Methodology
Methodologists often respond to these objections by claiming that a good methodology helps researchers arrive at reliable theories in an efficient way.
Interest in methodology has risen in the 20th century due to the increased importance of interdisciplinary work and the obstacles hindering efficient cooperation.
[12][13] This study or analysis involves uncovering assumptions and practices associated with the different methods and a detailed description of research designs and hypothesis testing.
In this regard, methodology provides the skills, knowledge, and practical guidance needed to conduct scientific research in an efficient manner.
For example, methodology should assist the researcher in deciding why one method of sampling is preferable to another in a particular case or which form of data analysis is likely to bring the best results.
[19][20] Some theorists prefer an even wider understanding of methodology that involves not just the description, comparison, and evaluation of methods but includes additionally more general philosophical issues.
One reason for this wider approach is that discussions of when to use which method often take various background assumptions for granted, for example, concerning the goal and nature of research.
[16] The discussion of background assumptions can include metaphysical and ontological issues in cases where they have important implications for the proper research methodology.
For example, a realist perspective considering the observed phenomena as an external and independent reality is often associated with an emphasis on empirical data collection and a more distanced and objective attitude.
Idealists, on the other hand, hold that external reality is not fully independent of the mind and tend, therefore, to include more subjective tendencies in the research process as well.
For qualitative research, many basic assumptions are tied to philosophical positions such as hermeneutics, pragmatism, Marxism, critical theory, and postmodernism.
This critique puts into question various presumptions of the quantitative approach associated with scientific progress based on the steady accumulation of data.
In the latter sense, some methodologists have even claimed that the goal of science is less to represent a pre-existing reality and more to bring about some kind of social change in favor of repressed groups in society.
Many methodologists practice their craft in a normative sense, meaning that they express clear opinions about the advantages and disadvantages of different methods.
[4][8] Examples of quantitative research include physicists at the Large Hadron Collider measuring the mass of newly created particles and positive psychologists conducting an online survey to determine the correlation between income and self-assessed well-being.
[33][34][35] A lot of qualitative research is concerned with some form of human experience or behavior, in which case it tends to focus on a few individuals and their in-depth understanding of the meaning of the studied phenomena.
Important disagreements between these approaches concern the role of objectivity and hard empirical data as well as the research goal of predictive success rather than in-depth understanding or social change.
[16] Aleksandr Georgievich Spirkin argues that methodology, when understood in a wide sense, is of great importance since the world presents us with innumerable entities and relations between them.
Spirkin holds that the interest in methodology on a more abstract level arose in attempts to formalize these techniques to improve them as well as to make it easier to use them and pass them on.
[16][14] This increased interest is reflected not just in academic publications on the subject but also in the institutionalized establishment of training programs focusing specifically on methodology.
For example, according to Kerry Chamberlain, a good interpretation needs creativity to be provocative and insightful, which is prohibited by a strictly codified approach.
In this regard, the expression "scientific method" refers not to one specific procedure but to different general or abstract methodological aspects characteristic of all the aforementioned fields.
[8][60][61] For this reason, various factors and variables of the situation often have to be controlled to avoid distorting influences and to ensure that subsequent measurements by other researchers yield the same results.
The interview often starts by asking the participants about their opinions on the topic under investigation, which may, in turn, lead to a free exchange in which the group members express and discuss their personal views.
[4][30][82] One advantage of focus groups is that they can help the researcher identify a wide range of distinct perspectives on the issue in a short time.
[19][87][41] According to William Neumann, positivism can be defined as "an organized method for combining deductive logic with precise empirical observations of individual behavior in order to discover and confirm a set of probabilistic causal laws that can be used to predict general patterns of human activity".
They are used, for example, to evaluate thought experiments, which involve imagining situations to assess their possible consequences in order to confirm or refute philosophical theories.
[111][112] Experimental philosophy is a recently developed approach that uses the methodology of social psychology and the cognitive sciences for gathering empirical evidence and justifying philosophical claims.
They start by listing known definitions and axioms and proceed by taking inferential steps, one at a time, until the solution to the initial problem is found.
[128][22] Various theorists emphasize similar aspects of methodologies, for example, that they shape the general outlook on the studied phenomena and help the researcher see them in a new light.
