• ARTICLES, Special Section, XIIIth Biennial Conference of the EPCA - 2016

Construing the doctoral examiner: what the doctoral student should know

Jankowicz, D.

Keywords:
Epistemology, doctoral examination, PCT associated techniques, methodology

Abstract:
Doctoral candidates often worry about how their constructivist epistemology will be received, especially if their examiners come from a positivist background. The issue affects candidates in the more conventional psychology departments, and in the business and management schools too. Methodology textbooks used by students, supervisors and examiners don’t offer a unified terminology or a consistent analytic framework for the epistemological issues involved. An exercise in student-examiner sociality, this paper seeks to remove some possible confusions arising from an imprecise use of the terms ‘method’ and ‘technique’, and from the simplistic use of such constructs as constructivist-positivist, subjective-objective, and qualitative-quantitative.