Science Behind Positivism How Concepts and Hypotheses Drive Discovery In Nursing Education

The Science Behind Positivism How Concepts and Hypotheses Drive Discovery In Nursing Education. In essence, positivism provides a framework for rigorous and systematic research in nursing and ensures that nursing practice is based on sound scientific evidence and contributes to improved patient outcomes.

The Science Behind Positivism How Concepts and Hypotheses Drive Discovery In Nursing Education

Positivism in nursing, based on the belief that knowledge is derived from observable and measurable evidence, uses concepts and hypotheses to advance knowledge and the advancement of nursing practice. This approach emphasizes the scientific method and focuses on objective data, quantitative analysis, and the development of generalizable findings.

Positivism plays a critical role in nursing education by emphasizing evidence-based practice. Nursing curricula provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills to critically evaluate research findings, understand the scientific basis of nursing interventions, and apply research-based practices in their clinical work. By understanding the principles of positivism, students are better able to interpret research findings, develop sound clinical judgment, and contribute to the advancement of nursing knowledge and practice.

Introduction

Every breakthrough in human knowledge starts with two deceptively simple tools that shape how we understand our world.

Part I: The Language of Understanding – Scientific Concepts

Concepts express generalizations from particulars—anger, achievement, alienation, velocity, intelligence, democracy.

What Are Concepts Really?

Examining these examples more closely, we see that each is a word representing an idea: more accurately, a concept is the relationship between the word (or symbol) and an idea or conception. Whoever we are and whatever we do, we all make use of concepts.

Naturally, some are shared and used by all groups of people within the same culture— child, love, justice, for example; others, however, have a restricted currency and are used only by certain groups, specialists, or members of professions idioglossia, retroactive inhibition, and anticipatory socialization. Concepts enable us to impose some sort of meaning on the world; through them reality is given sense, order and coherence. They are the means by which we are able to come to terms with our experience.

How Concepts Shape What We See

How we perceive the world, then, is highly dependent on the repertoire of concepts we can command. The more we have the more sense data we can pick up and the surer will be our perceptual (and cognitive) grasp of whatever is ‘out there’.

If our perceptions of the world are determined by the concepts available to us, it follows that people with differing sets of concepts will tend to view the ‘same’ objective reality differently—a doctor diagnosing an illness will draw upon a vastly different range of concepts from, say, the restricted and simplistic notions of the layperson in that con text; and a visitor to civilization from a distant primitive culture would be as confused by the frenetic bustle of urban life as would the mythical Martian.

Building Scientific Vocabularies

So, you may ask, where is all this leading? Simply to this: that social scientists have likewise developed, or appropriated by giving precise meaning to, a set of concepts which enable them to shape their perceptions of the world in a particular way, to represent that slice of reality which is their special study. And collectively, these concepts form part of their wider meaning system which permits them to give accounts of that reality, accounts which are rooted and validated in the direct experience of everyday life.

Case Study: Unpacking “Social Class”

These points may be exemplified by the concept of social class. Hughes says that it offers ‘a rule, a grid, even though vague at times, to use in talking about certain sorts of experience that have to do with economic position, life-style, life-chances, and so on. It serves to identify aspects of experience, and by relating the concept to other concepts we are able to construct theories about experience in a particular order or sphere’ (Hughes, 1976:34).

The Two Fundamental Truths About Scientific Concepts

There are two important points to stress when considering scientific concepts. The first is that they do not exist independently of us: they are indeed our inventions enabling us to acquire some understanding at least of the apparent chaos of nature. The second is that they are limited in number and in this way contrast with the infinite number of phenomena they are required to explain.

Part II: The Power of Educated Guessing – Scientific Hypotheses

A second tool of great importance to the scientist is the hypothesis. It is from this that much research proceeds, especially where cause-and effect or concomitant relationships are being investigated.

Beyond Wild Guesses: What Makes a Hypothesis Scientific?

The hypothesis has been defined by Kerlinger (1970) as a conjectural statement of the relations between two or more variables. More simply, it has been termed ‘an educated guess’, though it is unlike an educated guess in that it is often the result of considerable study, reflective thinking and observation.

The Creative Heart of Science

Medawar (1972) writes incomparably of the hypothesis and its function in the following way: All advances of scientific understanding, at every level, begin with a speculative adventure, an imaginative preconception of what might be true—a pre conception which always, and necessarily, goes a little way (sometimes a long way) beyond anything which we have logical or factual authority to believe in. It is the invention of a possible world, or of a tiny fraction of that world.

The conjecture is then ex posed to criticism to find out whether or not that imagined world is anything like the real one. Scientific reasoning is therefore at all levels an interaction between two episodes of thought—a dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical; a dialogue, if you like, between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal, conjecture and criticism, between what might be true and what is in fact the case. (Medawar, 1972).

Criteria for Strong Hypotheses

Kerlinger (1970) has identified two criteria for ‘good’ hypotheses. The first is that hypotheses are statements about the relations between variables; and second, that hypotheses carry clear implications for testing the stated relations.

