The Interpretivist Paradigm and Intellectual Identity
Brandon Ching
Arizona State University
PAF 602

As developing scholars, it is important for doctoral students to have a solid understanding of mainstream approaches to their respective disciplines. Not only does this mean that students should have functional and theoretical understandings of the tenants of their field but they should also be familiar with different perspectives through which one can approach study and research in that field.

Until recently, I did not have a complete understanding of what it meant to approach a discipline through a general collection of subjective practices. Of course I understood that different people can view and react to aspects of a discipline differently, yet I was ignorant to the degree of specificity with which the, “study of study” could be done. Perhaps my previous schooling ill prepared me for the more theoretical approaches to the field; or quite simply I could  easily have just forgotten them. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: epistimology, interpretivism, methodology, objective, ontology, paradigms, qualitative, radical humanism, realism, research, social reality, sociology, subjective