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The Three Major Strengths And Characteristics Of Research Paradigms

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This literature review will be covering the topic on research paradigms. There are three major paradigms in the research paradigms which are the positivist paradigm research, interpretivist paradigm research and critical paradigm research. Each research paradigm has its own strengths and effectiveness due to their unique features which are specific to their particular approach as well as weaknesses. All researchers have their own beliefs and methods while conducting a research. Therefore, the ways of research studies conducted are vary. However, there is a standard principle called paradigm that will act as a guidance to researchers’ actions and beliefs. Paradigm is a concept developed by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 whereby it is a basic orientation …show more content…

Positivist paradigm was developed by Auguste Comte who believes that it is possible to observe social life and establish a reliable yet valid knowledge about how it works (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2013). Positivist paradigm research refers to philosophical positions that emphasizes on empirical data, statistical analysis and scientific methods. This research is also called the scientific paradigm or better known as quantitative research. Some examples of positivist paradigm research methods are such as surveys and questionnaires. The purpose of this paradigm research is mainly to determine whether a hypothesis can be accepted or not. Additionally, Hughes (2001a) described positivist paradigm as a way of seeing the world that frames a research topic and influences the way we think about the topic. This means that by observation and experiment, everything that happens around us can be explained by using the knowledge of universal laws. For example, the story of Sir Issac Newton and the apple. The apple that fall from the tree which coincidently hit Issac Newton’s head had made him began to wonder about the gravity force of Earth and thus the theory of gravity was developed (Mukherji and Albon, 2009). From this example, the observed incident was the falling apple while the underlying universal law was the gravity (Keesing,

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