Competing paradigms & epistemological
consideration: Positivism and Interpretivism
Encyclopedia of research (2008) defines a
paradigm as a set of assumptions and perceptual
orientations shared by members of a research
community. Paradigms determine how members
of research communities view both the
phenomena their particular community studies
and the research methodology that should be
employed to study those phenomena.
• Denzin and Lincoln (2005) paradigm is the net
that contains the researcher’s epistemological,
and methodological premises. Whether
consciously or not, every researcher works from
some theoretical orientation or paradigm.
• According to Cohen, Manion & Morrison (2000)
Researchers have their own different worldviews
about the nature of knowledge and reality that
helps them clarify their theoretical frameworks.
Perspectives can vary a great deal among
researchers who see the world through different
cultural, philosophical, or professional lenses.
One researcher might seek evidence of the
regularity of patterned behavior in trends, rates,
and associations while others might focus on how
people understand or interpret what they
experience. These two predominant research
worldviews are the positivist paradigm and
interpretive paradigm which are the focus of the
study. It has become very common in
methodological literature that a quantitative
methodology is described as belonging to the
positivist paradigm and a qualitative
methodology as belonging to the interpretive
paradigm. An interpretivist paradigm represents
the world as socially constructed, complex, and
ever changing in contrast to the positivist
assumption of a fixed, measurable reality external
to people.
Positivism is based on the assumption that there
are universal laws that govern social events, and
uncovering these laws enables researchers to
describe, predict, and control social phenomena.
Interpretive research, in contrast, seeks to
understand values, beliefs, and meanings of
social phenomena, thereby obtaining a deep and
sympathetic understanding of human cultural
activities and experiences.
Rubin and Rubin (1995) and Cohen, Manion &
Morrison (2000) pointed out that quantitative
research methodologies are a search for both law
like regularities and principles which are true all
the time and in all given situations.
On the other hand, qualitative researchers attempt
to understand the complexities of the world
through participants’ experiences. Knowledge
through this lens is constructed through social
interactions within cultural settings. Meanings
are “found in the symbols people invent to
communicate meaningsor an interpretation for
the events of daily life” (Popkewitz, 1984).
• A researcher’s choice of research paradigm can
also be determined by the kinds of questions that
help them to investigate problems or issues they
find interesting.
• The traditional view regards the social sciences as
largely similar to the natural sciences, and the
researchers who adopt this approach are thus
concerned with discovering laws concerning
human behavior (Schulze, 2003; Krauss, 2005).
• The critical epistemological debate in terms of
conducting social science research is whether or
not the social world can be studied according to
the same principles as the natural sciences
(Bryman, 2001).
There are two broad epistemological positions:
positivism and interpretivism .
Epistemology poses the following questions:
What is the relationship between the knower and what
is known? How do we know what we know? What
counts as knowledge? For positivists, which are
evolved largely from a nineteenth-century
philosophical approach, the purpose of research is
scientific explanation.
• According to Neuman (2003) positivism sees social
science as an organized method for combining
deductive logic with precise empirical observations
of individual behavior in order to discover and
confirm a set of probabilistic causal laws that can be
used to predict general patternsof human activity.
The nature of social reality for positivists is that:
empirical facts exist apart from personal ideas or
thoughts; they are governed by laws of cause and
effect; patterns of social reality are stable and
knowledge of them is additive (Crotty, 1998;
Neuman, 2003; Marczyk, DeMatteo and
Festinger, 2005).
A basic assumption of this paradigm as Ulin, Robinson
and Tolley (2004) remarked is that the goal of
science is to develop the most objective methods
possible to get the closest approximation of reality.
Researchers who work from this perspective
explains in quantitative terms how variables interact,
shape events, and cause outcomes. They often
develop and test these explanations in experimental
studies. Multivariate analysis and techniques for
statistical prediction are among the classic
contributions of this type of research. This
framework maintains that reliable knowledge is
based on direct observation or manipulation of
natural phenomena through empirical, often
experimental, means (Lincoln & Guba 2000, 2005;
Neuman, 2003).
On the other hand, an interpretivist perspective,
the theoretical framework for most qualitative
research, sees the world as constructed,
interpreted, and experienced by people in their
interactions with each other and with wider
social systems (Maxwell, 2006; Bogdan & Biklen,
1992; Guba and Lincoln, 1985; Merriam, 1988).
According to this paradigm the nature of inquiry is
interpretive and the purpose of inquiry is to
understand a particular phenomenon, not to
generalize to a population (Farzanfar,2005).
Researchers within the interpretivist paradigm are
naturalistic since they apply to real-world
situations as they unfold naturally, more
specifically, they tend to benonmanipulative,
unobtrusive, and noncontrolling. According to
Ulin, Robinson and Tolley (2004) Qualitative
research methodology often rely on personal
contact over some period of time between the
researcher and the group being studied.
Building a partnership with study participants
can lead to deeper insight into the context
under study, adding richness and depth to the
data. Thus, qualitative methodologies are
inductive, that is, oriented toward discovery
and process, have high validity, are less
concerned with generalizability, and are more
concerned with deeper understanding of the
research problem in its unique context (Ulin,
Robinson and Tolley, 2004).
Both positivist and interpretive researchers hold
that human behaviour may be patterned and
regular. However, while positivists see this in
terms of the laws of cause and effect,
interpretivists view such patterns as being
created out of evolving meaning systems that
people generate as they socially interact
(Neuman, 2003).