Surfacing Paradigms underneath Research on Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering

Software engineering is a wide field with topics ranging from coding to organizational aspects. In the last two decades, researchers have developed a growing interest in the human and social aspects of software development. To investigate these phenomena, researchers have often employed methods common in social sciences such as case study and ethnography. These methods usually have specific underpinnings about the relationship between knowledge and the world, the so-called research paradigms. Although these paradigms are essential to define what is legitimate knowledge and how research should be performed, so far, this topic has been barely discussed in the software engineering community. In this paper, our goal is to explore how different research paradigms reflected in the current studies of human and social factors in software engineering. To achieve this goal, we present an overview of the main research paradigms: positivism, postpositivism, constructivism-interpretivism, critical theory, and pragmatism. Then, we analyze the papers published in the Technical Track of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) that focus on human and social aspects to explore if and how these paradigms influence Software Engineering research. Our results show that these studies generally do not explicate the paradigms they are following but, from several aspects, it is possible to relate the studies to a pragmatic perspective with a strong postpositivistic influence. We also discuss topics on which research could be enriched by employing diverse paradigms.