Robert Donmoyer

Data as Drama: Reflections on the Use of Readers Theater as a Mode of Qualitative Data Display

This article focuses on using readers theater for the purpose of qualitative data display. The article describes what readers theater is and differentiates this approach from more conventional forms of theater. The article also uses a recent attempt to present data in a readers theater context to ground discussions of (a) the procedures used to convert qualitative data into a readers theater display format and (b) the advantages and disadvantages of displaying data in the context of a readers theater production.

Take my paradigm … please! The legacy of Kuhn’s construct in educational research

Thomas Kuhn developed the construct of research paradigms to make sense of the history of conceptual change in the physical sciences. The construct has since been appropriated by a number of academic fields and by non‐academics as well. This paper traces the use of the construct in the educational research field. The bulk of the paper is organized around two questions: (a) Was it ever appropriate to characterize the educational research field’s acceptance of qualitative methods as equivalent to one of Kuhn’s paradigm revolutions? (b) Is paradigm talk appropriate today?

Reconsidering the Utility of Case Study Designs for Researching School Reform in a Neo-Scientific Era: Insights from a Multiyear, Mixed-Methods Study.

In recent years, policy makers and researchers once again have embraced the traditional idea that quasi-experimental research designs (or reasonable facsimiles) can provide the sort of valid and generalizable knowledge about “what works” that educational researchers had promised—but never really produced—during the previous century. Although critics have challenged this thinking, to date most critiques have been more epistemological than methodological.The purpose of this article is to critique neo-scientific thinking about case study methods. In the process of doing this, the article also provides a more general, methodologically oriented critique of neo-scientific thought. The authors use a mixed-method, multiyear study of a reform initiative to keep their discussion tethered to relatively concrete methodological concerns.

Evers and Lakomski’s search for leadership’s holy grail (and the intriguing ideas they encountered along the way)

Critiques the 15‐year research program of Colin W. Evers and Gabriele Lakomski. Significant contributions are highlighted and the significance of each of the highlighted contributions is discussed, since apparent problems with Evers and Lakomski’s substantive contributions to the field are also considered. In addition, critiques Evers and Lakomski’s discipline‐like way of working, which is oriented toward constructing the most inclusive and parsimonious theory that can be developed to make sense of educational administration practice. This disciplinary orientation is judged to be problematic, because, it is argued, educational administration is best conceptualized as a public policy field rather than as an academic discipline. The implications of the public policy field conceptualization are explored and this discussion is used further to highlight positive and problematic features of Evers and Lakomski’s research program.

Can Qualitative Researchers Answer Policymakers' What-Works Question?.

The article asks whether constructivist qualitative researchers have anything to offer policymakers who expect researchers to tell them what works. The first part of the article addresses philosophical objections to characterizing the social world in cause/effect terms. Specifically, it considers whether it is legitimate for qualitative researchers who claim to be employing a constructivist research paradigm to even attempt to provide the sort of simplified causal explanations that policy makers normally expect. The second part of the article takes a more empirical tack by focusing on three recent evaluation studies in which funders wanted to learn what types of programs they should support to produce desired results. The underlying question in this part of the article is pragmatic: Even if there is no paradigmatic prohibition against attempting to answer policymakers’ what-works question, are constructivist qualitative researchers able to answer policymakers’ bottom-line question in a defensible way?

The Search for Connections across Principal Preparation, Principal Performance, and Student Achievement in an Exemplary Principal Preparation Program.

Critics complain that the educational leadership researchers have not produced evidence that demonstrates that principal preparation programs affect student achievement. This study addressed this complaint by focusing on the impact of one exemplary program on graduates and the schools they led. The preponderance-of-evidence strategy used in this qualitatively driven mixed-methods study uncovered apparent linkages between student achievement, principal behavior, and the principals’ preparation program. One finding suggested that the program’s cohort design produced lagged-socialization effects after the actual program ended. The study also demonstrated that, because of inevitable selection effects, answering impact questions is much more difficult than critics assume.

Two (Very) Different Worlds The Cultures of Policymaking and Qualitative Research

This article brackets assumptions embedded in the framing of this special issue on “problematizing methodological simplicity in qualitative research” in a effort to understand why policymakers put pressure on all types of researchers, including those who use qualitative methods, to provide relatively simple, even somewhat mechanistic portrayals of social life. The article employs an auto-ethnographic approach to demonstrate that simplified thinking is a virtual prerequisite for making policy. The article also demonstrates that qualitative researchers normally have a diametrically opposed view of simplification, but that this view is not necessarily shared by other academics. These other academics, consequently, are likely to have a greater impact on policymakers. The article concludes with an account of how the article’s author, who was attracted to qualitative methods because they promised to accommodate the complexity of social life, has attempted to influence policymakers and the policymaking process without completing losing his methodological soul.

Attributing Causality in Qualitative Research Viable Option or Inappropriate Aspiration? An Introduction to a Collection of Papers

This brief article sets the stage for the three articles about causality and qualitative research by Maxwell, Donmoyer, and Anderson & Scott (as well as Erickson’s critique of these articles) that follow by placing the debate about causality in qualitative research in an historical context. This article notes that the use of qualitative methods historically often was justified by claims that qualitative methods represented a new and radically different paradigm, a paradigm that, among other things, rejected the notion that social phenomena could be described or explained in cause and effect terms. This article suggests that the paradigm talk of the past should not be dismissed cavalierly since all empirical research is framed and, therefore, influenced by the a priori assumptions of the researcher (and the particular research community that has socialized the researcher). However, the article also suggests that earlier thinking about paradigms and qualitative methods—and, more specifically, thinking that unequivocally dismisses the possibility of causal explanations in qualitative research—needs to be reconsidered. This reconsideration, of course, is what the papers that follow do, albeit in quite different ways.

Researching Leadership for Social Justice: Are Some Methods Better than Others?

This chapter links a concern with social justice, in general, and leadership for social justice, in particular, with choices about research methodology. The first part of the chapter demonstrates how the methodological debate about qualitative and quantitative research that occurred in the United States during the final three decades of the twentieth century helped keep a concern for promoting social justice front and center in the field of education. Specific benefits of both the qualitative research that these debates legitimated and the thinking that was used to legitimate the use of qualitative methods are also discussed.

Elliot Eisner’s Lost Legacy

Because of Elliot Eisner’s recent passing, it seems appropriate to note that he actually began his signature work on arts-based research by writing about program evaluation. This article revisits Eisner’s evaluation ideas and briefly considers why Eisner’s thinking about evaluation has had a relatively limited long-term impact on the evaluation field. The article also demonstrates that at least some of Eisner’s arts-based strategies can be effective evaluation tools when certain modifications are made and that Eisner’s thinking is important even for evaluators who are not inclined to use techniques and strategies associated with the arts.