Download or read book Methodology and Epistemology for Social Sciences written by Donald T. Campbell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988-10-27 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from the work of an influential contributor to the methodology of the social sciences. He treats: measurement, experimental design, epistemology, and sociology of science each section introduced by the editor, Samuel Overman. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Download or read book Research terminology simplified written by Laura Killam and published by Laura Killam. This book was released on 2013-11-10 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research is rooted in philosophical beliefs about values, concepts, and the nature of knowledge. In order to appreciate these philosophical beliefs, several key concepts and terms require consideration and understanding. Complicating the novice researcher’s understanding of these ideas is the unfortunate reality that existing definitions can be confusing. This situation can leave students feeling overwhelmed and confused. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of major inquiry or research paradigms in a simplified way. The terms discussed in this book include, but are not limited to: Paradigm Axiology Ontology Epistemology Methodology Paradigm shift Positivism Modernism Post-modernism Post-positivism Critical Theory Constructivism Keep in mind that the terms covered in this book are often debated, understood, and communicated in multiple “correct” ways. Also, due to the evolving nature of knowledge and diverse perspectives within the literature, this book serves as an introduction to research terminology that will help you understand, follow, and even participate in this debate. This book will be particularly useful to nursing students who are learning about nursing inquiry. Nursing is a field in which inquiry skills are integral to the development of best evidence and furthering of the profession as a whole.

Download or read book The Foundations of Social Research written by Michael Crotty and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1998-08-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choosing a research method can be bewildering. How can you be sure which methodology is appropriate, or whether your chosen combination of methods is consistent with the theoretical perspective you want to take? This book links methodology and theory with great clarity and precision, showing students and researchers how to navigate the maze of conflicting terminology. The major epistemological stances and theoretical perspectives that colour and shape current social research are detailed and the author reveals the philosophical origins of these schools of inquiry and shows how various disciplines contribute to the practice of social research as it is known today.

Download or read book Epistemology and Metaphysics for Qualitative Research written by Tomas Pernecky and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clearly written and provocative text outlines the wide range of epistemological and metaphysical pillars of research. In a clear, easy to follow style, the reader is guided through an array of concepts that are defined, explained and made simple. With the aid of helpful examples and case studies, the book challenges the prevailing modes of thinking about qualitative inquiry by showcasing an immense variety of philosophical frameworks. Armed with a strong understanding of this philosophical backbone, students will be able to choose and defend a ‘pick and mix’ of research methods that will uniquely complement their research. Empiricism Rationalism Realism Skepticism Idealism Positivism Post-positivism Idea-ism Hermeneutics Phenomenology Social Ontology Quantum Mechanics Essential reading for new and experienced researchers, this ‘must’ for any social science bookshelf will help unlock a new level of research creativity.

Download or read book Understanding Management Research written by Phil Johnson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-12-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'These sections represent the clearest rendition yet of these subjects, with difficult concepts introduced in a digestible form for the neophytic (or not so neophytic) researcher. Whilst in a book this size not every argument can be presented, there is ample extra material to be found to encourage further engagement... At the end of each chapter, there is a very useful Further Reading section provided by the authors, which gives useful guidelines. I believe to be an extremely useful text, which addresses what has until now been a significant gap in the market. This book will be my first choice in the future for introducing doctoral students of management-related subject to the philosophical underpinning they require for their studies. There is no other text which covers this area so clearly, so succinctly and in language that is readily accessible to a wide range of researcher back-grounds. I can enviSAGE this being a valuable source book to which researchers return again and again in order to deepen their understanding as research projects progress; it certainly provoked some new questions for me. To conclude, an excellent buy' - International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation This is an invaluable introduction for all students and researchers of management confronting a new research project. Understanding Management Research provides an overview of the principal epistemological debates in social science and how these lead to and are expressed in different ways of conceiving and undertaking organizational research. For researchers and students who are increasingly expected to adopt a reflexive understanding of their own epistemological position, the authors present a concise, accessible guide to the different perspectives available and their implications for research output. All students undertaking empirical research for theses and dissertations will find this book helps them comprehend the key ongoing debates and engage with their own pre-understandings when trying to make sense of management and organizations.

Download or read book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology written by Kerry E Howell and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides students with a concise introduction to the philosophy of methodology. The book stands apart from existing methodology texts by clarifying in a student-friendly and engaging way distinctions between philosophical positions, paradigms of inquiry, methodology and methods. Building an understanding of the relationships and distinctions between philosophical positions and paradigms is an essential part of the research process and integral to deploying the methodology and methods best suited for a research project, thesis or dissertation. Aided throughout by definition boxes, examples and exercises for students, the book covers topics such as: - Positivism and Post-positivism - Phenomenology - Critical Theory - Constructivism and Participatory Paradigms - Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism - Ethnography - Grounded Theory - Hermeneutics - Foucault and Discourse This text is aimed at final-year undergraduates and post-graduate research students. For more experienced researchers developing mixed methodological approaches, it can provide a greater understanding of underlying issues relating to unfamiliar techniques.

