Transcript for:
Research Onion by Mark Saunders

brilliant that's great so we're all in business just to just to say folks a final slide for those of you who may be in the wrong place as we say as sam inch said in his introduction this is a workshop on research philosophies approaches and strategies with plenty of time at the end for you to ask questions on anything at all in related to research and within this workshop we're going to be looking at the um research onion now sam's already introduced me a bit so i won't go into my actual role at birmingham that much other than to say the director of global engagement is a phenomenal role because it's actually about building links and relationships with universities and organizations throughout the world so i'm really grateful to be having that what i thought would be useful just a little bit more of an introduction was to give you a bit more background of my self in terms of my work so i think that will help you in terms of answers being able to ask questions has the slide changed happily sam sam hello can somebody just unmute and say if you can see a second slide now please for me just so i know i'm in the right way yeah i can see there's a test yeah hey thank you guys that's great mike thanks so what we've got here is just a sample of some of the textbooks i work and what i wanted to bring out of this was that on the textbooks i'm one of those few people like doing both quantitative research so you see books on statistics and also qualitative research you see book on case study for example and i tend to do work in human resource management manage and change and look at employee relations and not only do i publish books on that but use i've published journal articles as well on how to teach and issues associated with teaching the um most recent book which may well be of interest quite a few of you is the how to keep your doctor on track book which is actually looking at the realities of doing a doctorate rather than the sanitized account of how straightforward it really it is because we all know it isn't and how we've built written that book is we've got contributors to talk from both the doctoral students perspective and also from supervisors perspective on the same issues and it's written in the style of sitting in a coffee bar having a chat so should be of interest to you in terms of my work on um trust and distrust come out into a variety of journals but just to say just to give an idea we've looked at trust and distrust in doctor-patient relationships trust and distrust in organizations we looked at it within service industries and more widely across cultures so a variety of things coming there and of course just leave a link into a book there on handbooks research methods on trust um i've also published quite a lot in the areas of hrm so here's some recent ones in human resource development quarterly training development and so on the training development works quite interesting we're arguing that train development research is very basically very simplistic and doesn't actually get to understand it within the context and then quite a lot of work on methods in british journal management annals of tourism research human performance in particular the work i've been focusing on the moment is that really thorny question of how many interviews are enough and the short answer is it depends and the longer answer is if you want to get published in a top journal you're probably looking at between 30 and 50. if you're wanting to reach saturation and it's a homologous population about 10 to 15. so it depends very much so and then finally i've done quite a lot of work with different organizations so for many people here and today probably one which has come up is higher education training in south africa where we've got a a really fantastic project with um university of pretoria looking at some doctoral development and working with um people in a variety of universities to upskill phd students and then there's been work on english language testing helping small businesses looking at skills for motor industry and a variety of different organizations in terms of health authorities local government uk and hs and at the end result i'm as sam said earlier member of the academy of social sciences british county management and also the charter institute of personnel development so folks that's really me um is are there any questions yet on the basis that nothing's come back i'm going to proceed forward so okay thanks here we have the first slide so this is where we're going to end up by the end of today and i'm really hoping that by the end of the day you'll be able to explain to other people the different philosophical perspectives so what do we mean by positivism interpretivism and so on and what that means for approaches management research so how that fits into how we do research as management research and business researchers but also within that how we have to be systematic and how we have to have a coherent research design in relation to the philosophies i'm going to hopefully expect you to be able to explain terms like epistemology so things the nature of knowledge and in particular what's acceptable knowledge terms like ontology that's your own assumptions you have about the nature of reality or being and then terms like actually the role of values in your research in particular the role of your values and of the researchers value in how they do research but not only just explaining but also where do you sit in the debates associated with these and how does this impact on your own research now these terms are really crucial not in terms of the labels themselves but in terms of what they mean for how you do research and how your values what successful knowledge impact upon that um i'd also like to spend a bit of time talking about deductive research so that's where you start with a hypothesis for example and collect data to to test that hypothesis inductive research where you start with data and then build hypotheses from the data and abductive research where you move back and forth between the two but not just talk about being able to distinguish but also see how do these impact on your research and the way you're doing research because really what we're all about without exception today is we're about doing the best possible research we can do to actually answer questions that are important and by important i mean important to us important to the people we live with important people we work with or for and important to our lives and other people's lives and next thing i want to be able to be able to identify main research strategies and i want you to think about should different research strategies be mutually exclusive and that is very much a debate we can have perhaps in the chat or you could have afterwards but there's something to think about and i want you to think about using multiple methods in collecting research so combining more than one data collection method and what more one analysis method so we've got a fair bit to cover over the time today but as sam said we've got a break coming in at 10 30 uk time so take whatever time you started that now and a half to it that'll be we'll have a half hour break then it may be slightly early it may be slightly later depending on how we're getting through the slides and then we'll also have breakouts before then and we've got breakout rooms already organized so you can discuss things so what we're really doing is we're working our way through the research onion and this onion is probably what most people know me for so my guess is that's probably similar for most you guys out there yeah yeah and yeah thank you it's good to have voices coming back thank you exactly yeah um with the onion that started life living on my whiteboard in my office and i shared an office with another guy called phil and it lived on my whiteboard and every single person who came into my office i said what do you reckon to this and the comments that came back were oh i don't like that bit or isn't that more like that so that was developed with colleagues and students over a period of about six months and i wanted to put it put it in the research methods book and phil said oh i'm not sure adrian said no it's rubbish we shouldn't put that in so i said no i'm in charge of this book i'm putting it in i was i was saying this is important and it's take it's been kind of like its own i think there's been four or five phds written on it now which is quite amazing but more importantly what the crucial thing is for you guys is what it's about is saying we have that white bit in the middle which says data collection and data analysis and that's where you end up but all the outside layers are things you have to think about to ensure you select the right data collection data analysis tools and techniques to be able to answer your research question or to meet your aim and objectives so these are all things and decisions you have to make so what it's really saying is that place where you end up has a lot of thought going in behind it and what we in effect we're doing is we're giving you talking about the outer layers of things you have to think about and today we're talking about issues of the philosophy layer the approach to theory development layer and in particular the strategies layer and we'll also talk a little bit about the um methodological choice the mono method and multi method as well so and the reasons behind those so it's a very useful tool to follow through and to help force you to think about the other aspects and that's what it was designed for all those years ago so anyway let's get into doing something right this is time where i'm quite happy for you guys to switch your microphones off and actually say something so here we have a situation and if the situation is of team workers being briefed and before the start of their working day in a factory and what we'd like i'd like people to do is to say think about what could be a research question there first of all so what do you think could be a research question switch your microphone off if you've got an idea just let talk it out and then we'll take that and run with it so what could be your research question a job to do for the day yeah so research questions that's obviously the question that the managers are asking the workers and my guess is just looking at there you can guess who the managers are can't you they're the ones on the left and they're asking that's they're they're briefing people about the job for the day but what would a research question be people be able to say something can i say something yeah abdi is my name i can say um to what extent is um still is um worker management relationship having an effect on organizational performance right let's take that people put their microphones up i mean you want me to repeat it to what extent to what extent is worker management relationship having an effect on organizational performance really thank you very much indeed i've written that down so i've got it in front of me it's to what extent is work management relationships having an effect on what on organizational performance and that's quite a nice research question because when you ask something is to what extent you're not saying it is having an effect and you're not saying it isn't effective you're leaving it open and you've got a cause and effect relationship coming in there quite nicely okay so we've got a research question in there so if we take that as our research question and we can have microphones back on again what are the beliefs and assumptions behind that so in asking that question what what what what what beliefs do we have what assumptions do we have so what how do we think the world works for example worker productivity is not encouraging so we so it we could be starting from the basis that there is a problem with worker productivity within this organization couldn't we that could be but the way we've phrased our question is quite clearly not actually defining it as a problem at the moment so we're being a bit more open at this at the moment which is quite helpful to see so that's one of the beliefs we could have what else might we have a little productivity yeah so we could have a belief and low productivity okay so what this is saying is folks is as we come into doing any research we bring with into our research some of our own assumptions and beliefs now certain world views certainly certain world views certain logical views would say we can get rid of those we can put them to one side and approach our research completely value neutrally other people will say no that's not possible and what we do is when we come in to do undertake our research although we may try to put our own world views our own beliefs and assumptions to one side invariably they will impact upon the research we do and within business and management and a large number of the social sciences there are different views within the same subject area so some people will say the researcher can be value value neutral and their values and beliefs will not affect what they do other people will say no that isn't the case and the way they've been brought up just the world view they have their previous life experiences will invariably impact on how they look at things so we've now got to the stage we have a research question to what extent is work management relationships having an effect on organizational performance and we have some for the sake of taking this forward some beliefs and assumptions and belief assumptions that we have is that there is a problem with workers and there's low productivity so if we're now researching this what data do you think would be acceptable and to whom and again microphones often answer so what data will be acceptable and to whom it's certainly going to be a question here okay so one possibility would say is a questionnaire okay and it will be issued to both parties both um the management and the staff of the organization okay thank you for that that's that's certainly one really interesting suggestion and it's certainly not wrong but does anybody have an alternative suggestion hang on um there were two people talking there so one of you let's have the person who sounded so female first and then the male second so the female first uh who sounded female but uh oh dear can i go ahead yeah of course you can sorry about that i mean no i i what i want to see here is that um i don't know whether in in sort of carrying out this kind of research you should first of all have a benchmark which you use to judge productivity or the outputs of your staff i mean without having some kind of benchmark or some levels um you wouldn't measure what the productivity is and where they are so i would think that maybe mm in in device and the company's production strategies there should be some level of productivity embedded in the in the in the research so that you can know where where you want to go and why you haven't been there excellent thank you so that's sort of saying acceptable knowledge would have to be benchmarked so we could see whether what we considered to be low or high was sensible to label it as such by looking at other organs looking at other organizations or perhaps previous levels in the same organization some idea of benchmarking any other ideas and what would be acceptable knowledge okay let me we'll have the microphones off for a minute and let me just come back to you with some ideas here what you guys have said is that in order to understand the extent to which a worker management relationship has an effect on organization performance we need to collect data which we can quantify so you were very much going down data which would measure organizational performance in the numerical terms