Contemporary social research: difficulties, problems and challenges.

Abstract

The proposed article focuses its analysis on the reflection of the problems, difficulties and challenges of contemporary social research, for which it was necessary to start from the historical debate between quantitative and qualitative research methods and the insertion of positivism in the practices of researchers. coming to point out on the revised bibliography of several authors, proposals for overcoming this debate through the application of “multimethods”, “mixed methods” or “methodological triangulation”, giving rise to different perspectives of social research and a series of consequences around its design, characterized by its flexibility, which acquires reliability and validity through methodologies such as “methodological surveillance”, “making the unobservable observable” which together with “Grounded Theory” allows qualitative methodology overcome fragmentation in data analysis while conceptualizing and classifying r more clearly the data from the empirical base. Subsequently, it is analyzed how to overcome the common sense of the investigators through the theory, so necessary to explain the underlying part in the observations about the world, where the articulation of theory, method / technique and empirical basis is fundamental when analyzing the data. of reality that are not collected, but are produced through the encounter between researcher and researched, who cooperatively build knowledge. Next, a critique of the prevailing positivist research in the Ecuadorian context is presented, which together with wrong policies hinder and many of the times impede the development of research in the social field. Finally, challenges are posed to our own investigative practices in the face of the epistemic turns of the feminist, the environmental, the decolonial, the hermeneutic and the complexity; closing the analysis momentarily with the importance of promoting ethical processes in social research.