Experimental Research Paradigms

A research paradigm is the set of common beliefs and agreements shared between scientists about how problems should be understood and addressed. Describing something as a research paradigm means that it is an established model, accepted by a substantial number of people in a research community. Each academic discipline may have its own research paradigms. Research paradigms can be characterized through some features like their ontology and methodology. These items and different research paradigms will be discussed in this paper. Approaches could refer to designs, methods of data collection or analysis. In time, a research approach could become paradigmatic for a discipline. Thus, experimental method is a well-established paradigm in many natural sciences, but it took centuries for this to become the case. This paper focuses on main and common research paradigms and some of its assumptions and framework will be critically discussed.

Keywords:

Anti-positivism , Positivism , Qualitative and Quantitative Methods , Research paradigms