so some form of output perhaps in a canteen number of meals served or amount of waste of food things like that but if you look at that question you came up with worker management relationships how do you you hadn't really come across talk about how do you measure the relationships what do people feel about them and that becomes more difficult so it might be there though yes do come in yes i think i read i go for qualitative data yeah exactly so it may well be that it would be useful to collect some qualitative data about how people the both the managers and the workers actually understand that relationship and what they consider to be important within that so what we're seeing here is with one question the way we look at our beliefs and assumptions is going to impact our beliefs and assumptions are going to impact on what acceptable knowledge and also the aspects we look at i brought in for example the fact that i was interested in the relationships between these people and how they work together and actually understand it from both sides perspectives now and as it was something we didn't know much about and it was something where we'd have to explore first perhaps a qualitative approach perhaps interviewing might be more useful alternatively we could have said let's use a time and motion study and actually observe what these people are doing and see are they working efficiently so there's lots of different things if i may ask a question yeah of course you can um with something like looking at this spatial organization of the company or site be a form of data that can be included in a question like this so looking at the environment exactly indeed you could so you could you could look at um relationship proximities say between in actually within the canteen itself but also between different buildings on site and how that affected the amount of time people had to take to away from work to get food so there's lots of different ways to do it so what we're seeing here is the assumptions and beliefs we bring and our form and our knowledge impacts on how we get we could answer these research questions none of the suggestions you've made are wrong that in fact all of them are really interesting exciting but it depends on how we want to answer that research question now if we're working from doing work for an organization applied research then the organization will have some very clear issues that outputs they want from the research and find they're about finding out rather than telling them a specific answer then then we can actually work with that what we don't want them is to tell us the answer they want because we obviously need to find out what's actually going on but all the time here we need to be very clear about what the question is and how we on our values and functions impact on what knowledge is going to be acceptable and then how we're going to fix that are we okay to move on folks yep i believe we are right so what we're doing here is we've been thinking about our research philosophies as a reflexive process and by something being reflexive it means that as a reflex process it means that we think about the impact we're having as researchers on the research topic and the people who are being researched and so this is a our beliefs and assumptions we've just been looking at um things like the um what we consider acceptable knowledge the nature of reality in the role of our own values that impacts on that's impact upon our research philosophies and our research philosophies partially dictate our beliefs and assumptions and both of those come down and they impact upon our research design so all these things are interrelated and what we're really saying is that all i'm saying is that research philosophy matters and that's because research philosophy is about the beliefs and assumptions we make during our research now if you think about it when we looked at the picture of the team workers and having their briefing the canteen workers we immediately made assumptions one of the assumptions my guess is that all of us made i certainly did was that the people on the left in the skirts and white blouses were the managers and the people on the right with the aprons and the headdresses were the workers then as the questions came up or the question came up and the methods to doing it we were making assumptions about things we were making assumptions that managers and their relationship with workers will affect performance we will make assumptions about productivity we will make assumptions about which sorts of data were acceptable to the organization and what we were quite a lot of the assumptions were there that quantitative data tend to be more acceptable to organizations than qualitative data i mean as an aside i think that's and so one of the interesting things that happens when we're looking at these data we often make the assumption that organizations like quantitative data but what we actually see is they like quantitative data but it what wins hearts and souls is the qualitative illustrations behind that so just to illustrate that work looking at providing support for people with who have children with learning difficulties and some work i was doing a few years ago and the sending in of people to support these people and we were asked to find out what the families felt about this and we did a quantitative survey because they wanted numbers but it was the qualitative comments that actually told the real story there was this amazing comment from one of the parents saying my child cannot speak and they cannot obviously right and that they're blind but what is noticeable is that when they hear the carer's voice they their arms go outstretched and they smile and that was much more powerful than any quantitative data and illustrating the importance of the role these carers had so we're very much here looking at how the systems of beliefs and assumptions about everything affect the research we do and what i want you to think about is your views on your assumptions about the nature of reality and we're going to be looking at the heart questionnaire in a while and what how you your assumptions of reality affected your research philosophy i want you to be thinking again about your assumptions about what constitutes acceptable valid and legitimate knowledge and also how we communicate this knowledge to other people i also want you to be thinking about the role of your own values and the role of acting and researching ethically and how important that is it so really what i'm saying is that you everybody on this um webinar all 132 of you have a research philosophy and that is based on your beliefs and assumptions and your values but hopefully soon you're going to be aware but hopefully you're going to be much more aware of your beliefs and assumptions and what i want you to think about also is are they systematic and by that i mean do they all fit together so here's going to be a little quiz for you to do on your own or one question actually and i'm not going to give you the answer yet but what i want you to do is to read through the next slide and i want you to actually say write down is this systematic or not so all you need to do is in relation to this slide is write down systematic or not systematic so does it all fit together this dissertation is based on a premise that very little is actually known about why formal organizational change programs have such a high failure rate the aim of the research is therefore an in-depth exploration of the possible reasons for such failure in particular the study will look at the interpretations of failure by senior managers 200 questionnaires have been sent to senior managers around the uk to test the relationships between the common causes of failure and their effects the responses were analyzed statistically using the spss the key finding is that resistance to change is the most common cause of failure of formal organizational change programs which supports previous studies now what i'm interested in you thinking through and making a note of is whether that research as described in terms of how the method is put over is systematic or not so does it all fit together is it consistent i don't want an answer yet because i want you just to note that down and we'll come back to it later [Music] okay do we have any questions so far at all so many questions coming up um no not really so i mean it's just comments so the last comment here or someone said i agree with you the views of managers workers and customers all count but um no real questions yet thank you for agreeing with me okay let's move on then guys so let's have a look at the assumptions that management researchers make and we're going to start off by looking at the word ontological so ontological assumptions are about the world and the nature of reality so they're your own person about assumptions about the world what reality is and they will determine how you see what you're researching so if we were to look at that for example do we see organizations as something which is static and be shown as a chart or do we see organizations about organizing and managing things something that is fluid and already changing that's basically how you see the reality or two ways you could see the reality of an organization so the important part point behind this is what are your ontological assumptions and what in other words how do you see reality and how does that impact upon your research to give it a little bit more concrete perhaps recently a colleague and i were looking at trust between doctors and patients and we approached this research both having a reality and an understanding of this which had come from our previous histories of employment i used to work in social care and my colleague used to work in intensive care nursing so we came to that with an understanding of how that world worked and so the reality that we were seeing could well have been different from other people's so we were very clear in our own research to actually explain our backgrounds because we knew that would impact on the research we're doing it also impacts on the theoretical frameworks you choose your research the sorts of data you look at i'm increasingly interested in people's perceptions and the minutiae of the way they view their daily lives and how that impacts on trust and it impacts on what you notice my background in social care means i tend to notice certain things in the way people interact and certainly when i'm looking at doctor-patient relationships because i have a knowledge of those from previous working roles it impacts on the sorts of things i'm looking for as i'm collecting data so i think it's really important to think about you as you are where you've come from life experiences you've had the sorts of books you've read the research you've read and how that impacts on the way you're going to do your research so your ontological assumptions so you're something about the nature of reality just think about what's going on in has gone on in the world i'm going to use an example from the uk on purpose because then it makes it neutral for everybody else and in the uk we had a the uk's relationship with ireland in the past has been very very um troubled to want a better way and within that that there were people setting off bombs which invariably were killing people both in ireland and in the uk now for some the people setting off bombs and certainly for the uk government were called terrorists but for the people who were actually trying to move out from british rule in ireland they weren't terrorists they were freedom fighters so the reality depended on the viewpoint of the person who was looking at it an extreme example but it illustrates how the way you look at things impacts sorry do we have a question yeah sorry mark um we've got two questions in the chat box okay so we've got a question from duke yeah and the question is is the assumptions determined from the literature that's one question okay and there's another question from sam necre which is would you talk about systematic knowledge in humanities also about automatic sorry i didn't quite get the word about systematic knowledge in humanities also right okay let's i'm going to start with the second question because it leads into the first question quite nicely okay so about systematic knowledge and humanities um i'm a social scientist so i would feel very very concerned about being able to say what goes on in in the humanities so so because that includes arts and social sciences so if we narrow it down to social sciences i would say that there is there is system on systematic knowledge yes but there is conflicting systematic knowledge in that even within business and management which is my has been my discipline now for 25 years different groups will look at the same topic very differently and have very different user so for example when i was doing the work on looking at sample size some people were arguing from a very from the viewpoint that we had to select sample size for interviews looking at from a positivistic viewpoint and what mattered was having something a sample which was statistically representative other people were arguing from a more interpreted viewpoint and saying what matters was being able to understand the minority so this actual size of sample didn't was far less important and what was much more crucial was the fact that the sample was large enough to get gain useful insights so what we're seeing in there is different views but but both on systematic knowledge within the discipline so there's a range of different systematic knowledges depend and that means there's also of in going to duke's question there are a variety of different assumptions that you can gain from literature and invariably everything we read will impact on how we look at things and that duke and by the way duke when i finish do and other colleagues do come back to me on this the idea of assumptions from the literature is really crucial and it's important to recognize that as we read we learn and what we read impacts on how we look at things and how we look at things in the future and to be aware of that so invariably we will be impacted upon what what we do what we what we read will impact on what we do and we need to be aware of the assumptions made in literature and talk about these undertake our research is that answered your question duke and also the other colleague do come back i can see you've listened that lit up so do tell me is that okay um oh yeah and then mark sorry if you don't mind there's two more questions here and there's one question which says from kathy yeah can one's ontological viewpoint vary depending on the type of research project one is undertaking ah so that's the question from kathy kathy you you were basically asked what i call the chicken and the egg question does your does your ontology come before your research project or does your research project is your research project so is your research project defined by your ontology or does your ontology define your research project and the honest answer is i it's my personal answer is i think it depends on how strong you are in the wedding to a particular ontological view for some people it would just be not so uncomfortable to do research which went against their beliefs about the nature of reality and research and how they see their research objects that they couldn't do it so again their ontology would define the methods they use for other people they would start the research question quite often they're prepped from a pragmatist viewpoint and they will say my answer i would adopt this form of ontological view to answer this research question so it depends on you okay any other questions sam yeah yes there's one more so this question