“In what sense can and should social research be anti oppressive? Illustrate your answer with real or potential examples from an area or areas of research with which you are familiar.”

Policy Makers and practitioners determine the allocation of resources through the results of various forms of social research. Therefore it is crucial that social research be anti oppressive in order to ensure that these resources are utilized on appropriate non -oppressive provision. This acknowledgement that social research is a political process has called for an emancipatory paradigm that seeks to ensure that political policy is anti-oppressive.

Obviously not all-social research has to take an anti oppressive stance, the positivist approach to research is their to predict and explain things and for interpretists it is based on common sense to interpret and understand people….(short extract)