Module 4 – Paradigms etc

Phew. So glad to have reached this point. I remember when I started in October I had resolved to attend student seminars whenever possible – to network, be supportive and also learn. The first was that same month and was conducted by two 3rd year students. I understood most of it, but for some of it they threw around these words I did not understand: “Pragmatism” “Realism”. One of the students seemed to also have had some sort of mini-existential crisis (I’ve been there…) but about her learning theories and frameworks.

Huh?

My own supervisor even said to me “it helps to know where you are coming from so if you are a….” then I don’t know what he said. Positivist possibly? I just froze like a rabbit in the headlights. Huh?

The start of module 4 though provided some solace. We looked at research questions (as you saw) which was fine (well, ish…) and then we got onto approaches.

Approaches to research

We touched on a lot of scary words here, but these are important because they frame how you see the world and thus will influence your research – your approach to it and the questions you feel able to ask. I made notes and when I worked out where my head was at/my stance, I highlighted those parts in purple to try and get it to stick. I expect the below will be simplifications; don’t shoot me! Cut me some slack, I’m working this out 😉

Ontology – what you think the world is all about. “How it is”. You can have a positivist ontology – and think the world is objectively “out there”, factual, observable and measurable. Or you can have a constructionist ontology that the world is as people view it, it is shaped by our perspectives and how we think.

I fall down on the constructivist ontology. I won’t try and articulate why as I don’t have the vocabulary to do this clearly (buy me lots of cider and you could perhaps persuade me to try!), I just feel it.

Epistemology – what knowledge is and how we come across it/how we know and learn things. We can have an objectivist perspective; that knowledge is a thing, is objective and exists and is independent of what we as people may (or may not) experience. Or there is the subjectivist perspective that people assign meaning and knowledge based on how they understand things, it’s subjective.

I have a subjectivist perspective. Again, I can’t intelligently articulate why (I also want to save this kind of effort for the next part), but this is what I adhere to.

Mini-existential crisis

Now I had a bit of a panic. I wanted to do quantitative research. I wanted to do learning analytics and build predictive models. But, if I come from the stance that the world is constructed by human perceptions and experience and knowledge is subjective and cannot be certain because meaning is essentially, what we assign to it – then how on earth can I be quantitative about such a complex subject as retention, when my whole stance is that we can’t know or count or measure anything, especially when it relates to human behaviour!

Pants.

This panic continued as I worked through research paradigms (essentially frameworks that people will use and talk about, that set out essentially how you think things work and how you should act). Positivism – research results in objective knowledge, facts independent of perception. Constructivism – we see reality through our interpretation, it is socially constructed and cannot be measured objectively.

So here is a worry already. Clearly, positivism is where the quantitative data is at and constructivism is about interviewing people to ask why they dropped-out and get close and personal in their experience because this is what will have shaped their reality. Oh dear. You see my quandary?

There is also critical realism. This one was a bit more complicated for me to understand, it posits that there are 3 levels of reality (real, actual, empirical) – it recognises that the world is complicated and in empirical reality we can observe and measure some things. There is often a sense of righting wrongs with this paradigm.

OK, I was beginning to feel a bit calmer, and then I came to the fourth paradigm – pragmatism. What we want to do through research is fix problems and find answers “the truth” is actually less important. So actually, we do what is needed to get to a useful and practical answer, we often need mixed methods research to get to our solution.

Hallelujah!

I am a pragmatist. I realise that people have different, complicated circumstances that affect why they may act (eg drop out of Toastmasters) that can be influenced by many different, unknowable, unfathomable things. However, I also believe that whilst a person as an individual can be complicated, people as a whole mass will even out – you can spot patterns and trends in groups of people that will indicate they are likely to perform a certain action/behaviour. And yes, one of them might act differently to what the data told you because a meteor fell on their house (or whatever) but generally, we can pragmatically take a lot of the guesswork out when we are looking at large numbers. If I have 300,000 people to look at, I need to be pragmatic and have a rough formula. If I want to know what 20 persons will do, then I will interview them. Hooray for pragmatism!

This also supports my aim to follow up “interesting” data cases with interviews.

Now I understand what those earlier students were talking about, and why it may have panicked them so much. Wow; felt like I was really learning something here. Next, I will touch on logics of enquiry (I can actually hear your excitement from here…)!