Constructivism

Some very short words about constructivism

My stance

Having read about positivism and constructivism in a sociological context, I have become convinced that my attitude can be best described as constructivism. Positivism appears to be too rigid and too deterministic for sociological inquiries. My main critique with positivism is, it assumes experiment design and repeatability. While some social experiments do work and are repeatable, such as the well known experiment of a “sick” person collapsing on the street and analyzing the response of public, there are many more experiments that depend on many factors.

A good high level introduction, lacking a lot of details, can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology - despite its numeruous flaws and gaps. At least the article doesn’t contain any obvious mistakes, just a lot of shortcuts and gaps.

Noteworthy, there’s a data leak that points to how positivism might evolve in the future. The electorate data leakage of 2016, more details at https://www.upguard.com/breaches/the-rnc-files, is a good example of how far positivism could be pushed. This analysis did a large scale text analysis on reddit, ran it through categorizing algorithms and created some scores about voter likelihoods. While the analysis could be described as interpretavist, the repeatable nature of their analysis, they applied a similar model in former elections, could be described as positivistic. Maybe BigData will push the boundaries of positivism even further into psychology and sociology?

Social Constructivism

I really like the Wikipedia article on Social Construcivism, its section on academic writing highlights some of the fundamental issues I have with positivism. In summary, all knowledge is constructed through the interaction with social forces, such as culture, habbits, discussion, et cetera. By following or willingly not following establishment - citing, referencing, reading into, et cetera- one constructs a certain an image of reality. And here’s where my difficulty starts with positivism. I think research needs to understand and recognize that all knowledge is somehow constructed and that a researcher can never fully distance him or herself from the subject under investigation.

Key terms in phenomenology

Here’s a list of key words, for which I still need to write a brief description, see Moustakas (1994) for details.