About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about some key philosophical perspectives taken when engaging in social research, focusing in particular on: (i) a key issue with undertaking social research, which is that the researcher themselves plays a part in the society they are attempting to capture; (ii) two fundamental philosophical questions being what is real, and how do we know what is real; (iii) how the concepts of ontology and epistemology are captured in these fundamental questions; (iv) Auguste Comte’s epistemological claim of positivism, which posits that the social world can and should be studied in a scientific manner, akin to the laws of physics; (v) objectivism as the ontological equivalent of positivism and its three key elements; (vi) the second ontological claim being social constructionism, which states that the world is brought into being real through the cultural and social meanings that people ascribe to it; (vii) the epistemological comparison to social constructionism being relativism, which states that knowledge is contextualised in the culture and beliefs of the time; (viii) interpretivism, an epistemological claim which states that what we know to be real is based on our individual interpretations of the world; (ix) the ontological equivalent of interpretivism being subjectivism, which states that an individual’s view of the world is a product of their understanding of what they see to be true.

About the lecturer

Dr Nathan Kerrigan is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. Dr Kerrigan’s research interests include community studies, the sociology of space, and informal social control. Some of Dr Kerrigan’s recent publications include ‘Who cares for the carer? Exploring the role of advocacy in supporting young people’ (2018) and ‘The Master Gardener Programme working with urban communities: Garden Organic’s London Food Poverty Project’ (2019).