Transcript of Source of Knowledge Lecture

One
Welcome to the first lecture in the Sources of Knowledge course. In this lecture I am going to be
looking at sources of knowledge and social science research. There on the screen you can see
my email address. Just to remind you that my office hours are from two until four on a Thursday
afternoon, so if you have got any questions you can try and drop me an email or come and see me
in my office between those times. As I said before, I think, if the answer to your question is in the
handbook I will send you away to read the handbook rather than telling you the answer.

So this afternoon, I am saying this afternoon, it may not be afternoon when you are watching this, it
is afternoon for me, these are the topics that this lecture is going to cover. We are going to have a
think about where our knowledge comes from, different sources of knowledge and we are going to
think of social science research as one particular source of knowledge and what that means, and
what the characteristics are of social science research. What does it look like? What is particular
about it compared with other science?

Now, just before I start on the lecture, and this goes for the whole course, I want to say something
about the literature that we will be drawing on. I am aware that I think everything we draw on this
course, comes from the tradition of Western philosophy and the reason for that is, this whole
course is about helping you to engage critically with research articles, the vast majority of which
will have been written in that tradition. Because we are reading English language articles, they are
predominantly underpinned by views about research which come from the Western philosophical
tradition. So please, please, please, don’t interpret this as a value judgement, that it is only dead
white men from the West that can write good philosophy, it is more a recognition that their views
have been most fundamental in developing the kind of research that we see published in the
Western context at the moment. If you are interested in writing from female philosophers, more up
to date philosophical work, philosophical writing in different traditions, then I would strongly
recommend the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. It is a really good source of philosophical
writing from a range of traditions. I will put the link up to it on the Learn page at some point. It is not
the core reading for this course but if you are interested in just exploring philosophical ideas a bit
more broadly then that is a good place to start.

OK, so moving on, where do we get our knowledge from? Now the first thing to say is that this list
of sources of knowledge that you have in front of you here, is not an exhaustive list, and the other
thing it is not a completely discreet list, by which I mean, there is some overlap. There will be
some sources of knowledge, which, for example, are both seen as an authority and are tradition. In
fact tradition can be seen as one form of authority. But it is one of the way in which we can divide
up thinking about different sources of knowledge and just think about them a little bit. So first of all
we are going to look about superstition. I am just going to talk very briefly about most of these.

Superstition I guess, could be described as belief in magical events. It is often said to be at work
when people are interpreting things which are actually random as to falling into some kind of
pattern and meaning that there is some hidden hand going on making things happen. So for
example you may have heard the phrase ‘bad things happen in threes’, there is actually no
evidence that bad things happen in threes at all, and the reality probably is that bad things can
happen singly or two in a row, three, four, five, six but because we have this idea of bad things
happening in threes, when you do have three bad things happening in a row you think ‘ah, that is
because bad things happen in threes!’ or two things happen and you think ‘right now, I am just
waiting for the third’. But of course if one bad thing happens, you don’t think ‘right I am waiting for
the other two’ and if four happen you don’t think ‘oh my goodness, how did that happen?’. So it is
a belief in magical events, interpreting random events as non-random.

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Some examples of some Scottish traditions, so you can see just quite how crazy we are. Did you
know it is bad luck, apparently, to put shoes on the table. Now … some people say it is new
shoes, and other people just say a pair of shoes, but I, in my house, will not let the kids put their
shoes on the table. Of course nothing terrible would happen if they did, but that is a very strong
superstition amongst some families. Another one, this is a beautiful Rowan tree, native tree of
Scotland, lovely berries that the winter birds love to eat, make a great jelly as well, but apart from
that apparently will fend off witches, so if you plant a Rowan tree in your garden it will ward off
witches. And the final one, that I want to show you is this, now I couldn’t actually find a picture that
fits exactly this superstition. The superstition is that you should not take pigs on fishing boats. It
may be because of this superstition pigs have never been allowed on fishing boats, so there is no
photographic evidence, so I found pigs on a boat of some kind. But apparently it is bad luck to take
pigs on fishing boats. So to sum up, superstitions are beliefs in things for which there is no proof.
And as you have seen from some of the ones I have shown you here, it can sound a little bit silly
when you think about it, but a lot of people believe them to be true.

So that was superstitions, what next? Well let’s think about intuition. No some of you may be
familiar with this man, Mark Harmon, and here he is in character as Agent Leroy Gibbs, in the TV
show NCIS, Gibbs is very famous for trusting his gut, trusting his intuition when he has a case to
solve. It is that feeling you get when you feel that something is true but there is no proof or
evidence or reasoning, or any sense really about where that comes from, just this gut feeling. Now
some intuitions have been explained as a result of the working of the sub conscious mind. So an
example here would be, relevant to the picture of Gibbs here, is when you just know that
somebody isn’t telling the truth. When you just know that somebody is guilty. It has been explained
as possibly your mind picking up on subconscious clues that lead you to form this view, because
somebody is maybe not making eye contact or their speech pattern is a bit difficult, or they are
sweating. All those things we know people do when they lie. So one suggestion for intuition is that
actually it is that your conscious mind is becoming aware of the clues that your unconscious mind
is putting together.

