The Naturalistic Approaches in Nursing Educational Research Beyond Positivism. Ethogeny is a methodological approach in the social sciences that examines how individuals create meaning and identity through their actions and link these meanings to social norms and cultural resources.
What Is Naturalistic Approaches in Nursing Educational Research Beyond Positivism
It emphasizes understanding social behavior from the perspective of the actors themselves, rather than relying exclusively on predetermined external categories. Ethogeny focuses on how individuals make sense of their actions and attribute meaning to them within a social context.
Introduction
It examines the explicit and implicit norms that govern behavior in social situations and how these norms are understood and followed by individuals. Ethogeny explores how individuals construct their identities through their interactions and use of social norms and cultural resources. It focuses on examining small-scale social interactions and the immediate social context in which the behavior occurs.
Rethinking Research Paradigms in Nursing Education
Ethogeny generally takes an “emic” approach and attempts to understand behavior from the perspective of the actors involved, rather than imposing an external framework defined by the researcher. Ethogeny emphasizes the active role of individuals in shaping their behavior, in contrast to more deterministic approaches that view behavior as driven solely by external forces. It emphasizes understanding the meaning individuals attribute to their actions, rather than focusing exclusively on observable behaviors. Ethogeny often uses methods such as conversation analysis and verbal reports to understand how individuals describe and interpret their own actions.
What Are Naturalistic Approaches
Although the opponents of positivism within social science itself subscribe to a variety of schools of thought each with its own subtly different epistemological viewpoint.
Defining Anti-Positivist Research Methods
They are united by their common rejection of the belief that human behavior is governed by general, universal laws and characterized by underlying regularities.
Core Principles of Naturalistic Research
Moreover, they would agree that the social world can only be understood from the standpoint of the individuals who are part of the ongoing action being investigated; and that their model of a person is an autonomous one, not the plastic version favored by positivist researchers.
Rise of Humanistic Psychology
In rejecting the viewpoint of the detached, objective observer—a mandatory feature of traditional research—anti-positivists would argue that individuals’ behavior can only be understood by the researcher sharing their frame of reference: understanding of individuals’ interpretations of the world around them has to come from the inside, not the outside. Social science is thus seen as a subjective rather than an objective undertaking, as a means of dealing with the direct experience of people in specific contexts.
The following extract nicely captures the spirit in which the anti-positivist social scientist would work: The purpose of social science is to understand social reality as different people see it and to demonstrate how their views shape the action which they take within that reality. Since the social sciences cannot penetrate to what lies behind social reality, they must work directly with man’s definitions of reality and with the rules he devises for coping with it. While the social sciences do not reveal ultimate truth, they do help us to make sense of our world. What the social sciences offer is explanation, clarification and demystification of the social forms which man has created around himself. (Beck, 1979)
The anti-positivist movement has so influenced those constituent areas of social science of most concern to us, namely, psychology, social psychology and sociology, that in each case a movement reflecting its mood has developed collaterally with mainstream trends. Whether this development is seen in competitive or complementary terms depends to some extent on one’s personal viewpoint. It cannot be denied, however, that in some quarters proponents of the contrasting viewpoints have been prepared to lock horns on some of the more contentious issues.
Understanding the Whole Person Approach
In the case of psychology, for instance, a school of humanistic psychology has emerged alongside the co-existing behavioristic and psychoanalytic schools. Arising as a response to the challenge to combat the growing feelings of dehumanization which characterize much of the current social and cultural milieu, it sets out to study and understand the person as a whole (Buhler and Allen, 1972). Humanistic psychologists present a model of people that is positive, active and purposive, and at the same time stresses their own involvement with the life experience itself.
They do not stand apart, introspective, hypothesizing. Their interest is directed at the intentional and creative aspects of the human being. The perspective adopted by humanistic psychologists is naturally reflected in their methodology. They are dedicated to studying the individual in preference to the group, and consequently prefer idiographic approaches to nomothetic ones.
Implications for Nursing Pedagogy
The implications of the movement’s philosophy for the education of the human being have been drawn by Carl Rogers.
Anthropomorphic Models in Healthcare Research
Comparable developments within social psychology may be perceived in the ‘science of persons’ movement. Its proponents contend that because of our self-awareness and powers of language, we must be seen as systems of a different order of complexity from any other existing system whether natural, like an animal, or artificial, a computer, for instance.
Because of this, no other system is capable of pro viding a sufficiently powerful model to advance our understanding of ourselves. It is argued, therefore, that we must use ourselves as a key to our understanding of others and conversely, our understanding of others as a way of finding out about ourselves. What is called for is an anthropomorphic model of people.
The Science of Persons
Since anthropomorphism means, literally, the attribution of human form and personality, the implied criticism is that social psychology as traditionally conceived has singularly failed, so far, to model people as they really are. As one wry commentator has pleaded, ‘For scientific purposes, treat people as if they were human beings’ (Harré and Secord, 1972).
This approach would entail working from a model of humans that takes account of the following uniquely human attributes: We are entities who are capable of monitoring our own performance. Further, because we are aware of this self-monitoring and have the power of speech, we are able to provide commentaries on those performances and to plan ahead of them as well. Such entities it is held, are much inclined to using rules, to devising plans, to developing strategies in getting things done the way they want them doing. (Harré and Secord, 1972) Social psychology’s task is to understand people in the light of this anthropomorphic model.
But what specifically would this involve? Proponents of this ‘science of persons’ approach place great store on the systematic and pains taking analysis of social episodes, i.e. behaviour in context. In Box 1.7 we give an example of such an episode taken from a classroom study. Note how the particular incident would appear on an interaction analysis coding sheet of a re searcher employing a positivistic approach. Note, too, how this slice of classroom life can only be understood by knowledge of the specific organizational background and context in which it is embedded.
