Article summary of What is epistemology? (Chapter 1) by Willig - Chapter

How, and what, can we know?

Epistemology is a part of philosophy and it is called ‘the theory of knowledge’. It answers the question: “how and what can we know?”. It is about thinking about the nature of knowledge itself, the scope of knowledge and about the reliability and validity of knowledge. Research methods have the goal of answering questions. However, before answering a question, one needs to know what the goal is, so: what are the objectives of our research? One also needs to decide on what kinds of things are possible to find out. This means that one should adopt an ‘epistemological position’ before carrying out any research.

What is positivism?

Positivism is one example of an epistemological position. According to positivism, there is a one-to-one relationship between the world (objects, events, phenomena) and our perception and understanding of it. If one takes a positivistic stand, then one believes that what is ‘out there’ is also all there is. It is also called ‘the correspondence theory of truth’. It suggests that phenomena directly determine our perception. There is thus no room for talking about differences in perception based on thoughts or beliefs. According to positivism, the goal of research is to produce objective knowledge: knowledge based on a view from the outside.

What is empiricism?

Related to positivism, there is empiricism. According to empiricism, our knowledge of the world should be derived from ‘facts of experience’. According to empiricism, simple observations are combined and lead to more complex ideas. Theory follows from observations: theory has the goal to make sense of the data collected through observation. Experiments are based on this position. However, contemporary, many researchers do not agree with the idea that perception is always related to facts. For instance, the more one knows about something, the more detail one perceives when observing it. Perception is known to be selective and people can perceive the same phenomenon in different ways. However, modern-day empiricists still argue that knowledge depends on the collection and analysis of data. Only theory is not enough: all knowledge must be complemented with data. There is a difference between the terms ‘empiricist’ and ‘empirical’: ‘empiricist’ refers to the attitude that all knowledge must be grounded in data, and ‘empirical’ refers to research involving the collection and analysis of data.

What is hypothetico-deductivism?

Karl Popper introduced the idea of ‘hypothetico-deductivism’, as a reaction to limitations of positivism, empiricism, and inductivism. It is now the basis of mainstream psychology. Popper explained that a collection of observations does not indicate causality. Even if someone observes the same thing repeatedly, one can not be sure: there is always the possibility that the next observation is off. This is called the problem of induction, and it meant that no scientific theory in that time could be verified because they relied on inductivism. Therefore Popper proposed to, instead of relying on induction and verification, scientists should rely on deduction and falsification. In hypothetico-deductivism, theories are tested by deriving hypotheses from them and then test these in practice. The aim of the research is to put the theory’s ideas to test, by either rejecting the theory of retain from it. Thus, instead of relying on confirmatory evidence, in hypothetico-deductivism researchers look for disconfirmation or falsification. It is about finding out whether a claim is not true. By a process of eliminating claims, one can find the truth.

What are critiques of the ‘scientific method’?

Popper’s method was also criticized, for example:

1. Hypothetico-deductivism limits theory development: relying on hypotheses generated by existing theories, it is hard to generate new theories.
2. Hypothetico-deductivism is elitist: since this position works with existing theories, it excludes people who are not familiar with such theories and systems from its practice.
3. Hypothetico-deductivism is a myth: in this position, scientists test hypotheses to find out which theories can be discarded. Thomas Kuhn (1962, 1970) disagreed. He stated that theories are not put to test in this way: if scientists found out that a theory could not be confirmed, then they assumed that their experiment was wrong.

What are feminist critiques of established epistemologies?

Most of the critiques noted came from females. In the 1960s and 1970s, females remarked that women are invisible in social scientific work. When women were studied, they were often portrayed as being inferior to men in terms of moral development, intelligence, and conversational style. To challenge these inequalities, the feminist scholars questioned the epistemological foundations of these types of knowledge. This lead to the critique of ‘male science’, which includes the following arguments:

1. The male as the norm. Most of the studies carried out were done with male subjects. Therefore, the findings from these studies were generalized to the whole population of males. Then, other members of society were compared to these males, making these males ‘the norm’.
2. The God trick. The ‘male science’ claimed to be objective. Feminists argued that the attempt to be ‘objective’ and the strategies adopted towards this goal were not effective. They stated that it is impossible for a researcher to position themselves ‘outside of’ the subject matter. Attempts to do so were called ‘God’s eye view’.

However, in despite of these feminist critiques, there is no one feminist epistemology or methodology. There were several approaches developed by feminist social scientists and philosophers, called standpoint epistemology (Harding, 1991), ethnomethodology (Stanley & Wise, 1983), and varieties of feminist post-structuralism (Henriques et al., 1984).

