Participatory Research and Social Transformation

Abstract

The social science research methodology had become an elitist and dominant methodology after the second World War. The growing importance of development, and debate on various models of the same, in the newly independent countries of the South had witnessed a growing иве of this research methodology in identifying and determining the agenda of development by the ruling elites of these new nation-states. Professionally trained researchers were being produced by the emerging factories' of knowledge-production to carry out research on problems of poverty, development and growth. The research methodology they learnt, imbibed and practiced had borrowed heavily from the natural sciences and was based on myths of neutrality, objectivity and scientificism. Under the guise of these tenets of natural science research methodology, the social science research methodology became heavily dependent on behaviorism and empiricism as the basic defining paradigm of research. Professionally trained adult educators were no exception to this historical trend.