I have ot teach reseacr planning this year and Ive adopted a
simple schema from Crotty:
1. pistemology .........2. theretical perspective .......
3. methodology .......4. methods
he cites two common schmes:
1. objectivism ...2. positivism ... 3. survey methodology/design
...4. statistical methods
and
1. Constructivism/ionism ... 2. Symbolic interactionism
3. ethnography ... 4. participant observation
(and one can have plenty of fun imagining different combinations up
and down the schema: " are any combinations of 'ism', methodology and
method 'illegitimate'? in some sense?"
The distinction here between methodology an d methods is like
yours/someones below i think: the methodology is the general design
approach, and the methods are like tools from a kit that get shaped,
ordered and so on by the methodology.
Id like to know what anyone thinks of this scheme?
Julian
Influenced, I guess, by various European traditions, especially the Russians,
I have come to distinguish sharply between the terms method and methodology.
My way of thinking about this seems similar to Ricardo and Alena's. At one
point Alena wrote:
Then the methodology
would account both for the intimate connection between method and its
assumptions as well as for the connection of a given method to other
methods via those same assumptions.
I think my phrasing is more or less synonymous. I think of methodology
as the ensemble of methods that mediate between theory and data to support
conclusions relevant to the phenomenon under investigation. This requires
that one think about the (hopefully!) principled relations between methods
as well as their multiple relations to data generated on the one hand
and theoretical assumptions on the other.
For example, as sketched in *Cultural Psychology*, I am interested in
the dynamic relations between microgenesis, ontogenesis, and cultural-historical
(perhaps activity system?) genesis. Methods used to gather data on these
different scales are not identical but (again hopefully) are principly
related to each other. I never find my achievements adequate to my hopes, but
that seems to be part of the territory, requiring me to keep re-searching.
mike
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