To these he adds two ancillary criteria: those hypotheses disclose compatibility with current knowledge; and that they are expressed as economically as possible. Thus if we conjecture that social class background determines academic achievement, we have a relationship between one variable, social class, and another, academic achievement. And since both can be measured, the primary criteria specified by Kerlinger can be met. Neither do they violate the ancillary criteria proposed by Kerlinger.

Four Reasons Hypotheses Drive Research Forward

He further identifies four reasons for the importance of hypotheses as tools of research. First, they organize the efforts of researchers. The relationship expressed in the hypothesis indicates what they should do. They enable them to understand the problem with greater clarity and provide them with a framework for collecting, analyzing and interpreting their data. Second, they are, in Kerlinger’s words, the working instruments of theory. They can be deduced from theory or from other hypotheses.

Third, they can be tested, empirically or experimentally, thus resulting in confirmation or rejection. And there is always the possibility that a hypothesis, once confirmed and established, may become a law and fourth, hypotheses are powerful tools for the advancement of knowledge because, as Kerlinger explains, they enable us to get outside ourselves. Hypotheses and concepts play a crucial part in the scientific method and it is to this that we now turn our attention.

Part III: The Scientific Method Demystified

If the most distinctive feature of science is its empirical nature, the next most important characteristic is its set of procedures which show not only how findings have been arrived at, but are sufficiently clear for fellow-scientists to repeat them, i.e. to check them out with the same or other materials and thereby test the results. As Cuff and Payne (1979) say: A scientific approach necessarily involves standards and procedures for demonstrating the “empirical warrant” of its findings, showing the match or fit between its statements and what is happening or has happened in the world’ (Cuff and Payne, 1979:4).

Breaking the Laboratory Stereotype

These standards and procedures we will call for convenience ‘the scientific method’, though this can be somewhat misleading for the following reason: the combination of the definite article, adjective and singular noun conjures up in the minds of some people a single invariant approach to problem-solving, an approach frequently involving atoms or rats, and taking place within the confines of a laboratory peopled with stereotypical scientists wearing white coats and given to eccentric bouts of behavior.

Yet there is much more to it than this. The term in fact cloaks a number of methods which vary in their degree of sophistication depending on their function and the particular stage of development a science has reached. We refer you at this point to which sets out the sequence of stages through which a science normally passes in its development or, perhaps more realistically, that are constantly present in its progress and on which scientists may draw depending on the kind of information they seek or the kind of problem confronting them.

The Four Stages of Scientific Inquiry

Of particular interest to us in our efforts to elucidate the term ‘scientific method’ are stages 2, 3 and 4. Stage 2 is a relatively uncomplicated point at which the re searcher is content to observe and record facts and possibly arrive at some system of classification. Much research in the field of education, especially at classroom and school level, is con ducted in this way, e.g. surveys and case studies.

Stage 3 introduces a note of added sophistication as attempts are made to establish relationships between variables within a loose frame work of inchoate theory. Stage 4 is the most sophisticated stage and often the one that many people equate exclusively with the scientific method. In order to arrive at causality, as distinct from mere measures of association, re searchers here design experimental situations in which variables are manipulated to test their chosen hypotheses.

The Messy Reality of Scientific Progress

Here is how one noted re searcher describes the later stages: First, there is a doubt, a barrier, an indeterminate situation crying out, so to speak, to be made de terminate. The scientist experiences vague doubts, emotional disturbances, and inchoate ideas. He struggles to formulate the problem, even if inadequately. He studies the literature, scans his own experience and the experience of others. Often he simply has to wait for an inventive leap of mind. Maybe it will occur; maybe not.

From Problem to Knowledge: The Research Cycle

With the problem formulated, with the basic question or questions properly asked, the rest is much easier. Then the hypothesis is constructed, after which its implications are deduced, mainly along experimental lines. In this process the original problem, and of course the original hypothesis, may be changed. It may be broadened or narrowed. It may even be abandoned. Lastly, but not finally, the relation ex pressed by the hypothesis is tested by observation and experimentation.

On the basis of the research evidence, the hypothesis is accepted or rejected. This information is then fed back to the original problem and it is kept or altered as dictated by the evidence. Dewey finally pointed out that one phase of the process may be expanded and be of great importance, another may be skimped, and there may be fewer or more steps involved.

These things are not important. What is important is the overall fundamental idea of scientific research as a controlled rational process of reflective inquiry, the interdependent nature of the parts of the process, and the paramount importance of the problem and its statement. (Kerlinger, 1970) With stages 3 and 4 in mind, we may say that the scientific method begins consciously and deliberately by selecting from the total number of elements in a given situation.

Modern Frameworks: The Eight-Stage Model

More recently Hitchcock and Hughes (1995:23) suggest an eight-stage model of the scientific method that echoes Kerlinger. The elements the researchers fasten on to will naturally be suitable for scientific formulation; this means simply that they will possess quantitative aspects. Their principal working tool will be the hypothesis which, as we have seen, is a statement indicating a relationship (or its absence) between two or more of the chosen elements and stated in such a way as to carry clear implications for testing.