applying deductive reasoning to their topic and creating hypotheses using social science theories. Much of what we think of as social science is based on this hypothetico-deductive method, but this leaves out the other half of the equation. Where do theories come from? Are they all just revisions of one another? How do any new ideas enter social science?

Through inductive reasoning and idiographic causal explanations!

Let’s consider a social work example. If you plan to study domestic and sexual violence, you will likely encounter the Power and Control Wheel, also known as the Duluth Model (Figure 8.9). The wheel is a model designed to depict the process of domestic violence. The wheel was developed based on qualitative focus groups conducted by sexual and domestic violence advocates in Duluth, MN. This video explains more about the Duluth Model of domestic abuse.

The Power and Control Wheel is an example of what an idiographic causal relationship looks like. By contrast, look back at the previous section’s Figure 8.5, 8.6, and 8.7 on nomothetic causal relationships between independent and dependent variables. See how much more complex idiographic causal explanations are?! They are complex, but not difficult to understand. At the center of domestic abuse is power and control, and while not every abuser would say that is what they were doing, that is the understanding of the survivors who informed this theoretical model. Their power and control is maintained through a variety of abusive tactics from social isolation to use of privilege to avoid consequences.

What about the role of hypotheses in idiographic causal explanations? In nomothetic causal explanations, researchers create hypotheses using existing theory and then test them for accuracy. Hypotheses in idiographic causality are much more tentative, and are probably best considered as “hunches” about what they think might be true. Importantly, they might indicate the researcher’s prior knowledge and biases before the project begins, but the goal of idiographic research is to let your participants guide you rather than existing social work knowledge. Continuing with our Duluth Model example, advocates likely had some tentative hypotheses about what was important in a relationship with domestic violence. After all, they worked with this population for years prior to the creation of the model. However, it was the stories of the participants in these focus groups that led the Power and Control Wheel explanation for domestic abuse.

As qualitative inquiry unfolds, hypotheses and hunches are likely to emerge and shift as researchers learn from what their participants share. Because the participants are the experts in idiographic causal relationships, a researcher should be open to emerging topics and shift their research questions and hypotheses accordingly. This is in contrast to hypotheses in quantitative research, which remain constant throughout the study and are shown to be true or false.

Over time, as more qualitative studies are done and patterns emerge across different studies and locations, more sophisticated theories emerge that explain phenomena across multiple contexts. Once a theory is developed from qualitative studies, a quantitative researcher can seek to test that theory. For example, a quantitative researcher may hypothesize that men who hold traditional gender roles are more likely to engage in domestic violence. That would make sense based on the Power and Control Wheel model, as the category of “using male privilege” speaks to this relationship. In this way, qualitatively-derived theory can inspire a hypothesis for a quantitative research project, as we will explore in the next section.

Complementary approaches

If idiographic and nomothetic still seem like obscure philosophy terms, let’s consider another example. Imagine you are working for a community-based non-profit agency serving people with disabilities. You are putting together a report to lobby the state government for additional funding for community support programs. As part of that lobbying, you are likely to rely on both nomothetic and idiographic causal relationships.

If you looked at nomothetic causal relationships, you might learn how previous studies have shown that, in general, community-based programs like yours are linked with better health and employment outcomes for people with disabilities. Nomothetic causal explanations seek to establish that community-based programs are better for everyone with disabilities, including people in your community.

If you looked at idiographic causal explanations, you would use stories and experiences of people in community-based programs. These individual stories are full of detail about the lived experience of being in a community-based program. You might use one story from a client in your lobbying campaign, so policymakers can understand the lived experience of what it’s like to be a person with a disability in this program. For example, a client who said “I feel at home when I’m at this agency because they treat me like a family member,” or “this is the agency that helped me get my first paycheck,” can communicate richer, more complex causal relationships.

