Research Philosophy | Types, Foundations & Approaches

Introduction

How do you look at the world? It's a simple question that is also difficult to answer, but the response dictates how you design research, collect data, and conduct analysis. As a result, you will benefit from having a clearly defined research philosophy to give your research audience a signpost for how to interpret your findings.

This article examines the idea of a research philosophy, how philosophical underpinnings inform research, and what approach to qualitative research methodology you should employ to ensure your research philosophy aligns closely with your research design.

What is a research philosophy?

To those who are new to social science research, the idea of a research philosophy sounds ambiguous and abstract. The scientific method commonly taught in school follows a straightforward process and its outcomes are often presumed to be etched in stone, its findings not to be questioned. This creates the misconception that science should only be viewed in only one light, an absolutist view of the world that looks only at "objective" reality.

The counter to this notion is that the world, even if it is an objective manifestation, is nonetheless subjectively interpreted by scientists and researchers. The boiling point of water at sea level may be absolute regardless of conditions, but how that boiling point is determined and assumed is a construction of dialogue among researchers who conduct experiments and deem the results empirical by a subjective consensus.

The acknowledgment that different researchers adopt different research philosophies also comes with the idea that scientific knowledge can take on varying degrees of ambiguity. Rather than consider qualitative research to be too ambiguous to contribute to scientific knowledge, researchers can propose causal relationships and propositions for more experimental research to test.

The qualitative research methods you employ in the research process depends on a number of factors, including your research philosophy. Some research methods seek a greater sense of objectivity through the traditional scientific method, employing the traditional control group-experimental group dynamic to test how an independent variable operates under different conditions. However, to fully capture the essence of complex social phenomena, qualitative researchers more often employ naturalistic methods such as interviews or observations.

Even those engaged in quantitative research require or at least follow a particular research philosophy. Quantitative data may seem objective at first glance but it will depend on what the numbers are intended to represent. Certainly, values for temperature or barometric pressure have fixed, objective meanings, but what about numbers on a Likert scale, which are often employed to measure the perspectives of survey respondents?

Ultimately, a rigorous researcher is expected to reflect on their practices and make explicit the way they view data, if only to transparently convey to the research audience how the researcher conducts analysis. In a social science research paper, a statement of one's research philosophy often accompanies a description of research methods as one is related to the other. In theses and dissertations, the methodology chapter almost always includes a discussion of the research philosophy chosen for the research design. Without this description, it can be challenging for the audience to engage in a similar level of interpretation of the data collected and come to a consensus as to the research findings.

The major research philosophies

Even though every researcher and their respective epistemologies are different, they can ultimately be grouped into a number of broad categories along common philosophical underpinnings. Scholars agree on the existence of a number of main research philosophies that inform research design. The research philosophy you choose can help determine the type of research you conduct and what research questions you can explore.

Positivist research philosophy

The traditional approach to scientific knowledge is to emphasize or presume the idea of an objective reality. Under this positivist philosophy, empirical evidence is treated as part of a universal truth that can be extrapolated or generalized across contexts or situations.

Needless to say, this approach aligns with research in the physical, material, and natural sciences where researchers seek out theories governing an ordered, predictable world. In the absence of this predictability, there would be an unacceptable level of ambiguity in applied fields such as medicine, food science, and manufacturing.

Engineers, for example, need as close to an absolute certainty as possible an understanding of heat and stress tolerances of building materials before they can commit to using them to create complex structures for housing or business purposes. In this respect, ambiguity is unwelcome if it jeopardizes the safety or well-being of the prospective occupants.

The search for such scientific knowledge based on objective data is aimed at building a universal understanding of the world. Through the scientific method, theories are tested and then developed when new evidence contradicts previous assertions under the assumption that a fully developed proposition is applicable to all situations and conditions.

Subjective meanings are mitigated under positivist philosophical underpinnings. If there is only one objective reality, any interpretive approach to understand the nature of reality is adversely biased and confounds the understanding of scientific knowledge.

Positivism relies heavily on experimental research methods and statistical analysis under the assumption that there is objective data to be gathered from empirical research methods that emphasize focusing on a narrow set of conditions while mitigating or controlling others.

In contrast, qualitative methods such as thematic analysis and grounded theory invite a level of uncertainty and ambiguity that a positivist researcher may not be perceive as scientifically rigorous.

In contemporary scholarship, positivist researchers and researchers adopting other research philosophies are not necessarily contentious. On the contrary, a research philosophy like interpretivism has the capacity to develop theories that positivist research can affirm or challenge and then later measure. However, the main takeaway here is that the choice of research philosophy, by way of its underlying philosophical assumptions, influences the data collection and data analysis methods that are suitable for the research.

Interpretivist research philosophy

Keep in mind that positivism is a term that scholars in social science research typically use to create a contrast with other philosophies. Most research in the social sciences require some degree of interpretation or accept some level of bias as inevitable, if not acceptable.

Researchers who adopt an interpretivist orientation occupy the end of the spectrum opposite where positivist researchers can be found. The notion of objective data, at least in terms of the social world, is treated with skepticism and critique, given differences in cultures, languages, and identities to inform the various and disparate perspectives among individuals. There may be an objective truth about a particular object of inquiry, but the understanding of that object varies from person to person, and any search for that truth starts with the interpretations that people make about that object.

Under an interpretivist research paradigm, your data collection methods and data analysis strategy are informed by the subjective meanings that individuals draw from what they see and experience. Interviews and focus groups are appropriate for gathering perspectives from research participants and analyzing their interpretations.

