Burying the Mantle and Taking Up the Craft

In her recent editorial, Lisa Given (2017) gives voice to many of the struggles faced by researchers identifying strongly with qualitative approaches. Many of the challenges she documents, all connected to a “general lack of awareness” of what makes qualitative methods unique, are especially applicable to graduate students. As a doctoral student, I have already seen these misunderstandings at play in my far shorter experience. They translate into well-written but unfunded scholarship proposals, tensions between students in seminars, and so on. As such, I preface the following reply by echoing her call for powerful and authoritative individuals to be further educated on interpretive and qualitative practices. This is especially important for my qualitatively inclined peers who are still establishing their scholarly identities. Academia is plenty challenging without the added exercise of constantly explaining one’s epistemological practices.

While I certainly agree with Dr. Given’s assessment of the institutional landscape, I respectfully part ways with her prescriptions for effecting change. While her editorial spoke to me in the above ways, it also stirred discomfort. Many of my peers and I have long been targets of recruitment strategies by professors identifying with either quantitative or qualitative approaches. In the first case, qualitative methods are framed as a nice add-on to quantitative studies but on their own amount to little more than investigative journalism. Likewise, I have witnessed the qualitatively inclined—professors and students alike—engage in what I like to call “stats bashing.” Stats bashing is the caricaturizing of social statistics as a flimsy and two-dimensional representation of the social world. I believe Dr. Given would disapprove of both types of narrow-minded rhetoric. But I also believe her comments encourage graduate students, in a much subtler way, to choose a side and “pick up the mantle” of the paradigm wars. Contrary to intentions of stopping the latter, they might, in fact, contribute to their elongation. I would like to draw some attention here to concepts that can help us to avoid donning antagonistic frames and move us toward an agenda of real mutualism between the two types of methods.

Dr. Given’s central prescription to both researchers and graduate students practicing qualitative methods is to “embrace the concept of ‘paradigm’ once more and use it to [their] advantage.” By attaching the word “qualitative” to the term “paradigm,” they can add epistemological weight to their corrections of positivist manuscript reviewers, ignorant colleagues, and so on. Throughout the article, Dr. Given uses terms such as “qualitative paradigm,” “nonqualitative researchers,” and “qualitative methodologist.” While infusing the word paradigm with the connotations of “qualitative” is a powerful defensive tactic, it also generates collateral damage by ossifying researchers’ identities vis-à-vis a binary of qualitative and quantitative. It conveys the message—especially to graduate students—that academic identities are fundamentally bound to one’s chosen methods.

Importantly, this practice can deprive so-called nonqualitative researchers of the riches that qualitative methods introduce to social research. Reflexivity, metacognition, how to effect social change, and creating colorful and fascinating texts are things that should be learned by all researchers. Nowakowski (1990) once made this point in The Paradigm Dialog. This kind of terminology communicates to graduate students that qualitative methods must dominate their professional lives to gain access to these strengths, which are applicable to all types of research. For this reason, among others, other methodologists have argued to keep the terms quantitative and qualitative away from the notion of paradigm (Pearce, 2015). Even critics of positivist mixed-methods research—which Dr. Given rightfully criticizes as bastardizing qualitative methods—have argued for this semantic arrangement. Giddings and Grant (2007, p. 57), for example, locate reflexive and critical methodological awareness as a property of human researchers, not of “the qualitative.” So, as important as it is for the qualitatively inclined to be aware of how methods fit into higher order philosophical concerns, our language should avoid suggesting this awareness is the exclusive property of qualitative methods and those who use them. It is important today for the quantitatively inclined (and the uncategorizable) to be equally reflexive and critical. Further, I believe this initiative starts with my generation of scholars who are still learning to locate themselves. We should try to avoid the use of binary labels like “(non)qualitative researchers,” which gives some students and professors alike a free pass to avoid important metaphysical concerns. Otherwise, we remain doomed to watching ships pass in the night.

Further, separating the human researcher from the qualitative/quantitative divide is important to avoid traditional views of what sustains the latter. While the two methods certainly differ in important respects, this does not mean we should accept qualitative or quantitative approaches as wholesale paradigms or silos that come with a set of defining traits. I fear that by speaking of a qualitative paradigm, this kind of thinking is promoted among graduate students still learning to navigate methodological terrain. One example of cross-pollination is reflexivity in quantitative studies, through which authors consider how their social positions influence the collection and analysis of numerical data (e.g., Walker, Read, & Priest, 2013). This might be adding an interpretive element to a quantitative study, but I would hesitate to say it adds a qualitative element. Such labels are confusing and can discourage newcomers from thinking creatively or attempt to start bridging the “abyss.”

