Social justice research methods : the problems of abstracted empiricism and the politics of evidence

The role that social scientists play in fostering social justice and tackling seemingly intractable issues in relation to concerns such as poverty, discrimination, child abuse, education, housing and health care is reliant not only on the ability to collect and interpret data accurately and communicate results effectively but also on the ability to place the very notion of social justice at the core of methodology and method. Globally, disciplines within the social sciences are grappling with social justice methodology and research methods in an environment constrained by research funding agendas and a resurgence of the politics of evidence. In this context, the established set of methodological techniques is often applied to the empirical problems of social justice" elevating the commitment to the methods over the area of research. In this sense, methods are determining the social problem (Mills, 1959). The debate surrounding the politics and ethics of evidence and what value qualitative methods have in addressing matters of social justice is at play (Lather, 2004). Social justice research should promote creativity and imagination within a critical frame of reference to challenge the status quo; it should invite the researcher into creative spaces for thinking about and researching "the social", wherein the processes of social justice research (methodology) and the presentation of the research (re-presentation) are seen as intertwined. Instead, the current political environment that the researcher is constrained by has led to a crisis of imagination wherein claims of a re-emergence of scientism, even in the face of its criticisms (e.g. Pietroni, 1992), are escalating (see Torrance, 2011). This positivist evidence-based epistemology is presented to researchers as the only path to obtain reliable and valid knowledge. It appears the social scientists are faced with debates and constraints of the past, as Denzin (2009, 139) argues" "this is like old wine in old bottles, 1980s battles in a new century." The following sections will provide an overview of this landscape and examine potential pathways forward for the researcher who wishes to engage with social justice research outside of the constraints of abstracted empiricism.