is from barbara and her question is how do you develop your research philosophy as an early career research scientist oh my goody aunt barbara your you guys are asking some phenomenal questions making me really think so that's how do you i think our research philosophies are actually there and what we actually need to do is to actually bring them out from the subconscious and out into open that's what we're going to be doing as we go go along as a researcher i had no idea what my research philosophy is in fact i i i was trained as a positivist research philosopher which means basically there is one way of doing it and that's the right way and you don't need to know about anything else and life was very straightforward but then i discovered that the questions i wanted to answer or i was asking couldn't be answered from within that philosophical viewpoint so i thought well what's going on and i basically taught myself by reading about other philosophies until i found something which seemed to fit what we're going to do with you guys and actually barbara you've given me a great segue into moving forward but also into talking about harp in a little while is what we're going to do is we're going to use look at where you are now and see does it make consistency and does it fit with who you are because the crucial thing in my view is that you're clear about your ontological views your histological views and your axological views and then you remain true to them and make sure they're consistent when you understand your research and you will find that you will develop over time as you read more to taking in those early questions you get different assumptions from literature other knowledge and you'll grow any other questions if you're a quick sound cause i'm mind yes yeah mark let me just be quick there are two questions and then we can move on so i'm going to read both to you and then um when you finish answering you can move on so the first one is from john and john's question is how can you be sure that the research philosophy you are adopting is the right one that's the first question and the second question is from lady and lady's question is having read so much upon which benchmark do i determine my world view that's that's they're both questions which are very similar so how can you be sure it's the right one and benchmark without giving too much away in business and management there is no one right philosophy so you're not looking for the right philosophy and if you think back to the earlier question what does systematic mean what you're looking for is consistency in your research design and your research philosophy so it's somebody it fits together and it's systematic and so there is you can't benchmark it but what you can do is you can see how people in the philosophy which you feel comfortable in are undertaking research and look at the what the accepted norms within that philosophical approach to things so we you can see for example in top american journals there is a very ex very clear accepted norm of how to write positivistic research up when you move into more interpretivist research or or critical realist research that there are not such prescribed sector laws but there's a clear way of how we do things so how we report our data code and so on so you can actually see the ways of doing things that they fit together okay hopefully that was enough to keep us moving forward do keep the questions coming and it looks to me as sam that we may well be running a little bit late already but what the heck this is what's important for these guys if anybody is feeling we're going too slowly and it's not of any use put it in the chat and sam will tell me that it's a load of rubbish and i'll speed up if the time's right timing's about right you're getting stuff out of it again please do put that in the chats it's quite helpful to know we're going in about the right speed for you folks okay we're going to move on so the next form of assumptions that researchers make are um called um epistemological and these are the ones which are about what constitutes valid legitimate sexual knowledge and we've already talked a fair bit about this in terms of organizations tend to like quantitative data and figures but what this does for you as researchers is what you feel is important what's valid to you impacts on the data you collect and then how you can collectively you and how you communicate this and so what we're seeing here is the difference between collecting data on measurable facts versus stories and narratives which is are both legitimate are both acceptable is one more so than other do you believe that statistics offer the ultimate truth or do you believe that the opinions of individuals matter more and for you it's what to do the your epistemological assumptions how you feel about what counts as values of data what impact does that have on your research just so you know i actually feel that both are valid and both have a part to play but then that's from my own pragmatist viewpoint then we have about our axiological value assumptions these are about the role of our own values and ethics in the research process i'm really fortunate in that now i i can do research that i believe matters and fortunately the university actually pays me to do it which or an organization do i'm actually really keen at the moment on doing research which actually understands about why people trust and how trust operates in organization and also how when there's been disputes and trust has been broken how can we move to areas of distrust how can we rebuild move from distrust to neutral and rebuild trust in organizational relationships i'm also very keen at the moment to looking at the impact that working online has on trust and distrust and in particular how as we communicate at the moment the fact that we're using these means what impact does that have on our understanding our abilities to be able to build trust and uh i've been looking recently at the united nations moving to working online what impact does that have on their ability to come to agreements and so on it also determines how we personally become involved in the research process do we act as a researcher who is neutral and away from what's being researched or will are we actually part of what's been researched so for example whose responsibility should career development be some people think that career development is the responsibility of the organization i think thing think it's the responsibility of the individual both could be considered to be right it depends on your values another one should companies be pay a fair amount of tax or the legal requirement so here we have um the amount of tax paid by companies some major name companies just to illustrate that and something which will make people really really depressing as a percentage amazon pays less taxes of proportion than i pay is that right in fact in the uk amazon paid less tax the uk government than i paid so one human being paid less tax on the company of amazon all those profits is that right and that's about your axiological values so we need to take because that affects your assumptions on how you do your research so let's actually try and summarize this and this is a a table which comes out of them chapter four of the research methods book now i'm referring to this chapter on purpose because what i've i got permission from the publisher was to put this up on my academia.edu webpage as a free download so you can actually get the whole chapter for free so i'm not i'm not selling anything guys you can have this for nothing and it's there but what we're actually seeing here is how if you look at a continuum from being objective through to subjective along the top how our ontological our epistemological and lactological assumptions whether objective or subjective impact on the nature of method so if we tend to be objectively saying there's external it's real it's one true reality and we're looking at things and we're trying to create order we're interested in facts numbers observable phenomena and we're researching it values three and we're detached we tend to be more likely to go down quantitative methods and that's what we're talking about we're saying about things being systematic and fitting so that goes back to the question that was asked by our um by john and also by lady how they come together and and be systematic if we're if we're actually more saying that um that reality is decided by so by convention it's socially constructed there are multiple realities and it's a flowing process orders chaos and what matters is i'm just looking to see somebody's gonna if anyone's gonna say anything sam i'm sure they were in a minute if you want to put it in the chat sam can just say it that way instead because first of all you need to be able to position your research in the area that you are seeking to enter is more or less inclined towards work also in tattoo that comes in the context of the research is really important because what not what you want to do is to be able to be clear about how you want your research to be read so if you explain to somebody that you're taking it adopting an interpretivist approach that immediately signals to the reader to read that there you're going to be interested in telling in-depth stories you're more likely to be using qualitative data and it says read my research in this way in the way i intend it to be read so it's very helpful to do that so there's positioning yourself to the reader and it's also the positionings your research in relation to what others have done so what you're you're showing there is by explaining what my research is and talk about others you can see the different insights that different philosophic philosophical approaches are likely to give yent came on to talk about resolving conflict shadrach which is a really interesting one one of the issues when i was directing dr pro the doctor program which always worried me was how many students without questioning adopted their supervisors philosophical stance and did as they were told rather than actually being open to look at what who they were i think the crucial thing here is about being able to is being able to defend what you're doing and recognizing that business and managers management is what we call a pluralist subject in terms of philosophies that means we have a variety of different ways of doing the same of looking at things because we're a young subject and we and we borrow from across the social sciences i think about resolving conflict is being it's about being clear and being able to explain why you've done it the way you have and to justify it so some really great points there shadrach do we have any other yeah i mean mark we've got a couple of questions here do you mind if i read them i'll see know that's fine thanks sam okay so the first one is from milan and milan's question is will your philosophy inform the type of research questions you ask as a researcher that's the question from milan and then i'm going to should i just read out all the questions and then i i leave it to you we'll take those and then we'll move on again okay but yeah all right and then next question is from anthony and his question sorry his question is apart from the social sciences and humanities can ontology epistemology and axiology be applicable to research philosophy in the physical sciences that's anthony's question okay the third one is from kasiwa this first question is if philosophy is different it could be challenging for them so i think that in relation to something you said and then the next one is from peter and the question is is there anything as a value-free concept or assumption or judgment that's from peter okay that's great those are really great questions and then there's so yeah sorry there's some there's one more okay and that question is from paul and paul's question is what should inform the research philosophy should it be informed by the study's objectives or the researcher's own research philosophy okay some fantastic questions from the five people so let's um start with anthony apart from social science and humanities is research philosophy the physical sciences yes it is and if you look at the physical scientists what use one of the ways we often refer to positivism which is a research philosophy is as a as a natural scientist doing experiments so it's equally applicable the difference is that they tend to they tend very often to be adopting a positivistic approach so yes it is equally applicable to all sciences because it's about the nature of knowledge and how we look at it and the nature of knowledge is equally applicable to physical sciences as to social sciences and humanities um right then i'll just go to um cursors one on if philosophy is different it could be challenging the answer to your question is a very simple one-word answer yes but that doesn't really help you much so let's take it a little bit further and what i would say is the most crucial thing is to get on well with your supervisor and you can judge her or him better than i can and if they say you do it this way and they have good justifications and you're happy with them work with it if it's the way they suggest in terms of research philosophies is so different to how you view the world it may well be worth discussing that with them and coming to an unemployed way forward because otherwise you'll be having a horrible internal conflict between yourself and your phd or your doctor or your research which won't work um with regard to can research be value three well if you're a positivist you believe it is and we'll come on to that a bit more so we'll talk about that more and then the last ones were about your philosophy informing your research question or should your research question inform your philosophy and it depends on who you are and can we leave that and come to it as we talk more about the philosophy because i think that will come come to light a bit more as we move forward okay let's carry on so here's a quick quick question i'm just going to ask you to write down your answer to this imagine you're part as part of your research you discover workplace bullying in an international organization your axiology will primarily determine what which one of those one of those answers is right so axiology is about your you know because we talked about it so you could have noted down how you conceptualize how you gather and communicate knowledge becoming personally involved and it won't affect your research i'm not going to ask for examples this time just mindful of the time sam and when you get onto stuff which is interesting it goes slower but that doesn't matter because it's just fun to go we don't get through some of the material so quick that's fun though fine though because we're doing interesting stuff and nobody's come up to you sam yet and said we're going too slowly have they um no so one person wrote in the chat box and said that the pace was perfect that was from barbara barbara you're the most wonderful human being i've ever met thank you so much big hugs right carry on right so you've probably written down an answer while we've been talk sam and i've been talking so let's if you put down number four then basically you're wrong because the axiology will affect how you do your research your your own values and belief values and your how you view ethical research will impact on how you do it so if you've got four you're wrong the thing which axiology is about is about your values and whether you can believe you can keep apart from her and so what we're looking at here is your your axiology will affect the extent which you let yourself become personally involved in helping your research to participants so you'll be you actually may be