Ethogenics Method in Nursing Research
The approach to analyzing social episodes in terms of the ‘actors’ themselves is known as the ‘ethogenics method’.9 Unlike positivistic social psychology which ignores or presumes its subjects’ interpretations of situations, ethogenics social psychology concentrates upon the ways in which per sons construe their social world. By probing their own accounts of their actions, it endeavors to come up with an understanding of what those persons were doing in the particular episode.
Key Features
As an alternative to positivist approaches, naturalistic, qualitative, interpretive approaches of various hue possess particular distinguishing features:
Fundamental Characteristics
Intentional and Creative Action
- people are deliberate and creative in their actions, they act intentionally and make meanings in and through their activities (Blumer, 1969);
Intentional and Creative Action
- people actively construct their social world— they are not the ‘cultural dopes or passive dolls of positivism (Becker, 1970; Garfinkel, 1967);
Dynamic and Contextual Situations
- situations are fluid and changing rather than fixed and static; events and behavior evolve over time and are richly affected by context—they are ‘situated activities’;
Unique and Non-Generalizable Events
- events and individuals are unique and largely non-generalizable;
Natural State Investigation
- a view that the social world should be studied in its natural state, without the intervention of, or manipulation by, the re searcher (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983);
- fidelity to the phenomena being studied is fundamental;
- people interpret events, contexts and situations, and act on the bases of those events (echoing Thomas’s (1928) famous dictum that if people define their situations as real then they are real in their consequences—if I believe there is a mouse under the table, I will act as though there is a mouse under the table, whether there is or not (Morrison, 1998));
Multiple Interpretations
- there are multiple interpretations of, and perspectives on, single events and situations;
- reality is multi-layered and complex;
- many events are not reducible to simplistic interpretation, hence ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) are essential rather than reductionism;
- we need to examine situations through the eyes of participants rather than the re searcher.
Understanding Paradigms
The anti-positivist movement in sociology is represented by three schools of thought—phenomenology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. A common thread running through the three schools is a concern with phenomena, that is, the things we directly apprehend through our senses as we go about our daily lives, together with a consequent emphasis on qualitative as opposed to quantitative methodology.
The differences between them and the significant roles each phenomenon plays in research in classrooms and schools are such as to warrant a more extended consideration of them in the discussion below (p. 23) A question of terminology: the normative and interpretive paradigms.
We so far have introduced and used a variety of terms to describe the numerous branches and schools of thought embraced by the positivist and anti-positivist viewpoints. We clarify at this point two generic terms conventionally used to describe these two perspectives and the categories subsumed under each, particularly as they refer to social psychology and sociology. The terms in question are ‘normative’ and ‘interpretive’.
The Normative Paradigm in Nursing Research
The normative paradigm (or model) contains two major orienting ideas (Douglas, 1973): first, that human behavior is essentially rule governed; and second, that it should be investigated by the methods of natural science.
Interpretive Paradigm in Nursing Education
The interpretive paradigm, in contrast to its normative counterpart, is characterized by a concern for the individual. Whereas normative studies are positivist, all theories constructed within the context of the interpretive paradigm tend to be anti-positivist.
As we have seen, the central endeavor in the context of the interpretive paradigm is to understand the subjective world of human experience. To retain the integrity of the phenomena being investigated, efforts are made to get inside the person and to understand from within. The imposition of external form and structure is resisted, since this reflects the view point of the observer as opposed to that of the actor directly involved.
Behavior vs. Action
Understanding the Distinction
Two further differences between the two paradigms may be identified at this stage: the first concerns the concepts of ‘behavior’ and ‘action’; the second, the different conceptions of ‘theory’. A key concept within the normative paradigm.
Behavior (Normative Paradigm)
Behavior refers to responses either to external environmental stimuli (another per son, or the demands of society, for instance) or to internal stimuli (hunger, or the need to achieve, for example).
Action (Interpretive Paradigm)
In either case, the cause of the behavior lies in the past. Interpretive approaches, on the other hand, focus on action. This may be thought of as behavior-with-meaning; it is intentional behavior and as such, future oriented. Actions are only meaningful to us in so far as we are able to ascertain the intentions of actors to share their experiences. A large number of our everyday interactions with one another rely on such shared experiences.
Theory Development
As regards theory, normative researchers try to devise general theories of human behavior and to validate them through the use of increasingly complex research methodologies which, some believe, push them further and further from the experience and understanding of the everyday world and into a world of abstraction. For them, the basic reality is the collectivity; it is external to the actor and manifest in society, its institutions and its organizations.
Practical Applications
The role of theory is to say how reality hangs together in these forms or how it might be changed so as to be more effective. The researcher’s ultimate aim is to establish a comprehensive ‘rational edifice’, a universal theory, to account for human and social behavior. But what of the interpretive researchers? They begin with individuals and set out to understand their interpretations of the world around them. Theory is emergent and must arise from particular situations; it should be ‘grounded’ on data generated by the research act (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).
Challenges and Considerations
Theory should not precede research but follow it. Investigators work directly with experience and understanding to build their theory on them. The data thus yielded will be glossed with the meanings and purposes of those people who are their source. Further, the theory so generated must make sense to those to whom it applies.
The aim of scientific investigation for the interpretive researcher is to understand how this glossing of reality goes on at one time and in one place and compare it with what goes on in different times and places. Thus theory becomes sets of meanings which yield insight and understanding of people’s behavior. These theories are likely to be as diverse as the sets of human meanings and understandings that they are to explain.
Conclusion
From an interpretive perspective the hope of a universal theory which characterizes the normative outlook gives way to multifaceted images of human behavior as varied as the situations and contexts supporting them.
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