The second part of the article tries to verify the unity of social space, social geography, and sociology of rural areas on the basis of multi-paradigm narrative model and author’s empirical research in order to further study their constructivist components, as well as to understand the social world of the analyzed respondents as participants of a general study and related actions, while determining explicit and implicit causal relationships. Theoretical basis of this empirical approach is critical realism, social constructivism, and institutionalism which, according to the authors of the article, allow adequately interpreting empirical social phenomena. Empirical verification of the far mentioned hypotheses (about the weak compatibility of the scientific discourses of the studied concepts of social space, social geography, and rural sociology; that the points of their possible contact should be narratives which can be specific representative formats of mediation between the values, meanings, and contents of these concepts) was conducted on the basis of 60 in-depth interviews using content analysis methods, narrative technologies (I. Trotsuk) and typological (G. Tatarova) types of research. In particular, the article carries out the content analysis of in-depth interviews on the author’s topic of rural development, proposes a narrative ambivalent model of the relationship between the government and rural residents, where the statement “The government helps, there is a dialogue with the government” is at one pole, and “The government does not help, there is no dialogue with the government” – at the other one. As a result, there is dependency and other forms of destructive behavior in rural areas. The authors propose the additional methodological foundations to study causal mechanisms, key processes, and causal relationships. They contribute to a deeper understanding of the results of theoretical and empirical research of the observed social and organizational phenomena in rural areas, operationalized and verified at the “junctions” and interdisciplinary boundaries of social space, social geography, rural sociology, critical realism, social constructivism, and institutionalism
Keywords
social space, sociology of rural areas, social geography, rural sociology