Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

2. Core Ideas and the Framework
27
evaluate policies and institutions, such as welfare state design in
affluent societies, or poverty reduction strategies by governments and
non-governmental organisations in developing countries.
What does it mean, exactly, if we say that something is a normative
analysis? Unfortunately, social scientists and philosophers use these
terms slightly differently. My estimate is that, given their numerical
dominance, the terminology that social scientists use is dominant
within the capability literature. Yet the terminology of philosophers is
more refined and hence I will start by explaining the philosophers’ use
of those terms, and then lay out how social scientists use them.
What might a rough typology of research in this area look like?
By drawing on some discussions on methods in ethics and political
philosophy (O. O’Neill 2009; List and Valentini 2016), I would like
to propose the following typology for use within the capability
literature. There are (at least) five types of research that are relevant
for the capability approach. The first type of scholarship is conceptual
research, which conducts conceptual analysis — the investigation of
how we should use and understand certain concepts such as ‘freedom’,
‘democracy’, ‘wellbeing’, and so forth. An example of such conceptual
analysis is provided in section 3.3, where I offer a (relatively simple)
conceptual analysis of the question of what kind of freedoms (if any)
capabilities could be. The second strand of research is descriptive. Here,
research and analyses provide us with an empirical understanding
of a phenomenon by describing it. This could be done with different
methods, from the thick descriptions provided by ethnographic methods
to the quantitative methods that are widely used in mainstream social
sciences. The third type of research is explanatory analysis. This research
provides an explanation of a phenomenon — what the mechanisms are
that cause a phenomenon, or what the determinants of a phenomenon
are. For example, the social determinants of health: the parameters
or factors that determine the distribution of health outcomes over
the population. A fourth type of research is evaluative, and consists of
analyses in which values are used to evaluate a state of affairs. A claim is
evaluative if it relies on evaluative terms, such as good or bad, better or
worse, or desirable or undesirable. Finally, an analysis is normative if it is