RESEARCH ETHICS IN POSITIVIST, INTERPRETIVIST, AND PRAGMATIST PARADIGMS

Abstract

Maintaining ethics in research will defend its credibility, usefulness, and impact within society. However, ethics can vary significantly between research paradigms. This is due to the kinds of ontological, epistemological, and methodological philosophies that each possesses. This paper studies research ethics within positivist, interpretivist, and pragmatist paradigms. There is a clear difference between these paradigms. Ethical considerations in the positivist paradigm concentrated on objectivity, reliability, and treating people fairly. Researchers must uphold objectivity, refrain from prejudice, and defend the rights of participants. Getting informed consent, protecting data, and reducing the possibility of harm to research participants during surveys or experiments are important ethical considerations. The interpretivist paradigm places a high value on ethical concerns arising from subjectivity, ethnocentrism, and researcher involvement. Researchers need to manage personal dynamics, engage in reflexivity, and establish trust with participants. Relational ethics values participants’ lived experiences and promotes collaborative knowledge creation, going beyond traditional judgement to ensure ethical engagement. To consolidate both paradigms, a flexible approach is introduced as the pragmatist paradigm. This is distinguished by methodological diversity and practical problem-solving. Pragmatist researchers, therefore, combine qualitative and quantitative methods to observe ethical dilemmas in a situation-appropriate manner. The researcher must critically balance their ethical responsibilities under various approaches to ensure that moral principles are maintained without sacrificing the flexibility of their study. Using a comparative approach, it reviews literature, research ethics guidelines, and philosophical texts to analyse ethical practices within each paradigm, focusing on ontological, epistemological, and axiological beliefs in research ethics. Ethical decisions should be grounded in the study's philosophical and methodological context, promoting responsible and contextually aware research practices. This paper provides researchers and all parties involved with useful information to enhance ethical standards that consider different research traditions.