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Volume 19, Issue 1
March 2012
Pages 7182

Authors

Justin Cruickshank

College of Birmingham POLSIS, Edgbaston, Birmingham, West Midlands, United kingdom

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Justin Cruickshank, College of Birmingham POLSIS, Edgbaston, Birmingham, West Midlands B15 2TT, United kingdom.
E-mail: j.cruickshank@bham.ac.united kingdom

Abstract

CRUICKSHANK J. Nursing Inquiry 2012 19. 7182
Positioning positivism, critical realism and social constructionism within the health sciences: a philosophical orientation

This short article starts by thinking about the variations inside the positivist tradition after which it progresses to check two most prominent schools of postpositivism, namely critical realism and social constructionism. Critical realists hold, with positivism, that understanding ought to be positively applied, but reject the positivist method for doing it, quarrelling that causal explanations need to be based this is not on empirical regularities but on references to unobservable structures. Social constructionists have a different method of postpositivism and endorse a relativist rejection of truth and hold the task of scientific studies are to promote a scepticism that undermines any positive truth claim made. It’s contended that social constructionism is really a contradictory position.