When we do research we do it in relation to the world and we have to engage with the nature of the world and how we can know it. In other words we work with what Crotty calls a theoretical perspective, although others use the term ‘meta-theory’ to mean the same thing. That theoretical perspective must include an ontology, that is a worked out understanding of what the world is. Crotty rejects the use of ontology in this way (1998, p 10) but here we are following Blaikie, who asserts that ontological assumptions constitute: ‘ways of answering the question’:

Ontology comes first because the epistemological position, that is the approach to how the world may be known, depends on that fundamental understanding of what the world actually is. And here we have to emphasise by using ‘is’, a form of the present tense, we are dealing not only with what is but what has been and what might be; with the past, the present and the future.

If we were cosmologists what has been said so far would delineate the issues to be addressed in this chapter. In other words if we were ‘pure’ scientists dealing with phenomena over which human beings can have no influence whatsoever given our present state of technology, then we would need to say no more. However, we are applied social scientists and both those adjectives – ‘applied’ and ‘social’ – require us to go further. Let us start with the implications of dealing with science which is social science, in other words science which is concerned with social reality.