undertaking research on this bullying and as you get into it you think i've got to do something about this that's your values coming in and it's about part of who you are so hopefully you're okay with that let's now move on this one's an interesting one which one of the following statements is correct now it depends each one of these depends management business researchers must not make any kinds of assumptions now if you're a positivist you might say that one was correct so it depends on your philosophy managers and business researchers make either ontological or epistemological or axiological assumptions well no they make all of those assumptions ontological assumptions are more important than epistemological and axiological assumptions all of them are important and the last one all management business researchers make ontological pistols blah blah blah assumptions but they may not or may or may not be aware that is the best answer in there but you might answer number one if you're a positivist but the best answer of all is number four on there because everybody's making these assumptions we need to be but they just may not realize you'd be doing it so what does this mean for us here we have a picture of you it can't be of me because it's got hair so so the epistemology what are your assumptions about knowledge what do you think of the role of values your axiology and then your gut what are your assumptions about reality so your your your mind or your brain what the assumptions of knowledge your heart your values and your gut feeling the reassumptions of reality so that basically summarizes that now what we're going to do is we're going to have a bit of a we're going to have a bit of a speed up now because i'm gonna i'm minded that we're nitwit 20 past and i want to get a little bit further along so what i'm going to say is is i'm just going to ask a very quick question is there one best research philosophy turn your microphone on and answer no there isn't any one best research philosophy okay no and either you or somebody else let's have some reasons as to why that is the different philosophies give us different perspectives um so it's almost like you're seeing a picture and looking at different parts of the picture so they all bring together different perspectives which make our uh knowledge more in-depth or more full okay that's interesting so we can look at if we bring them together do we get uh some of the parts is if you add all the parts together we get something bigger than the individual parts the whole is bigger than individual parts so that's another part that could be but also there's also the aspects that in the business and management of the social sciences it has grown by adopting a variety of philosophies and different people have different views on this and what we're really looking at here is where we work in what's called a pluralist discipline so it's discipline which recognizes that there are a variety of approach of approaches and as the previous speaker just said each of these has value at the same time within that for us as individuals whilst we may recognize that each of these approaches has value so different philosophical philosophical approaches have value we would probably also have certain ones which we feel happier with ones which fit in more with who we are if you think of the picture on the left they fit in not only with our mind but with our heart and our gut and so invariably there will be a certain one what ones which we feel happy with or in particular which we will tend to adopt when we undertake our own research and this is can be summarized by looking at management and business research as a and what's called a chimera and that that's a mythical beast which brought together um as you can see a lion and bear and various other animals together and so if we take those ideas what we can say is that we are a newcomer and we're we're sort of stuck between we have the positivistic science view of doing things a certain way having that sort of authority and also wanting to give a contribution which comes more from the arts and the moralistic aspects of things and so we've isolate between being politically in between philosophies and what makes sense and what there will be ongoing battles into which philosophies are right for us now let's get on and do some interesting stuff about your philosophies as preparation um sam are you we got everybody didn't we to have a go at doing harp yes yes yes yeah and i'm we're working on this assumption folks that you've all had a go at doing this yes this is normally when you've got a class of students you say how many of you of you have done this and everybody looks very sheepish and looks the other way but i don't think we're gonna have a problem with you guys because you're at the um doctoral level so what what what heart was a good colleague of mine alexandra bristow and i we we developed this questionnaire to actually start to ask you about your own beliefs and maps against the major philosophies and it's not a personality test it's to start exploring your own research philosophies and it's about you where you are now and going back to some of the early questions this is about our research journeys and so this is you at a particular point in time it's going to change as we move forward looking at our research philosophies and so what we've done is we've actually put you into groups and so the it guys should be able to press some buttons and things should happen now and the time now it is my watch is about 22 minutes past and what i'd like you in your groups and so it's gonna is do you have forget the word both do you have a clear fit with one research philosophy or do you have different or do you have more than one which philosophy do you disagree with the most and in your group are they the same or different philosophies and what implications do you think this has so what we're looking at is is everybody got the same philosophy of their differences do people have more than one philosophy and do people disagree and what we're going to do is we'll put you into your groups and if you come back from your groups back into the from your so your group chats back into the main room and if we say come back at half past yeah so i'll give you six minutes just to quickly talk through these and bounce some ideas about okay okay right so if whoever does the groupie bits can they do that and i'll just wait yeah yeah so the idea is just go to him put everyone into groups now okay okay cool so it should have come up on people's screen the host is inviting you to join breakout room number and so when it does join the breakout room and have a look at those questions okay in all honesty it's quite nice to actually see some human beings rather than talking to a blank screen and especially as there's quite a few people smiling so what i'd like to just first of all ask i mean i from what i can gather there was somewhere between four and ten groups operating it was very difficult to see cause i couldn't actually get in to see anything but so can somebody from one of the groups just first of all when when people were doing that did everybody come up with the same philosophy or did you have different philosophies in the groups okay thanks very much what we see here first for for all is there are a variety of research philosophies that people have and that is what we what you would expect within our discipline people do have a variety and that's as it is we also see that people are not necessarily i am definitely a something or something i'm not definitely interpreting this i'm not definitely uh post-modernist but people tend to have leanings towards a particular one more than others and again that is normal and you you would expect so very few people are well-defined something or something else the only one where people tend to be clearly one rather than the others is if people are a positivist and that was coming through from the interpretation but even there there may be occasions where that isn't the case where you did see people being more than one you tended to quite often there were people who've been a pragmatist and saying interpreters or pragmatists and the critical realist and that's because pragmatism tends to bend and adopt what makes the most sense and we'll talk a bit more about what a pragmatist look feels like what they believe in in a few minutes the important thing is that this is done it came through from some interpretation it has allowed you to surface what your assumptions actually are rather than following a particular way of doing research because that's the way you've been taught to do it so this is about you thinking about how do you look at the world and then following through that through and how is this going to impact or how could this impact on the way you do your research where it becomes it can become problematic if you look at the world one way and you're expected to do the research in a very very different way and the reason that's problematic is it causes cognitive dissonance you feel you don't feel comfortable in what you're doing the other thing which has already been raised by people is where this may be problematic is if you have a supervisor who says you must do it one way and that doesn't fit with the way you look at the world and there it's about talking it through your supervisor and i always say to students when i'm working with them that if your supervisor says something and i say something else your supervisor's right and i'm wrong and so the last thing i want i hope any of you do is go to your supervisor and say i was in a session which sam organized and mark said this and mark must be right to your wrong supervisor because that's like to upset them and make them very very angry so please be a bit more subtle and say i've had these alternate views can we talk them through or something like that learn how to manage your supervisor in a in a subtle and caring manner what we're going to do now is we're going to look at this in a bit more detail sam i'm mindful that the timing has gone completely and utterly to rubbish now so what i'm going to do is i'm going to carry on for a while you have a sort of a break there and then um what we'll do is when we get to the end of the bit of philosophy we'll then have a 15-minute break and go on into the next bit yeah folks these things happen working with you guys it's almost inevitable because we're working with doctoral students let me just let me just back to sharing screens and then we should be back to run and again sam if you can keep your microphone on one with sharing and bring the questions right okay that's a really lovely desktop that's the background you've got mac oh it's just the one that window windows for mac provides there's nothing hang on let's move that out of the way and just come down here we go and we should be coming okay have you got the screen yeah it's back on screen what you've been looking at is a um basically five major philosophies which tend to be used in business and management research and the way i find tends to be easy to remember them is to use these analogies so think of a positivist as a scientist in a laboratory a critical realist as a archaeologist bringing together lots of different information from the past and trying to put it together a um interpretivist as a artist sculpting what she or he sees from other people's views the post-modernist the critical ant activist perhaps black lives matter would be the obvious one to have out there as a now as a political activist and actually somebody's doing something which is crucial to our futures in the world and then the pragmatist as an architect designing and so using research to actually answer questions that matter the most important thing being the designer or answering them what we're going to do um whoever is that is just turn the noise off is we're going to actually start off by looking at positivists and this is these are people who see research being natural scientists so in ontological terms they would see management and organizations are real just like physical objects are real and as a researcher we don't influence them by how we feel and there's fixed structures and it's very granular you can see exactly what's going on um from an episodical point of view we're trying to discover that one truth through observable and measurable facts we're looking for cause and effect relationships and from that we're generating laws rules and generalizations and what value three is researched in axological terms and we can be objective and not surprising when you see that we tend to you this tends to lead towards using quantitative methods with very much very structured so questionnaire type collection of data or using existing data that's already been collected structured observation and and then large samples of measuring things and we might visualize positivism as as something like newton's clock we're calling orange so or um here we see an in from the 19th and 18th centuries how they believed the world could be seen as a clockwork universe on the left-hand side so you could actually measure it and behave and it's not governed by laws it's very much what positive say everything is governed by laws you can predict and you can take that to its actual extreme of actually being able to produce machines and apply and actually create mechanical objects so here we have a clockwork duck created in the 1790s 1739 and so what's happened here is you that like positives would say well you can actually cr the whole world is like a machine and you can and it operates almost like clockwork and in this clockwork the idea was you could feed it and it would actually create some poo coming out the other end so you can actually see that little arrow where the bottom is so it's about taking a mechanic mechanistic view of organizations and this in all honesty is one of the dominant perspectives in which research operates yeah mark sorry and there's a quick question if you don't mind me asking you here's a quick question so it's from patients and her question is what is the difference between positivism and post positivism right um post positivism has taken positivism and said okay but let's look at the realities of the worlds we're living in and actually recognizing that that that will impact upon it so it's actually adding probably the closest say some ideas of critical realism um probably the best in facebook probably the best thing patience is to go into a bit more detail on this independently uh rather than spend time now though okay right the possibility is very much the research of left hand and i think this is quite a interesting analogy in kovid time so you don't actually impact on the research and like when we were we wear gloves at the moment in covid terms it doesn't impact upon us we can move to the idea of critical realists researchers are archaeologists now so we're saying like with a positive organ management and organizations are real things but we're saying now they're not they're not like physical objects they have different structures and layers and very much more nuanced and what we're saying is that we can't always see immediately the underlying causal mechanisms of what's happening which impact what we do see on the surface so they're saying it's like layers you know like an archaeologist goes down through layers to discover what happened in the past and how that impacts on what's happening now we're saying we need to excavate through excavate down to discover these underlying causal mechanisms and so in doing that as critical realists we're actually trying to get to we're trying to go through the facts and look at things in terms of historically of what the facts were the stories that people have and generate