STEP ONE

Research paradigm

In our experience, understanding and setting the research paradigm is without doubt the most confusing part of the dissertation process for students. It is easy to switch off when people talk to you about the philosophy of research, when they start to use words like epistemology and ontology, positivism, post-positivism, critical theory or constructivism, or ask you questions like: What is your view of the nature of reality? We sympathise!

Broadly speaking, research paradigms (e.g., positivism, post-positivism, critical theory, constructivism, etc.) are ways of explaining the basic set of beliefs that you have (i.e., at a philosophical level) and how these influence the way you do research (i.e., the practical aspects of doing a dissertation). We all have these basic sets of beliefs, but you may not know what they are or what to call them. Whilst they can be very abstract and complicated to understand, we have tried to make these as straightforward as possible in the Research Paradigms section of the Fundamentals part of Lærd Dissertation.

Your dissertation guidelines may not mention the need to discuss research paradigms or research philosophies; and in some cases, your supervisor may have explicitly told you not to include them. If this is the case, move onto STEP TWO: Research design. However, since most students have to produce a Research Paradigm section within their Research Strategy chapter (usually Chapter Three: Research Strategy), even if their dissertation guidelines do not mention such things, it is still worth checking with your supervisor whether this is a requirement. If you leave it out at the start, but are later told it needs to be included, it can be much more difficult to incorporate at a later date. This is because when applied properly to your research, it is so instrumental in shaping the choices you make when setting your research strategy, as well as affecting the conclusions that you make based on your findings (something that we discuss in Chapter Five: Discussion/Conclusions within the Route #1: Chapter-by-Chapter part of Lærd Dissertation).

Since you are taking on a Route #1: Replication-based dissertation, you will ideally need to understand the research paradigm that underpins your main journal article so that you can compare this with your chosen research paradigm. Unfortunately, journal articles rarely state the research paradigm that underpinned their research, usually because journals do not require such information to be included, or because many academics will either not think about such things or they will be implicit in the way that the research was carried out or written up. Since understanding the principals and characteristics of research paradigms can be a difficult process in and of itself, especially at the undergraduate and master's level where you're limited in the time you'll have to look into such things, this makes it very tricky to recognize the characteristics of different research paradigms in the main journal article you are interested in. As a result, assuming that including a Research Paradigm section within your Research Strategy chapter is a must, this leaves you with two choices:

• Option A
  Focus on the research paradigm guiding your dissertation

  If a difference in the research paradigm underpinning the research in the main journal article and your dissertation is not a major justification for your choice of route or the approach within that route, we would suggest ignoring the research paradigm used in the main journal article, and simply thinking about the research paradigm you want to use in your dissertation. To do this, you'll need to think about your basic set of beliefs, since it is these beliefs that you have (i.e., at a philosophical level), which influence the way you do research (i.e., the practical aspects of doing a dissertation). Ultimately, since you are doing a quantitative dissertation, this will most likely lead you to choose between a positivist or post-positivist research paradigm. However, it is worth noting that there are other research paradigms that may be appropriate when taking on a quantitative dissertation, as well as different ways of describing such research paradigms (e.g., the way that post-positivism is characterised can be very different between texts). Nonetheless, to (a) learn more about these two paradigms, (b) how to choose between them, and (c) some of the implications that your choice will have for the rest of your research strategy, jump to the Research Paradigms section of the Fundamentals part of Lærd Dissertation now.

• Option B
  Learn how to recognize some of the main characteristics of research paradigms in a piece of research

  If a difference in the research paradigm underpinning the research in the main journal article and your dissertation is a major justification for your choice of route or the approach within that route, we would suggest learning how to recognize some of the main characteristics of research paradigms in a piece of research. A research paradigm can act as a major justification for your choice of route and approach when the choice of research paradigm in the main journal article has led to a potential flaw or limitation in the main journal article. Take the following example:

  Example A
  Research paradigms and "wild assertions"
  
  Imagine that the authors of your main journal article made what you would consider to be "wild assertions" when it came to saying how far their findings could be generalised. To illustrate this, imagine that your main journal article examined the relationship between teaching method and exam performance, concluding that the use of seminars in addition to lectures improved exam performance amongst the population of undergraduate students at a single university. But what if in the Discussion section of the main journal article, the authors had concluded that: The addition of seminars to lectures improves exam performance amongst university students. The authors are making the assertion that their results can be generalised not only to the population that they investigated (i.e., undergraduate students at a single university in the United States), but a much wider population (i.e., all types of student - undergraduates, postgraduates, part-time students, full-time students, etc. - and all universities, wherever they may be in the world). Now such an assertion could simply reflect a loose writing style, which could be criticised for being nothing more than that, but it could also reflect a particular basic set of beliefs (i.e., those beliefs that form part of a research paradigm known as positivism, which without going into any detail at this stage, are more inclined to support context-free generalisations such as these). If your basic set of beliefs differed from these, and you felt that such assertions could not be made about the findings from the main journal article, this would be a philosophical justification to test the different populations, settings/contexts, treatments and time in which the findings from the original study hold (i.e., a Route B: Generalisation-based justification).

  To learn how to recognize the characteristics of different research paradigms in journal articles, start by learning about the two main research paradigms you are likely to come across in quantitative research, positivism and post-positivism, in the Research Paradigms section of the Fundamentals part of Lærd Dissertation.

By the end of STEP ONE: Research paradigm, you should be able to state, describe and justify the research paradigm underpinning your dissertation (i.e., typically a positivist or post-positivist research paradigm), and if using a philosophical justification for your choice of route, and approach within that route, explain your philosophical justification.