Week 8: "Isms" in information science: constructivism, collectivism and constructionism

Talja, S., Tuominen, K. and Savolainen, R. (2004)

Constructivism, collectivism and constructionism differ in their views of knowledge and language.

• Constructionism takes discursive practices as its research object and perceives the production of knowledge in discourses as the primary context for information behaviour and knowledge organisation.

• Collectivism takes professions and knowledge domains as its research object and sees the information and communication practices of professions and domains as the promary context for information behaviour and knowledge organisation.

• Cognitive Constructivism takes individual searchers and their interaction with information retrieval systems as its research object and takes the view that work tasks provide the primary context for information behaviour.

Constructivism: a view in which an individual mind constructs reality but within a systematic relationship to the external world (Gergen, 1999) e.g. Piaget.

Social Constructivism: while the mind constructs reality in its relationship to the world, this mental process is significantly informed by influences from societal conventions, history and interaction with significant others (Gergen, 1999: 60). e.g. Vygotsky and later works of Bruner.

Cognitive Constructivism: sees knowledge production as the creation of mental models. HUmans cannot be 'given' information which they can immediately understand, instead they must 'constructu' their own knowledge. An information user is not a passive information processing system but actively makes sense of the surrounding reality and attaches personal meanings to information.

Social Constructionism: the primary emphasis is on discourse as the vehicle through which the self and the world are articulated. (Gergen, 1999: 60) e.g. Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Foucault. Constructionism sees language as constitutive for the construction of selves and the formation of meanings. Constructionism speaks of discourses, articulations and vocabularies, and replaces the concept of cognition with conversations. We produce and organise social reality together by using language. The main assumption of constructionism is that the boundaries of social knowledge are set by discourses that categorise the world and bring phenomena into view.

Collectivism: the core assumption of collectivism is that it is a mistake to psychologise issues like relevance and user needs as users are social and cultural beings. Collectivist approaches emphasise that information processes should be seen as embedded in social, organisational and professional contexts. hey shift attention from individual knowledge structures to "knowledge-producing, knowledge-sharing and knowledge-consuming communities" (Jacob & Shaw, 1998: 142).

Activity theory: suggest that an individual lives within a world that is at once physically, socially and subjectively constructed, and that living and actin in this world constitutes knowledge (Jacob & Shaw, 1998: 142).

Table 1: Major features, influences and representatives of cognitive constructivism, collectivism & constructionism

Taylor (1986: 35) stated that it is predominantly "organisation that provides the context and establishes the tasks and responsibilities form which problems, and hence, information needs, are generated". He argued that different professions are socialised into their own world views, i.e. CEOs define and solve problems in the same way in Miami and Helsinki, and that the information behaviour of teachers is similar in Pretoria and Portland (Taylor, 1991: 227). According to Taylor professions are the builders of their specific information universes.

"Knowledge is formed through a dialectical relationship between a community and its members... mediated by language and influenced by the history of the specific [domain]" (Hjorland and Albrechtsen, 1995: 407).

Table 2: Major fields of application of cognitive constructivism, collectivism and constructionism in Information Systems:

Week 4: The issue of quality in qualitative reserach

Hammersley (2007) The issue of quality in qualitative research. 

Available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17437270701614782

Focus: Examines whether criteria are necessary and considers whether a single set of criteria is achievable.


Problems with qualitative research:

• Criticised for not servin evidence-based practice well
• Argument that there is no clearly defined set of quality criteria available for judging it, ' so that it is of uncertain quality'

This assumes that:

• There are already clearly defined criteria of quality for quantitative research
• That explicit assessment criteria are needed

Problem faced by lay users e.g. policymakers and practitioners):

• how to assess research findings in the terms in which they present themselves
• how to relate these findings to what they already know and how they normally judge validity

Importance of trust - researchers largely have to trust that other researchers have carried out their work efficiently, presented their findings honestly, that normal processes of criticism with in the research community have reduced the danger of error etc. There is no mechanism that can check independently that the knowledge they produce is sound, or even that they have pursued this knowledge in the most effective way possible. Dilemma: the whole point of research is that it may produce un-commonsensical conclusions, therefore findings must not be dismissed because they are counter-intuitive. It is not possible for researchers to make their judgements transparent, in the sense of fully intelligible to anyone, irrespective of background knowledge and experience. Indeed, there are limits to the extent to which these judgements can be made intelligible even to fellow researchers, because of the situated nature of judgement.

Paradigms

Different 'paradigms' of qualitative research (Thomas Kuhn) - i.e. qualitative research is divided by divergent theoretical, methodological and value assumptions about the nature of the phenomena being investigated and about how they can and should be researched. The differences between qualitative researchers stem from the reality that each comes from their own unique situated practice and each employs a different approach to examining the process of research. Hammersley therefore believes that 'paradigm conflict' arises from a difference in practices rather than just a 'clash of ideas'.

Max Weber (& Neo-Kantianism) believed that social scientists strive to understand 'social phenomena in their socio-historical contexts' rather than attempting to establish 'universal laws' as is the case with natural science. This is an important difference as it means that social scientists will always draw on different sets of values and assumptions about the factual nature of the social phenomena, which will inevitably bring about divisions within educational research.

Scientific method and rigour

Historical clash of opinion between researchers who believed that physics / Botany etc. provided the exemplar for scientific method and those who believed that the study of social phenomena required a very different approach. Some researchers believed that understanding social phenomena could only be achieved 'from within' in order for the researcher to fully understand the meanings and cultural references of those people being studied. This led not to a wholesale rejection of scientific method but rather to a conception of science that was better suited to studying social phenomena.

Discourse analysts vs ethnographers

It is often the belief of Discourse Analysts that readers must be presented with the data to enable them to form their own opinions as to the validity of the data. Some also state that what is inferred must not go beyond what can be 'observed' in the collected data. This differs from the argument made by many ethnographers that it is not possible to make all the data available to readers, and that the accuracy and relevance of their observations is wholly dependent upon their successful observation and interpretation of the culture of the people being studied.

Realism vs constructionism

Constructionists believe that social phenomena

• 'do not exist independently of people's understandings of them, that those understandings play a crucial generative role'
• 'are culturally constituted and can only be understood by describing the processes by which they are culturally constituted as the things they are'

This means that the social phenomena, their causes and effects are no longer the focus of investigation. Rather it is the processes by which they are identified and in effect created through identification by culture members' that becomes the goal of enquiry.

Conclusions

• There is a need to try and reduce the significant differences in perspective of approaches to social science research in order to try and establish guidelines for what is and is not good quality work.
• The plurality of methodological approaches and respective criteria for what constitutes 'quality' should not simply be accepted unquestioningly.