In the social sciences, a paradigm is a theory that has
come to be generally accepted as the way to do research in
a given field. A paradigm designates what kinds of issues are going to be researched
and how (what sorts of tools will be used, etc) those issues will be
investigated.
As an example of this, one can argue that
there are two competing paradigms within the discipline of political science in the US.
One of these is a quantitative approach and the other is more traditional. The two
paradigms differ with one another most clearly on what tools to use. The quantitative
people believe that political science research should be based on numbers and
statistical analyses of those numbers. This encourages them to look at questions that
tend to produce a lot of data. By contrast, the other paradigm relies more on
interviews, opinions, and theories. It does not aspire to be a hard science and it asks
questions that are more about ideas than about numbers.
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