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Paradigm

A paradigm is a set of assumptions and perceptual orientations shared by members of a research community. Paradigms determine how members of research communities view both the phenomena their particular community studies and the research methods that should be employed to study those phenomena.

The paradigm construct was initially developed to make sense of phenomena in the physical sciences. During the last quarter of the 20th century, however, social scientists appropriated the construct to account for the growing interest in and acceptance of qualitative research methods in a number of social science fields that previously had defined research in quantitative (and often in experimental-design) terms. More recently the meaning of the term has expanded, and the term has become part of popular culture. This entry reviews the history and evolution of the paradigm construct and concludes with a look at the concept of research purposes as an alternative.

Paradigms in the Physical Sciences

The paradigm construct was initially developed and popularized by physical science historian Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn employed the construct to make sense of a phenomenon that he and other historians had noticed when they studied the process of conceptual change within the physical sciences: Fundamental changes in thinking within a scientific discipline—the shift from Newton's to Einstein's version of physics, for instance—did not occur incrementally and were not merely modifications that resulted from what Kuhn called normal science, that is, day-to-day scientific experimentation and other procedures associated with what traditionally has been called the scientific method. Rather, they reflected radical shifts in perspective—or, in Kuhn's words, paradigm revolutions—that were triggered by problems that could not be resolved either by the field's standard operating research procedures or by its established ways of thinking.

Kuhn compared paradigm revolutions to the holistic shifts in perspective demonstrated by gestalt psychologists when they used pictures that people could see in two quite different ways, for example, as a bird and an antelope. Kuhn quickly added a caveat to this comparison, however: Although most people can learn to shift their points of view and see the gestalt psychologists' picture in one way at one moment and in the next moment, as something quite different (they can learn to see both a bird and an antelope in the picture alluded to above, for example, though of course not simultaneously), scientists who have been socialized to accept a particular paradigmatic perspective assume that what they see is reality rather than merely a perspective of reality. Consequently, according to Kuhn, when a new paradigm becomes accepted by members of a scientific community, that community will have rejected older ways of thinking and doing research and embraced new research methods, fundamentally different perceptions of the physical phenomena that members of the field studied, and radically different views of the field itself.

Kuhn's Construct in the Social Sciences

In the1970s, qualitative research methods began gaining a foothold in certain social science fields that previously had defined research almost exclusively in quantitative terms. For some 20th-century qualitative researchers such as Matthew Miles and Michael Huberman, the growing acceptance of qualitative methods represented nothing more than the addition of new and somewhat unique research techniques to social scientists' methodological arsenal. For others such as Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln, however, the growing acceptance of qualitative procedures signaled a revolution that was more-or-less equivalent to the paradigm revolutions Kuhn had discussed in a physical science context.

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