In social science research degrees, you have to declare yourself.

I don’t mean declare your major. You obviously have to choose and defend a research topic, but again, not that. I mean you have to declare yourself – your worldview, your paradigm, your beliefs about what knowledge is, your beliefs about what is is. It’s telling. Some graduate researchers (GRs) realise they are extremely pragmatic: to them, truth is about what is accurate enough to work. Others discover a deep well of radical thought, a hunger for complexity and a recognition that power shapes social reality.

If the paradigm landscape were one-dimensional (which it isn’t), the perimeter would look like this:

Positivism is the belief that there is an objectively true answer to everything. The sciences are built on this belief: test, observe, seek evidence, seek counter-evidence, all of it is striving towards those true answers. In ideal conditions, my experiment should get the same results as your experiment, because there is one truth.

Constructivism is the belief that reality only exists subjectively. Each of us “constructs” a reality of our own, and although we can compare notes, my understanding of your notes is still going to be different to yours. This paradigm was introduced through the social sciences.

Think of these two extremes as kind of like the idea of “perfect”. Nothing is 100% perfect, but things can lean. Obviously no well-read scientist today believes that objective truth is a feasible or even desirable goal. We know that Newtonian, Einsteinian and quantum physics are incompatible – they cannot all be true at once – but we still use all of them when they are useful. And no socially-functioning social scientist believes we should all march about behaving as though we live in separate worlds from one another. There are uncertainties we must choose to accept and work with in order to make any attempt to conduct research.

My own worldview is shifting. It certainly leans more towards the constructivist side of our reductionist scale, but of course it’s a bit more complicated than that (social reality being a specific domain which operates within but is different to material reality; “knowledge” being distinct from “truth”, and various other metaphysical oddments).

Something many graduate researchers notice, as they’re being instructed to identify their own worldviews, is that it’s extremely rare to find a research author who discloses theirs. You’re asked to do this work of explaining yourself in order to become a real researcher, but it’s not a thing real researchers appear to be doing… so what does it even look like?

Still, it’s really important, when reading research findings, to be able to identify the authors’ worldview. This is how we can tell what they believe knowledge actually is; what constitutes evidence; what reality they are trying to research. If I’m trying to build an argument about the influence of gender on school performance, and I believe gender is a fluid and subjective social construction, then the work of researchers who position gender as a fixed, pindownable property is going to sit awkwardly alongside my argument – even if its findings are supportive of my conclusions. It is evidence for a world that is not my world.

But I’m beginning to wonder if declaring a paradigm isn’t enough. In academic journal tradition, authors are expected to declare any conflicts of interest (for instance, if their funding source has a particular stake in the findings). I’ve barely ever seen this happen. COIs are kind of a Big Deal: they have a legal flavour which casts the entire research project into question. It really doesn’t lay a welcoming foundation for softer forms of researcher transparency – say, “I have friends who are gender fluid”. And perhaps this is something we should be doing in our research. Our beliefs and values shape not just our interpretations but the very questions we choose to ask, and and how we ask them. Qualitative researchers are generally encouraged to be reflexive about this, journalling or otherwise keeping tabs on their own responses to things as they conduct their research. But where are the results of this reflexivity in the published findings? How can a reader identify them? How might who we are shape what our research means?