The Wheel of Science

I understand and appreciate the lens through which a researcher with a subjectivist epistemology approaches research. The subjectivist approach to research entails interacting with targets of interest in their social contexts to understand social phenomena. Objectivism, on the other hand, seeks to make generalizations about social phenomena for explaining, predicting, and later controlling the phenomena. Common to these epistemological poles is the notion that researchers from either approach seek abstractions among people’s nuanced behaviors.

Abstractions are generalizations that form the building blocks for theory. Themes develop through objective and subjective observation of behaviors, and researchers begin to make preliminary guesses about how these abstractions relate through laws of interaction and formal propositions. The development of these abstractions, however, differs by the epistemological standpoint from which research is conducted. In the subjectivist tradition, the researcher becomes the tool through which data are gathered. A separation between the researcher and the research is neither a focal concern nor a regulatory ideal. Although the biases of the research should be made transparent, these biases do not hurt the systematic process of science. The objectivist tradition relies on the scientific method to maintain objectivity in finding truth.

In several research method texts, a “wheel of science” is publicized wherein research created from the subjectivist and objectivist work hand in hand to develop and extend theory. Although I appreciate the idea of the wheel of science, the notion of a complementary system of empiricism in practice does not exist beyond multiple methodologists. How researchers practice research is largely guided by the departments in which they learned research methods. When they become indoctrinated into a specific view of science, researchers enter into silos, with neither side reading much of the output of the other. I, only on rare occasions, read qualitative research because I have been taught to believe that results from qualitative research are tenuous at best. My research previous to this class was thus influenced only modestly by data-first inquiry unlike what this wheel of science presents as almost commonplace. And although my initial reaction is that it might be a product of my educational upbringing, I recently searched through the flagship journal of our discipline only to find no qualitative studies and only a handful of citations of qualitative studies in the references of these quantitative investigations.