causal explanations of things um within this we will recognize that there are values coming through and research is value-laden different people will see things in different ways one fantastic example of that which i've just been reading is a book called black emu which is looking at um australia and the account using the accounts made by the white settlers of australia about how they saw the way the indigenous aboriginal aboriginal peoples actually looked after the land and reanalyzing that data and what they've discovered is that rather than being nomadic peoples and as defined at the time as primitive they're actually incredibly advanced and have learned how to husband and look after a very fragile ecosystem and actually enable it to produce sufficient crops and support sufficient animals for them to live to live well and so what had happened was that the values that the original explorers to place on that data led them to interpret that these people as being nomadic and actually not been a very advanced when when we reinterpret the same data from a modern day with but perhaps i would hope better understanding we actually see these people were incredibly advanced in knowing how to husband and look after the land and to be able to survive so the idea of research being valuated but what i think is very important these ideas of how the values of the research impacts on what's actually being said and then so we're looking at methods of his in-depth historical analysis and also analysis of social structures and organizational structures and crucially using a variety of methods and data if we um take critical reality realism a bit further we actually it depends what we're really saying is it depends on how you look at things so if you take this diagram here we actually have two squares a and b and the question i would ask you is are they of different colors and your answer will probably be initially yes but look they're actually the same color it's just the visualization the way it's been visualized that actually enables that to happen if we take another example here which i think will bring it home quite well what i'd like you to do here is i'd like you to listen to this video hang on just a minute let's go back to the right place you know i'd like you to watch this video and i'd like you to just note down any of the music artists you might recognize okay oh jesus right so let's actually get this to go and it should hopefully work on sound as well thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you very much i'd like to introduce the members of my group we're going [Music] further people's [Music] [Music] keep moving [Music] please okay folks so first of all stan did the sound come through okay well it came through okay here at my end yes excellent so folks first of all how many um let's have a look at these artists so the people who are coming on there you've probably got some of them at least where elvis presley was in that elvis presley was supposedly playing with the sugar babes marvin gaye jimmy page from led zeppelin no gal i have promotions keith moon from the who sheryl crone stevie wonder and as a realist you would say i've seen it therefore it is as a critical realist so you you actually start to say hang on i don't actually think that's possible for example i know that elvis presley died in 1977 and i know that oasis as a band with noel gallacher wasn't actually around until the 2000s so i also know that keith moon's dead as well so how could he be playing in a concert so let's have a look and put some more data into this is it accurate well that's where the shots are actually films are actually from so one from one of elvis's concerts and you can see the various things here and here's when they were actually filmed so what if you were looking at this as a critical realist what you would actually be saying is yes i can see this but it doesn't make sense and you'd be bringing in information you already had or information that you actually went out and collected subsequently to actually look at what you were seeing and to interpret it more fully it's a bit like as you walk down the street and you sometimes see these pavement artists you've done these amazing drawings on pavements and some of them are things like you can actually see steps supposedly going down into the pavement now you know in reality they don't exist because you're because you you can say this is a drawing on a patent because you can see somebody's a piece of chalk but so you're bringing external or additional information to understand what's happening that's what a critical realist they're critical about what they see and they interpret it in the light of other knowledge so that's we've now looked at critical realists let's now go right so if we look at realism in a bit more i mean what we're saying is critical realism takes into account different layers of reality and recognizes the differences between physical reality and we see on the left and social reality the fact of culture relationships and so on what it recognizes is that some rules we can actually define and some are not so changeable so it's very difficult to be able to defy the laws of gravity but laws of marriage are socially constructed and they change between different countries and they can be altered and if you can move to one country don't be subject different rules so that's a social reality rather than a physical fact like um gravity and what we would argue is much of organizational reality is about social facts which are not set in stone and they change and based on interpretation if we look at interpretivists interpretivists are moving towards a more artistic or act to type approach to research so they would view in ontological terms organizations and as managing and organizing so it's a flux and of processes and experiences it's complex and most importantly it's socially constructed through our culture and our language in a minute we have a little short little question to actually try and understand that better and so we're saying there are multiple meanings and multiple interpretations of realities and so what one person sees as a reality may be very different from what somebody else sees an example of that is i quite often with my students i get them to look out the window and write a note of what they see and they all look out at the same class window but they all interpret that reality that they see out the wind out of the window slightly differently there are some consistencies and constances across the constants between them but their interpretations are all slightly different epistemologists epistemology in for interpretivists they make meaning through looking at how people tell stories people's narratives about what they see their perceptions and interpretations and from this they try and build new understanding new world views of what's happening so they're saying that research is very much value-bound and as researchers our values will invariably be impacted upon by what research and we will impact upon our research and as we show as we're empathetic and show show this in our research it's invariable that's going to impact back on what we're researching and our interpretations are key in what we contribute and not surprisingly given this focus on understanding and experiences it tends to move towards small small samples in qualitative methods and in-depth investigations interpretations so what we're seeing in relation to that earlier question now is we're seeing how the philosophical approach you adopt does have an impact upon the methods but they're not exact this approach equals this method it's a much more fluid type relationship so just a quick question how many fingers do you have write it down okay so how many how many anybody want to say how many fingers they've got go on sam you can do this how many fingers have you got is that a true question i've got 10. i'm sorry has anybody got a different number of fingers to sam oh no 10 fingers uh you've got 12 yes the other one is a thumbs so it's 8 8 yes right this is exactly what i thought would happen now what what i've what what were he what we're saying here is for interpretivists even hard physical realities are socially constructed so it's pretty it's a pretty strong physical reality of how many fingers we or thumbs or things we've got sticking out of our palm of our hand isn't it it's there and you can touch it and feel it but the way we interpreted it is different i mean sam had 10 so sam was not distinguishing between fingers and thumbs in fact it may well be conceptually for you sam there's no such thing as a thumb everything's a finger so he had ten others of us like myself and a few other colleagues we said we've got eight fingers and two thumbs and that's that's typical in the uk in germany and indeed in south africa for sam and in greece and russia they don't distinguish between fingers and thumbs at all so they've got ten however if you go to others and this is where greece and russia come in so i got that wrong in greece and russia they don't distinguish between toes or fingers or thumbs they're all fingers so if you if you ask a greek or a russian this they're going to say they've got 20. so what we're trying to see here which is a crucial part of interpretivism is that hard realities are physically constructed and it's and the physical world is very much mediated by our use of language not saying that some people have more fingers because they've grown an extra finger it's saying it's the language and it's how we mediate the physical world so it's really important and interpreters say that even physical realities are reconstructed by our use of language okay let's just have another one of this and see how this comes out another little question for you how many planets does the solar system have let's see seven or eight yeah exactly i heard thank you for that saying that or it could be it's even more complex than that though it um the the issue with later on to this picture which is of pluto and in 2005 um pluto was one of nine planets and then they did and and but there were other objects being discovered larger than pluto which would not be include planets and so what they decided was they were going to have a new code and pluto was no longer going to be a planet it was going to be a dwarf planet and they put other ones in so the solar system has now gone from 11 down to 8. so in effect what's happening here a hard physical reality has been reconstructed through language and social consensus or indeed lack of it because some don't believe pluto is a planet and think about it this is what happens quite a lot of the time in the organizational world in that um they things get repackaged and given different names and talked about in a different way and so we can look at in financial crisis of how do we how did they repackage subprime mortgages we can look at coronavirus and how america or sorry parts of america i.e donald trump have been trying to repackage it not the virus but as a chinese plague and things like that we repackage it that interpreters is all about this use of language and how we use the language to describe and explain and interpret the real world and then finally we move to um post-modernists and these are researchers as political activists is a quite nice way of visualizing this so and what the key issue here is about is about organizations being constructed through power relationships and um and what's as important as the way people say things is is what people don't say so silence is an important thing it's about it's people who are skeptics they question the truth it's about revolutionaries they they say let's look at things in a very different way and what they're trying to do is to expose power relationships and question dominant views and i think the um black lives matter movement other than being absolutely crucial to our futures is a really good way of a post-modern exposing power of power relationships and showing how truth is a product of ideology and how the way the world is constructed negatively affects certain groups of people and within this we're very often focusing on absences silences and the repress repression of meanings and of certain groups voices within this people's values are really really important so value your as a research your own values are crucial and there's a recognition that you as a researcher are working with and embedded within these power relationships which you're looking at and quite often trying to critique and you're reflexive so you recognize your that what you your impact on what you're researching and then what yours how what your research impacts back on you tends to be using qualitative methods and it tends to be very much in-depth investigations and the search for the hidden voice and the hidden perspectives so a very again a different viewpoint so you're reflecting back i just thought i was a beautiful picture to give this idea of searching for the midnight and looking at something then looking at then looking back on yourself and what impact that's had on you and what impact you're having on what you're researching the final one i wanted to um actually sorry is there a question there sam no mark it's someone who was in talking okay right sorry yeah and we're looking at is uh pragmatists um the i in digital image here is a researcher and architect and so there is the idea in terms of ontology is that it's still about process and managing organizing but and we're looking at the complex realities of what's happening but the crucial hit thing here into ontological things is the practical implications of research so we're doing research which has practical implications and we're trying to find methods that fit to that research problem so we're looking in terms of looking for practical meanings in epistemological terms and trying to undertake research which will enable successful action normally to improve and to solve problems so it's very much of epistemological focus on practical relevance and utility and so within this what you're researching is what you believe to be important so your beliefs and also your doubts and you think hang on what's going on here this doesn't make sense and again you're recognizing you have an impact on the research and the research has an impact on you but it's driven by your values in terms of what you enter into research methodologically it's about which method makes the most sense to in to answer the particular question and by metadata method or methods and so quite often you'll be doing mixed or mult multiple method research or action research but it could be anything and the real focus is to develop practical solutions or outcomes in terms of the research through these five main research philosophies of these math but other ones like post-modern post-positivism and so on but at least hopefully that gives you an overview so let's just have a couple of quick questions just to check a bit of understanding and then any any questions from you and then we will take that well-earned break albeit a little bit later than we were going to so the first quick check question jane wants to challenge conventional thinking about the banking industry by examining what junior bankers right and don't write about their jobs in social media jane is least likely to be a what do you reckon guys you've got a one in four chance of being right positivity whoever said who shouted out positivist you had the golden star for this morning oh thank you all right you can you can put it on your lapel and walk around it be really happy about life what she's most likely to be is a post-modernist she's likely to be challenging things and leave and that she's interested in the silences what people leave out what they don't write so it's