What is methodology?

We explain what the methodology is and what are the benefits of this science. In addition, what are its uses in various fields.

1. What is methodology?

The word methodology has its origin in the Greek language, and refers to the applicable model that research methods must necessarily follow , even if they are questionable. It is the normative, descriptive and comparative theory about the method or set of them, added when the investigator proceeds.

While the method is the plan with which the scientist believes that a certain objective will be achieved , the methodology is the science that studies those methods, without stopping in pragmatic validity, but – justly – in the methodological one.

To exemplify this distinction, perhaps somewhat confusing, the case of the scientific method can be used : it is thanks to the methodology that a logical system has been devised that involves each stage of the scientific procedures. This is the theory that provides the framework on which the knowledge sought is inserted .

The methodology has been classified in different ways: with respect to its character , qualitative or quantitative , but also with respect to the result it seeks to find from the research. It is a very large number of sciences and fields of action that present some type of methodology, with certain variants as appropriate.

The methodology of the story necessarily involves the question of sources and their reliability , and the type of reasoning that must be adjusted to that kind of science. It happens that because it is a social science , it is effectively the type of science that generates the greatest controversy when characterizing a methodology.

There is a consensus on the validity of observation , experimentation and, especially, statistics based surveys or questionnaires. Software development and market strategies are approached very seriously by the methodology, seeking to optimize strategies for the analysis of the effectiveness of the methods of action.

On the other hand, formal sciences have contributed the most to the development of methods through the methodology . It is thanks to them that the most modern scientific method is known, which is based on the reproducibility of knowledge and its falsifiability, that is, its possibility of being refuted.

Much of what epistemology has proposed begins to play within this analysis of the fundamentals and specifications of each of the scientific methods that comprise the methodology, among which the empirical-analytical, the hypothetical deductive, the logical deductive or the inductive. In applications, this type of method has been taken to other types of sciences.