43 results
Bifocal stance theory, the transmission metaphor, and institutional reality
- Martin J. Packer, Michael Cole
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Biologists have replaced the metaphor of “genetic transmission” with a detailed account of the molecular mechanisms underlying the phenomenon which Darwin referred to as “like produces like.” Cultural evolution theorists, in contrast, continue to appeal to “imitation” or “copying.” The notion of ritual and instrumental stances does not resolve this issue, and ignores the institutions in which people live.
3 - The Analysis of Qualitative Interviews
- from PART I - The Objective Study of Subjectivity
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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Coding is analysis.
Miles & Huberman, 1984, p. 56The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a temporary imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge; then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.
Polanyi, 1967, p. 20In the standard qualitative research project, the step after conducting an interview is to transcribe it and analyze the material obtained. The analysis of qualitative material causes much anxiety and confusion for researchers, especially students conducting research for the first time. Yet remarkably little is said about analysis in many introductory qualitative research textbooks, and what is said is often unclear.
For example, Seidman's (1998) comprehensive book Interviewing as Qualitative Research includes only 14 or so pages on the topic of analysis out of a total of 124.Maxwell, in an otherwise excellent book titled Qualitative Research Design, writes in the chapter titled “Methods: What Will You Actually Do?” that his discussion “is not intended to explain how to do qualitative data analysis” (Maxwell, 2005, p. 95, emphasis original). This is odd coming from someone who offers an “integrative approach” to qualitative research design and insists, surely correctly, that all the elements of project design should interrelate.Maxwell talks only in general terms about analytic strategies of “categorizing” and “connecting,” and it is not clear how these link to the research questions that orient a study or to the other components – goals of the study, theoretical framework, and others – whose interconnections he considers carefully.
These are not isolated cases. Generally only extremely brief characterizations of data analysis are offered; for example, that it is “a process of looking for significant statements, and comparing what was said in different interviews” (Blaxter, Hughes, & Tight, 2001). But what counts as “significant”? Is an interview really composed of “statements”? Why compare interviews, and how is the comparison made? What is the outcome of this comparison?
Despite the lack of detail, there is general agreement that analysis is a matter of “coding.” Miles and Huberman state baldly that “[c]oding is analysis” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 56).
Acknowledgments
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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12 - Emancipatory Inquiry as Rational Reconstruction
- from Part III - Inquiry With An Emancipatory Interest
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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Against the intellectual grain of the time, Jürgen Habermas's grand theorizing defends the claims of reason, universality and normative validity. Among internationally prominent intellectuals on the left today, Habermas is a rarity: he insists the Enlightenment got it mostly right. For decades, he has been at work reconstructing what he sees as the damaged but vital legacy of Enlightenment rationality, rescuing its practical and emancipatory dimensions from the encroachments of technocratic and instrumental reason.
Forbath, 1998, p. 969Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important philosophers today. He was trained in the Frankfurt School, and he continued its reappraisal of Marxism, which by the 1960s he felt seemed to be better at legitimating authoritarian states than critiquing them. Orthodox Marxism – with its determinist reading of Marx's writings – seemed to be serving an ideological function similar to the one the Frankfurt School had found in positivist science – that of “portraying particular interests and goals as technical necessities” (Mendelson, 1979, p. 46). Four aspects of Habermas's work are important to us here. The first is his elaboration of Marx's proposal that knowledge is never neutral and disinterested but is made possible by “knowledge-constitutive interests.” This proposal transformed the image of critical inquiry, showing that it is distinct from both empirical-analytic science and interpretive inquiry but is no less a science for its interest in emancipation. The second is his debate with Gadamer over the requirements for critical inquiry, in which Habermas stated a position that he has never changed: that a researcher needs more than the resources of a member. A frame of reference outside the form of life being investigated is necessary. The third aspect of Habermas's work is his exploration of psychoanalysis as a model for critical and emancipatory inquiry, a process in which the therapist carries out a depth hermeneutics aided by a theoretical reconstruction of the consequences of childhood trauma. The fourth and final aspect is Habermas's turn to a collaboration between philosophy and social science to carry out the “rational reconstruction” of human communication and social organization in order to identify their universal underlying norms.
These four aspects center around the crucial question of what kind of special knowledge or stance a researcher needs in order to conduct critical inquiry.
