Abstract
Jayadeva Uyangoda, Social Research: Philosophical and MethodologicalFoundations, Social Scientists’ Association, 2015, Pages: vii + 657, Price:LKR 1800, ISBN: 978-955-0762-33-0
Highlights
IntroductionIt critically examines the humanistic traditions from which social sciences originally evolved, the rise of positivism, and the current turn from positivistic research towards qualitative approaches, and contextualizes these changes in the epistemological orientation of social research within debates in intellectual history about the nature of knowledge and means of knowledge production
Uyangoda states in the foreword that the book was a decade in the making and perhaps the best appreciation students of social science can offer such a text is to use it with similar patience and attention to the nuanced and detailed arguments it makes
The book through its very structure and organization shows that taking sides is not necessarily a bad thing in the social sciences
Summary
It critically examines the humanistic traditions from which social sciences originally evolved, the rise of positivism, and the current turn from positivistic research towards qualitative approaches, and contextualizes these changes in the epistemological orientation of social research within debates in intellectual history about the nature of knowledge and means of knowledge production For those approaching this text from current utility-driven discourses of education, this might appear to be a weakness because the text may not seem ‘practical’ – for instance, it does not directly deal with how to design a research study, how to frame research questions, choose between qualitative and quantitative approaches, etc. In doing so the book urges, implicitly, that social sciences research has to reconcile itself with the partial and contingent nature of the truth claims possible in our fields of disciplinary inquiry – in essence the text reminds social researchers that human-centric research cannot be technicist, narrowly specialized and strive for some kind of non-existent objectivity
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