Educational Researcher, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 14–23
“The polar categorization of research in terms of the quantitative–qualitative distinction contributes to promoting research that emphasizes a certain type of data collection and certain construction modes rather than focusing on the construction of good research questions and conducting of good research.” (p. 14)”Traditionally, quantitative research has as its goal to make claims about an entire population of cases on the basis of a subset of the population. The population most often consists of people (“Grade 8 students,” “African Americans”) but may also consist of events (Shaffer & Serlin, 2004). One can characterize this class of research, therefore, as making inferences of a certain type, from a sample of specimens to the entire population from which the specimens derive.” (p. 15)”The approach of qualitative studies is to produce thick descriptions and, depending on the researcher, to generate a hierarchy of categories that summarize these descriptions. Because such hierarchies of categories are more economical than the descriptions, they constitute a form of theory that describes only the situation observed. The theory initially
explains only the situation within which it is grounded. Some researchers only generate thick descriptions; others are more interested in the grounded theory. In this type of research, the level of inference is low. However, some level of interpretive inference is still required in order to bridge the gap between the sample of lived situation and the things that can be said about it.” (p. 15)”In education research, as in the dominant mode of Western thought more generally, quantity and quality are treated as two independent, dichotomous phenomena, as different kinds of things (thereby pertaining to ontology) and different forms of knowledge (thereby pertaining to epistemology). The adjectives “quantitative” and “qualitative” are used in education, for example, to portray two distinct and apparently incompatible approaches to doing research (e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985). But not
all scholars view quantity and quality as dichotomous entities. There are qualitative and quantitative differences in the world, even though, as radical constructivists rightly emphasize, we can never know what they really are. Nonetheless, they require qualitative
and quantitative equivalents in knowledge and understanding (e.g., Thom, 1981).” (p. 16)”Associated with the polarization of research into quantitative and qualitative is another, correlated polarization, according to which the former type of research is objective and the latter subjective. Although qualitative research is thought to be context based and the inclusion of the researcher’s subjective perspective enriches the quality of the research, quantitative research is considered to be objective and its judgments are expected to be replicable by other researchers. Even though these approaches to viewing the role of the researcher and the research activity seem very different, both types of research activities involve subjective judgments. In quantitative research, once the data are constructed, statistical methods constrain and define the types of inferences that can be made on the basis of the data. Yet there are many stages of the data construction that require subjective,” “defensible” judgments by the researcher (Ercikan & Roth, 2006).” (p. 17)”We suggest that rather than distinguishing research by means of a
dichotomous quantitative–qualitative dimension to locate different
forms of research on a continuous scale that goes from the (unreachable)
lived experience of people on one end (e.g., what doing
and learning mathematics feels like to girls and boys) to idealized
patterns of human experience (e.g., a significant correlation between
short-term storage space and mathematical ability), on the
other. Whereas previously, quantitative and qualitative constituted
(qualitatively) different categories of research, they are now
on the same scale and therefore only different by degree. The formerly
distinct forms of quantitative and qualitative research now
are located on different parts of the same scale, which is characterized
by low levels of inference on one end and high levels of inference
on the other end (see Figure 4).” (p. 20)”The purpose of research is to generate knowledge rather than to
concretely realize one method or another. Research methods are
means to answer knowledge-constitutive questions. We therefore
suggest that research questions, not method, ought to drive education
research. This call for research questions as drivers of research
is consistent with a report generated by a National Research
Council committee charged with addressing three related questions:
(a) What are the principles of scientific quality in education
research? (b) How can a federal research agency promote and
protect scientific quality in the education research it supports?
(c) How can research-based knowledge in education accumulate?
(Shavelson & Towne, 2002, p. 26). The report and various publications
arising from it emphasize that research questions should
drive the choice of research methods. The types of research questions
asked therefore depend on the stage of development in the
area of exploration.” (p. 21)
It’s just a draft. A messy one!