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Chapter 3 Research Framework
resident autonomy. It must therefore be ascertained what it means to be autonomous
- how is it experienced in practice and how do people explain it. Doane and Varcoe
(2005) explained that pragmatism is a process that offers a fundamental change in
the approach to theory development and to nursing practice whereby the theory
moves beyond an abstraction that is developed in isolation from everyday practice
and becomes a practical activity that is central to every nursing moment.
In other paradigms the researcher is very much like a scientist who emerges from
research with new knowledge, but the participants remain in relative ignorance
(Weaver and Olson, 2006). Positivism and post-positivism were not deemed
appropriate as the context-stripping process required limits their application to such a
practical-focused research question (Schumaker and Gortner, 1992). The positivist’s
focus on rigid scientific investigation through control groups, experiments, etc.
would not enable a thorough or contextual understanding of resident autonomy to be
reached. It is believed that post-positivism neglects the “whole” person by studying
parts and it does not make explicit how the views of the stakeholders are drawn into
the research process (Pearson, 1990). According to Rodriguez and Kotarba (2009),
positivists claim that truth can be ascertained by maintaining researcher objectivity
and by controlling confounding variables. However, this approach can devalue the
exploratory and discovery phases required to answer some research questions.
Interpretivism, while capable of articulating, appreciating and making visible the
voices, concerns and practices of research participants, does not take the findings a
step further by adding the objective view (which pragmatists believe is important)
(Gortner, 1993).
Crotty’s (1998) framework suggests that once the theoretical perspective or
paradigm has been established the researcher can then choose the methodology that
best meets its epistemological and ontological beliefs (the researcher has summarised
these approaches in a table format in Appendix 4).
The main research methodologies will now be discussed. Some researchers (e.g.
Creswell, 2003) refer to these as strategies.