Rationalists, and we will come to rationalists later, may argue that intuition is a form of rational
insight, that we intuitively know some things to be true. And that is actually a key principal of
rationalist philosophy. Of course, one of the problems with intuition as a source of knowledge is
that it is often mistaken. I am sure you can think yourselves, of occasions, where you have felt
something to be true, and you have got a feeling about something, and actually it has turned out
not to be the case. So we will say goodbye to the lovely Mark Harmon. And move on to another
source of knowledge.

This time we are looking at authority. When we say we are getting our knowledge from authority,
we are usually talking about a respected person. Somebody who we trust, somebody who we think
has expertise in the area, so for example, when you go to see your doctor and they give you some
advice about healthy eating or cutting down smoking, something like that. We trust them as an
authority in medicine. The same if you were to ask an architect to design a house for you, you have
confidence in the knowledge that they are using to help design that house, because you think they
are an authority of building design. So it is when a famous or respected person tells us something
and actually probably the most obvious example is when a parent or a teacher tells a child
something. Children tend to believe that without question. My children are now of the age where
they are beginning not to believe anything I tell them. Because they are 12 and 15, but certainly
when they were younger, if I said that something was true, it didn’t really occur to them to question
that too much. The example we use a lot in our family is in Scotland we have ice cream vans,
which go up and down the residential streets with their bells going on, to let the children know that
the van is there. They sell ice cream but they sell sweeties as well. And for a long time I told my
children that the ice cream van only rang its bell when it had run out of ice cream and sweeties and
that was the sign that it was closing. And it wasn’t until quite recently that they realised I was telling
them a complete lie. OK. So historically and still today as well, one of the biggest sources of

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authority is of course the church. Before the Enlightenment, European Enlightenment, sort of 18 th
century, the church acted as a source of knowledge and that was just accepted and wasn’t
questioned at all. We see that in some relations today, to this date. And we can also see it at work
in celebrity endorsements. So advertisers love it when they can get celebrities to promote them
goods, and here is an example. Some of you may not know who this is. This is Steven Gerard,
former Liverpool captain endorsing Adidas soccer boots. So the idea being that because he knows
about football, people are going to look at that and go ‘oh well Steven knows about football, he is
pretty good, I better buy the same boots he does’. So that is our knowledge, believing things
because they come from an authoritative source. Perhaps the biggest authoritative source is
books in the library because we presume they have been written by somebody who knows
something.

OK, where else do we get our knowledge from then? I am going to suggest we get some of our
knowledge from tradition. And this is knowledge that has been passed down through generations,
ways of doing things that are so established they have just become the accepted way to do things.
Some people would include spiritual knowledge under this heading, belief in the spiritual, although
other people might talk about that under superstition. A good example of traditional knowledge
would be knowing how to use plants for medicinal purposes. But there is other traditional
knowledge that I think as practitioners we use as well. We often find ourselves, I think, doing things
because it is the way that it has always been done and sometimes it can take somebody from
outside that group to come in and say ‘why do you do it like that? Think about doing it slightly
differently.’ So … it is always interesting to move into different groups and listen to people from
different cultures because that is when you really get this light shone on traditional knowledge
where you think actually maybe there are other ways of doing this and maybe this isn’t right or the
only way of doing it. Anyway, a pretty picture of traditional knowledge. Turmeric, the spice used
extensively in India, but is now widely recognised as having antiseptic properties, having been
used in herbal medicines in India for centuries.

OK, moving on from tradition, we come to tenacity. Tenacity, that bit of holding on to something,
the not letting go. Sometimes we think we know things because we have heard it said so often that
it just becomes part of our consciousness, part of our knowledge about the world we live in
because it is repeated so much. There is some really good examples of these. I grew up being
told that we only used 10% of our brains, and that is something that people still think is true.
Carrots improve eyesight. No they don’t. And lemmings race over cliff edges, well no they don’t.
None of these things are true. I have posted onto the Learn folder this week, a link to a YouTube
video which is 25 facts that you think you knew were true, and all of them are things which just
aren’t, but have kind of filtered into that common knowledge about the world. Just through being
repeated so often. Here again, with tenacity, you can see that clearly there is an overlap with
tradition and superstition and authority as well. These ideas have been around for a long, long
time. So that is tenacity and that is a rather scary looking lemming who looks a bit like my hamster
actually, but apparently yes, lemmings do not jump off cliffs. That was a myth started by a 1950s
TV documentary where they herded them off the cliffs to make the TV show more interesting.

Moving on. Rationalism as a source of authority. Rationalism, we are moving now on to sources
of knowledge which are kind of beginning to use more philosophical terms here. So rationalists
believe in innate knowledge, knowledge which is internal to us, knowledge which is sometimes
called a priori which means ‘we know it before we have experience’. So we know it before
experience and it is knowledge which doesn’t rely on experience. The rationalists believe there are
truths which are fundamental truths, that exist in mental states in our mind, that the mind can grasp
directly. The mind doesn’t have to have any experience of, we just know it to be true. The most
common examples of this kind of knowledge would be mathematical truths, that two straight lines
will never meet, that two and two is four. Rationalists would argue that you don’t have to see two
straight lines before knowing that they will never meet. It is something that just intuitively we know.
And the other kind of knowledge which is often talked about under this heading of rationalism, is
moral knowledge. That sense of knowing what is right. What the right thing to do is. So some

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moral theories would argue that our moral knowledge and understanding is innate, it is something
that we are born with, it is not something that we learn through experience.

