The Dialectics of Citizenship: Exploring Privilege, Exclusion, and Racialization

Chapter 1. The Epistemology and Methodology of Exploratory Social Science Research: Crossing Popper with Marcuse

1 CHAPTER 1 The Epistemology and Methodology of Exploratory Social Science Research Crossing Popper with Marcuse If you insist on strict proof (or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are. KARL POPPER, THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY, 2002 This chapter seeks to propose a rationale for exploratory research in the social sciences. Inspired by the recent debates around qualitative methods (Gerring 2001; George and Bennett 2005; Brady and Collier 2004; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Ragin 2008, to name just a few), I seek to demonstrate that exploratory research also has a rightful place within the social sciences. In order to live up to its potential, exploratory research needs to be conducted in a transparent, honest, and self-reflexive way—and follow a set of guidelines that ensure its reliability. Exploratory research, if conducted in such a way, can achieve great validity, and it can provide new and innovative ways to analyze reality. In most cases, exploration demands more from the researcher than confirmatory research, both in terms of preparation and in terms of willingness and ability to expose oneself to foreign cultures and languages, as well as the courage to engage in a critical and honest self-reflection and critique. It also requires intellectual engagement with the topic at stake, far beyond 2| Chapter 1 the needs of those running regressions from their office computers. However , exploratory research normally demands less money to conduct, as most projects can be done by one researcher alone, without the need to mobilize, train, and pay large research apparatuses. Given the disciplinary power of elite scholars and academic institutions when it comes to selecting research through funding and hiring, exploratory research thus has great emancipatory potential, because it can escape the disciplinary power often exercised by senior “peers” and mainstream funding agencies. To legitimize and provide a solid epistemological groundwork for exploratory research in the social sciences, it needs to be grounded in a philosophy of science, it has to be articulated within an epistemological framework, and it has to formulate a comprehensive methodological framework that justifies its methods. Thought also needs to be given to the ontology of the social sciences, as decisions about what counts as real and what we shall accept as fact necessarily impact our strategy of inquiry. THE LIMITS OF CONFIRMATORY SOCIAL SCIENCE Confirmatory social science dominates the field. Most social scientists use quantitative or qualitative methods in order to prove, or corroborate, their hypotheses. They expect to confirm laws, regularities, or conditionalities of the if . . . then . . . sort. Confirmatory research is what graduate students train for and what qualifies most researchers to get a tenure-track academic job. Confirmatory research has indeed many advantages—some of which are also very relevant for exploratory research. Confirmatory research allows for a clear formulation of a theory to be tested in its application, commonly formulated as hypotheses; it allows for bringing order into the research process by formulating theories and related hypotheses up front, and developing a research design and methodological tools best suited to address the research question, which is also formulated up front. By formulating research questions , theories, hypotheses, a research design, and a method—and by forcing the researcher to operationalize the involved terms and concepts and think of indicators to assess them—confirmatory research provides a clear scheme that is easy to follow and hence easy to teach. If trained appropriately in confirmatory research techniques, researchers know how to proceed. By providing schematic and standardized procedures, confirmatory research also provides a mental map for how inquiry works and what it can achieve. Taking inspiration from the work of Karl Popper (2002) and Epistemology and Methodology| 3 Carl Hempel (1966), confirmatory research proceeds deductively by testing hypotheses. The great advantage of proceeding in such a way lies in the clear and well-structured research process that such an approach is able to secure. Mental models, ideas, or theories are compared to empirical reality and tested for their explanatory power. This allows for an isolation of an empirical domain and a focusing on one clearly delimited facet of reality . It also allows for a zeroing in on one, or a small number of potentially causal relationships and mechanisms. This is absolutely necessary for conducting any sort of empirical research, given the high complexity of reality. In reality, everything potentially relates to everything else—and...