Transformations in Educational Research and the Functionalist Framework
Vol.11,No.2(2019)
Abstract
Keywords:
Key words; functionalism; educational research; social research
Functionalism was described by J. H. Turner as one of the most general and at the same time most significant perspectives of contemporary sociology. It is founded on organicist ideas which define the essence of social life in terms of analogous to biological life. Functionalism was fundamentally formed by the notion that social reality needed to be studied as a system, that the processes unfolding in this system could be understood only in the context of relationships among the elements of this system and, finally, that the social organism, as any other organism, exhibited internal integration tendencies. The early functionalist beliefs grounded on these assumptions were crucially re-worked by Robert Merton, becoming an attractive research perspective in social sciences which is particularly useful in the study of educational phenomena and processes.
Key words; functionalism; educational research; social research
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