So for the rationalists, it is really important that the starting point for all of our knowledge is reason.
It is not the senses, it is not direct sensory experience. Rationalists would argue that without prior
categories, or structures, in the mind, if we didn’t have these ideas that were innate, that we were
born with, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of our experience. That sensory experience, we
would just be overwhelmed by all these different sensations from all our different senses, if we
didn’t already have something existing, prior to that, in our mind, this system of ideas, categories
that allow us to make sense of the experience. Now a key thinker in rationalism is René
Descartes. He was a French philosopher and he was writing in the first half of the 17 th century so
the 1600s. and Descartes famously used the method of doubt to dispense with all beliefs that
could be doubted. He said ‘what are the things that I think I know and can I be certain of them?’
and he got to a point where he even thought, there could be an evil genius playing with his mind
that was fooling him to thinking things, ‘how did he know when he was dreaming, that he wasn’t
awake when he was dreaming, and dreaming when he was awake’. He doubted everything that
he could doubt and the only thing that he said was left, that he could know for certain to be true
was that he existed as a thinking being of some kind. And his very famous statement is “cogito,
ergo sum", I think, therefore I am. Then having reduced everything to things he said wasn’t
possible to doubt he then built up again, what could be known from these basic beliefs, on the
basis of this ‘I am a thinking being’. So one of the first things he added to it was ‘there is a God
and the God is an honest God’. It was very difficult, I think, for philosophers writing in the 17 th
century to try and engage with public debate at the time without having to find a way of
accommodating religious beliefs into it because that was still absolutely the prevalent way of
thinking. It was exactly the same with Darwin, later on, when he was putting forward his Theory of
Evolution. He didn’t publish for years and years and years because he didn’t quite know how to
make things OK with the overwhelming religious beliefs that were current in society at the time. So
Descartes, it is interesting that he went straight from saying ‘I cannot doubt that I am a thinking
being’ to then, the next thing he proved, or he thought he had proven existed was a God who didn’t
deceive him. And when we come to talk about the empiricists we will encounter a man called
George Berkeley who took a completely different view but also the first thing he did with it was to
prove the existence of God. So Descartes and rationalists, I think, therefore I am. All knowledge
originally comes from reason. Reason is the source of all knowledge. So here is a little cartoon
with René at the bar, ordering his pint of beer, being asked for another drink by the bartender, ‘do
you want another drink René?’, ‘no I think not’ and therefore disappearing in a puff of logic. So that
is the rationalists for us.

On final source of knowledge that I want to think about in this lecture, I want to think about
empiricism. And empiricism is often put forward as being in direct contrast to rationalism. So
rationalism and empiricism are seen as being directly opposed to each other. Because empiricists
would take the view that knowledge is obtained through direct observation. Through our senses.
Empiricism as an approach to understanding knowledge came to the fore in the later part of the
17th century, so this is following on from Descartes, and the 18th century. Classic empiricists were
John Locke, the most famous of them all and then David Hume, from here in Edinburgh and
George Berkeley who was an Irish Bishop. And George Berkeley is very interesting, you remember
I said earlier about Descartes, the second thing he was keen to prove existed, after himself, was
God. Berkeley did something very similar. He said that the only things that exist are our
perceptions of them. That is all there is. We live in "esse est percipi", I think, ‘it is because it is
being perceived’. So what happens then, if there is a tree in the forest and nobody is looking at it,
and there is no insects or any living creature perceiving it, is it really there, if all there is is
perceptions. And so George Berkeley came up with the idea ‘well of course it is there still, it is
there because God is perceiving it’. Therefore, because there are things in the world that we know
… the tree is there and when we come back the next week it is still there, the reason it has
continued to exist is because it has continued to be perceived by God. Ok. In the way that
rationalist knowledge was sometimes perceived as a priori, meaning

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‘before experience’, empirical knowledge is sometimes described as a posteriori, meaning ‘after
experience’. That knowledge comes from experience. Most science is founded on empirical
principles, that is it depends on direct observation. So you are observing facts that are happening,
and then you are observing a series of facts, and then you build up through inductive reasoning
principles. So the classic example of induction is the white swans. If you are sitting by a river and
the swan goes past and it is white, and you sit there all afternoon and the only kind of swans that
go past are white swans, you might develop the idea that all swans are white. Now if you were in
Australia, apparently there is quite a lot of black swans in Australia, so that wouldn’t happen. So
actually that is an example of something that is built up from observation which later turns out not
to hold universally. But that is the way in which knowledge is built up in lots of empirical research.
Depending on direct observation and reasoning then used to build up principles. One of the
problems with empiricism, and one of the reasons why the rationalists are so against empiricism as
a source of knowledge, is because they say ‘well but our senses can be deceived, we can’t rely on
our sensory experience’. So one of the things that Descartes pointed out was when you put a
spoon, a straw or something like that, in a glass of water, it no longer looks straight, it looks
distorted, but we know it is not. Our experience of … we take it out, it is still straight, put it in the
water and it looks distorted. So pointing out the many, many, many optical illusions or ways in
which our senses can be deceived and therefore we can’t be confident in knowledge which comes
just from our senses.
So here is an example of … an optical illusion, I guess you would call it, where I can promise you I
haven’t done anything fancy to this slide, there is no movement, it is a 2D picture, but I don’t know
about anybody else but I get slightly seasick when I look at that. So an example of our senses
deceiving us.