Neither kind of causal explanation is better than the other. A decision to seek idiographic causal explanations means that you will attempt to explain or describe your phenomenon exhaustively, attending to cultural context and subjective interpretations. A decision to seek nomothetic causal explanations, on the other hand, means that you will try to explain what is true for everyone and predict what will be true in the future. In short, idiographic explanations have greater depth, and nomothetic explanations have greater breadth.

Most importantly, social workers understand the value of both approaches to understanding the social world. A social worker helping a client with substance abuse issues seeks idiographic explanations when they ask about that client’s life story, investigate their unique physical environment, or probe how their family relationships. At the same time, a social worker also uses nomothetic explanations to guide their interventions. Nomothetic explanations may help guide them to minimize risk factors and maximize protective factors or use an evidence-based therapy, relying on knowledge about what in general  helps people with substance abuse issues.

So, which approach speaks to you? Are you interested in learning about (a) a few people’s experiences in a great deal of depth, or (b) a lot of people’s experiences more superficially, while also hoping your findings can be generalized to a greater number of people? The answer to this question will drive your research question and project. These approaches provide different types of information and both types are valuable.

• Idiographic causal explanations focus on subjectivity, context, and meaning.
• Idiographic causal explanations are best suited to exploratory research questions and qualitative methods.
• Idiographic causal explanations are used to create new theories in social science.
• Explore the literature on the theory you identified in section 8.1.
• Read about the origins of your theory. Who developed it and from what data?
• See if you can find a figure like Figure 8.9 in an article or book chapter that depicts the key concepts in your theory and how those concepts are related to one another causally. Write out a short statement on the causal relationships contained in the figure.
• List the key terms associated with qualitative research questions
• Distinguish between qualitative and quantitative research questions

Qualitative research questions differ from quantitative research questions. Because qualitative research questions seek to explore or describe phenomena, not provide a neat nomothetic explanation, they are often more general and openly worded. They may include only one concept, though many include more than one. Instead of asking how one variable causes changes in another, we are instead trying to understand the experiences ,  understandings , and  meanings that people have about the concepts in our research question. These keywords often make an appearance in qualitative research questions.

Let’s work through an example from our last section. In Table 9.1, a student asked, “What is the relationship between sexual orientation or gender identity and homelessness for late adolescents in foster care?” In this question, it is pretty clear that the student believes that adolescents in foster care who identify as LGBTQ+ may be at greater risk for homelessness. This is a nomothetic causal relationship—LGBTQ+ status causes changes in homelessness.

However, what if the student were less interested in  predicting  homelessness based on LGBTQ+ status and more interested in  understanding  the stories of foster care youth who identify as LGBTQ+ and may be at risk for homelessness? In that case, the researcher would be building an idiographic causal explanation . The youths whom the researcher interviews may share stories of how their foster families, caseworkers, and others treated them. They may share stories about how they thought of their own sexuality or gender identity and how it changed over time. They may have different ideas about what it means to transition out of foster care.

Because qualitative questions usually center on idiographic causal relationships, they look different than quantitative questions. Table 9.3 below takes the final research questions from Table 9.1 and adapts them for qualitative research. The guidelines for research questions previously described in this chapter still apply, but there are some new elements to qualitative research questions that are not present in quantitative questions.

• Qualitative research questions often ask about lived experience, personal experience, understanding, meaning, and stories.
• Qualitative research questions may be more general and less specific.
• Qualitative research questions may also contain only one variable, rather than asking about relationships between multiple variables.

Qualitative research questions have one final feature that distinguishes them from quantitative research questions: they can change over the course of a study. Qualitative research is a reflexive process, one in which the researcher adapts their approach based on what participants say and do. The researcher must constantly evaluate whether their question is important and relevant to the participants. As the researcher gains information from participants, it is normal for the focus of the inquiry to shift.

For example, a qualitative researcher may want to study how a new truancy rule impacts youth at risk of expulsion. However, after interviewing some of the youth in their community, a researcher might find that the rule is actually irrelevant to their behavior and thoughts. Instead, their participants will direct the discussion to their frustration with the school administrators or the lack of job opportunities in the area. This is a natural part of qualitative research, and it is normal for research questions and hypothesis to evolve based on information gleaned from participants.

