Regarding paradigms

Dear friends,

Started reading on research. I have begun by reading various paradigms that underpin research. An interesting trend is dominance of Positivism in social and educational research. Yet this dominance is increasingly challenged by critics from two alternative traditions –constructionism and critical postmodernism -- which are well established and which have played prominent roles in Western thought. I believe that in India qualitative research is much less understood. Even all those practitioners who claim to be doing qualitative research do not understand it fully.

This according to me may be due to the fact that we do not understand the paradigms that underpin research fully. I’ll try to summarize what I have read and understood: Positivistic concerns to uncover truths and facts using experimental or survey methods have been challenged by interpretivists who assert that these methods impose a view of the world on subjects rather than capturing, describing and understanding these world views. Critical postmodernists argue that these imposed views or measures also implicitly support forms of scientific knowledge that explicitly reproduce capitalist structures and associated hierarchies of inequality.

Now let’s consider the interpretivist and constructionist genres. Central to both has been a concern with subjective meanings -- how individuals or members of society apprehend, understand and make sense of social events and settings. Interpretivists assume that knowledge and meaning are acts of interpretation hence there is no objective knowledge which is independent of thinking, reasoning humans. Interpretivism often addresses essential features of shared meaning and understanding whereas constructivism extends this concern with knowledge as produced and interpreted to an anti-essentialist level. Constructionists argue that knowledge and truth are the result of perspective hence all truths are relative to some meaning context or perspective.

All this is fine but I was wondering what bearing does it have on research in general and qualitative research in particular? For example, if I go by constructionist genre would my interpretation and understanding of some phenomenon say classroom processes in a rural school of Jaipur be different than my interpretation if I would have taken interpretivistic perspective?

Can you all suggest further readings on this subject or explain it to me?

-Rajesh, Digantar