So I said there that empiricism is one of the foundations of science, this idea of observations being
built up into principals. And actually science is generally understood as drawing on both empiricism
and rationalism. So yes, absolutely direct observations are used to generate theories but we also
have science where science also starts with principals and deduces hypothesis from these
principals and then tests these principals empirically. So science, both generates knowledge from
observation, and building that up into theoretical principals, but also we know of science, where
people start from those principals and say ‘well if that is right, then what would happen in this
situation? Well lets test that hypothesis, is that what happens?’. So you get this combination of
both, what we would call, bottom up, so from observation to theory, using inductive reasoning but
also deductive reasoning from the theory down to making predictions about what will happen and
can be tested. And actually an awful lot of scientific research has this kind of cyclical nature, where
either you … the starting point could be a universal principal and you think ‘ok, how does that work
in practice?’ and ‘this is what I would expect to happen, lets construct an experiment and make
observations and see if it does’ and if your prediction is borne out you would say that the
hypothesis had been confirmed, but if it wasn’t. If something slightly different happened, then you
would go back and you would revise the hypothesis and revise the theory that you had.
Alternatively there is some approach, where if you are studying a new area, where there isn’t much
pre-existing theory, because nobody has really studied it before, then it is much more common that
you would go in and you would generate theory using what we would call, a grounded theory
approach, from the observations and the data that you are drawing on, and then you would
develop theories and then you would then think about … ‘if this is our emerging theory, emerging
understanding of what is going on, how can we test that out and check if that is right?’ and then
you’d go back into designing research and you would be conducting more observation. So you can
see that more deductive and inductive reasoning are used often in the same study. These are,
therefore, drawing both on empiricism – knowledge from observation, knowledge from the sense,
and rationalism – knowledge from innate ideas. And a key feature of rationalism is that it uses, it
depends on, logic and deductive logic to arrive at new knowledge from these kind of first principals
that you get. So both top down, and bottom up.

OK, so science uses both empiricism and rationalism, it draws on both of them. Science also has
some peculiar characteristics, particular characteristics, often you will find a definition of science as

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being systematic. It is systematic enquiry. There is a famous definition of it as ‘systematic enquiry
in the public domain’. So science is something … I think that was Lawrence Stenhouse in 1975,
talking about systematic enquiry made public. So it is open, it is transparent, another word you will
sometimes hear being used to describe research. So it is open for other people to look at. So what
do we mean by systematic? Just that it follows a … it is organised, it is ordered, it follows a plan, it
has a structure it has a logical order to it, it is rational, it makes sense. It is not a kind of a slap
dash, let’s throw things at the wall and see what happens, there is a plan and it all fits together.
What is the question you are trying to answer? How do you design your research? To answer that,
what methods are you going to use? How are you going to analyse the data that you generate
from those methods? So a very kind of systematic approach. And the systematic structure of a
research project you would find in the research proposal. Before you conduct any research, most
people would start off with an idea about what they are going to do. We will, as we go through the
course, see that in real life, research doesn’t always turn out like that. And actually some people,
particularly those that take a more ethnographic approach, want to get into the research field,
before they start working out exactly what they are going to do. But there should be, at some point
there should be a kind of systematic account of what was done and why. It is also empirical, so a
quote from Wellington and Sczerbinski, I think is how you say that … the reason I put this here is
because some people would question this, some people would want to expand the definition of
science. Certainly expand the definition of research to include research which is conceptual. So
research which is in the philosophical tradition, research which is maybe developing frameworks or
models or looking at clarifying concepts and not generating new data. Some people might also say
that the secondary analysis of data, so data that has been generated from one research project is
often stored, and then another researcher can come along and analyse that and we call that
secondary analysis. And some people would say that that doesn’t really count as empirical
research, others would say ‘well the data were empirical originally’ so there is some dispute about
whether or not empirical has to be there. If something doesn’t have an empirical aspect of it, does
it count as a science? So you can chat about that amongst yourselves.

Something that I think everybody would agree that science has to be is critical. By this we mean,
really … whenever a scientist, somebody who is doing research, would make a statement or want
to reach a conclusion that that should always be on the basis of having thought about all other
kinds of interpretations, looking for problems with that. So if I am analysing my data, and I think I
have found something really nice that I think maybe interviewees are telling me, one of the steps I
will take, is I will then go back and I will read through every other interview that I have done, and I
will try to find … I will actively seek out data which contradicts the story that I want to tell. Because
I want to be sure that the story that I am telling about my research is accurate and that it is not just
in my own opinion, or that I am not reading things into it that I like the look of, or I like the sound of
because it fits my own prior views. This is self-critical … is another aspect of this. Being aware of
what your own prejudices are. Being aware of the kinds of things that you like to see or you want to
find. If I am somebody running a mountaineering project for kids who have grown up in Local
Authority care, I might be quite heavily invested in finding that the kids love it, that they find it very
useful in developing their self-esteem or their teamwork skills or their confidence or something. I
think we have to be very, very careful as researchers that we don’t read into what they are telling
us things that we want to find there. And also that we design research in such a way that … any
good research design should be designed in such a way that it is always possible to find things that
you don’t expect. That a research project which doesn’t have the possibility of discovering
something which is counterintuitive or against what the literature tells you or against your beliefs,
your preexisting beliefs, is not good research. Good research should always be open to us being
surprised by it. Otherwise it doesn’t really count. If it is not possible to find something new, or find
something that we are not expecting then all you are doing is you are going out to prove your
assumptions to be true.

