Essay Sample on The Philosophical Orientation that Reflects my Worldview

Introduction

The term worldview is "a basic set of beliefs that guide action" (Creswell, 2014). Worldviews can also be described as the way in which the world is generally orientated and the type of research that an investigator holds. A researcher's worldviews are dictated by his or her area of specialization or discipline, the advisers' beliefs, his or her faculty, and his or her research experiences. The worldviews held by a researcher are useful in determining whether he or she utilizes mixed, quantitative, or qualitative research methods when conducting the research (Dorgan, 2018). Four different worldviews shape the research methodologies: advocacy/participatory, pragmatism, constructivism, and post-positivism (Rohleder & Lyons, 2015; Wang & Reio, 2017; Wang, 2015).

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The philosophical orientation that reflects my worldview is the post-positivist worldview. This type of worldview is sometimes referred to as post-positivism, empirical science, and positivist/postpositivist research. Post-positivism is based on a deterministic philosophy whereby causes possibly influence effects or outcomes (Information Resources Management Association, 2015). Consequently, post-positivism research approaches are aimed at identifying and assessing the causes that affect results, e.g. those in experiments. This philosophical approach can also be described as reductionistic because its primary goal is a reduction of ideas into a discrete set of ideas that are testable, e.g. research questions and hypotheses.

The knowledge derived through post-positivism is obtained by carefully observing and measuring the objective reality that is found "out there" in the world (Creswell, 2014). Consequently, a post-positivist researcher must develop valid and reliable measures of observations needed to study the behavior of research subjects. Finally, positivism is grounded in the belief that some theories or laws dictate how the world operates and they need to be tested and refined to enable us to comprehend our world. Consequently, in post-positivist philosophy, the approach to investigating a phenomenon starts with a theory, followed by data collection needed to refute or support the theory, and ends with making necessary revisions before conducting additional tests.

Epistemological and Ontological Assumptions

Epistemological Orientation

Epistemology refers to the study of knowledge. It seeks to address the question: How do we know what we know? (Matheson & Vitz, 2014). The epistemological orientation of post-positivism can be traced to Weber's concept, which recognizes that social realities need to be studied from the subject's perspective instead of the observer's perspective and in totality instead of isolation. However, to realize this perspective, it not sufficient for an investigator to simply imagine himself or herself being in another's position or for the researcher to interpret another person's responses to a data collection instrument from the researcher's expectations regarding what these responses may imply. Instead, the researcher is required to recognize that actors are active subjects who are actively engaged in their social realities and not just the objects of social forces (Fox, n.d.).

Based on Weber's concept, post-positivist epistemology involves comprehending the intention and context of the social realities for the subject herself or himself. The investigators can gain knowledge of the subjects in the field by fully acknowledging and understanding the meanings and interpretations of the subjects. Consequently, in my future research, I hope to gain an understanding of different phenomena by being separated from the world, objective, independent, and being involved in what is going on in the world. Lastly, postpositivistic research is based on the assumption that social reality is measurable and understandable, but difficult to access (Bisel & Adame, 2017).

Ontological Orientation

The term ontology can be described as the study of being, existence, and nature of reality. The ontological position of positivism is based on the assumption that objects exist independently of the investigator (Twum-Darko, 2016). Consequently, the researcher believes that reality is already there or exists. However, unlike positivists, post-positivists belief that reality can only be known imperfectly.

How these Assumptions lend themselves to Research Approaches

Because post-positivism is based on the epistemological belief that there are causes that influence a subject's outcomes, post-positivist research approaches are aimed at explaining the relationships (File, 2016). The complex interactions of the social realities and the subjects can, therefore, be understood through experimentation and correlation research approaches. Both of these research approaches are generally referred to as quantitative research techniques. Correlation research is aimed at examining whether two variables are related to each other (Jackson, 2016). On the other hand, experimentation involves the manipulation of one variable, the independent variable, to understand the changes in another variable, the dependent variable (Sue, 2014).

To understand a particular phenomenon using quantitative research approaches, there is a need to seek verifiable evidence through data collection and testing of hypotheses. Quantitative data is collected using standardized observation tools, closed-ended questionnaires and standardized tests. Analysis of the collected data is done through descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics are used to describe or summarize data in a meaningful way (Tripathi, 2016). On the other hand, inferential statistics enable results from a sample to be generalized to populations (Cacioppo & Freberg, 2018).

References

Bisel, R. S., & Adame, E. A. (2017). Post-positivist/functionalist approaches. In C. R. Scott, J. R. Barker, T. Kuhn, J. Keyton, P. K. Turner, & L. K. Lewis (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication (pp. 1-22). Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118955567.wbieoc168

Cacioppo, J. T., & Freberg, L. (2018). Discovering psychology: the science of mind (3e ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, Inc.

Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th ed). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Dorgan, S. (2018). Building research capacity and capability in the nursing, midwifery and allied health professions. British Journal of Nursing, 27(11), 634-635. https://doi.org/10.12968/bjon.2018.27.11.634

File, N. (2016). Understanding research in early childhood education: quantitative and qualitative methods. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Fox, N.J. (n.d.). Post-positivism. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick_Fox3/publication/261287946_Post-positivism/links/00b7d533ca688688e0000000/Post-positivism.pdf

Information Resources Management Association (Ed.). (2015). Research methods: concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, an imprint of IGI global.

Jackson, S. L. (2016). Research methods and statistics: a critical thinking approach. Retrieved from http://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/1305257790

Matheson, J., & Vitz, R. (Eds.). (2014). The ethics of belief: individual and social (First edition). Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Rohleder, P., & Lyons, A. C. (Eds.). (2015). Qualitative research in clinical and health psychology. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sue, D. (2014). Understanding abnormal behavior (11th edition). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Tripathi, S. S. (2016). Learn business analytics in six steps using SAS and R: a practical, step-by-step guide to learning business analytics. Berkeley, California: Apress.

Twum-Darko, M. (2016). Proceedings of the international conference on business and management dynamics 2016: sustainable economies in the information economy : cape town, south africa, 7 sept. 2016-8 sept. 2016.

Wang, V. C. X. (Ed.). (2015). Handbook of research on scholarly publishing and research methods. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Wang, V. C. X., & Reio, T. G. (Eds.). (2017). Handbook of research on innovative techniques, trends, and analysis for optimized research methods. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.