This brings me to another issue in my reading of Dr. Given’s editorial. She laments that many researchers, under the guise of “mixing methods,” may attach an open-ended question to the end of a survey and convince themselves what they are doing is embracing the strengths of qualitative methods; or that qualitative methods are typically understood as a way of elaborating on more rigorous statistical models. She goes onto say that we need to abandon notions of mixing methods and instead discuss mixing paradigms to ensure the holistic integrity of metaphysical frameworks. I respect the frustration found in her subtext—for decades, many researchers pulled such stunts under misinformed variants of “pragmatism.” I would suggest, though, that researchers doing this in 2017 are grossly ignorant of current mixed-methods literature, which offers a suite of tools for what Dr. Given suggests when she says “mixing paradigms.” So while I agree with Dr. Given that ignorance is a major problem, I respectfully differ on how to best address that problem.

In my view, we should be careful not to discredit the fruitful conversations taking place in the contemporary mixed-methods community. Much bridge-building work is underway in this area, and I believe it can act as an important starting place for future scholars to bury the mantle now. It is therefore crucial that all researchers, especially novices, are not dissuaded from exploring those conversations; indeed, there has never been a better time for researchers of all backgrounds to explore this work. Over the past decade, extensive paradigmatic and methodological shifts have recognized the suffocating epistemological hegemony of “triangulation” and complementary strengths that caricaturized qualitative methods. Concepts like dialectical pluralism (Johnson & Schoonenboom, 2016) centralize and promote thoughtful and reflexive cross-paradigmatic conversations between scholars, a practice encouraged by Dr. Given. Likewise, the recently introduced idea of “data diffraction” recognizes that the ontological complexity borne of mixing methods should be explored and preserved rather than simplified to facilitate triangulation (Uprichard & Dawney, 2016). Such ideas privilege the fundamental differences between the two methods alongside their ability to support each other within a wide variety of paradigms. Certainly, much work still needs to be done. The takeaway here is that among this once-rigid community, several footholds now allow for diverse claims to knowledge production. Historical distrust should not deprive this community of the expertise offered by interpretivist experts.

I would like to conclude by offering a vocabulary of mutualism that captures my own position. Dr. Given concludes with the hope that “that we can move beyond the previous paradigm wars to embrace new ways of thinking and talking about our research, in the future.” Once again, I agree—almost anxiously so. As someone halfway through a doctoral program, I actively seek out opportunities to diversify my skillset for both creating knowledge and a job market that feels less welcoming with each passing week. However, I am unsure if I, and many of my peers, can afford to “learn a paradigm” if that paradigm requires identifying with and/or primarily using either quantitative or qualitative methods. I would rather think of learning and practicing research as a craft regardless of what method(s) are used in any one project. Organizational scholar Richard Daft (1983) argued more than 30 years ago that all researchers should don a “craft attitude” that embraced uncertainty and surprise, viewing research as a form of storytelling, understanding the importance/influence of colleagues on our work, and other attributes that speak to research as a process-oriented activity.

By advancing the notion of research as craft, I want to advocate for a perspective that sees the doing of research, irrespective of chosen method, as driven by methodological creativity and awareness. As an aspiring methodologist, I am inspired by uncategorizable studies such as that by Seltzer-Kelly, Westwood, and Peña-Guzman (2012) who, after finding an anomaly in inter-coder reliability, decided to explore the coding discrepancy through narrative rather than “correct” their quantitative study. They explicated that starting with quantitative methods gave them a reflexive entry point that qualitative methods alone could not have provided (p. 268). The fruits of such insights only grow, however, beyond the rigid walls of paradigmatic and methodological silos. I aspire to venture there, and invite my cohort—who are now beginning to find themselves in important positions—to do the same. Rather than conveying to graduate students that they can choose one of two paradigms from which to view all methods, we should be encouraged to resist taking sides and seek inspiration in smart, situated studies that begin to bridge the abyss. This is my own hope for 2017 and beyond.