RRU Day 1 - The squirrel paradigms

First day of class. Yeah! I like Dr. D. She teaches research and is awesome. Today was all about figuring out what research paradigm your line of inquiry is based. There was a lot of academic talk around this. As far as I can figure out it all boils down to this:

1. Critical paradigm - squirrels eat nuts because they have been conditioned to do so by those in power. We need to bring to light the negative power dynamics that is resulting in squirrels not being able to determine their own food choices.
2. Interpretive-constructionist paradigm - Let's study the small group of squirrels that live in the tree across the street from my house to see how they hunt, gather, and interact with the nuts. 
3. Discovery - squirrels have nut preferences. To prove this, let's take a random sample of squirrels, give them access to piles of different nuts, and measure which cache of nuts gets the most squirrel action.

Fingers-crossed, based on the above squirrels, I am a post-positivist. 'Cause I'm all over the random sampling of squirrel nut love.