There are a lot of overlapping terms in use in qualitative methodology. I
wrote the paragraph below in order to sort my head out a bit about them.
Somebody on another email list suggested they might be of use to others.

About 'conceptual frameworks'. I see a conceptual framework as the set of
   concepts, the language, in terms of which particular assertions/hypotheses
   are put forward, considered, affirmed, or denied.

   "The cat is two feet above the mat" is an assertion couched in terms of the
   concepts of 'cats', 'mats', and a unit of measurement called 'the foot'. If
   you don't have the same concepts, then you aren't working in the same
   conceptual framework. If we both use the term 'mile', but you mean an
   'American' mile (which has one length) and I mean an 'English' mile (which
   has another), then we may have the same terms, but we are not using the same
   conceptual framework.

   A 'discourse' depends on a conceptual framework, but several discourses may
   use the same framework. An orthodox Marxist might declare that 'capitalism'
   is 'doomed' and can only be replaced by 'socialism'; a less orthodox or
   revisionist might declare that 'capitalism' can always find a way out of any
   particular crisis (at a cost), and so is not 'doomed'. Both share the notion
   of 'capitalism', 'socialism', 'doom' and 'finding a way out of a crisis':
   they share the same conceptual framework, but make different assertions in
   terms of it, which can amount to two discourses.

   A scientific 'paradigm' (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) includes a conceptual
   framework, but also includes the 'research methodology' in terms of which
   evidence relevant to competing hypotheses (or 'theories' seen as a body of
   empirical assertions couched in terms of the concepts of the conceptual
   framework) are to be collected or generated, processed, and interpreted and
   then adjudicated upon. As a result of that adjudication, certain hypotheses
   (or bodies of hypotheses) are normally felt to be less plausible or more
   plausible than they were before (Karl Popper's collective falsificationism).

   A conceptual framework exists at the heart of any discourse.

   More than one discourse is compatible with a given conceptual frameworks.

   Scientific discourses are part of a paradigm in which there is a conceptual
   framework; methodologies for generating, processing and interpreting
   evidence relevant to competing 'conceptualised hypotheses'; and discourses
   about the reality with which the particular paradigm is concerned.

   This is at least one way of making what I think are useful distinctions. I
   have used them in my 'Qualitative research interviewing: biographic
   narrative and semi-structured method' (2001: Sage).




                 <http://www.sagepub.co.uk/shopping/Detail.asp?id=4813>

          provides details of my (long-awaited if only by me) textbook
     'Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and
semi-structured method'

Tom Wengraf
24a Princes Avenue
Muswell Hill
London N10 3LR
UK