Scientific Research Activity and its Self-Reflexive Consideration

Abstract

How did my social-scientific worldview and my preferred methodological approach on selected research topics get to the point where they are "in the end"? I am talking about the development of my positioning as a researcher in the field of tension between personal-familial, professional-disciplinary, university-institutional, political, and societal relationships. Here, the concept of scientific work/activity as performed by researchers in context plays a central role. I connect this to the postulate and the practice of an accompanying self-reflexive consideration as a component of my personal research style. In my eyes, the norms of scientific knowledge production do not result from an abstract "logic of justification" (Popper 1992) but are rather guided by the idea of an integrative inclusion of the social-scientific object of knowledge, the role of the personalized research subject, and the procedures of theory generation based on data, interactively produced within the framework of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967).