What a nice surprise Robson is. Clearly positioning himself as a realist in the Preface to The Second Edition, he makes no bones about his belief that the Positivist approach has failed and that the Social Constructionists are a little too loosey-goosey. Realism, at least as I understand it, appears to offer the best approach to producing research that can be used in practice, something that is hugely important to me at this stage of my development. The Realist explanation, which emphasizes "mechanism" within a context, is much more viable for explaining phenomenon that occurs in the real world than the Positivist constant conjunction approach.
Robson's "boxes" are nice little cheat sheets that should be useful for when I embark on my own real world research. In Chapter 3's "Developing Your Ideas" he gives some very good examples of how to create successful research. In Box 3.4 (page 56) he provides hints for both "successful" and "unsuccessful" research which is quite useful. "Successful" item 5 "real world value" and "unsuccessful" item 3 "motivation by publication, money or funding" resonated especially with me.
The discussion of the "paradigm wars" on page 43 was reinforcement that some of the truculence between Positivists and Interpretivists that I have been sensing whilst reading extracurricular research is not my imagination. It is a little shocking for a freshman like myself to realize that these two camps don't like each other very much. However, if I ever do get those three letters behind my name, I'll probably take just as impassioned a position as the current incumbents ;-)
The first three chapters in Robson have helped my understanding of the vast number of philosophy of science approaches, but I'm still somewhat unsure of what hermeneutics is all about. I will say that these terms pop up in the IS literature consistently that I have read, so it is important to understand their meaning.
Comments
Erik,
I like Robson's "boxes" also because those always provide useful and interesting tips.
Erik,
You and I often see things from a similar perspective and this is another case of that. I find myself wondering why the theory books we read complicate matters so much when the same ideas can be laid out as eloquently as Robson has done. I think it may come back to the audience and the author attempting to write to his audience as we learned very early in the course. I think the other two authors were writing to theory specialists (or at least those new to the concepts but in the field) Robson seems to take a more practicioner approach breaking things down and explaining in a way that both future researchers and practicioners can understand and gain value from.
The paradigm wars also surprised me. I am wondering whether the wars are over yet just like the discussion about feminism is already over.
I think that that "paradigm wars" have pervaded the social sciences for over a century, so I doubt that they will abate any time soon. To me, the biggest worry with the "flexible" design, as with most subjectivist, not exactly but maybe kinda replicable, research is the potential for the researcher to let the data lead him right to where he always wanted to be in the first place. This is what "Science" is supposed to guard against.
But, what else can you do, when strict quantifiability and serious laboratory experiments are just not feasible?