“Challenges to Validity from the Standpoint of Methodological Pluralism: The Case of Survey Research in Economics”

Abstract

By focusing on the case of survey research in economics, the paper shows how methodological pluralism emerges as a natural consequence from a very common dynamics of feedback between problems and solutions taking place in scientific practice. This continuous feedback between methodological problems and attempts at solving them, being essentially connected with the pursuit of validity, naturally leads to the pluralistic tendency found in empirical research in economics over the last decades and clearly manifest in the case of survey research. The methodological challenges within the latter mainly come from the pervading presence of framing effects in survey research, which, as argued here, prompts the application of new procedures able to improve the different kinds of validity.