What is social constructionism?

Social constructionism is about the fact that human experience, including perception, is mediated by history, culture, and linguistics. What one perceives and experiences is thus not a direct reflection of environmental conditions. Instead, it must be understood within these conditions. It states that there are ‘knowledges’ instead of ‘knowledge’. Research within social constructionism is about how there are various ways of constructing social reality. For example, researchers in this field have studied emotion, prejudice, and psychopathology to describe how these provide a way of construing reality instead of reflecting reality.

What about epistemology and methodology?

To answer what the relationship is between epistemology and methodology, one first needs to be aware of what the difference is between ‘method’ and ‘methodology’. Even though these terms are often used interchangeably, they are different. ‘Methodology’ is defined as ‘a general approach to studying research topics’, while ‘method’ refers to a specific research technique. For example, when a researcher adopts an epistemological position, he or she will adopt a methodology of collecting data. The specific methods used can differ. Hypothetico-deductivism is one approach that offers both an epistemological position and a research method, namely hypothesis-testing through experimentation. A researcher’s epistemological and methodological commitments do limit him or her in which methods can be used. Consider a social constructionist methodology: this methodology is not compatible with methods that are designed to measure variables in a population. This is because it questions the validity of ‘psychological variables’, and is more about exploring different ways in which these variables are construed.

What can be said about qualitative research?

Qualitative research methods can and are used by researchers with different epistemological positions. Empiricist as well as social constructionists use qualitative measures. This means that there are ‘qualitative methodologies’, and not one ‘qualitative methodology’. However, qualitative methods share a number of assumptions, and this can be referred to as ‘qualitative methodology’.

Qualitative methodology

Qualitative research is about meaning. It is about how people make sense of the world and how they experience events. They are thus interested in the quality and texture of experience, and not with identifying causal relationships. Qualitative researchers ask questions such as: “What do people do when they form groups?”, or “How do people manage change in the workplace?”.

Epistemological differences

Epistemologies determine the approach to qualitative data and thus the theory that is used as a framework. If one takes a social constructionist position, then they may approach text using a discourse analytic theoretical framework. When one has a empirical position, then one may use the grounded theory method or content analysis to identify categories of meaning. The different qualitative methodologies can be differentiated based on the extent to which they emphasize reflexivity and by the degree of emphasis on language. Reflexivity refers to that a researcher is aware of his or her contribution in the research, and acknowledging that it is impossible to remain ‘outside of’ the subject matter (think back about the ‘God’s eye’). Reflexivity is then about that the researcher reflects on what their role is in the research. There are two types of reflexivity: personal reflexivity and epistemological reflexivity. Personal reflexivity refers to reflecting on the ways in which our own values, experiences, interests, beliefs, political commitments, and so forth affect the research. It is also about thinking how the research may have affected and possibly changed us. Epistemological reflexivity is about questions such as: “How has the research question defined and limited what can be ‘found’?, and “How has the design of the study and the method of analysis ‘constructed’ the data and the findings?”. Qualitative researchers differ in the emphasis they place on reflexivity in their research: for some, personal and epistemological reflexivity are important and should be reported, while for others they do acknowledge the importance, but do not report it. One part of reflexivity is ‘critical language awareness’. This means that the words we use to describe experiences play a part in the construction of the meanings we attribute to experiences: it has to a constructive dimension. The categories and labels that researchers use will thus shape their findings. For example, when a researchers asks a respondent how she felt during a medical procedure, this invokes the category ‘emotion’. Whatever the response is, emotion will have to be oriented to.

What are ‘small q’ and ‘Big Q’?

There is a distinction between two meanings of ‘qualitative research’, with big Q referring to open-ended, inductive research methodologies. ‘Big’ Q is oriented with theory generation and exploration of meanings, whereas ‘little q’ refers to including non-numerical data into hypothetico-deductive research (thus complementing experiments with qualitative data). For an example of ‘Big Q’, researchers can include an open-ended question in a forced-choice questionnaire, and then use content analysis to ‘score’ the qualitative material. It is thus not about ‘bottom-up’, the goal is not to find ways to gain new insights into the ways in which participants construct meaning and/or experience of their world. Instead, they have a hypothesis and they have defined categories, against which the qualitative data is then checked. In the book, it is mainly about ‘Big Q’ methodology.

What are three epistemological questions?