Part II - Ethnographic Fieldwork – The Focus On Constitution
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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In the first part of this book, I have followed Thomas Kuhn&s lead and examined the common practices of qualitative research today in order to see what epistemological and ontological commitments were embedded in them. In the conduct and analysis of semistructured interviews we found the assumption that subjectivity is an inner, mental realm that contrasts and yet coexists with the objectivity of an outer world. We found subjective experience contrasted with objective knowledge. The latter is abstract and general, so that subjective kinds of knowing must be extracted from their context, their indexicality must be repaired, and commonalities must be found across individuals in order to arrive at objective statements. We also found contradictory metaphors for language. Language is a conduit. It is a repository of concepts, names for objects and events. It is a joint production.
In the last two chapters, I started to explore a more adequate ontology and epistemology. I traced the history of hermeneutics from the aim to understand a spoken or written text by reconstructing the author&s subjectivity to the view that the meaning of a text is an event, the effect it has on a reader or listener. This event is an application of the text by the reader to their current situation.
If we apply this to interviews, we see them as a joint production of discourse that, in its use of linguistic devices, especially tropes such as metaphor, invites a new way of seeing the world – or a new world to see. Analysis becomes a matter of examining this poesis to articulate how it works, to explicate how the discourse was skillfully designed to have various effects.
I suggested in the introduction that qualitative researchers are not aiming high enough and are not asking sufficiently interesting questions. When it comes to the qualitative research interview, the most common way to obtain empirical material, the aim has been to describe subjective experience, ‘to understand the world from the subjects’ points of view, to unfold the meaning of people's experiences, to uncover their lived world prior to scientific explanation’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 1). It has become clear that we could have been asking, should have been asking, how we learn about people when we talk to them, when we read what they have said.
List of Figures and Tables
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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6 - Calls for Interpretive Social Science
- from Part II - Ethnographic Fieldwork – The Focus On Constitution
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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We cannot measure such sciences against the requirements of a science of verification: we cannot judge them by their predictive capacity. We have to accept that they are founded on intuitions which we all do not share, and what is worse that these intuitions are closely bound up with our fundamental options. These sciences cannot be wertfrei [value-free]; they are moral sciences in a more radical sense that the eighteenth century understood. Finally, their successful prosecution requires a high degree of self-knowledge, a freedom from illusion, in the sense of error which is rooted and expressed in one's way of life; for our incapacity to understand is rooted in our own self-definitions, hence in what we are.
Taylor, 1971, p. 57In the 1970s, a number of calls were made for a new kind of interpretive social science that would have ethnography at its center (e.g., Bernstein, 1976; Dallmayr & McCarthy, 1977; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979). In this chapter, I will examine three of these calls: Charles Taylor's proposal for an interpretive approach to political science, Anthony Giddens's hermeneutically informed sociology, and Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology. In each case, interpretation – hermeneutics – was regarded as an important, even central, element. In each case, immersion in the social practices of a community – that is to say, ethnographic fieldwork – was considered crucial (though at the same time, as we shall see later, ethnography itself was in crisis). In each case – in sociology, political science, and anthropology – it was claimed that the new approach would resolve core dualisms that had plagued the discipline. And, in each case, it was said that this would be because we would study the key relationship of constitution between humans and the world. This chapter begins our exploration of this notion of constitution, a notion that will lead us to a new way of practicing fieldwork. Once again, it will turn out to be important to get the ontology right.
Interpretation And The Human Sciences: Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) is a Canadian philosopher who has written on the philosophy of science and on political philosophy. He emphasized the importance of “intersubjective” phenomena in the social sciences in an important article, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (1971).
Introduction
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This is an exciting time to be writing about the character of inquiry in social science for there is a growing interest in and openness to new forms of inquiry. Researchers throughout the social sciences are increasingly working with qualitative data – interview transcripts, verbal reports, videos of social interactions, drawings, and notes – whether they view these as “soft data” (Ericsson & Simon, 1984), “messy data” (Chi, 1997, p. 271), or “the ‘good stuff’ of social science” (Ryan & Bernard, 2000, p. 769). Research projects that include such empirical material are becoming increasingly popular. In addition to self-styled “qualitative researchers,” investigators in the learning sciences, developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and even in survey research, as well as many other areas, have turned to nonquantitative material and are exploring ways to collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from it.