likely she's a post-modern history but you're right she's least likely to be a positivist and then the last one before any questions and the break genie uses mixed methods to find a solution to a staff turnover in the hospitality industry she is most likely to be a black matist well there's quite a few extra gold stars going around there she's most likely to be a pragmatist and the clue there is about the using mixed methods and she's finding a solution so that it's in there um before we take a break up until half past and let everybody have comfort rates get some liquid and other things do we have any any questions that need sorting out on the chat yeah i mean mark we've got about four i don't know if you want to take them quickly before we go i think so then it gives us all right and then we can sort of what i'll say folks is if you want to listen to the questions do if you want to take a break do start it now but we will be back on stream and chatting away and bouncing around the world of research strategies at half past the hour yeah correct okay so let me read them out to you quickly so the first one is from joshua and joshua's question is is research philosophy the same as research paradigm so that's the first question from joshua is research philosophy the same as research paradigm okay okay and then the next one is from tony and tony's question is what is the difference between critical realism and critical theory that's tony's question that's the second one um and then the next one the third one is from duke and duke's question is my literature has led me to an initial interviews to be conducted on my sample size before moving to the quantitative side of my study can this be a critical realism philosophy so can a quantitative study be a physical be critical realist yes yeah and then and the next one after that is um and one mix so that's from giving given and given's question is can one mix interpretivism and pragmatism righty ho there's some really great questions there yeah mark sorry there's one more that just came in from lulu from lulu well done lulu you sneaked in at just at the end so lulu's question is what i think it's i think it's jenny uses mono methods yep but the research is looking for a practical solution is she still a pragmatist that she's jenny use if she was yeah so what if jenny uses mono methods but the research is looking for practical solution is she still a pragmatist okay yeah okay i've got those that's really good so let's start off with joshua is a research philosophy a paradigm um not quite joshua paradigm is a broader term [Music] for granted um assumptions which underwrite the frame of reference to which you underdo which to which you undertake your research so it may well have aspects of the research philosophy it's like to be brought it's like to be broader than just a research philosophy it'll have other things coming in as well so it's a set of basic taken for granted assumptions which underwrite your frame of reference your way of working how you theorize and how you operate so it's it's broader um then tony was about critical realism and theory wasn't it what's it what's the exact part with tony's one sam critical realism theory sorry sam you're muted yeah sorry let me just go back to tony's question now yeah i'm scrolling up remark can you just maybe move on to the next one while i'm looking at this okay let's go um duke can a quantitative study be a critical realist study the answer is yes it can be because it's but the likelihood is the critical yearly study which is a quantitative study you know when you do these quantitative studies on the questionnaire you you have things which we and you say if you're willing to help further please please write your details here and then what you're doing is you're then using that to further understand what the response has been so then the critical realist part comes in so you can have quantitative as part of the critical realist study that's absolutely not problematic whatsoever it's likely though there will be other parts to it as well um given um in can if you can you be some interpretivist and pragmatist at the same time i think was really what you're getting that there and the answer is with a pragmatist the key thing with the pragmatism is that you're actually choosing the research methods and the research approach that best enables you to find the solution and to answer your question so what way will happen is that you may well as a pragmatist be adopting a lot of the views and the understandings that an interpretivist uses for a particular research question the world view will still be that of the pragmatist it's just some of the met the methods you use may well move towards the listening because the crucial thing is about most appropriate method or methods to find the solution so it's a focus on the solution and the utility with the pragmatism so you may want to facing the methods but you're doing it from a pragmatic point of view from an interpreter's point of view um lulu looking at that jenny one that's still up on the screen if jenny had used the mono method to find the solution if that was the most useful and most appropriate way to find in the solution she could still be a pragmatist using the mono methods pragmatists do tend to use mixed methods but you don't have to be using mixed methods to be a pragmatist and now we can go back to tony's question which hopefully you've got there now sam um yeah so i mean there was one um you know initially by duke which was on the critical realism philosophy have you um have you looked at that one already yes i've done that one okay you've done that one it was it was tony's one on the critical realism and theory i'm just trying to okay so um tony's question was what is the difference between critical realism and critical theory ah right critical realism is the is the the philosophical approach to how um where you take is is where you look at it and your question the the whole point of the of both these is the word critical and the word critical it means we're actually looking at what we see and bringing other information and knowledge to bear on it in order to critique it and better understand it so with critical realism we're taking a realist perspective or realist philosophy and bringing the other knowledge uh other knowledge understanding to critique what we see from a realist perspective so becoming critical of it with critical theory what we're doing is we're taking the theory and saying and doing exactly the same bringing other information to look at that particular theory and say hang on this does this make sense because and so we're critiquing it so we're being critical so we're bringing other knowledge into better understand and critique so they're different at different things completely but but the critical aspect is is similar ideas on both okay did anything anything else pop up in the chat while we were talking sam um no and that's about it thanks uh that's milk from everybody thank you folks um what will say is it's now 20 past by my watch so we'll resume at half which will give everybody a chance to have a bit of a comfort break and so on and when we assume we look at research approaches and strategies okay yeah correct okay great thanks very much cool so we'll see you at half past yeah all indeed okay for the screen sam yeah it's backward now so what we're looking at thank you great so what we're looking at now folks as we're moving on and we're moving on and looking at the approaches and strategies in so in particular what we're doing on the onion here is we're looking at the ideas of experiment survey archival research case study ethnography and so on and how they actually in relate back to philosophies but also how they start to relate to our data collection methods so we're starting to see the interrelationships so if you were looking at this diagram you may remember as a child having those little circles where you could move different concentric circles around they were held together by a paper clip in the middle so we're rotating each of these these layers of the onion reach these circles around to actually make sure that the research philosophy is aligned with the approach to theory development uh our methodological choice and then our research strategy strategy then going right through to the data collection methods recognizing that there we can use a variety of different data collection methods within each research philosophy so in terms of the um research strategies what we have though is the experiment and where we're actually studying looking at change and seeing what happens when you in effect change on one variable from another variable it normally involves having a control group and then manipulating in an independent variable we'll be looking at surveys which is a structured collection of data from a sizeable population often using data collecting questionnaires but i think it's important to remember when we talk about surveys that surveys are more than just questionnaires i mean it can include other techniques for collecting them large amounts you could have a structured observation or you could have structured interviews there's also forms of surveys like questionnaires we're looking at um archival research so analyzes and uses administrative records and documents as a principal data source and these are really important because they produce through day-to-day activities and they show how people were actually looking at a response that if you think of newspapers they report day-to-day activities but they do have the bias on the news the editor for the context as well as the immediate context we're looking at grounded theory methodology where we um actually develop theory from the data from a series of data points and build up the theory inductively and we'll also look a little about narrative inquiry so we use people's narratives to actually reconstruct their experiences so that's what we're going to look at but rather just sort of look at them and abstract let's actually look at them in terms of examples of what people are doing so here's um the first one to look at and we've got somebody called chloe and chloe's got access to a national chain of retailers to collect data for a research and relationship between employee treatment and trust so basically how the employees are treated and whether or not they trust their employer as part of her research she gets over 300 store employees to complete a questionnaire tess asks the respondents to indicate their level of agreement 50 statements such as you have a statement strongly agree agree neither agree or disagree disagree and then strongly disagree so what i'd like you to think about is what sort of data is this sort of research generated and then from that very brief overview of the research strategy again what sort of strategy has chloe adopted or strategies um what's her methodological choice and then what's her philosophy as well so does anybody want to actually start off with the sorts of data that chloe is collecting either put it in the chat and sam can read it out or unmute yourself and let me know there's a stunning silence there there's actually um something in the chat box someone's shadrack says quantitative thank you shadrach indeed it is quantitative data and it's quantitative data where we're looking at the level of agreement and disagreement and what you what you can do from that is you can get an overall score and it's data that will be coded numerically you can see that from the questionnaire where you've got a little five next to strongly agree a foreign extra degree and so on as an aside we have to be careful with when we sort of use these data because what we've we're but we have to be careful we don't we've really got an ordinal scale going from strongly agree through to strongly disagree and yet we've given a coding which says that responding agree is twice is twice what the code for disagree so it may be that those codes are not the most appropriate in terms of the form of analysis we're doing so we need to think carefully about that it may be better for example to code it with strongly agrees to agree as one neither is zero disagree is minus one and strongly disagree is minus two but so but anyway and then with these data and encoding numerically we can actually undertake some statistical analysis for example we could rank rank responses and we'll analyze it quantitatively so so what's the strategy that chloe's adopted if she's using a questionnaire what's that likely to be come on guys we've got so um so three responses in the chat box service service savvy great i was just about to say guys with this one yeah we've got 117 great minds in in in the participant box here and re realistically we ought to be able to get this with 117 great minds we ought to get that one a survey strategy you're right and the methodological choices he is using a mono method and it's a mono method quantitative but let's take it a bit stage a stage further and what research philosophy do you think chloe has adopted here you should be able to do that now guys put it in the chat box if you want so you don't have to identify yourself somewhere that's positive positivism yay well done that was caroline wasn't it yeah well done caroline that's fantastic so what welcome what you're seeing folks is you can do this so let's have another one this is a this is a bit of this is another which is very very different so as part of a research strategy to answer the question and how and why do employees careers aspirations differ between gender sven asks 30 participants in one company to write a short paragraph titled where do i see myself in 10 years time now i'm not going to ask you to do the exercise in blue because we're running so far behind time but what i'd like you to do is imagine you've done that exercise you've drafted your short paragraph and again what sort of data is this going to generate so qualitative data okay and it's qualitative data and we can take and it's going to be qualitative textual data isn't it yes okay and this next question what research strategy has spent somebody said case study and somebody said interview now we need to be careful here what we've actually got is interview is not it's not a research strategy it's certainly there's something going on here whether or not it's an interview we can come to in a minute but it that it could be a case it could be a case study because he's working with people in one company so occasionally makes good sense there so we could say he's doing a case study of one organization here so and then somebody that said interview well it could be an interview where what he's doing is he's doing an interview he's actually preparing people by asking them to actually write this as as part with within the interview so yeah it could be done as an interview as a data collection method it could be part of the diary collection method we don't have enough information to know yet but certainly interview is one whose methodological choice is [Music] and what philosophy do you think sven's adopting here it could be interpreted somebody said critical realness and then went they sort of went critical or and then went quiet it could be a critical realist as well at the moment we don't we don't have enough information to know but it's certainly in that sort of area because we but we don't know which it's going to be but it's either an interpretivist or a critical realist almost certainly within there okay so let's just move along and what here is the third one sorry he's watching somebody i didn't quite catch that can you stay out of the game please okay never mind then here's the third so right here's the third one what is the research strategy here mark has two research