Conceptual Framework

39 Biologist Bernd Heinrich (1984, pp. 141 151) and his associates once spent a summer conducting detailed, systematic research on ant lions, small insects that trap ants in pits they have dug. Returning to the university in the fall, Heinrich was surprised to dis-cover that his results were quite different from those published by other researchers. Redoing his experiments the following summer to try to understand these discrepan-cies, Heinrich found that he and his fellow researchers had been led astray by an unex-amined assumption they had made about the ant lions time frame: Their observations hadn t been long enough to detect some key aspects of these insects behavior. As he concluded, Even carefully collected results can be misleading if the underlying context of assumptions is wrong (p. 151).For this reason, the Conceptual Framework of your study the system of concepts, assumptions, expectations, beliefs, and theories that supports and informs your research is a key part of your design (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Robson, 2011).

for research practices, implying specific methodological strategies. At the most abstract and general level, examples of such paradigms are philosophical positions, such as positivism, constructivism, realism, pragmatism, and postmodernism, each embodying very different ideas about reality (ontology) and how we can gain knowl-

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