Download or read book Instrumental Reasoning and Systems Methodology written by Richard Mattessich and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has been written primarily for the applied and social scientist and student who longs for an integrated picture of the foundations on which his research must ultimately rest; but hopefully the book may also serve philosophers interested in applied disciplines and in systems methodology. If integration was the major motto, the need for a method ology, appropriate to the teleological peculiarities of all applied sciences, was the main impetus behind the conception of the present work. This need I felt a long time ago in my own area of analytical and empirical research in accounting theory and management science; later I had the opportunity to teach, for almost a decade, graduate seminars in Methodology which offered particular insight into the methodological needs of students of such applied disciplines as business administration, education, engineering, infor matics, etc. Out of this effort grew the present book which among other things tries, on one side, to illuminate the difference and relationship between methods of cognition and methods of decision and on the other, to sketch a framework suitable for depicting means-end relationships in a holistic setting. I believe that a systems methodology which incorporates recent endeavours of deontic logic, decision theory, information economics and related areas would be eminently suited to break the ground for such a future framework. Yet systems theory has two major shortcomings which might prevent it from evolving into the desired methodology of applied science.

Download or read book Epistemology and Method in Law written by Geoffrey Samuel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to question the widely held assumption in Europe that to have knowledge of law is simply to have knowledge of rules. There is a knowledge dimension beyond the symbolic which reaches right into the way facts are perceived, constructed and deconstructed. In support of this thesis the book examines, generally, the question of what it is to have knowledge of law; and this examination embraces not just the conceptual foundations, methods, taxonomy and theories used by jurists. It also examines the epistemological schemes used by social scientists in general in order to show that such schemes are closely related to the schemes of intelligibility used by lawyers and judges.

Download or read book Online Interviewing written by Nalita James and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Online Interviewing is a short, accessible and highly practical introduction to designing and conducting online interviews in qualitative research. James and Busher focus on helping the reader to understand the methodological and epistemological challenges of carrying out online interviews in the virtual environment. They highlight the many new ethical issues that face researchers in this medium. The authors also encourage an engagement with the critical theoretical issues that must be considered in the conduct of online interviews. The resulting book is a well-reasoned introduction to the challenges and opportunities offered by online interviewing, drawing on a wide range of international sources to support these discussions. This is an ideal first introduction for anyone who is interested in using online methods, and who has an interest in the theory of the method. It will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate level students in the social sciences, and for professional researchers.

Download or read book Applied Ontology written by Katherine Munn and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ontology is the philosophical discipline which aims to understand how things in the world are divided into categories and how these categories are related together. This is exactly what information scientists aim for in creating structured, automated representations, called ‘ontologies,’ for managing information in fields such as science, government, industry, and healthcare. Currently, these systems are designed in a variety of different ways, so they cannot share data with one another. They are often idiosyncratically structured, accessible only to those who created them, and unable to serve as inputs for automated reasoning. This volume shows, in a non-technical way and using examples from medicine and biology, how the rigorous application of theories and insights from philosophical ontology can improve the ontologies upon which information management depends.

Download or read book Books in Brief Epistemological Integration written by Fathi Hasan Malkawi and published by International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a program which seeks to construct an intellectual framework for Islamic methodology with a view to realizing practical training in the thoughtful investigation of issues related to knowledge in various fields. The book’s title affirms the distinctive types of integration that characterize Islamic methodology, including integration of sources, means, and schools of thought, as well as existing realities with desired ideals etc. This is fully consistent with human nature, as variety is fundamental to the functions people perform and skills they master. The work essentially makes the case that fundamental to any Muslim recovery is laying the foundations of sound thinking and values that integrate the two main sources of knowledge: Revelation and Reality (that is the created worlds both physical, societal and psychological) under the umbrella of Tawhid. This concept of integration implies using both human theoretical conceptualization and practical experimental investigation whilst also affirming the need to apply human capabilities in understanding the divine text, and acquiring sound knowledge of the physical world in terms of its resources, as well as accumulated past and present human experiences. The aim being to vitalize human potential and creativity.