To evaluate research, one needs to know what the goal of the research is. There are three questions that can help to identify the methodology’s epistemological roots:

1. What kind of knowledge does the methodology aim to produce? The type of knowledge that is aimed to produce depends on the epistemological positions.
2. What kinds of assumptions does the methodology make about the world? This is about ‘ontology’, which is defined as the nature of the world. Compared to epistemology, which asks: “How can we know?”, ontology asks: “What is there to know?”. When one assumes that events are generated by underlying structures such as socioeconomic status, this would constitute a materialist ontology. If one assumes that psychological phenomena are independent from such structures, this is called an idealist position. Ontological positions are divided into ‘realist’ and ‘relativist’. A realist ontology is about that the world exists of structures and objects that have cause-effect relationships. Materialism is a form of realist ontology. A relativist ontology states is about that there are different interpretations of the world. Idealism is form of a relativist ontology.
3. How does the methodology conceptualize the role of the researcher in the research process? Some methodologies in qualitative research view the researcher as a builder who constructs a house: the researcher is the central figure in the research process. Other methodologies in this research acknowledge the importance of the researcher, but do not view the researcher as the author of the findings. Instead, they view the researchers as someone who uses their skills to find evidence.

BulletPoints

• Epistemology is a part of philosophy and it is called ‘the theory of knowledge’. It answers the question: “how and what can we know?”. It is about thinking about the nature of knowledge itself, the scope of knowledge and about the reliability and validity of knowledge. Research methods have the goal of answering questions. However, before answering a question, one needs to know what the goal is, so: what are the objectives of our research? One also needs to decide on what kinds of things are possible to find out. This means that one should adopt an ‘epistemological position’ before carrying out any research.

• Related to positivism, there is empiricism. According to empiricism, our knowledge of the world should be derived from ‘facts of experience’. According to empiricism, simple observations are combined and lead to more complex ideas. Theory follows from observations: theory has the goal to make sense of the data collected through observation. Experiments are based on this position. However, contemporary, many researchers do not agree with the idea that perception is always related to facts. For instance, the more one knows about something, the more detail one perceives when observing it. Perception is known to be selective and people can perceive the same phenomenon in different ways. However, modern-day empiricists still argue that knowledge depends on the collection and analysis of data. Only theory is not enough: all knowledge must be complemented with data. There is a difference between the terms ‘empiricist’ and ‘empirical’: ‘empiricist’ refers to the attitude that all knowledge must be grounded in data, and ‘empirical’ refers to research involving the collection and analysis of data.

• Most of the critiques noted came from females. In the 1960s and 1970s, females remarked that women are invisible in social scientific work. When women were studied, they were often portrayed as being inferior to men in terms of moral development, intelligence, and conversational style. To challenge these inequalities, the feminist scholars questioned the epistemological foundations of these types of knowledge. This lead to the critique of ‘male science’, which includes the following arguments:

  • The male as the norm. Most of the studies carried out were done with male subjects. Therefore, the findings from these studies were generalized to the whole population of males. Then, other members of society were compared to these males, making these males ‘the norm’.
  • The God trick. The ‘male science’ claimed to be objective. Feminists argued that the attempt to be ‘objective’ and the strategies adopted towards this goal were not effective. They stated that it is impossible for a researcher to position themselves ‘outside of’ the subject matter. Attempts to do so were called ‘God’s eye view’.

• To answer what the relationship is between epistemology and methodology, one first needs to be aware of what the difference is between ‘method’ and ‘methodology’. Even though these terms are often used interchangeably, they are different. ‘Methodology’ is defined as ‘a general approach to studying research topics’, while ‘method’ refers to a specific research technique. For example, when a researcher adopts an epistemological position, he or she will adopt a methodology of collecting data. The specific methods used can differ. Hypothetico-deductivism is one approach that offers both an epistemological position and a research method, namely hypothesis-testing through experimentation. A researcher’s epistemological and methodological commitments do limit him or her in which methods can be used. Consider a social constructionist methodology: this methodology is not compatible with methods that are designed to measure variables in a population. This is because it questions the validity of ‘psychological variables’, and is more about exploring different ways in which these variables are construed.

• There is a distinction between two meanings of ‘qualitative research’, with big Q referring to open-ended, inductive research methodologies. ‘Big’ Q is oriented with theory generation and exploration of meanings, whereas ‘little q’ refers to including non-numerical data into hypothetico-deductive research (thus complementing experiments with qualitative data). For an example of ‘Big Q’, researchers can include an open-ended question in a forced-choice questionnaire, and then use content analysis to ‘score’ the qualitative material. It is thus not about ‘bottom-up’, the goal is not to find ways to gain new insights into the ways in which participants construct meaning and/or experience of their world. Instead, they have a hypothesis and they have defined categories, against which the qualitative data is then checked. In the book, it is mainly about ‘Big Q’ methodology.