This is a very broad topic, so it would help if you told us more about your actual research interests.

In general, ontology and epistemology are issues in the philosophy of knowledge, and their actual application to research may be quite remote.

hi

Ontology and epistemology do affect  researchers' perspectives on the concepts of reality,  data , data interpretation,  validity and reliability of research, generalizablity, etc.They indubitably influence conceptual and metatheoretical concerns of legitimacy, control, data analysis, among other things .

Definitions and interpretation of terms such as culture, beliefs, morality and imagination, attitudes, norms and values are intimately tied up with the researchers' ontological and epistemological  approaches of  logical positivism ( empiricism) and rationalism, as an example leading to their interests in and practice of qualitative or quantitative research designs and relevant paradigms.  

Ontology is basically -very very basically- related with science of existance. Also epistemology is about science philosophy, philosophy of science, understanding of knowledge or whatever you want to say. There is no common way to adopt or to engage epistemology or ontology in your research. Actually your epistemological paradigm and your ontological beliefs give shape to your study, your science, your thinking way and your ideas. I think your mentor or supervisor told this to you. I can just say to you read. There is no shortcut about this question.

I would revise what Rahimi said to: "Definitions and interpretation of terms such as culture, beliefs, morality and imagination, attitudes, norms and values are intimately tied up with..." how one does one's research.

That is enough, without dragging in ontology and epistemology.

Hi Haya:

You might get some ideas from visiting this page:

http://ifmlab.for.unb.ca/people/kershaw/Courses/IUFRO_Research_Methods/Monday/Monday_PM_5.pdf

If you find this of interest, we can keep going.

Thank you for your response  Dr.David  my research interest is Social work and child abuse  my issue is how to apply these parts in my study

in general I understand the their meaning but struggling with my specific study  

Thank you for your replay Dr.Rahimi

your answer give me some thing helps me to rethink about this matter 

Thanks Engin for you answer

Hi Rolfe 

Thank you for your help

if you can update me with relative materials it will be great 

Most of the discussions of ontology and epistemology in social sciences (e.g., Lincoln and Guba) have very little to say about the use of actual research methods, let alone the collection and analysis of data. Instead, Lincoln & Guba basically considered the conduct of actual research to involve technical and mechanical issues. That is why I said the connection to actual research issues can be "remote."

In paractice, Lincoln and Guba used ontology and epistemology to define what they called paradigms, using labels such as positivism, post-positivism, and constructivism. But even that choice of paradigm did not guarantee a choice of methods.

You will certainly find people who link ontological and epistemological assumptions directly to the choice of either qualitative or quantitative methods, but that was not approach that Lincoln and Guba followed.

Unless you are required to discuss ontological and epistemological issues for some reason, I would suggest concentrating on your research design: What are your goals and how can you go about accomplishing them?

Hi Haya,

An interesting question and one that I happened along as I studied visual perception. I am not going to be able to summarise this work properly here so list some online presentations. I made one speculative effort to expand the work effort into considerations with respect to social orders and its on my RG page: 

Vision-Space: What does perceptual structure indicate with respect to cultural development, the maintenance of social orders and communication between world-views?

In essence we increasingly live in a world dominated by an approach to reality based around 3rd party observation. This relies strongly on explicit processing and this has been transferred to our instrumentation.  This ontology is dominating our thinking and relationships. With a shift towards implicit thinking we realise that reality is a phenomenological relationship we form with the real. Both the explicit and implicit ontologies are operational within our sense of vision with the implicit playing out as contextual vision (incorrectly termed peripheral vision). 

Given that 90% of vision and hence perpetual awareness is dominated by implicit processing we should be trying to understand that processing system? It becomes clear that this requires a change in our ontology from 3rd party observation to a formal accommodation with experiential reality. 

Is this just mumbo-jumbo? No. We have developed a new form of illusionary space based on perceptual structure as opposed to optical projection and its now in a base technology that we hope to establish as a platform technology. Vision-Space would then replace virtual reality systems and information display systems based on the 3rd party ontology. We term this new form of illusionary space Vision-Space as opposed to picture space and it paves the way (so I think) for new information communication technologies (ICTs). 

Not sure if this helps but you might find it interesting.

Dear Haya,

As john properly states ,

with a shift towards implicit thinking we realize that reality is a phenomenological relationship we form with the real.

In my opinion ,gone are the days of single objective reducible, realities perceived similarly  collectively by all individuals.

The ontological and epidemiological dynamicity and transformation could immensely influence the nature and practice of social research which is inextricably  tied up with the nature of knowledge , its domains, limitations and implications.

Moreover, ontological issues of the nature of reality, existence and and  organizations , do have  practical applications in information science, social science,  technology and most specifically ideological studies.  

as simplest term that I can answer

Ontology: the reality that you are looking for i.e. the objective of the study or goal of selected paradigm

Epistemology: the relationship between the research and you i.e. data collection strategy to achieve the knowledge overview e.g. triangulation etc.

thanks for simplification and clarification , zairul . 

Thank you very much for all useful answers

I really appreciate all your helps

Greetings

Thank you very much for all useful answers

I really appreciate all your helps

Greetings