At the same time, a strong backlash has developed against this kind of inquiry. In the United States, as in England and Australia, the funding priorities of government agencies emphasize “evidence-based” research. We are told repeatedly that there is a “gold standard” for research in the social sciences, the randomized clinical trial. Other kinds of research – typically cast as naturalistic, observational, and descriptive – are viewed as mere dross in comparison, good only for generating hypotheses, not for testing them. They are seen as lacking the rigor necessary for truly scientific research and as failing to offer practical solutions to pressing problems. Clinical trials, in contrast, are seen as relevant because they test treatments and interventions, and as rigorous because they involve direct manipulation, objective measurement, and statistical testing of hypotheses. Any suggestion that there might be research that follows a logic of inquiry different from that of traditional experimental research is dismissed. The possibility that complex human phenomena might require a kind of investigation that traces them in time and space and explores how they are constituted is not considered.
In the 1980s, there was general agreement that the “paradigm wars” had ended (Gage, 1989). For many, the correct way to proceed seemed to be with “mixed methods” that combined qualitative techniques with aspects of traditional experimental design and quantification. Arguments against mixing “qual” and “quant” are often dismissed as an unnecessarily belligerent perpetuation of the conflict. But now the “science wars” are being fought over much the same territory (Howe, 2005; Lather, 2004).
13 - Social Science as Participant Objectification
- from Part III - Inquiry With An Emancipatory Interest
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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Bourdieu's theory of practice is a systematic attempt to move beyond a series of oppositions and antinomies which have plagued the social sciences since their inception. For anyone involved in the social sciences today, these oppositions have a familiar ring: the individual versus society, action versus structure, freedom versus necessity, etc. Bourdieu's theoretical approach is intended to bypass or dissolve a plethora of such oppositions.
Thompson, 1991, p. 11A second perspective on the kind of investigation that attends to the “objective framework” in which people live can be found in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). For Bourdieu, we are always “playing a game” but are necessarily unaware of its arbitrary character. Everyday activity is the product of an interaction between what he called “habitus” and “social field,” a situated encounter between agents who are endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, and it is frequently the occasion for “symbolic violence” that critical inquiry must expose.
Bourdieu emphasized that the presuppositions that Habermas insists we must examine are not matters of individual tacit knowledge. Like Kuhn, Bourdieu argues that the presuppositions are embedded in social practices and embodied in bodily habitus. Reflection will not expose them. We need to study material practices, and because scientific practices themselves are techniques of “objectification,” we need to objectify these techniques, turning them on themselves as instruments of reflexivity. Critical inquiry needs to be reflexive rather than reflective, and it achieves this by “objectifying objectification.” Reflexivity is also a matter of turning our instruments of objectification on ourselves. This means studying one's own habitus together with the field in which one acquired it (where one grew up) and the field in which one applies it (the academy).
By being reflexive, critical inquiry can avoid objectivism, the error of claiming that one's system of categorization and classification is neutral and uniquely appropriate. It also can avoid subjectivism, the error of merely cataloging the diverse perspectives among the players of a game. The result is a viewpoint that “transcends” the “partial and partisan” point of view of a player but is not the gaze of a “divine spectator.” It becomes possible to describe the field of play so as to show how the players have different perspectives because they occupy different positions.
4 - Hermeneutics and the Project for a Human Science
- from PART I - The Objective Study of Subjectivity
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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The hallmark of the “linguistic revolution” of the twentieth century, from Saussure and Wittgenstein to contemporary literary theory, is the recognition that meaning is not simply something “expressed” or “reflected” in language: it is actually produced by it.
Eagleton, 1983, p. 60If we are to rethink the use of the interview as a tool in qualitative research, we must ask some fundamental questions. What does it mean to understand what someone says? What does it mean to understand a text? What is the “meaning” of a text? What is the relationship between a text and its author's subjective experience? The coding approach to analysis assumes that the answers to these questions can be found in the conduit metaphor for language. This metaphor implies that words or short phrases “represent” objects and events, that experience is “put into” words, that to understand is to “unpack” this content from the form, and that this “meaning” can be repackaged in language that avoids indexicality. We have seen how unsatisfactory these answers are.
