Norman Blaikie - Social Research: Paradigms in Action

Also from Polity

Approaches to Social Enquiry,2nd edition, Norman Blaikie (2007)

Designing Social Research,2nd edition, Norman Blaikie (2010)

Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest

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Copyright Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest 2017

The right of Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1540-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Any work of this kind is based on intellectual influences, inputs and contributions from a variety of sources over many decades. We are grateful to countless methodologists and social researchers, students and colleagues, research participants and sponsors, who, over the years, have provided useful ideas and intellectual resources, stimulation and challenges, opportunities and support which have proven valuable in shaping our orientations towards, knowledge of, and skills for doing social research.

We are particularly indebted to Erica Hallebone who travelled with us during the planning phase and in the early stage of writing this book. She made significant contributions to the setting of its aims and provided insightful comments on early drafts. In particular, the selection of the illustration on the institutional sexual abuse of children and young people was hers, and she was responsible for its initial draft.

We also wish to acknowledge the material support provided by the Graduate School of Business and Law at Melbournes RMIT University and the support of InfoServ Pty Ltd for access to its research and practice files.

[T]he purpose of social enquiry is to produce ever more adequate knowledge [and] ever more powerful explanations of social phenomena.

Layder 1998: 9

The aim of this book is to contribute to what Layder has identified as the purpose of social inquiry. While this purpose may be regarded as uncontroversial, its achievement is a constant challenge to produce ever more adequate knowledge and ever more powerful explanations. The ultimate challenge for social researchers is to go beyond description to explanation; to be able to say whysomething is as it is or is happening that way, not just whatexists or is going on. This book presents and illustrates three major ways in which this can be achieved in the social sciences.

It is important to state at the outset that this is not a standard research methods textbook. It differs from such books in a number of important ways. First, it makes only passing references to the techniques that are currently used to collect, generate or analyse data. Secondly, it deals with a range of decisions that have to be made before a researcher gets to the point of needing to think about data. It is our view that there is a tendency in many social research methods textbooks to neglect or not deal adequately with many if not most of these decisions.

What this book does is pick up and develop themes that have been expounded in its two forerunners, Approaches to Social Enquiry

(Blaikie 2007) and Designing Social Research(Blaikie 2010). Both of these books identified a number of research paradigms, classical and contemporary, which have dominated the social sciences from their beginnings.