Methodology
This chapter will discuss how we use our methods as a tool to answer the research question and working questions. The chapter will include ontological considerations as well as a reflection of our epistemological standpoint in order to evaluate how ‘knowledge’ is obtained about the DSM and pharmaceutical companies and to what extent the issues are based on assumptions or available empirical data. An overview of our research design and considerations behind our data collection will be included too. Furthermore, it will include a literature review where literature on this topic is examined. It will include literature on the DSM, where conflicts of interest and public policies regarding disclosure of ethical issues as one example
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At the beginning of the process, the idea of a certain social reality being a law-making concept was what formed our perception of the conflict of interests within the American psychiatric medical field. It was predetermined by us that the conflict of interests existed and the impacts of these and we discovered how our research of the topic was locked beforehand and our conclusion thereby was predetermined to. We discovered how this epistemological perspective did not provide us with the appropriate knowledge about the social world, because it was predetermined. Therefore, we decided to change our epistemological perspective to interpretivism. This provided us with more opportunities, but most importantly the opportunity to change our study so it would become an investigation of the topic. Thereby the social reality was not necessarily fixed, and we could investigate the topic and the conflicts of interest differently. Using interpretivism we were able to understand the human behavior instead of just making an explanation of it. By not having settled the reality behind the conflict of interest, we were also able to investigate the existence of human behavior and to what extent. When changing our epistemological approach, it also enabled us to change our research strategy and approach to the research, as well as the types of data used in our project …show more content…
This being said, it is also an opportunity to investigate and interpret the relationship between the DSM panel and the pharmaceutical industry by using the ontology of social constructionism where a society, in this case institutional groups, forms the reality of social actions of the individual. The use of this ontology therefore enables us to represent more aspects and a bigger perspective on the social reality that exists, which makes us able to understand it as well. The ontology will mainly be visible in the discussion, because we will interpret our findings from the analysis and thereby explain them as well as understand