Studying water: Reflections on the problems and possibilities of interdisciplinary working

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 213-220

  Connelly, Steve ^a   Anderson, Clive ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMON CRITERIA; CRITICAL REALISMS; HUMAN INTERVENTION; INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAMS; SOCIAL SCIENTISTS; WATER CATCHMENT;

CATCHMENTS;

PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS;

EID: 35448964276     PISSN: 03080188     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/030801807X183669     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Water environment and society: what happens when you change the scale?', www.shef.ac.uk/environmentdivision/wes.
2. W. Outhwaite: New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, 1987, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
3. These positions will be elaborated on to some extent in the following discussion. Inevitably, however, no justice can be done here to their full richness and complexity, and the discussion is necessarily heavily oversimplified. The critiques have developed in a myriad ways within broad 'interpretivis' and 'realist' 'camps', which share little more than their antipathy towards some or all of the tenets of positivism and are themselves internally very heterogeneous. Even for the positivist paradigm there are no definitive canons establishing distinctive tenets to which adherents 'sign up', and the literature describing, differentiating and defending the paradigms is vast. Yet in the WES seminars the basic distinctions became manifest very quickly, in discussions between, for example, planners and biologists over the nature of truth and knowledge.
4. C. Prell et al.: 'If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail: 'traditional' versus participatory model building', Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2007, 32, 263-282.
5. H. Cramer: Mathematical Methods of Statistics; 1946, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
6. That is the linked ontological and epistemological assumptions which - together with related approaches to methodology - constitute the philosophical basis of a scientific paradigm.
7. P. Sabatier, W. Focht, M. Lubell, Z. Trachtenberg, A. Vedlitz and M. Matlock (ed.): Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management; 2005, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
8. M. Hajer and H. Wagenaar: 'Introduction', in Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, (ed. M. Hajer and H. Wagenaar), 1-32; 2003, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. S. Kvale: 'The social construction of validity', Qualitative Inquiry, 1995, 1, 19-40.
10. Developments in the probabilistic modelling of qualitative observations (see A. E. Raftery: 'Statistics in sociology, 1950-2000', Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2000, 95, 654-661) may offer richer possibilities in future.
11. Consider, for example, whether patient waiting times for hospital treatment 'actually' measure the quality of patient care: this question is one of construct validity.
12. For a thorough exposition of positivist validity criteria, see for example T. R. Black: Doing Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences: An Integrated Approach to Research Design, Measurement and Statistics; 1999, London, Sage.
13. S. Kvale: 'The social construction of validity' (see Note 9).
14. J. Mason: Qualitative Researching; 2002, London, Sage.
15. I. Hodder: 'The interpretation of documents and material culture', in Handbook of Qualitative Research, (ed. N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln), 703-715; 2000, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.
16. A. Sayer: Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 2nd edn; 1992, London, Routledge.
17. R. Bhaskar: A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn; 1978, Brighton, Harvester.
18. For example A. Sayer: Method in Social Science (see Note 16)
19. and M. S. Archer: Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach; 1995, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
20. J. M. Bernardo and A. F. M. Smith: Bayesian Theory; 1994, Chichester, Wiley.
21. A. E. Raftery: 'Statistics in sociology' (see Note 10).
22. A. Morton: 'The theory of knowledge: saving epistemology from the epistemologists', in Philosophy of Science Today, (ed. P. Clark and K. Hawley); 2003, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
23. S. Kvale: 'The social construction of validity' (see Note 9).