paradigm

Research

A shared set of assumptions about reality, knowledge, and method within a research community — e.g. positivist vs. interpretivist.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Thomas Kuhn”, Alexander Bird (first published 13 August 2004; substantive revision 2 September 2025) plato.stanford.edu accessed 22 September 2026

The term in this sense is Thomas Kuhn’s, from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Alexander Bird’s entry on Kuhn separates the two senses Kuhn used: the broad disciplinary matrix — the “shared commitments”, including “key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions” — and the narrow exemplar, “consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research”, which the entry calls “the most novel and least understood aspect” of Kuhn’s work. Talk of positivist and interpretivist “paradigms” in social research extends the broad sense to whole methodological traditions; that extension is common and useful, but it is not Kuhn’s usage, and conflating the two is a frequent source of confusion.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is cited because it carries a named author and a dated revision for each entry, so the claim is attributable to a person on a date — which is the test this lexicon applies to reference sources, and the reason an open-edit encyclopedia is not used. The application to research practice above is this lexicon’s reading.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Also defined as

A dominant framework of shared assumptions and methods in a field (Kuhn); research paradigms (positivism, interpretivism, critical realism) determine what counts as valid evidence.

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).