Characterization of "situated social relevance", in perspective of its intervention in social-scientific research

Abstract

This research characterizes “situated social significance” (PSS in Spanish) as a category of epistemic-methodological base emerging from an internal differentiation, consequent to the conceptual operationalization of the initial analytical category: “social significance” and piloting on the documentary field of analysis.

The study is configured on a documentary field of 29 practical, concrete cases, represented by doctoral thesis, defended, and approved in postgraduate courses at six Argentine public management universities. The latter represented the total of higher education institutions accredited by CONEAU that, during the period between 2012 and 2016, had postgraduate degrees specifically called: "doctorates in social sciences."

The research level was initially exploratory, descriptive, in perspective qualitative, based on documentary information sources (doctoral thesis in social sciences) with direct registry observation and collection of information by content analysis. This methodological strategy allowed adding to the proposed level of study, an explanatory approach, coming from the inferential component of the former.

The empirical plane of the object of study is not configured by the actors of the contents communicational that make up the thesis (neither issuing author, nor receiving author), but the products resulting from the research process itself. The epistemic plot promoted permeated a central particularity, linked to the relevance of the contexts. This validated the construction of a working hypothesis in perspective of an initial thesis: “the sense of the pertinently social in scientific knowledge productions -doctoral thesis in social sciencescan be visualized based on the attributes and indicators of situationally, expressed in the
category: “situated social relevance” (PSS).

This research concludes by validating this hypothesis, evidence in the results obtained a marked orientation of a PSS on a vertical model of construction of scientific knowledge, a fact that also enabled the opportunity to challenge by alternatively proposing a horizontal orientation, typical of the PSS, contemplating among its most relevant empirical indicators: the positioning of the researcher, his method, justification, and results.

Without ignoring the degree of academic importance of the service generated from the institutional production of knowledge through research, the idea is to wonder about the fate of these productions in the key to practical social interest. On that boarding line, the PSS passes.

When the attributes, characteristics, properties and/or variables linked to the situationally component of the PSS are absent in the knowledge process produced, or are not clearly targeted, the risk of a product (albeit scientifically valid), socially impertinent, is at risk. In the intervention of the PSS, the potential for social transfer of the knowledge produced and consequently the transformative impulse of the investigated social reality is defined and guided.