Nature of Reality
Realism, which arises from naturalism, has dominated much of scientific research. It proposes that the social world external to individual cognition is a real world made up of hard, tangible and relatively immutable structures. This was a key aspect of a naturalism which involved the 'disenchantment of the world', a process which moved away from the rich appearance of phenomena to regard the world objectively as consisting of inherently meaningless objects which are in causal interaction with one another.
The social world thus for the realist exists independently of an individual’s appreciation of it and the social world has an existence which is as hard and concrete as the natural world. Contrarily, nominalism assumes that the social world external to individual cognition is made of nothing more than names, concepts and labels which are used to structure reality.
Participatory research adopts the nominalist approach and further goes on to suggest that the social world inhabited by people is rather context bound, relational and situated. Participatory research argues that social reality is historically constructed, recognizing that specific interests drive current social practices. Thus social reality is viewed as being constructed through social perceptions making it subjective.
Subsequently, historical and reflective methods are preferred in participatory research as they uncover that social practices are neither natural nor inevitable, that is; society is a human construction to be critiqued and changed on the basis of more-inclusive interests.
While this post is by no means a complete summary of the ontology of participatory research, it is a starting point for those who wish to learn the basics. In the next post, I will be discussing the epistemology of the participatory research approach.
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