Investigating the Place of Dialogue in Social Research

The concept of dialogue has recently been considered by some social researchers. Citing the views of Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Boehm, these researchers place a high value on dialogue in social research. They criticize the disregard for dialogue and call for a paradigm shift in the social sciences. However in practice Research conducted with a dialogical approach only use the guidelines of dialogue theorists when interviewing their participants. Thus, these researches have reduced the position of dialogue from a new paradigm to a research tool and technique. In this article, first, the theories of experts in the field of dialogue are examined. Then the consequences of the claims of these thinkers in the field of social research are formulated. And a new design of a dialogical research is presented a plan based on which the whole research (and not just a part of it) is considered as a continuous dialogue which is valuable and should be included in the research report.