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Why Should I Think About Guiding Assumptions?

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Abstract

This chapter explores a range of patterns of assumptions (also referred to as ‘paradigm assumptions’) that you could adopt in social and behavioural research; patterns such as positivist, interpretivist/constructivist, critical realist, critical social science, participatory inquiry and indigenous or feminist. Such patterns emerge from your answers to a number of pivotal questions and have clear implications for downstream contextual and methodological choices. We show how different patterns are associated with different criteria for evaluating research quality and argue that, in order to evaluate research independently of adopted patterns, meta-criteria for research quality, surrounding the central question of convincingness, are required. We argue for pluralism and diversity in pattern adoption where you make choices to fit research problems and contexts and where no one pattern is necessarily the right or wrong one to adopt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UNE Business School, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia

    Ray Cooksey

  2. RMIT University Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Gael McDonald

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  1. Ray Cooksey
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  2. Gael McDonald
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Correspondence to Ray Cooksey .

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Cooksey, R., McDonald, G. (2019). Why Should I Think About Guiding Assumptions?. In: Surviving and Thriving in Postgraduate Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7747-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7747-1_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-7746-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-7747-1

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