But these answers are not the only ones possible. These questions have been asked for hundreds of years, and a variety of answers have been proposed. For 200 years, they have been topics of scholarly debate in philosophy, literary theory, and religion, in the field known as hermeneutics. Ironically, research with qualitative materials today more closely resembles the way people thought about these matters in the 18th century than it does contemporary views. The objective study of subjectivity has much in common with what is known as “Romanticist” hermeneutics. Yet the Romanticist view of interpretation, although very influential in the 1700s and for a considerable period afterward, searched for something unreachable. It required an endless circle of interpretation, or empathic leaps of identification with an author, or the appeal to a metaphysical notion of a universal life-force unfolding towards an objective end point.
The belief that there can be an objective science of subjectivity can be traced back to Wilhelm Dilthey, who in the 19th century made one of the earliest attempts to define a human science distinct from the natural sciences. His Geisteswissenschaften (science of the mind or soul) had the two central elements that we can see today in the standard practice of qualitative research.
16 - The Concrete Investigation of Constitution
- from Part III - Inquiry With An Emancipatory Interest
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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[T]his study asks, How is pugilistic intentionality, the “aboutness” of that particular form of skilled social action, practically constituted; what social ingredients enter into its manufacture; through what pedagogical techniques is it transmitted and validated; and what can its social genesis, inculcation, and unfolding teach us about the logic of any practice, and thereby about the vexed nexus of body, mind, and society?
Wacquant, 2005, p. 442This final chapter takes the next step, offering concrete advice about how to design and conduct the kind of research that I have recommended in the preceding chapters. Like the instructions given to Eduardo Kohn, my advice may at first seem opaque. Certainly, it is not separable from the preceding chapters; it represents suggestions for how to put into practice the abstract considerations of those chapters. These suggestions cannot be successfully applied without familiarity with those considerations.
I shall use as an illustration of the techne of this kind of research the investigation by Loïc Wacquant that I have already mentioned. Wacquant's research into the world of professional boxing, centered on a gymnasium in Chicago's South Side, offers an example of one way to align the components of qualitative research as a scientific study of the constitution of human beings.
It is important to reiterate that qualitative research is interpretation, through and through. It is not a Romantic hermeneutics that tries to penetrate to a hidden truth, but it is the kind of hermeneutics that operates “on the surface” of phenomena, articulating what is not usually noticed because it has been taken for granted.
We saw in Chapter 8 that interpretation is always organized by a “forestructure” (see Figure 16.1). In any research project, you will need (1) to gain access to the phenomenon you wish to study in its involvement within a whole situation (your fore-having). You will have (2) a question that arises from an interest, and this provides a perspective from which to engage the phenomenon and understand it (your fore-sight). You will also have (3) preconceptions that provide an interpretive framework (your fore-grasp). These constituents of the fore-structure organize (4) the understanding you obtain through practical involvement with the phenomenon. The character of this practical involvement takes different forms in ethnographic fieldwork, in the study of ontological work, and in interviews.
9 - The Crisis in Ethnography
- from Part II - Ethnographic Fieldwork – The Focus On Constitution
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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Ethnography has, perhaps, never been so popular within the social sciences. At the same time, its rationales have never been more subject to critical scrutiny and revision.
Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994, p. 249We can now return to those calls in the 1970s for a new approach to research in the social sciences, one that would escape dualism by adopting an ethnographic mode of investigation through “immersion” in a foreign form of life. We can see now that this approach has promise to the extent that it recognizes that practical activity operates prior to the separation of subject and object, of subjectivity and objectivity. The logic seems clear: if embodied practical activity is the locus of a constitution of both social order and the knowing subject, we need to study this activity in specific settings. The researcher ought to acquire a practical familiarity with the people and way of life being studied, and this can come only from participating in this way of life. Ethnographic fieldwork ought to be the way to go.
But over the past 20 years, cultural anthropologists have been debating and rethinking the character of ethnography, and right now there is little consensus about ethnographic investigation. The basic premise of anthropological ethnography has been that one lives among the people one wants to know, participates in their practices, observes what they do, and writes a summary report. But there are significant problems with this conception of ethnography, and these problems have led to a reexamination in cultural anthropology of the character of ethnographic fieldwork. In this chapter I will review this debate and see what conclusions we can draw about how ethnographic fieldwork should be conducted if it is to help us study constitution in a program of relevant qualitative research.
