My thesis explores residential care for older people in a country other than my own western country. I am drawn to pragmatism because I will be asking 'what' and 'how' questions and it is notable that Indian dialectical philosophy; the Sanskrit concept of anekàntavada corresponds with western dialectical pragmatism in that both views hold there is no singular reality (ekànta) (Schang, 2010).
This far, the majority of my reading links pragmatism to mixed methods designs (qual/quant). Is there a reason why this paradigm is not linked with qualitative designs?
Pragmatic researchers ask ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions by selecting a variety of data collection methods which are capable of answering different research questions (Creswell, 2014, Murphy et al, 1990). For them, situations nor indeed entities cannot be divorced from context which means that investigations and explorations are embedded within the socio-economic-political and historical contexts (Ball, 1979, Creswell, 2014). For pragmatists, ‘truth’ is a relativistic concept which changes unpredictably from place to place and time to time, dependent on ‘the situation, the context, the issue…’ (Johnson & Gray, 2015). Although pragmatists are not constrained by singular paradigms, the epistemological and ontological inferences within pragmatism imply that deliberate actions have consequences which create situations (Cherryholmes, 1994, Creswell, 2011, 2014). Being unencumbered by abstract thought on the nature of ‘reality’ a pragmatist researcher looks to examine what is really going on within social processes of the concrete world and offers readers ‘descriptions, theories, explanations and narratives’ (Cherryholmes, 1992:13).
