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.