The central importance of ethnography comes from the recognition that our planet contains a rich variety of human forms of life and the conviction that to understand them one has to witness them firsthand “actually taking part in the activity together with the people involved in it” (Winch, 1956, p. 31; see Winch, 1958):
One of the chief tasks of the social scientist who wishes to understand a particular form of human activity in a given society will be … to understand the concepts involved in that activity.
List of Boxes
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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14 - Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics
- from Part III - Inquiry With An Emancipatory Interest
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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[The task] consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to language (langue) and to speech. It is this “more” that we must reveal and describe.
Foucault, 1969/1972, p. 49The third approach to critical inquiry we shall consider is that ofMichel Foucault (1926–1984). Foucault developed a form of critical inquiry that explored knowledge, power, and human being itself as products of history and culture. His work throws light on the central aspects that define a form of life, as well as how investigation itself always arises in a form of life. Foucault reversed Kant's critique: whereas Kant had claimed to show how seemingly contingent aspects of human experience, such as causality, are actually necessary and universal, Foucault aimed to show how apparent necessities are actually contingent. Unlike Habermas, he didn't view language as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental domain. Unlike Bourdieu, he didn't view science as a field that produces knowledge that can transcend its circumstances. Indeed, Foucault's historical critique was directed especially at the “universal truths” of the modern biological, psychological, and social sciences. These turn out, in his analysis, to be outcomes of contingent historical events. But we shall see that Foucault did not consider truth to be indistinguishable from opinion, politics to be merely the play of power, or ethical judgments to be culturally relative. Whereas Habermas focuses on individual know-that, on reflection and decision making, and Bourdieu emphasized know-how, the embodied knowledge of habitus, Foucault recognized both formal knowledge and informal practical know-how and explored the relationship between them, as well as their relation to the acting knower.
Foucault is sometimes described as a postmodernist and is sometimes accused of being antimodern. It is more accurate to say that all his work was motivated by the aim to understand how modern society operates. He was no more interested in telling a history of the failure of what he calls “our modernity” than in telling a history of its successes.
Part III - Inquiry With An Emancipatory Interest
- Martin J. Packer, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia
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Kant worked hard to resolve a contradiction that emerged from the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality: the contradiction between the new view of man as an individual, natural creature and the need for valid scientific knowledge and ethical conduct. How could objective knowledge and binding ethics be built from subjective experiences and preferences? Kant's proposal was that ideas are representations that the mind actively constructs using its innate capacity for universal reason. Mind constitutes reality as we know it. As a result, individuals can have indubitable knowledge of the world and be clear on their moral duties.
The empirical-analytic social sciences accepted this solution and defined their job as the objective study both of people's objective behavior and of their subjective beliefs, opinions, and desires. Qualitative research, when it is defined as the objective study of subjectivity, also accepts Kant's solution. But this solution operates at the epistemological level, while it presumes an ontological divide. It is torn in two by the dualisms of appearance and reality, subjective opinion and objective knowledge, foritself and in-itself.
In the face of these problems, some people began to ask, ‘What more?’ Their answers change our understanding of both the character and the location of constitution. They emphasize that practical activity is the origin of order and of subjects and objects. Constitution takes place in practical know-how before any theoretical or objective-seeming formal know-that. Knowledge – reason, logic, and so on – is a local accomplishment. Objects and subjects are formed in practical activity.
We can now understand better the calls for a new kind of interpretive research in the 1970s. These researchers wanted to study constitution, avoid dualism, focus on practices through immersion, and use hermeneutics. We have seen that the ontological approach to constitution does indeed offer a nondualistic account of humans and the world and emphasizes the primacy and importance of social practices. These practices provide a tacit knowhow on which all formal knowledge is based, and they involve ways of being. It seems reasonable that researchers have to obtain familiarity with social practices by participating in them, by becoming ‘immersed.’
Parts I and II of this book have explored two central ways of defining qualitative research, first as the objective study of subjectivity, centered around interviewing, and then as the participatory study of intersubjectivity, centered around ethnographic fieldwork.
References
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Subject Index
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1 - What Is Science?
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[T]he logical empiricists sold us an extraordinary bill of goods.