So I would say these, for me, are quite important characteristics of science, systematic is certainly
really important. Empirical, as I have said, there is a bit of dubiety about that, whether that is an

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essential characteristic, but it is certainly true to say that lots and lots of science is empirical at
some stage, but absolutely it needs to be critical and it needs to be self-critical.

So that is overall characteristics of research. Thinking then of different kinds of research. Still
thinking about science generally here. A common way of dividing up research, and you will find this
in the chapter from Coe, which is one of the readings for this week, is this division between pure
research and applied research. And I think it is probably fair to say that in the natural sciences, the
balance is probably quite towards the pure research. Research which is just about generating
knowledge for the sake of it. What do we need to know? What can we find out about things? But
not with a kind of explicit aim of finding out exactly what the direct benefit would be to humans or to
farmers or to a particular section of society. It is just about generating the knowledge. Now, of
course, pure research often has hugely positive impacts on society. Huge benefits to people. But
the point is that when the research is at the planning stage, the reason for carrying it out is
primarily about generating the knowledge and finding things out for the sake of it. Rather than
finding out answers to particular problems. Trying to solve something. There are arguments
around, and something we will come back to in week four when we look at the impact of research.
There are increasing pressures for research to move more towards the applied end of the
continuum in terms of its usefulness for people. I was listening to something on Radio 4 last week,
it was a mathematician from Cambridge University, she was talking about the challenges of doing
pure maths research, because governments and funders like to see immediate consequences.
Who is going to benefit from this? And so it is certainly the case, that researchers, researchers
working in universities, researchers generally are under a lot of pressure to be able to evidence the
impact of the research and there is a whole tradition now within European funding of research and
Horizon 2020, about actually the pure … the researchers talking to potential end users, and
potential societal groups, even before they start the research. About the kinds of questions which
need to be asked. And think about the kinds of possible benefits that might come from the
research. So I would say that pure research is somewhat under pressure at the moment, mainly
because of funding. This need to evidence impact.

Applied research on the other hand, I think it is fair to say, is much more common in fields like
education which are linked to very practice based fields. Health research would be another one.
Nursing studies, that kind of thing. So applied research, because it often seeks answers to specific
questions and it is usually with the purpose of improving things. So … often there will be,
governments will want to know what works. They have got a policy aim, raising attainment, raising
literacy levels, raising fitness levels, improving wellbeing, developing community groups, that kind
of thing. And they want to know what works in doing that. Now … there are huge problems with
the ‘what works’ research agenda. Those of you doing the MSc in Education who are taking the
philosophy strand, I am pretty sure James will be talking to you quite a lot about issues of ‘what
works’ research. Problems about being able to move from saying what has worked for particular
outcomes, in one particular setting, whether or not they are generalizable to other settings, and
actually other people, like Pamela Munn, wrote a paper when she was president of the British
Educational Research Association, where she is talking about actually what works is not the most
interesting question, the most interesting question is ‘why does it work?’. So we are needing to get
to these underlying mechanisms, but why ‘what works’ works, in that particular context. Because it
is when you get into those underlying mechanisms that you have maybe got more of a chance.
Because this is saying ‘this is likely to work in another context as well’. So there are challenges
both to pure research from funders who want to see impact. But also applied research from
academics who question the value of ‘what works’ research. Not the value of it, sorry, that is
unfair. But who are concerned about the dominance of that kind of approach. So within education
research it has maybe led to people trying to doing lots of randomised trials, because they want to
be able to establish cause and effect and other folk will come along and say ‘well you know, you
are kind of missing something important here about the relationships and what is going on in this
setting’.

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So pure research and applied research are very common ways of dividing up research. Both have
their issues.

So pure and applied research, that we just looked at, apply to science in the natural world, what we
call natural science, as well as to social science. Social science is a particular kind of science and
it is a particular kind of science because basically … well as you would guess from the title, it
involves the study of individuals, the study of society’s social problems like crime and deviance,
drug taking, capitalism. It studies culture and social organisation. So often we will look at the way
in which different institutions work like the banking sector or the education sector, policy makers.
And there are arguments about the extent to which social science can be like, or ought to be like,
the natural sciences. Particularly the arguments about to what extent it can mirror what is
described as the scientific method. Now the scientific method is held up as … people say it and
they are invoking certainty and credibility and high quality research. But actually when you start
looking at research from the natural sciences, there isn’t one scientific method. There is lots of
different methods within natural science. There is lots of different ways of approaching research,
lots of different research designs, lots of different ways of measuring things. Scientific method is
often associated with hypothesis testing or more frequently the testing the ‘null hypothesis’. So
you have an idea about … maybe arrived at deductively from a principal or arrived at inductively
from observations, you have an idea about something, an explanation about something that is
going on that you want to test, and you will design an experiment to test that hypothesis. Actually
what people try to do is they try to test the ‘null hypothesis’ which means they are testing … they
are saying ‘well I am trying to prove that that … the relationship that I think is there, isn’t actually
there’, because the problem with induction is if you prove something is there in a particular setting,
it doesn’t mean to say it is there in every setting. Whereas if you can prove the null hypothesis and
prove it doesn’t exist there then the theory doesn’t stand, because you have disproved it in one
context. So therefore it could be disproved in others. I am aware that is sounding very abstract. So
let me help.