Constructivist research philosophy

There are nuances among research philosophies that acknowledge subjectivity among researchers. Constructivism aligns with an interpretive approach with some key differences. The main distinction from interpretivism is that a constructivist approach looks at how people make sense of their realities through deliberate action.

This shifts the processes of meaning-making away from passive observations under an interpretive approach to the interactions between people and participation within rituals. Ethnographic research, particularly if it employs participant observations, is an all-encompassing research approach that aims to capture how people make sense of the world they live in through their everyday experiences.

Critical realist research philosophy

If interpretivism and constructivism look at how people see the world, critical realism looks at the underlying influences that inform that worldview. Researchers in psychology, social work, and nursing employ critical realism when they want to identify and understand the underlying structures that inform the way that people interpret the world.

Consider that the idea of beauty is socially constructed, but how? Simple interactions between people (e.g., "that makeup really suits you") are more than enough, but TV commercials, social media trends, and consumer preferences influence people's decisions regarding what is beautiful and what is not. A critical realist stance unpacks the underlying causes of the idea of beauty, critiques the power of those causes, and seeks answers for how to deconstruct those causes.

Critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis employ a critical realist philosophy when the goal is to examine the nature of power dynamics in phenomena such as mass media which have an outsized influence on the individual. In doing so, researchers who adopt this research philosophy demonstrate the capacity to explore concepts like political extremism and viral marketing in ways that a positivist or interpretivist analysis of surveys and interviews do not have.

Pragmatist research philosophy

Beyond the objective-subjective divide, the pragmatist paradigm is oriented toward research that leads to real-world applications. Pragmatism doesn't necessarily strike a middle ground between positivism and interpretivism for the sake of having a middle ground; rather, researchers adopt a pragmatist approach in search of research methods that align with their research objectives. This acknowledges that experimental research will be useful in some inquiries while more naturalistic methods will be suitable in others.

Researchers measuring the performance of computers, for example, will rely on experimental methods to gather data on how quickly they can complete automated tasks. However, if they want to measure the satisfaction of customers who bought their computers, they turn to surveys and interviews to gain insights on how they use computers and what benefits they gain from using them, with the understanding that different customers even within the same target market will have different use cases.

Those who are looking for actionable insights and not merely theoretical developments will find that a pragmatist research philosophy will be most appropriate for their research goals. When a search for solutions to real-world issues is the driving force behind a research project, a researcher should be open to various methods whether or not they fit their paradigm of preference.

That said, the action-orientation aspect inherent to a pragmatist approach is not suitable to descriptive research or basic research. If the goal of a research project is simply to know more about a particular concept of phenomenon, other more specific research philosophies will prove more appropriate to the research design, as a pragmatic approach that leads toward actionable outcomes can unnecessarily skew the data collection or analysis methods.

Postmodernist research philosophy

All of the above research philosophies place at least some emphasis on rational thought as a driver of scientific knowledge. There may be fundamental differences in assumptions about how universal truth is attained through scientific inquiry, if ever, but research under any of the philosophies mentioned thus far is aimed at developing knowledge.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, assumes no such universal truth exists, whether objectively or subjectively. Under this paradigm, there are no unifying theories to be found, no theoretical frameworks to be generated in one context to be applied to another. Every particular context is its own social world with unique rules, norms, and expectations, and any similarities across contexts should not prompt researchers to draw or assert any causal connections.

This may sound arbitrary and even counter to the idea of ordered scientific knowledge, but the underpinnings of postmodernism inform the acknowledgment of subjectivity in qualitative research. With the understanding that there is no uniform knowledge between individuals comes an acknowledgment of multiple realities created by multiple interpretations, each a valid perspective given the diverse identities and backgrounds that individuals possess.

Postmodernism is the driving force behind the search for thick description in the social sciences. With all of the different aspects distinguishing cultures and communities, any inquiry intending to produce a universal truth is likely infeasible, if not impossible. As a result, thick description is often the goal in ethnographic research as researchers collect abundant data to provide as much context as possible and allow the research audience to understand the object of inquiry without resorting to theories.

Scholars who adopt postmodernism advocate for this kind of approach for its flexibility and freedom from prescriptive causal propositions. Ethnographers are thus not bound by predictable, ordered rules or norms. On the contrary, postmodernism challenges the idea of overriding norms that may be used to judge or stereotype cultures that don't align with accepted scientific knowledge of the social world.

How do I know what my research philosophy is?

A rigorous research project depends on a thoughtful consideration of your research strategy and the philosophy that aligns with your strategy. Researchers should look at a number of factors to decide which research philosophy is most appropriate for the study at hand.

The research question that drives your study will go a long way toward determining what research philosophy suits your project best. Research questions that explore power dynamics can benefit from a critical realist approach, while an exploration of individual epistemologies will likely pursue a postmodernist approach.

The research philosophy is also partly informed by the field you are in. Of course, if you are conducting research in the physical or natural sciences, then your approach is likely aligned with a positivist research philosophy that seeks an objective truth about the rules of the physical world. If you employ business research methods, then you might adopt a pragmatist orientation, particularly if you are conducting research for actionable insights.

Finally, the research findings you intend to generate will be informed by the research philosophy that you pursue. Keep in mind the objectives of your research, particularly if they aim toward theoretical or practical developments and if they are focused on individual cognition or collective action.

In most cases in the social sciences, you might find it unlikely to adopt a positivist paradigm, particularly if it involves socially constructed concepts whose analysis requires some level of interpretation. The important thing here is that there are different types of interpretation employed in qualitative research, requiring an intentional decision in the choice of research philosophies.

Further reading

• Denzin, N. K. (2009). The research act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods. London: Routledge.