Taylor, 1980, p. 26Science is not hypothetico-deductive. It does have hypotheses, it does make deductions, it does test conjectures, but none of these determine the movement of theory.
Hacking, 1983, p. 144In an article titled “What drives scientific research in education?” Shavelson and Towne (2004) note that the debate over how to define social science has gone on for more than 100 years. They try to calm what have become politicized arguments by recommending that scientific inquiry should be defined not by a particular methodology but by a way of posing and answering questions. Summarizing the conclusions of a National Research Council (NRC) committee convened in 2001 by the National Educational Research Policies and Priorities Board, they recommend (see Table 1.1) that all scientific research, in both the natural and the social sciences, should pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically, should be linked to relevant theory, should use methods that permit direct investigation of the questions, should provide a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning to rule out counterinterpretations, should replicate and generalize findings across studies, and should disclose research data and methods to enable and encourage professional scrutiny and critique (see Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002; Shavelson & Towne, 2002). Overall, “It's the question – not the method – that should drive the design of education research or any other scientific research. That is, investigators ought to design a study to answer the question that they think is important, not fit the question to a convenient or popular design” (Shavelson & Towne, 2004).
These recommendations seem reasonable, and the effort to overcome competition among polarized camps seems admirable. However, the questionable assumptions that underlie their recommendations start to become evident when the NRC committee identifies three fundamental types of questions and the methods they consider most appropriate to answer them (see Table 1.2).
The three questions are (1) What's happening? (2) Is there a systematic (causal) effect? and (3) What is the causal mechanism, or how does it work? The committee judged that the first type of question is asking for a description, and they recommended that this should be provided by a survey, ethnographic methods, or a case study. The second type of question is asking whether X caused Y. Here the most desirable method is a randomized clinical trial.
The Science of Qualitative Research
- 2nd edition
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This updated and expanded edition is a unique examination of qualitative research in the social sciences, raising and answering the question of why we do this kind of investigation. Rather than providing instructions on how to conduct qualitative research, The Science of Qualitative Research explores the multiple roots of qualitative research - including phenomenology, hermeneutics, and critical theory - in order to diagnose the current state of the field and recommend an alternative. The author argues that much qualitative research today uses the mind-world dualism that is typical of traditional experimental investigation, and recommends that instead we focus on constitution: the relationship of mutual formation between a form of life and its members. Michel Foucault's program for 'a history ontology of ourselves' provides the basis for this fresh approach. The new edition features updated chapters, and a brand new chapter which offers a discussion on how to put into practice Foucault's concept.
11 - Qualitative Research as Critical Inquiry
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- The Science of Qualitative Research
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- 06 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 16 November 2017, pp 355-370
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Summary
Critical theory is a metaphor for a certain kind of theoretical orientation which owes its origin to Kant, Hegel and Marx, its systematization to Horkheimer and his associates at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, and its development to successors, particularly to the group led by Jürgen Habermas, who have sustained it under various redefinitions to the present day.
Rasmussen, 1996, p. 11The notion of critique takes us back once again to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and to Georg Hegel's response. We saw in Chapter 7 that Kant considered the primary task of philosophy – perhaps its only task – as critiquing knowledge rather than justifying it. He proposed a “critical philosophy” that would explore the conditions for the possibility of true knowledge. We have seen that for Kant these conditions were transcendental, universal, a priori concepts. Kant maintained that a universal capacity for reason provides the basis for each individual's “Enlightenment” (German: Aufklärung) because it can “free our concepts from the fetters of experience and from the limits of the mere contemplation of nature” (Kant, 1784/2000, p. 402):
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own intellect without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use itwithout the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! (Kant, 1784/2000, p. 401)
For Kant, enlightenment is something one achieves individually, and maturity amounts to independence and the ability to decide for oneself what is right and what is true.
Hegel took a different position, arguing that the conditions for knowledge are historical, so that enlightenment is a social process that depends on relationships and participation in community. In this chapter, I will explore what Marx did to the concepts of critique and enlightenment, and how the group of scholars known as the Frankfurt School built on his work to expose the irrationality lurking at the heart of Enlightenment rationality. But first it is important to mention one portion of Hegel's reconstruction of the development of consciousness that has received considerable attention: his account of the “master–slave” dialectic, the struggle between what he called “lord” and “bondsman.”