Download or read book On the Epistemology of Data Science written by Wolfgang Pietsch and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses controversies concerning the epistemological foundations of data science: Is it a genuine science? Or is data science merely some inferior practice that can at best contribute to the scientific enterprise, but cannot stand on its own? The author proposes a coherent conceptual framework with which these questions can be rigorously addressed. Readers will discover a defense of inductivism and consideration of the arguments against it: an epistemology of data science more or less by definition has to be inductivist, given that data science starts with the data. As an alternative to enumerative approaches, the author endorses Federica Russo’s recent call for a variational rationale in inductive methodology. Chapters then address some of the key concepts of an inductivist methodology including causation, probability and analogy, before outlining an inductivist framework. The inductivist framework is shown to be adequate and useful for an analysis of the epistemological foundations of data science. The author points out that many aspects of the variational rationale are present in algorithms commonly used in data science. Introductions to algorithms and brief case studies of successful data science such as machine translation are included. Data science is located with reference to several crucial distinctions regarding different kinds of scientific practices, including between exploratory and theory-driven experimentation, and between phenomenological and theoretical science. Computer scientists, philosophers and data scientists of various disciplines will find this philosophical perspective and conceptual framework of great interest, especially as a starting point for further in-depth analysis of algorithms used in data science.

Download or read book Epistemology and Methodology in Ethics written by Tristram McPherson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element introduces several prominent themes in contemporary work on the epistemology and methodology of ethics. Topics addressed include skeptical challenges in ethics, epistemic arguments in metaethics, what (if anything) is epistemically distinctive of the ethical. Also considered are methodological questions in ethics, including questions about which ethical concepts we should investigate, and what our goals should be in ethical inquiry.

Download or read book Unpacking Sensitive Research written by Erica Borgstrom and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term ‘sensitive research’ is applied to a wide range of issues and settings. It is used to denote projects that may involve risk to people, stigmatising topics, and/or require a degree of sensitivity on behalf of the researcher. Rather than take the notion of ‘sensitive research’ for granted, this collection unpacks and challenges what the term means. This book is a collective endeavour to reflect on research practices around ‘sensitive research’, providing in-depth explorations about what this label means to different researchers, how it is done – including the need to be sensitive as a researcher – and what impacts this has on methods and knowledge creation. The book includes chapters from researchers who have explored a diverse range of research topics, including sex and sexuality, death, abortion, and learning disabilities, from several disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, anthropology, health services research and interdisciplinary work. The researchers included here collectively argue that current approaches fail to adequately account for the complex mix of emotions, experiences, and ethical dilemmas at the heart of many ‘sensitive’ research encounters. Overall, this book moves the field of ‘sensitive research’ beyond the genericity of this label, showing ways in which researchers have in practice addressed the methodological threats that are triggered when we uncritically embark on ‘sensitive research'. The chapters in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology and the journal Mortality.

Download or read book Uncertainty in Pharmacology written by Adam LaCaze and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers a wide range of topics concerning methodological, epistemological, and regulatory-ethical issues around pharmacology. The book focuses in particular on the diverse sources of uncertainty, the different kinds of uncertainty that there are, and the diverse ways in which these uncertainties are (or could be) addressed. Compared with the more basic sciences, such as chemistry or biology, pharmacology works across diverse observable levels of reality: although the first step in the causal chain leading to the therapeutic outcome takes place at the biochemical level, the end-effect is a clinically observable result—which is influenced not only by biological actions, but also psychological and social phenomena. Issues of causality and evidence must be treated with these specific aspects in mind. In covering these issues, the book opens up a common domain of investigation which intersects the deeply intertwined dimensions of pharmacological research, pharmaceutical regulation and the related economic environment. The book is a collective endeavour with in-depth contributions from experts in pharmacology, philosophy of medicine, statistics, scientific methodology, formal and social epistemology, working in constant dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

Download or read book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology written by Ayn Rand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-04-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today man's mind is under attack by all the leading schools of philosophy. We are told that we cannot trust our senses, that logic is arbitrary, that concepts have no basis in reality. Ayn Rand opposes that torrent of nihilism, and she provides the alternative in this eloquent presentation of the essential nature--and power--of man's conceptual faculty. She offers a startlingly original solution to the problem that brought about the collapse of modern philosophy: the problem of universals. This brilliantly argued, superbly written work, together with an essay by philosophy professor Leonard Peikoff, is vital reading for all those who seek to discover that human beings can and should live by the guidance of reason.

Download or read book Methodology and Epistemology of Multilevel Analysis written by D. Courgeau and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2003-07-31 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of the multilevel approach is to understand individual behaviors taking into account the social context in which they occur. This book deals with concepts and methods underlying this approach. This book is of interest to a broad audience of social scientists, statisticians and philosophers concerned with new issues raised by the multilevel approach, and more generally with explanation in the social sciences.