Philosophy of the research for a dissertation

The philosophy of the research is discussed here . You should be now wondering what is the relation between a philosophy and your humble dissertation. 

..........I have no choice but to get a little philosophical.......... !

So let us start with the term philosophy...as it always happens what ever work you have not understood, and consistently found in your study materials can be blamed on Greeks ( my Greek friends are very descent!). 

So... Philo= Love and Sophia = Wisdom ( some of my other friends are asking if they love wisdom so much how come they are in economic trouble now???..good question).

To make things a less philosophical , let me introduce this with some real life examples. For example , if you are supporting a specific political party , then you are understood to have a philosophy,following an ideology ( liberalism,socialism,communism so on) . So you developed your philosophy ( this can be economical,political,social,cultural,regional....) first and joins hands with like minded people.  

Therefore when you start your dissertation...research...follow a  particular philosophy . There are mainly 3 to 4 philosophies ...however I  understood only two :( ... but for the purpose of dissertation find the definition of other philosophies and mention it. Let us begin with positivism. you can get tons of material on positivism..still at the end of the day you will be wondering what it is ... at least I did :(.

So all those 'isms' I mentioned are your philosophy and the research approach and methods are the political parties you have selected to full fill your philosophical objectives. 

The theoretical explanation says positivism philosophy is followed by scientific experiments . In a scientific experiments , the scientists believe that they can prove any thing with experiments and if they have gone wrong blame it on the random error or statistics. This philosophy postulate that  the outcomes of the research should be quantifiable or it is not considered to be  a perfect experiment. Hence if your research involves conducting experiments in a controlled environment and data have a quantitative nature you are a 'positivist'..... GREAT!!!!

Just like you and me there are many people who do not believe that the truth cannot be squeezed out of a research conducted in a controlled environment especially for attributes with qualitative characteristics.  So when you are planning to conduct the experiment in a social setting , the outcomes are not always quantifiable and is explained with qualitative data analysis. So these sensible researchers are usually considered interpretivist. 

Hence the positivist have an objective approach and the interpretivist have a subjective approach ....

The inconsistencies of  a social science research are more visible if a positivism is applied ...such as trying to measure the loyalty of employees through a questionnaire and rewarding for best answers. The attribute like loyalty needs analysis from different dimension with subjective analysis... So a manager will show better accuracy in identifying more loyal employees than a positivist researcher.  

There are other philosophies and I am trying to summarise them with subjective and objective characterisations. 

Objective.                                         

1. Positivism
2. Realism.
3. Determinism.
4. Nomothetic.

Subjective.

1. Interpretivism.
2. Nominalism.
3. voluntarism.
4. Ideographic.

This list is not optimised and frankly for the purpose of dissertation I recommend only positivism , interpretivism and realism ( it is actually a mix of positivism and interpretivism) to be on the safer side. 

    Happy philosophical thinking .........!