However, this reflexivity and openness unacceptable in quantitative research for good reasons. Researchers using quantitative methods are testing a hypothesis, and if they could revise that hypothesis to match what they found, they could never be wrong! Indeed, an important component of open science and reproducability is the preregistration of a researcher’s hypotheses and data analysis plan in a central repository that can be verified and replicated by reviewers and other researchers. This interactive graphic from 538 shows how an unscrupulous research could come up with a hypothesis and theoretical explanation  after collecting data by hunting for a combination of factors that results in a statistically significant relationship. This is an excellent example of how the positivist assumptions behind quantitative research and intepretivist assumptions behind qualitative research result in different approaches to social science.

• Qualitative research questions often contain words or phrases like “lived experience,” “personal experience,” “understanding,” “meaning,” and “stories.”
• Qualitative research questions can change and evolve over the course of the study.
• Using the guidance in this chapter, write a qualitative research question. You may want to use some of the keywords mentioned above.
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The highest level of measurement. Denoted by mutually exclusive categories, a hierarchy (order), values can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, and the presence of an absolute zero.

a paradigm based on the idea that social context and interaction frame our realities

a paradigm in social science research focused on power, inequality, and social change

a research paradigm that suspends questions of philosophical ‘truth’ and focuses more on how different philosophies, theories, and methods can be used strategically to resolve a problem or question within the researcher's unique context

A cyclical process of theory development, starting with an observed phenomenon, then developing or using a theory to make a specific prediction of what should happen if that theory is correct, testing that prediction, refining the theory in light of the findings, and using that refined theory to develop new hypotheses, and so on.

when someone is treated unfairly in their capacity to know something or describe their experience of the world

conducted during the early stages of a project, usually when a researcher wants to test the feasibility of conducting a more extensive study or if the topic has not been studied in the past

research that describes or defines a particular phenomenon

explains why particular phenomena work in the way that they do; answers “why” questions

attempts to explain or describe your phenomenon exhaustively, based on the subjective understandings of your participants

"Assuming that the null hypothesis is true and the study is repeated an infinite number times by drawing random samples from the same populations(s), less than 5% of these results will be more extreme than the current result" (Cassidy et al., 2019, p. 233).

Scientific Inquiry in Social Work (2nd Edition) Copyright © 2020 by Matthew DeCarlo, Cory Cummings, and Kate Agnelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Introduction: Importance of Comparative Analysis

• First Online: 04 September 2024

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• Jason L. Powell 4  

Part of the book series: International Perspectives on Aging ((Int. Perspect. Aging,volume 43))

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Comparative aging research is a flourishing field, partly because funding in this area has increased in recent years. Comparing different societies and cultures seems especially fruitful for the analysis of societal and cultural factors in development over the life course. From a nomothetic perspective, the aim of comparisons is the search for similarities and commonalities in different societies and cultures; from an idiographic perspective, researchers are looking for societal and cultural specificity and distinctiveness. However, the potentials of comparative aging research are not fully realized for the time being. In many cases, there is little theorizing as to whether there should be differences (or similarities) in aging processes across countries, societies, or cultures. This chapter discusses the theoretical aims and ambitions of comparative aging research in general. Comparative theories are sketched, which could serve as a basis for comparative aging research, and aging theories are discussed, which could be modified to be used in comparative research. The rationale of comparative aging research is described and illustrated through empirical examples. Epistemological and methodological pitfalls (problems of conceptual, operational, functional, and measurement equivalence) are a substantial obstacle to comparative aging research. Hence, the merits and limitations of comparative designs and sampling procedures are considered.

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Jason L. Powell

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Powell, J.L. (2024). Introduction: Importance of Comparative Analysis. In: International Aging. International Perspectives on Aging, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67172-2_1

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