questions are trust and distrust judgment symmetrical or symmetrical or simultaneous do trust and distrust judgments entail the same or different expectations he decides to ask 60 participants in two organizations to rank 60 cards containing emotions they might feel in relation to change after partisans have answered these questions he asked them to explain why and just a bit of background these emotions include that they rank include the word trust and the word distrust describe the data these questions will generate again what research strategy or strategy has he adopted and what is his methodological choice so first of all the data that's going to create that's going to generate quantitative and qualitative yep it's going to generate both quantitative and qualitative data the quantitative data is going to come out of rank in the cards and the qualitative data will be from the questioning of them in as to explaining why they rank them in the order they have yeah and then the research strategy that's been adopted here you can actually get the research from the information you've got here yes you were pretty much right there and finally what's the research philosophy that's going on here it's when it's mixed methods we know it's either gonna it's pretty certain it's gonna be either critical realism or pragmatism and the this one actually was done as pr was a pragmatic piece of work but it depends on how the how it's going to be used and what the crucial focus is but yet you're right there as well so what you're seeing here is the link between the method and the research strategy and the philosophy so you see how they're all interrelated folks but we do actually start to see some patterns so let's actually start to look at that in summary so and what i've done in here is i've actually introduced an extra part to it i've introduced this idea of deductive so positivist research tends to be deducted so that means it's about starting with a theory and collecting data to test it it tends to use quantitative data and it tends to use either experiments so you have a control group and then you look at the impact of changes [Music] or it uses surveys okay interpretivist research tends to be inductive hang on so what that means is we you tend to start with data and did induce theory from the data so you're building theory out of data rather than theory testing and it tends to use qualitative data more and that's either in the case study grounded theory or in ethnographic approaches so we have different research strategies coming through there critical realism tends to be abducted now abducted research is research which can either start as an inductive piece or a deductive piece so it can either start as theory building inductively so you're starting with data and generating a theory or it can start as deductive research we've already got a theory you're testing it and what happens is as you're doing your theory to building or theory testing you come across a surprising fact something you weren't expecting and that causes you to go out and collect more data so you're moving backwards and forwards between induction and induct and deduction in terms of methods it can use qualitative and or quantitative and it tends to be things like archival research surveys although you can also have interviews and so on uh sorry in terms of strategies it tends to be archival research and surveys in the main although you can of course have it within a case study organization as well so it becomes more complex post-modernism is abductive as well and it's mainly qualitative research but it can use pretty much other than survey strategy any in combination and pragmatist research again can be it tends to be abductive can use quantitative and or qualitative data and it uses any in any combination whatsoever in terms of the research strategies so hopefully now you're seeing the relationship between these do we have any questions folks yeah mark um about three questions in the chat box so the first one the first one so it's four now first one is from jonathan yes and jonathan's question is is there any difference between a research philosophy and methodological choice that's the first question from jonathan and the second question is from kahiru and kahilu's question is what is action research when will this typically apply that's the second question what is action research and when will it typically apply and the next one is where does social constructivism fit that's the third question there are five now so the fourth one fourth one is can interviews and that's from rolling the fourth one is from rolling and the question is can interviews be a form of survey and then the fifth one is from caroline and caroline's question is can these philosophies apply to all disciplines or only to social sciences and then someone and said can you please provide some further clarification on abductive um yep okay thanks michael right yeah okay right i'm just i'm just checking my slides to see if i've got anything yeah okay what i've i've made a note of all these so we'll start we'll do take them in with jonathan's is there any difference between um research method research philosophy and methodological choice yeah i just you'll see you should see my my screen changing for a minute and that's because i want to put a slide up to answer jonathan's question okay all right right okay you should see the um onion up there again okay is that up research philosophy uh it refers to the five or five plus philosophies in the ones we've been talking about the five the positivism critical realism interpreted the ontology your histology and your axology and how these impact on the way you do research methodological choice if you count the outside images the third layer in a methodological choice is about the choice of methods you make so whether you're going to use one single quantitative method a mono method quantitative one single qualitative method the monomethod qualitative more than one quantitative method multimeter quantitative more than one qualitative method multimeter qualitative or you're going to start to mix your methods so use both quantitative and qualitative methods either in a simple way or a more complicated way so hopefully jonathan that's clarified that that one for you then um moving down we had cahill who wanted was what is action research okay and so action research is a research strategy where you're working within an organization and working with that organization to answer a research question which is of interest to that organization but at the same time the research findings you have have greater general applicability to the wider or world or wider organizational world than just that one organization so you're doing research with an organization to answer a research question of interesting organization but your findings have wider applicability so that's hopefully is clear for you if you um khalil then we had a question on social constructivism and where does it fit in and you'll prob those you can see me on the screen i've actually pulled up a book to double check on this because it's you get to the stage where your brain starts to get fudged and then you have to start looking things up so bear with me a moment it's silly because i actually wrote it so i now need to actually look and see what i wrote and why i'm getting confused is because there's social constructivism and social constructivism and i'm just trying to get my head around which one i'm talking about so right okay yeah social constructivism isn't it it refers just to an ontological position and so somebody who's a social constructivist their view will be that reality is constructed through social interactions in which social actors create meanings that these means are normally partially shared and they also claim to create create partially shared realities in other words they socially construct realities so in terms of that that fits in that it's the it's it's one possible ontological view and then those the ontological view you have in is part makes that part of a is part of your research for overall research philosophical view so it's it's a way of it it's a part of its one ontological view and then ontological your ontological view which could be that or another or one of a number of other ontological views then feed into what your overall research philosophy is so hopefully that's sorted that one out then we had rouland can interviews be a form of survey um yes i suppose they can if you think if you were to take a questionnaire as being a police face-to-face question there is a fully structured interview therefore you could argue that an interview platform of interview is indeed a former survey but they won't be always because normally interviews are semi-structured or unstructured and used either in action research or case study or prac ethnographic studies and and norm and because they're any semi-structured or unstructured they are they're normally only used with a small number of people and surveys tend to be used for large numbers so they can be but they're not always and then the final one was can research philosophies apply to all disciplines and the answer is all just every single person who is undertaking research has a research philosophy whatever discipline they're doing wherever in the world what you will see is that natural scientists very very strongly have one unifying philosophy across all the natural sciences which nearly all of them use and that's positivism although we are seeing some natural scientists adopting interpretivist perspectives more but the answer is the short answer that is yes okay any other questions come in sam yes mark there's some two quick ones here if you don't mind i'm just going to read them out so there's one from from kasiwa and i think she's just following up on her question around social constructivism and she's requesting if you can please give an example around social constructivism just to help her understand it better and and then there's a second one from john and john's question is can pragmatism go with an inductive strategy right and what i'm going to do is i'm going to take um i'm going to take john's question on pragmatism going with the inductive strategy first and the answer is it could do and where that where pragmatism would go with an inductive strategy with where you were trying to find the answer to a question which was of real value to an organization and you didn't really have much idea of what of of what was going on at all so therefore you you you collect data to build the theory out of that then be it to be able to answer your question so yes that could work um and then the other question was was um looking at social constructivist and actually an example of it yeah right so so base let's start back to am a social constructivist believes that reality is constructed through social interaction where you create partially shared meanings okay so i'm just i'm trying to think of it from the example which would work well at the moment it's always it's always a trouble when you get into these things if we have if we start to look at um if we start to look at some most of you are doing doctorates so let's actually have um we all have we all have a reality we all we all have an understanding of what a a doctorate is don't we about what the doctorate is a piece of research that is an individual piece of research which is under normally undertaken over a period of three to four years full-time equivalent and is a piece of work which will provide a an original contribution to knowledge and we can we can agree with it that way but the unders but the shared meaning of what we mean by original contribution to knowledge we have to create by conversation and and through social interaction and we only start to do that by discussing what do we mean by an original consequence is this an original contribution knowledge and that will be partially shared and some people will have slightly different views but we will just all know that there's the thing called an original contribution knowledge but we have to con socially construct does that help does that help a little bit come back if it doesn't please in the chat yeah um okay mark thanks mark there's some two additional questions do you mind taking them no no no at all carry on okay cool so there's um the first one from duke duke and duke is saying that i know that my philosophy is critical realism yeah adopting a mixed method strategy can you please distinguish between the complex and simple mixed methods yeah so that's them that's the that's the first question and then the second one is can you please and expand more on abduction abduction that's the second one and then the third one is from jonathan and jonathan's question is could you please highlight on the distinguishing features between a research approach and research strategy that's from jonathan and then the next one is from simpiway and simpu's question is that's the fourth one and then there's the fifth one which we just came in so the fourth one is is positivist always as always associated with quantitative data or are there situations where it can be associated with qualitative data and then the last one here is from shadrach and then shadrach's question is is it safe to say social constructivist ontology is likely to be adopted by researchers in the interpretivism philosophy i think we're going to come back i'm going to stop say with the ones you've got we've come back to shadracks afterwards because otherwise i'm going to get completely and utterly confused all right okay okay so let's first start off um and we had duke looking asking about critical realism and mixed methods yes that's absolutely fine to do that complex methods and simple mixed methods yes um a simple mixed method design would be one where you started off in either quantitative and then went to qualitative with the quantitative being dominant the qualitative probably being less so so you may start off with the questionnaire and then do say some focus groups you're just looking to try and understand the reasoning behind the responses you're seeing so an example of that would be some work i did a few years ago looking at the use of communication and organization we had this amazing finding that um all um shop floor workers on the production line never looked at notice boards but um people in the offices and the white collar workers did and you could write some amazing sociological reasons for this but we asked them in focus groups why they didn't look at noticeboards and they said well it's obvious they're at the front door and we're going through the back door so you can see how um the mix methods simple help there another mix method simple design would be where you start off with say some interviews to try and understand what's going on and on the basis interviews you design a survey a more complex mixed methods complex design would be one where you would which we've we've done before is where we started off with um um we did we did some in-depth interviews with senior managers we then did some archival research looking at the documentation within the organization on the basis of this we designed a questionnaire for staff and we also designed a separate questionnaire for customers and then uh having analyzed both those sets of data we ran a series of separate photographs focus group of customers and with with staff so you see how that one becomes a lot more complicated so that does that hopefully explains the difference between a simple and more complex mixed methods the idea of abduction it's very very much focused in the realities of the way we actually do research research is very often presented as either being deductive or inductive so i'm starting with by starting with