Critical social research

Abstract

Critical social research is, like the other approaches discussed in this book, a distinctive approach to studying social life, drawing on specific beliefs about the world and how it operates. The conventional notion of scientific research has been underpinned by an assumption that what is shared across disciplines is a similar scientific method and uniform standards that can be applied across the scientific community. This has been unsettled by critical research that regards the ‘scientific method’ based on positivist concepts as unsatisfactory because it deals only with what can be observed ‘objectively’ and does not locate social phenomena in their historical and political context. It asks awkward questions about the social interests served, masked or denied by research as well as other practices. Critical social research is grounded in critical theory, and this requires some explanation. As Nancy Fraser has said: A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical identification. The questions it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. (Fraser, 1989, p. 113)