Going back to the swans, the white swans, so if you generate the hypothesis that all swans are
white, what you would actually test is not an experiment to see whether or not all swans are white,
what you would set out to look for evidence for would be to support the hypothesis that not all
swans are white. And you would actively seek out, looking for swans which weren't white. And
because, on the basis that as soon as you find one black swan or pink swan or … multi-coloured
stripy swan, your theory that all swans are white, is disproven, it has been falsified. Whereas if you
set out just to observe white swans and that is all you see, you still can’t say all swans are white.
So … hypothesis testing is a key part of an awful lot of research in the natural sciences. It is also a
fairly significant part of quite a lot of research in the social sciences. And even if not explicitly states
like a hypothesis and a null hypothesis, you can often work out what it is that the writers thought
they were going to find and how they designed their research to investigate that. Having said that,
social science is often criticised for testing the hypothesis rather than testing that null hypothesis.
So seeking out to confirm its theories rather than seeking out ways of falsifying the theories. So
that is one of the criticisms that is levelled at social science research.

Social science research is different from natural science in some key ways and the first one and, I
think, the most important one, the first thing you start thinking about when you start thinking about
social science, is this issue of ethics. Research ethics is … you will see ethics application forms,
and will have discussion about ethics and we will talk about not doing any harm, making sure ‘no
animals were hurt in this’, ‘no children were hurt’ in this study. Gaining consent. Making sure that
people know that they can have permission to be involved in your research project or not. And
they know … we talk about informed consent. They need to know what involvement in the project
means before they can give consent to it, and confidentiality. What are you going to do with that
information. It is more often anonymity actually. You don’t keep your finding confidential but you
don’t name the place where you have done your research or the people you have spoken to. So
that is one way of understanding ethics. And that is because social science is about research with
people. So … obviously there are ethical issues when you do research with animals, but

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particularly all social science research, I would argue, has ethical issues, raises ethical issues,
because it is dealing with human beings.

I would say, the ‘do no harm’, gaining consent, the confidentiality and anonymity is just the first
step and not the most important one. This kind of following ethical codes is not as important as
actually being an ethical researcher and doing ethical research. What is a good use of your time?
What is a good use of our participants time? What are you going to do with the findings? How are
you going to use that? What kind of hopes might you raise with a group of people about going in to
do research with them? What kind of relationships are you getting involved in with them? What are
your responsibilities within the research field as a participant, as a human being, as a researcher?
All of these, I think, are much more interesting ethical questions, that the ‘have they signed the
consent form?’. But other people would disagree with me. I am just saying, ethics is an issue in
social science research.

Social science research also differs from natural science research, in that it very often involved
practitioners. Practitioners are the researchers. People are often researching their own practice in
a way that you don’t really find with … people working in the bio-chemistry lab are often not … they
are kind of quite separate from the people who will eventually be using the knowledge that their
research generates. Whereas in educational research, there is an awful lot of practitioners, some
people would argue, Richard Pring would argue, that the link between theory and practice, you
can’t separate them, that practitioners are constantly researching, they are researching their own
practice, they are generating theories, they are testing them on a local level all the time. All the
time. So it is not just that there is kind of a clear user group, from educational research. But an
awful lot of the research itself is conducted by practitioners, so that gives it a particular kind of
nature, a particular kind of form.

Another really big difference between science and social science, is that the thing that we are
studying in social science, people, human beings are active thinking actors. Which basically
means that what I do and how I behave is going to depend on what I think is happening. How I
understand the situation, how I read the situation. So trying to make predictions about how people
will behave is really, really difficult. Because each individual understands things differently and
reads situations differently. We are going to talk a lot about this … a lot? We are going to talk a bit
about this next week. Don’t panic. Just the idea that we wouldn’t ask … if you were doing a
chemical research, test tube research, you are not going to ask the chemicals … pharmaceutical,
you have developed a new drug, you are not going to say to the drug ‘what do you think about the
disease that we are designing you for, to combat. We have got this terrible new disease, this new
bacteria that has just arrived and we are … your purpose, the reason we are designing you is to go
and combat that disease.’ It just doesn’t make any sense. You are not going to ask them what
they think. But actually if you are asking people, and you are talking about ‘we are designing this
new approach to reading in schools’, of course it matters what the teachers who are going to be
implementing it think. Because, depending on what they think about it, and their beliefs about it
and their prior experience, and their attitudes towards reading and how confident they feel and how
important they think it is compared with, say, wellbeing or all these kind of things, will make a
difference. So because people are thinking, because their behaviour is influenced by what they
think, some people would argue that you just can’t study people in the same way that you can
study the natural world. We know that the apple will fall from the tree because of gravity. We
actually know if people fall from a tree. There is things that they can do to make their landing
softer. They could call out to a pal to come and catch them. You can, if it is a tall tree you can go
into that kind of skydiving pose. You can make sure you land on the balls of your feet, not your
heels. You can, when you impact on the ground, you can try, as far as possible, to roll to the side
or back, rather than rolling forward, to protect yourself. So if a person falls out a tree, the kind of …
the prediction about how injured they are going to be, is not just a matter of looking at how hard the
surface is, how heavy they are and how high up they fall from, in the way it would be if we were
looking at an apple falling out a tree and how high the tree was all that. We would be able, if we
knew all the things to measure, to predict how damaged that apple was going to be. We can’t do

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that for a human being because you don’t know how the human being is going to behave.
Because how they behave is going to depend on what they are thinking and what they know and
their history and all that. So … predictions, and a lot of science, essentially experimental design is
about predicting things and controlling things. Predictions are very, very difficult when human
beings are involved because they are unique and because part of how they behave is determined
by how they understand the situation. We will talk more about this when we start talking more
about different research paradigms.

