Title: Relevance of philosophical outlooks for research
Course: EDPS0009: Researching Education and Society: Qualitative Methods 2020/2021 > Section: 1. Research community

Research is often presented as something that is done to answer a question. The underlying principles or philosophical understandings are rarely discussed. In reality, however, the entire research design hinges on our thoughts of what is, how we know, how to reason, how we should act and how we experience. If we were to think of research in building blocks, then those elements would constitute the foundations.

Saunders et al. (2019) developed a different metaphor to demonstrate the relevance of philosophical underpinnings and their relationship to data collection methods. Theirs is a "research onion", where the innermost layer is the data collection method, with the layer on the outside the researcher's philosophical understanding.

Figure source:
Saunders, M., Lewis, P., & Thornhill, A. (2009). Research methods for business students. (8th ed.). Pearson education. p.130.

This figure highlights that what is done as part of the research process, such as an interview or questionnaire, is highly dependent on what goes on in the outer layers.

If we consider ourselves interpretivists, then we believe that people make sense of their experiences depending on their circumstances and their personal feelings etc. As a consequence, interpretivists do not believe that interviews will provide an insight into the real and only truth; interviews will only ever enable phenomenologists to understand what people feel or think or experience - a possible truth.

As positivists, by contrast, we are interested in factual knowledge, THE truth. Our view therefore is different in that we do not believe that interviews are trustworthy because people's opinions, feelings and thoughts change and interviews are events of interpretations. Instead, we will use observations or measurements as data collection methods, where the data is "objective" and "scientific".

Here is some more information on the relationship between ontology, epistemology, methodology and method:

Unfortunately, matters are not always as clear-cut as has been presented here. And that is because some approaches to research are philosophical outlooks AND methodologies (e.g. phenomenology), or methodologies AND methods (e.g. ethnography).

The key take-away point is that as researchers it is our duty to be aware of what our underlying views are and how these shape the research we undertake.