Question

Read the following passage. Are the authors using a positivist, realist, or interpretivist paradigm? These countries [included in our study] represent 85 percent of the world’s population. Though this set of countries was not selected randomly, there is no compelling reason to think that the findings discussed here would not apply to most national settings. From what we know of the set of all countries in the world, our dataset is reasonably representative. For example, 55 percent of our cases are democracies, compared to 59 percent of countries in the world. However, we find some lack of representativeness at the extremes of wealth, poverty, and despotism. The poorest 20 percent of countries represent only 7 percent of our dataset, and the richest 20 percent of countries represent 14 percent of our dataset. The two groups that are missing entirely include the handful of countries that are the most despotic in the world (North Korea, Eritrea, Sudan, Burma until 2015) and chronically failed states (Libya, Somalia, Congo, Yemen). Still, we believe our findings should be widely applicable since there are no compelling counterfactuals suggesting that they would not be. These considerations are similar to those raised by the World Values Survey and most other cross-national datasets.

Answer 1

Positivist paradigm is quantitative in nature and objective, its focus is mainly scientific and methodology is experimental. It relies on scientific evidence such as experiments and statistics, to reveal how a society truly works.

The realist paradigm focuses on states relation. It seeks to explain outcomes in terms of environment. It refers to shared fundamental assumptions several realist theorists make about the world. This paradigm assumes that there can be more than one scientifically correct way of understanding reality. There is no possibility of attaining a single correct understanding of the world.

Interpretivist paradigm uses qualitative methods for data collection. It is concerned with studying the world from subjective perspective and experiences of people. It's focus is mainly humanistic in nature and context is reactive.

Thus based on all the above explanations, it is clear that the authors are using a positivist paradigm as the research is objective in nature. They are covering only those countries which are representative and implying that findings would be applicable widely.