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We are always in the process of constructing our own reality. It's subject to reconstruction and it allows for change. There's no universal truth, it's a matter of interpretation.
These researchers are looking to uncover rules not laws. An individuals view is to do with a subject and they embrace the subjective. They say the social world is meaningful where positivists say it isn't meaningful.
The researcher always presents a specific version of reality rather than one that can be considered definitive. It's one version of reality, nothing to do with the rest of the world.
They believe that we have a subjective view of what our life is like, that people have some kind of agreement about social life and rules. So I have my own understanding of the world, but to live in culture we have to have some similarities to how other people around us understand the world. It's intersubjective, we all agree meanings of things and in different cultures people see things differently.
There is a real physical world out there but there is a difference between how I see it and how it actually is. It depends on the social meaning you put on things. The process of this perception is an active one. An example of this can be seen in a picture of a heart, the denotations are love and romance. This is an agreed meaning because we all know what a real heart looks like but we socially agree that this is a heart. The connotations are what it personally means to me, it may remind me of a valentine's card I once got. Research Strategy They take the qualitative approach to research and this can include so many things such as photographs, interviews, video recordings and observational notes. It is very in-depth research into small-scale studies to find the nature of it, because they believe things to have many layers of meaning. Theory / Research Order Inductive if you operate in such a way that the research comes first. Observing a phenomenon and then based on what you observe you deduct your theory, so you simply observe and comment on what you see. You can see all the effects because you're not looking for the particular answer so you can see much more, it's not focusing on just one thing. Phenomenology is an example of Interpretivism. The theory is by Hyssert Schutz (1890 1960). It says that to understand the world we should forget what we see as the norm and look at it and make it strange.' We should bracket off pre-conceptions' so forget our general understanding of the world. You should forget what you feel you should do because understandings of things are given to us by our culture. Ethnomethodology says that we interpret our culture and they are interested most in watching everyday occurrences' or everyday life. The meaning of the world is socially created so they study all the smallest things that humans do, like how we communicate. An example of this is phatic communication; saying things but not meaning them, just saying them to acknowledge another person in the world and be friendly e.g. saying hi how are you? When really we don't care how they are. More people are still positivists but Interpretivism is becoming more influential on people. Of course not everyone agrees. Alvin Gouldner pours scorn upon ethnomethodology for dealing with trivial aspects of social life, and …show more content…
The objective conditions of your life create you as an individual, he says interpretivists deny this so their wrong.
Critical realists look at society, not the individual says Bhaskar, and he believes you can't break down society because it's like an organism that has a life outside us. We come and play a part but when we leave the world will go on without us.
For Bhaskar people and society are not related dialectically. They do not constitute two moments of the same process rather they relate to radically different kinds of things. So humans don't create society but they transform it.
Much of what Bhaskar says can be explained just as well through interpretism, he has a diluted version of positivism and interpretivism. The interesting point of what he says is that if you are born into poverty that will have a real physical effect on your life, but apart from that I disagree with this worldview.
These researchers are looking to uncover rules not laws. An individuals view is to do with a subject and they embrace the subjective. They say the social world is meaningful where positivists say it isn't meaningful.
The researcher always presents a specific version of reality rather than one that can be considered definitive. It's one version of reality, nothing to do with the rest of the world.
They believe that we have a subjective view of what our life is like, that people have some kind of agreement about social life and rules. So I have my own understanding of the world, but to live in culture we have to have some similarities to how other people around us understand the world. It's intersubjective, we all agree meanings of things and in different cultures people see things differently.
There is a real physical world out there but there is a difference between how I see it and how it actually is. It depends on the social meaning you put on things. The process of this perception is an active one. An example of this can be seen in a picture of a heart, the denotations are love and romance. This is an agreed meaning because we all know what a real heart looks like but we socially agree that this is a heart. The connotations are what it personally means to me, it may remind me of a valentine's card I once got. Research Strategy They take the qualitative approach to research and this can include so many things such as photographs, interviews, video recordings and observational notes. It is very in-depth research into small-scale studies to find the nature of it, because they believe things to have many layers of meaning. Theory / Research Order Inductive if you operate in such a way that the research comes first. Observing a phenomenon and then based on what you observe you deduct your theory, so you simply observe and comment on what you see. You can see all the effects because you're not looking for the particular answer so you can see much more, it's not focusing on just one thing. Phenomenology is an example of Interpretivism. The theory is by Hyssert Schutz (1890 1960). It says that to understand the world we should forget what we see as the norm and look at it and make it strange.' We should bracket off pre-conceptions' so forget our general understanding of the world. You should forget what you feel you should do because understandings of things are given to us by our culture. Ethnomethodology says that we interpret our culture and they are interested most in watching everyday occurrences' or everyday life. The meaning of the world is socially created so they study all the smallest things that humans do, like how we communicate. An example of this is phatic communication; saying things but not meaning them, just saying them to acknowledge another person in the world and be friendly e.g. saying hi how are you? When really we don't care how they are. More people are still positivists but Interpretivism is becoming more influential on people. Of course not everyone agrees. Alvin Gouldner pours scorn upon ethnomethodology for dealing with trivial aspects of social life, and …show more content…
The objective conditions of your life create you as an individual, he says interpretivists deny this so their wrong.
Critical realists look at society, not the individual says Bhaskar, and he believes you can't break down society because it's like an organism that has a life outside us. We come and play a part but when we leave the world will go on without us.
For Bhaskar people and society are not related dialectically. They do not constitute two moments of the same process rather they relate to radically different kinds of things. So humans don't create society but they transform it.
Much of what Bhaskar says can be explained just as well through interpretism, he has a diluted version of positivism and interpretivism. The interesting point of what he says is that if you are born into poverty that will have a real physical effect on your life, but apart from that I disagree with this worldview.