John K. Smith

Closing Down the Conversation: The End of the Quantitative-Qualitative Debate Among Educational Inquirers

The contention of this paper is that the claim of compatibility and the call for cooperation between quantitative and qualitative inquiry cannot be sustained. Moreover, these claims have the unfortunate effect of closing down an important conversation. To elaborate these points, this paper briefly reviews the transition from conflict to cooperation between the two perspectives and then notes how compatibility is based on a confusion over two different definitions of method. Finally, the discussion focuses on why this conversation, because it invokes issues crucial to our understanding of who we are and what we do as inquirers, must be reinvigorated.

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research: An Attempt to Clarify the Issue

This paper will describe points of disagreement between quantitative research and qualitative, or interpretive, research. After a brief historical overview, the discussion will focus on how each perspective responds to three major and closely related questions: (1) What is the relationship of the investigator to what is investigated? (2) What is the relationship between facts and values in the process of investigation? and (3) What is the goal of investigation? Educational researchers have recently devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to the issue of one method versus the other. Unfortunately, much of the discussion has tended to obfuscate

The Stories Educational Researchers Tell About Themselves

In 1990, in the pages of Educational Researcher, McKenna, Robinson, and Miller and Edelsky engaged in an intensely argued debate over the research on language instruction. In this article, I revisit this important exchange because it remains the most important starting point we have for an attempt to characterize and clarify what is behind the increasing fragmentation of the educational research community. My claim is that the balkanization of our profession is a result of people engaging different vocabularies to tell different stories about research and the work of researchers. In examining this claim, I also examine what happened with the different vocabularies used to discuss qualitative research over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, I end with a brief comment about what the proliferation of different vocabularies and different stories might mean for our profession.

Judging research quality: from certainty to contingency

In this article, I hope to stimulate dialogue and reflection among sport and exercise scientists about how one might judge qualitative research. Over the last 40 or so years, much has changed in how we go about sorting out the good from the not‐so‐good social and educational qualitative research. We have left/are leaving behind the idea of method as a universal, ahistorical criterion for judging research. Instead, it has become increasingly clear that our judgments always have been, and only can be, contingent on historical time and social/cultural/political place. In this article, I discuss this transition from both a philosophical and personal perspective. I conclude that the recent philosophical changes and an understanding of oneself as a person as researcher rather than a researcher as person makes it clear that all social and educational research, including the supposedly ‘scientific’ research, is a matter of telling stories. And when it comes to judging stories, as we are all aware, there are no and can be no, ‘fixed’ criteria. Thus, our judgments about what is good versus bad research are always contestable because our criteria change as we change and we change as our criteria change.

Interpretive inquiry: A practical and moral activity

Interpretive social and educational inquiry may be the most difficult to grasp of the various approaches to research that can be loosely gathered under the label qualitative. The reason for this is that interpretivists, drawing on the work of people such as Rorty (1979, 1982, 1989) and Bernstein (1976, 1983), have realized that it is time to step aside from, or go beyond, various issues that have long been central to most discussions about the nature and purpose of research. That is, they think it is time to drop our preoccupation with theories of knowledge, to abandon the philosophical doctrine of realism, to recast the major concepts of objectivity, subjectivity, and relativism in different terms, and to reassess the role of methodology in the research process (see, for example, Barone, 1990; Schwandt, 1989, 1990; Smith, 1989, 1990, in press). This major conceptual shift means that social and educational research is not scientific in the standard (i.e., empiricist or positivist) sense of the term. To the contrary, interpretivists see research as an eminently practical and moral activity that shares much in common with, or is continuous with, other forms of inquiry, such as those practiced by journalists, novelists, painters, poets, and ordinary people in their day-to-day lives. And, as an extension of this point, interpretivists think it is time to dispense with the long-standing claim that the knowledge

From Empiricism to Hermeneutics: Educational Leadership as a Practical and Moral Activity.

With the demise of the empiricist theory of knowledge and the increased prominence of postempiricist and hermeneutical perspectives, it is clear that various aspects of our social lives – including educational leadership – should no longer be thought of in terms of technological or instrumental rationality and technical expertise. Although the current philosophical ferment allows for different ways to rethink leadership, this article examines the implications of one school of thought – philosophical hermeneutics – for the research on, and especially the practice of, educational leadership. The central point is that this perspective, when interpreted in terms of how we think of ourselves as persons, results in a conceptualisation of leadership as a predominantly practical and moral activity.

Challenging Neorealism A Response to Hammersley

How researchers can go about judging, or adjudicating among, different knowledge claims recently has become a highly contested issue. In this response to Hammersley, we argue that he has not been able to justify his neorealist position that we can/must appeal to an independently existing reality, which can be known as it really is, to sort out our differences. To the contrary, we argue that we must accept relativism, not in the sense of “anything goes,” but in the sense that as human beings we are finite. As a result, any criteria we pose for judging knowledge claims always is, as it must be, the product of time and place contingent agreement.

The Evaluator/Researcher as Person vs. the Person as Evaluator/Researcher

This paper outlines two views of what it means to be a person and then discusses the relationship of these views to the issues of relativism and research methods. The contention is that relativism is an inevitable consequence of our interpretive or significance-making mode of being in the world. This is so for our daily lives and, because methodology is insufficient to allow us to transcend this mode of being, equally so for our professional lives. It is argued that what does not overly concern us at the former level, should likewise not concern us at the latter level.

Teacher Stress: A Descriptive Study of the Concerns.

Almost 57 percent of all teachers surveyed by these writers have seriously considered a career change. Other findings of their study are reported here.

Educational Leadership: A Moral and Practical Activity.

The idea that educational leaders possess scientific-technical expertise regard to the schooling process is a commonly held one, according to ese writers, who discuss why that otion must be abandoned.