a theory which you want to test in deductive terms and then collecting the data to test it and then that's done induction of starting with data and then from that data building theory the reality is of how we do research is we whichever way we start as we start to analyze our data we come up with things we didn't expect which the and a person doing reductive research will call a surprising fact and on the basis of that surprise in fact we either have to re-define or develop our theory and or collect more data to see what's going on and that's when so the abductive research recognizes there'll be surprising facts which will change from how we're doing research from being either deductive or inductive and then adopting the alternative view so we move from in the process of being start abductive to deductive to in abducted sorry inductive to deductive to inductive to deductive as we progress through because of these surprising facts and new information we have which causes change rather it could also be surprising facts that come from the literature as we read more so hopefully that helps a bit there then we had what's the difference between approach and strategy um on the onion diagram which is up at the moment on the screen i very much talk about approach has been the way we look at how we develop theories so the idea of design being deductive abductive or inductive as we've talked about earlier whereas when we look at research strategy i'm looking at the overall design of are we using a case study are we using a survey are we using experiment are we using ethnography action research and so on so that hopefully helps distinguish between the two there we then had a couple of other questions which are probably now about six or seven i guess um two of them it's nice yeah it's still two can i just then read them out then quickly okay so and we've got the first one from shadrach and shadrach's question is can we say that social constructivist ontology is likely to be adopted by researchers in the interpretivism philosophy that's the first one okay there's a third question now um it's gonna be three and then the second one and it's from a colleague it's just them the you know number i can see not the name but the question is is research still qualitative where interviews are conducted using structured questionnaire and data analyzed statistically and that question is from josephine it's from josephine and then there's a third one and from becky and um his question is example of oh sorry i think he's giving okay and becky i'm not sure um here maybe you can turn on your mic and and explain to yourself but what i see is example of mixed method complex is equal to becky do you want to explain this question yourself sorry uh okay um i was just um when the question was asked about um method complex um i then i then said we can we can infer on it as being multi methods quantitative plus multi method qualitative while mixed method simple is basically a mono method qualitative and model qual method quantitative so i was just giving distinctions they just in case as an example from interfering from the example that was given yeah i think that that's a nice way of simplifying it and getting over the main ideas so thanks becky that that's really good um right shadrock can a social constructivist ontology be undertake is that is that linked with the sure sorry and then when we got to the second one is research still qualitative when we have a structured into a structured interview or like a questionnaire and we get qualitative data out and analyze it quantitatively what we've got there is we've got a questionnaire click it normally questionnaires collect data which will be analyzed quantitatively that's because we have questions which are closed questions which are then very very easy to code numerically when we put an open question in a questionnaire it tends to collect qualitative data which can be coded and so quantified but it's incredibly time consuming you imagine if you've got um two three hundred questionnaires and in each questionnaire you have ten questions which are open and people can write the answers they feel to actually code that data is phenomenally time consuming so we very very rarely analyze those sorts of data quantitative we tend to analyze those data qualitatively so yes you can do it but it can you people tend not to because the whole point of a questionnaire is collecting the same data in a structured format from a large number of people so that you can analyze it quantitatively normally you would only have one or two questions on a questionnaire which were open questions and would be collecting the qualitative data and those questions you would invariably tend to code and turn into quantitative data if you have the open questions and you're looking at the the qualitative data you tend to analyze it as qualitative data normally okay yeah mark sorry there's just a quick one here um can you say that mixed method goes with abduction that's from i'm sorry that's from asante yeah can you see mixed methods goes with abduction what i can say is mixed methods can go with abduction it doesn't have to go with the duction but it tends to go with the abduction i think what guys we're seeing now is that whereas when you did an undergraduate degree everything was in black and white and when you started to move to um masters level you got some shades of grey now it's a complete blurred grade mess and it's much more difficult to work it through and what you have to do is you have to create the arguments for what you're doing as to why you're doing it the way you are okay what we're now going to look at do a little a little bit more on deduction and abduction just because i think that's going to be quite helpful for people given the number of questions we've got have we got any other questions coming through sam or are we all right to move forward and yes there's one which i think you missed so let me just read it out quickly from simply and his question is is positivist always associated with quantitative data or are there situations where it can be associated with qualitative data the same applies for interpretivists positivists tend to be very very strongly associated with quantitative data i i'm very dubious about saying always and never because i i don't think we live in an absolute world but then that's me not being a positivist so yeah nearly always um and then it was it's positive is is interpreted as still is associated with qualitative data wasn't it i think the next part of it yes yes that's what yeah um very strongly but not not i would be very aware of saying always but nearly always so yeah a tentative yes i think the best way of putting that so let's anything else um no does it for now are you sure sam i mean i don't want to go right let's have a look at um deduction and theory testing just to sort of bring that a bit so deduction is operating like a scientist would be doing in a laboratory so they're looking for causal relationships and the method is very structured to collect these specific data to test this specific hypothesis and to do so and because these testing is nearly always done statistically we're looking at large samples because a larger sample is often needed to ensure that the data is has sensible confidence limits and so we can be in terms of level certainty and also we don't want the the breadth of the data to be too broad when we're doing it so we're looking at some confidence limits and certainty within that so that really pushes it's very much about quantitative quantification and very much what we see here is and it is the scientific approach of little steps towards inc or increments to build building theory so we start off with the theory we generate our hypothesis we measure it collect data to measure what we think is going on and then we use that data test the hypothesis and then we adapt the theory and that's pretty much a scientific approach and how deduction works so if we now look at um induction so here we start off with a problem complex from the numbers we're starting off with data we're starting off with observations what we're actually seeing happening and rather than focusing in the previous time on causal relationships we're much more interested in understanding that the sort of meanings and the context of what's going on so that the idea of this rich informed picture of what's happening and here you see me sort of being a bit like i was in the answers last questions on positivism and quantitative data interpretivism and qualitative data here we have this tendency to qualitative analysis but you can use quantitative but it tends not to and whereas it's a very structured research approach with deductive or tends to be what we have here is something which is much more flexible so the research can alter as it goes along and you can say ah that's an interesting issue coming up and collect data so it's less predictable and it's likely here that you may end up with very very different contributions to theory and things which so it's radical change rather than incremental change so in summary you start off with a phenomena so what you observing in happening you then understand the con look place it within its broader context collect data again and data and you use the data to generate to either generate an existing theory or to build new theory through it so it's a different way of actually building so it's theory building rather than theory testing okay and then finally abduction so this is about theory generation and theory modifying so as we've talked before we're combining deduction in an induction and we're going backwards between theory and what we're observing so we're in effect we've got a theory we're going back saying does that make sense testing it and moving back would and forwards in an almost a cyclical approach as illustrated by the diagram below and this surprising fact impacted on the conceptual framework or theory we're building and then testing it and going around fits with a variety of methods and you get a varied contribution to theory hopefully that's helped us pull that forward any questions sam or were you able to move forward um there is just one in the chat box okay from from offense and the question is what method best argus with pragmatism oh pragmatism is wonderful you can do what you want sorry that was a cynic a flippant answer pragmatism the crucial thing is so pragmatism is it's very much it depends on what the research problem is anything else sam no let's go on there no um right okay i'm sorry mark there's one the story mark there's one from question which is does it mean abduction is not used to start um it's not very clear do you want to see i can see exactly what kasu is getting that i it's a it's a very common question because i'm really pleased you brought it up what tends to happen with abduction is it's something that we move to after we've started we normally start either as inductive or deductive and it and with abduction what happens is as we're working our way either through deduction or abduction something comes along and you think that just doesn't make sense or gosh i never looked at it like that and that force that's when the abductive moment comes that surprising fact and so you then start moving between abduction sorry induction and deduction so it was a really great question thank you okay um sorry mark so um i said follow on to that there's one from linda queso says thanks by the way she said happy with their response there's one from linda which is is abduction supposed to show in the literature review or just in the data collection or both i think that abduction comes up in the methodology so it's part of the method not really the literature review now okay anything else sam um no it does it's right i'm going to change the slide that's that cut out for moment right so what we've started to do now to bring this section towards a close we've got a few only a few more slides with is before we move on that time in a short break and then going on to some questions you know open questions is this is what you need to think about in terms of your research philosophy what's your starting point going to be are you starting from theory derived from the literature are you starting from what you see out in the field in your research organization your research area what research contracts or phenomena are you focusing on what theories are you going to choose in relation to these above what data do you want to collect and how how are you going to analyze it how are you going to communicate your findings how personally involved will you become in your research what limitations will it have and then finally how does it all fit together which takes us back to this question i posed at the beginning is this extract systematic now my guess is you've all wrote something down just go back to what you wrote down and just make sure and look at it and then say now do you think that this is systematic i'll just give you a few moments that i have a little sip of water because what this idea of being systematic about is it's about the fit between your research philosophy your research strategy and the methodological choices you make and your research design and then finally your data collection and analysis methods does it all fit together so that you've all got an idea of what you think this let's actually now just start to look at it and is by systematic is it all is is there this consistency and the short answer is no and there's an inconsistency between the first part the bits i've highlighted in red and the second part the bits i've highlighted in blue so it starts off saying it's based on the premise that there's very little actually known so that very little actually known means that we're going to actually have to find out data and and to understand what's happening we have no idea and so that immediately says that we we need to do an inductive research and we need to in-depth and we're probably going to be using qualitative typework and that's formalized reversals but therefore we need to do an in-depth explanation [Music] and it's going to look at interpretations now when we see somebody say we're going to look at interpretations that starts to push us and suggests that they're going to be an interpretive strategy and he's seen the things of in depth as well so it's certainly pushing us down to a certain view of what this research is going to be probably an interpretivist piece of work and within that it's probably going to be an inductive piece of work at least early on then we get to the second part and we have 200 questionnaires and they're testing relationships between common causes and failures and then analyzing it quantitatively so do you see what mean here about the two halves of this extract don't fit together first half is interpretivist the second half is positivist the first half is path is looking at a qualitative in-depth piece of research or suggestion the second half is suggesting a quantitative broader piece using a survey or a questionnaire in this case so they don't fit together okay i just wanted to finish the first before we move on to the final part of this with a very short thing to say on the reading and this is really crucial i know sam has got the slides and he can actually circulate the slides to you as well but just to say that you can easily download the stuff we were talking about on philosophies and research approaches and that's free and there's there's the two websites to download it from it's been the most wonderfully you know without that it's been the best experience i've had since the start of kogan so thank you for making me have a wonderful day and feel happy again it's been really really i appreciate all of you very much