So in summary, social science is different from science in the natural world in some key ways. I
would say, the main ones are the ethical issues and this idea about people being active thinkers.
But … I think we need to be careful. Some people would say ‘it is so completely different, none of
that stuff about natural science research has any relevance to us as social science researchers’.
And other people would say ‘do you know what, there might be some differences, and yes, ok,
people are kind of making sense of their situation, but the person is still going to fall out the tree.
You can’t … we still know they are going to be sore when they land. There is certain things we can
still know.’. So there is bits of social science which we can actually make predictions about and
make sense of and do follow patterns, even though people are thinking individually. Thinking
about things and interpreting things in their own way and behaving in particular ways. So how
difficult you think social science has to be from the natural science, kind of depends on your own
views about how similar the world of the natural science is to the world of the social science.
About the extent to which you think it is possible to predict and explain things in the social world.
And there are different views about that. And what you will find when you are reading different
pieces of research is that they will come from different positions about what kind of thing it is that
they are trying to do. And about the possibility of social science research looking like natural
science research. Not just the possibility, it is not that … ‘here is social science research over
here, and there is natural science and social science is just trying really, really hard trying to be as
good as natural science’. That is one of the views you might find in the literature. But other people
might say, ‘do you know what social science is even better because we have got much more
flexibility in the kinds of things we can do, the kinds of questions we can ask, the range of
approaches that we use’. So it shouldn’t be seen as natural sciences good, social science is a
poor relation. But that is how it is seen by some people. Especially natural scientists. Coming
from a family of natural scientists, I have this argument, every family gathering we have, ‘you are
not doing proper research’, kind of thing, but there is a huge and growing body of literature
defending social science as a science in its own right. But I would certainly say, that to be counted
as a science, those criteria we looked at earlier, about being systematic, about being critical, about
being self-critical, about being transparent, absolutely they still apply. It is just they apply
differently. So they mean different things in social science research. But it is absolutely the case
that research in the social sciences has to be as rigorous and conducted as systematically as
research in the natural sciences. So it is not like the easy option.

Just thinking about what social science is like then. I have been looking through quite a lot of
literature and finding words like transparent, and systematic and public and critical and self-critical
but what other adjectives would you use to describe science? Have a wee think for a minute about
what you would use to describe science in natural science research. You might want to think about
that caricature of scientists in the lab in their white coats and their eye glasses on and then the
ethnographer going to study an ancient tribe somewhere. Would you use the same adjectives to
describe these different kinds of science, different approaches to science? Trying to get you to
think about this first bullet point on the slide. It depends on what you think about how similar the
worlds are and what is possible. There aren’t right answers about this. It is about ‘what do we think
and what kind of arguments can be made either for or against social science following the same
kind of approach as the natural sciences?’. So I am encouraging you throughout this course to just
think about your own position a bit. Where do you stand on all these things?

Thinking about social science research in particular, and this is just a very, very kind of introductory
… one of the things that I alluded to earlier was that social science is so broad and so diverse that

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actually there is a multiplicity of approaches and methods and some people say the reason we
don’t have a social science method in the same way, that some people argue, we have a science
method, is just because there aren’t any agreed principles because it is so diverse. There are so
many different ways of approach research in social science. This is just a flavour, on this slide
here, of the kinds of things that can be different. Think about the purposes. You will often see the
purposes of research being described as either exploratory - we have really got no idea what is out
there, let’s go and have a look, descriptive – which would be more, well ok, let’s think about this
group of people we are looking at, or this organisation, let’s think about how different
characteristics relate to each other, to describe what is going on here, often looking at relationships
between or correlations between different variables, or explanation – trying to say why did
something happen, or what will happen when we do this, to explain and predict. Interesting, it
would be useful for you keep these – explore, describe and explain – in mind, because I think it is
really helpful when you are thinking about the different kinds of research questions that you can
get.

So an exploratory research question would be something like: What is going on? What is
happening? What is this like? What are the issues here? A research project that is setting out to
describe something is more like to be asking about how things are happening? How are things
linked? How are things associated? And an explanation, something that is trying to explain
something is going to be asking why. Why is it that …? So thinking about the whats, and the hows
and the whys, as the starting point for research questions, when you come to develop your own
research, when you are doing your own dissertations. But just thinking about what kind of study is
this, what is it trying to do? And of course within social science research there is a huge range of
studies, of research designs, case studies, ethnography experiment, quasi experiments, narrative
survey, longitudinal, cross-sectional, auto-ethnography, there is just … phenomenological
approaches, hermeneutic approaches, documentary analysis, discourse analysis, participatory
research methods … there are a wide range. The three dots after survey mean, that is not the end
of the list. There is a huge range of … kind of designs that we find in social science research, and I
think it is in week three that you get an opportunity to focus in on one of these in more detail.

