The Paradigmatic Nature of Social and Human Research

This article of reflection, theoretical and methodological, of an epistemological nature, presents relationships of commitment between universities and the productive sector through research. Society in general, unions and the state have understood that more and more professionals require scientific research processes. Therefore, advanced education must be supported by inquiry processes that transform these sectors. In general, investigative issues that generate epistemological contradictions are addressed due to the misuse of investigative techniques and procedures. Both the first and the second are more specific and inseparable from the investigative action. Techniques are the DNA of research: they condense the theoretical and methodological history of whoever has developed them and whoever chooses them. That history can be deconstructed from a technique. A strong presence of an orthodox positivism persists, anchored from the analytical empirical that invades the limits of qualitative research that requires an exhaustive review. On the other hand, according to the so-called mixed investigations, mixtures are made that are not coherent with the proposed paradigmatic models. This dispersion of the sciences, paradigms and types of research are limiting to understand, interpret or transform the contexts involved in the investigative processes. For this reason, for the researcher, the techniques are presented, in their pedagogical dimension, as the access door to the research experience, which enriches it, broadens it, and makes it more fruitful the more and better the instruments are handled articulated between the parts. and these integrated with the whole, highlighting that we are immersed in a productive process in which the researcher must make decisions at each step, which must be marked by the social conditions in which said process is carried out. The opposite produces paradigmatic blindness or obstacles.