Although I must confess to having a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book, I could not imagine my academic life without it.
In this book, Crotty has achieved the nigh impossible by making social constructionism and constructivism understandable and reasonably straightforward. His discussion of positivism and post-positivism were similarly enlightening, as were the chapters relating to interpretivism, critical inquiry, and post modernism.
The only negative aspect of this book, for me, was the first chapter – the introduction. After reading texts by other authors, I realised Crotty's examples of methodologies were more commonly cited as examples of research designs. Similarly, Crotty positioned constructionism and post-positivism as epistemological and theoretical perspectives respectively (p. 5), whereas I see these more as examples of worldviews with their own sets of philosophical assumptions. Consequently, this chapter accounted for the patches of confusion.
This is a great book, just ignore the first chapter or read it after reading more recent texts on the research process.
