The term paradigm has been used to refer to the dominant framework in which research takes places. This framework defines how problems are identified (what is to be studied); the epistemological and methodological assumptions behind the research (how it is to be studied); and what is done with the research (the nature and value of the knowledge generated). A paradigm can be a lens, a worldview, which provides us with theories, models, exemplars, values and methods shared by a community of scholars.

The term is seen as derived, or at least borrowed, from Kuhn (1962) whose groundbreaking work challenged widely held views on both the objectivity and cumulative nature of scientific knowledge. Kuhn argued that ‘normal’ science took place within taken for granted theoretical frameworks, or dominant paradigms, which had been established to address critical questions. These paradigms did not fit all the material facts of a phenomenon but fitted the facts that mattered at a particular moment. At some point, however, a paradigm would fail to provide an explanation for a new set of data, or for an existing set of data looked at in a new light, and the paradigm was overturned. As an example, astronomers worked productively for many years within a view of the universe offered by Ptolemy, until this was turned on its head by a strikingly different conception put forward by Copernicus with the sun at the centre of a system of orbiting planets. The process of establishing a new paradigm requires a great deal of intellectual effort and the exercise of independent judgement; proposers of new paradigms in any field have to challenge the established ways of doing things. For this reason Kuhn suggested that scientists tended to conduct their groundbreaking work when young, when habits and routines of observation are less ingrained. The history of science, in Kuhn’s view, is marked not by steady accumulation of knowledge but by ‘revolutions’. A consequence of this view is that we are not reaching an ever more complete view of how the world works; rather we have ‘good enough’ theories to deal with pragmatic questions of critical interest.

The idea of a paradigm had an immediate appeal for social scientists for several reasons. First, it seemed to work to explain the seismic shifts in the ways in which social questions are explored. For example, the positivist view of research, which held considerable influence for long periods of time, was not amended or adapted by an interpretive one, but turned on its head. Second, the idea of battling against a dominant paradigm seemed to sum up pretty well the process of arguing for new approaches to research or generating new fields of study or simply crossing discipline boundaries - feminist research being a good example of all three. Indeed those arguing against existing paradigms could take comfort in the idea that there was a place for their work and it, too, might be valuable and, in time, ground breaking.

Kuhn offered a deeply original and engaging way, indeed a paradigm shifting way, of thinking about natural science but left areas open to debate, for example just how ideological were agreements between scientists and how important was the replication of findings in research practice? However it is difficult to take the analogy of science and natural science too far. While many social researchers battle against a dominant paradigm within their particular department or field, and some encounter outright hostility to certain methodological approaches when seeking funding or arguing a case to a dissertation panel, there has traditionally been a commitment to pluralism in the ‘social sciences’. Indeed researchers today are often described as working in a ‘post paradigmatic’ age, in which there is considerable tolerance for competing approaches, and indeed there is some evidence for this when considering the range of content and methodology covered in the academic literature. Further, if there are research paradigms it is not clear how they should be described. For example, it is common to talk of qualitative and quantitative paradigms, but this is a fairly trivial distinction; interpretivism and positivism are better thought of as paradigms but this does not provide a complete picture (for example post positivism, feminist methodology, pragmatism, critical realism offer competing standpoints) or recognise the broad range of approaches covered within any so-called paradigm.

If we are living in a post paradigmatic age this does not mean that anything goes. Researchers need, as ever, to establish the ways in which they carry out data collection and the interpretation they put on data; they cannot pretend that there are agreed ways of doing either of these things. They can help themselves by understanding the traditions, rather than the paradigms in which they are working, and they can report on the tensions and difficulties as reported in widely used approaches (as examples see action research and grounded theory). Working within a tradition gives the researcher something on which to draw, but provides flexibility and provides ‘room to breathe’.

References

Kuhn, T. (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.