And the other thing that there is a wide variety of in social science research is methods. The
method is, the instrument that you use, what is the way that you are going to be going about
generating or collecting data? How are you going to find your data that is going to help you answer
your research questions, which is going to help you meet the aim of the research? Are you going
to do interviews with people, and if so, what kind? Structured interviews, semi-structured
interviews, narrative interviews? Maybe you are going to ask people to fill in a questionnaire.
Again, what kind? Is it going to be open questions, are you going to generate qualitative data? Are
you going to ask them to answer in words, is it going to be tick box, is it rating scales? Perhaps
you are going to do observations. What kinds of observations? Timed observations, open
observations, naturalistic, participant observations? Documentary analysis. You are going to look
at texts. How are you going to select the texts? What kind of texts are you going to look for?
Focus groups, sometimes called group interviews. So again, this list, the three dots, this is not an
exhaustive list, but these are some of the more common ways in which we go about generating or
collecting data.

You will notice that I have said that twice. I have talked about either generating or collecting data. I
am doing that deliberately because there are two different approaches to thinking about research.
One is that the data is out there in the world, and we go and collect it. It is like collecting apples
from a tree. Another is you are generating research. You are creating the knowledge by the
research process. So when I talk about data I will usually try to both say generating or collecting
data, so I am talking to both those traditions within social science research.

Data are qualitative or quantitative. People talk about qualitative methods and quantitative
methods, or qualitative approaches and quantitative approaches. I am not so keen on that, I think
qualitative and quantitative are best kept as adjectives to describe data. But other writers, other

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thinkers, have different views and that is fine. Just be aware of that. Quantitative basically means
it is about quantity, about numbers. And qualitative is about the nature of something and is usually
expressed through words. The reason I think it is best to think of data as being qualitative and
quantitative is that, for example, in an interview you can ask somebody can ask you to give you
quantitative data. How many children do you have? How many times have you been married?
How many years have you lived at this address? That is quantitative data. Although people
generally think of interviews as being a qualitative method. That is why I think it gets confusing.
Questionnaires is another one. People often think questionnaires have to be quantitative, but of
course you can ask questionnaires with very open questions. The difference is that it is on a bit of
paper that you are giving someone and they are writing down their answer. So I like to think of
data as being qualitative and quantitative rather than methods or designs or approaches. But you
will find ways of using the language that is comfortable for you and the particular field of enquiry
that you come from.

Finally the other thing that can vary, there is other stuff as well like [unclear 54.23] analysis and
things. But one of the other things, common things that varies is the unit of analysis. What is it you
are interested in? Are you interested in the individual? Are you interested in a group of people?
Are you interested in the kind of relationship? Are you interested in a collection of texts? So … the
unit of analysis, the thing we are actually trying to understand can vary hugely as well, within
educational research.

OK, finally, we are near the end, you will be pleased to hear. Features of educational research.
So we are moving from social science research to educational research. I am aware that there are
people on this course from sports programmes, from dance science, which has an education
aspect to it as well. I think these kind of issues apply more or less to those areas as well. One of
the questions to think about, when you think about educational research is, is it that we are
researching about education? Or is educational research, does it have to be educational? Should
there be something learned from it. This comes from the very close link between practitioners
doing their own research. They are not just trying to find out knowledge just for the sake of it.
They are wanting to do something with it, do something useful with it to improve things. Is it
research for education or research about education? Education of course takes place in a wider
policy context. We talked a bit about the government demands for ‘what works’ research. As an
educational researcher, I can’t just go out and research whatever I want to, I have to get funding
for it, or I have to persuade my line manager that it is worth my time to do it or the institution’s time
to allow me to do it. So the research that gets done is the research that there is approval for. And
that shapes the kind of research and the kind of questions that get asked. I think it is also
important to note the nature of education as an importing discipline. So we have sociologists of
education, educational psychologists, historians, economists, linguistic studies, applied linguistics.
And each of these disciplines that we draw on within education has its own kind of conventions, its
own paradigmatic assumptions, its own ways of doing things, its own rules and assumptions about
what counts as good research. And so as somebody on an education programme, you are going
to be exposed to research which has been conducted in a number of these different, other, wider
paradigms. So for example in the MSc education, on the additional support needs programme, or
inclusive education programmes now, your likely to be reading things that have been written by
somebody from a sociological background, possibly a social policy studies background, social
policy background, philosophical background but also from a psychological background. So this
can make it quite difficult to kind of work out what is the sum body of knowledge within the
discipline, because it is coming from all these different fields. So we are actually looking at quite
different things in quite different ways.

Education research, applied versus basic? Much, much more applied research. I suspect that is
the same in sports as well. But Gavin, who tutors on that programme will be able to have that
conversation with you. And as I said before, one of the key features of education research is just
how many practitioners are engaged with research. And as I said, Richard Pring would argue that
every practitioner is engaged with research.

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OK, so where we have got to? We have talked about different sources of knowledge. I have talked
about empiricism and rationalism, about being the two sources of knowledge which are the most
fundamental to social science research. I have talked a bit about what science is and then a bit
about what social science is in particular. And about the ways in which social science is different
from science in the natural world but also the ways in which it is similar. And then right at the end
here, beginning to think about ‘well what about educational research, are there particular features
of that that we need to be mindful of?’. And I think for me out of all of these, I would just say
thinking about the context in which research happens, who has funded it, why are these questions
being asked, what other questions are there which could have been asked, which haven’t been
because they haven’t got funding or it doesn’t fit the government agenda? I think the idea of
education as an importing discipline is a really important one to keep hold of as well.

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