Module 1 Reflections

Wow!  This is a heavy module - reading 4 chapters and an article, keeping a journal of my thoughts, then viewing several videos ... don't think that I can handle this amount of work every week with 4 courses on the go.

When reading chapter 2 in Willis I felt as if I was learning a foreign language.  I would have to say that the text is dense with information - how do you take it all in and process it and really know it?  I hope that wasn't the intent, for as it stands, I have only a cursory understanding of many of the concepts.  What are some of the broad concepts that I understood from this chapter?  One thing is that the three dominant paradigms of social science research emerged as a response to some societal/social problem:

Positivism:  a response to metaphysical and magical explanations (what were those metaphysical explanations again?  -- Philosophical explanations - or 'beyond the physical' - metaphysics deals with anything outside of the realm of the physical world - such as ideals, thoughts, mind, consciousness, and spirit (p. 40).  "A fundamental assumption of positivism is that the use of the scientific method is the primary or only way of discovering truths about the world" (p. 32).  It assumes "we can discover universals about human behavior if we do a good job of scientifically and objectively studying them in well-controlled contexts.
Foundations:

• experimentation is the method for learning about the world
• good research must be quantitative; it must use numbers because no science can be known without mathematics (armchair reasoning is inferior) p. 34

Critical Theory: a response to the inequities in society - a response to the complexities of modern nation-states that often lead to domination and exploitation of one group by another (p. 61)  - analysis of data through the lens of an ideology (p. 44); a central point of critical theory is the "emancipatory imperative directed towards the abolition of social injustice and ... [the focus] principally on a critique of ideology, showing how repressive interests underlie the ostensibly neutral formulations of science, politics, economics, and culture in general" (citing Underwood, p. 48). (Huh???)

Interpretivism: a response to the excesses of "scientific" social science (p. 48). "Our experiences, our tools such as language, and our culture are filters that shape and help define the reality that we construct" (citing Every, p. 51).  A response against positivism and empiricism - essentially a reaction against the idea that you can use the same research methods and paradigms in the social sciences as are used in the natural sciences (p. 54)

Other:

• I liked the example of the empiricist turkey - (p. 39) - demonstrating that you can definitively disprove a hypothesis but you can never prove it beyond any doubt.