Social and Critical Psychology

Epistemology Lens Switch

One fictional school, one reported rise in classroom disruption, and three starting points about what the social world is. Build a study from each and watch the object, the question, the evidence, the method and the defensible claim move together.

Fictional case - Meadowbank Academy, its figures and its documents do not exist

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to say what each of three epistemologies takes its research object to be, and why the method follows from that rather than the reverse.

About 30 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.

How to use this

Commit to an answer to the question below.
Declare a starting point, then make three decisions that build a study from it.
Run the same case again from a different starting point, and compare what each study can say.

The case: Meadowbank Academy

A fictional 11-16 school of about 900 pupils. Referrals for "low-level disruption" rose from 260 to 412 between the autumn and spring terms, and senior staff have asked for research. In January the behaviour policy changed: referral, previously discretionary, became the expected response to a second warning.

So nobody yet knows whether pupils are behaving differently. The log records staff referrals, not pupil behaviour, and the thing that most obviously changed is the rule about when to refer. The school's full evidence file sits inside the activity below, and it is the same file for every lens.

All figures are invented for teaching. They are not estimates of anything, and no real school, policy or dataset is described.

This part needs JavaScript

The lens switch assembles a study specification in your browser as you make each decision, so it cannot run with JavaScript switched off. The case, the debrief and the limitations above and below are readable without it.

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Key terms

Ontology: What a position takes its research object to be — an underlying mechanism, a regularity among observables, or something produced in talk.
Epistemology: What that position treats as knowledge of the object, and therefore what could count as evidence about it.
Positivism: Looking for regularities among observable quantities, and treating careful measurement of them as the route to knowledge.
Critical realism: Holding that there are real structures beyond what is observed, while our access to them stays fallible and theory-laden.
Social constructionism: Treating the object of study as produced in interaction and language. It is a claim about how the object comes to be what it is, not a claim that nothing is real.

The study you are specifying

Case: a reported rise in low-level disruption at Meadowbank Academy.

The evidence the school holds, for reference

Recorded incidents. 260 logged in the autumn term, 412 in the spring term. A logged incident is a referral typed into the behaviour system by a member of staff.
A staff survey. 68% of the 74 respondents agree that "behaviour in lessons has got worse this year". 12% disagree.
A policy change. In January the behaviour policy was revised. Referral, previously discretionary, became the expected response to a second warning.
Staffing. Eleven of the 62 teaching staff are in their first year at the school, against three the year before.
Rooms and timetable. Two departments moved into temporary accommodation in January; both are among the four highest-referring departments.
Pupil focus groups. Notes from two sessions. Recurring phrases include "they only write you up if they don't like you" and "it depends whose lesson it is".

Lenses you have run on this case

For each completed lens: the object of study, the claim the design could support, what becomes visible and what recedes
Starting point	Object of study	Becomes visible	Recedes from view	Action it points to

Methods are usually taught as a toolbox: pick the technique that suits the question. That hides the step before it. All three teams held the same log, the same survey and the same policy change; what differed was what each took disruption to be, and that decision settled the question, the evidence and the claim before anything was collected. Choosing a method looks like the decision. It is the consequence of one already taken.

The case: Meadowbank Academy

First, a judgement

The lens switch

Build a study from a position

The study you are specifying

What this study could and could not say

Lenses you have run on this case

Challenge - five things somebody wants to say

What this demonstrates