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| **Research Challenges** | |
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| Research design can be defined as a process of creating an empirical test to support or refute a knowledge claim. Two tests of knowledge claims exist in the postpositivist paradigm: (a) Is the knowledge claim true in this situation (does it have internal validity)? (b) Is the knowledge claim true in other situations (does it have external validity or generalizability)? (p.126) | |
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| Mertens’ (2015) first task was to discuss different types of threats to the validity of experimental and quasi-experimental research. There can be threats to each type of research either internally or externally, or even both. Internal validity refers to the truth of the experiment in and of itself while external validity refers to whether or not the experiment can represent situations beyond the experiment itself. | |
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| Validity is paramount to any form of research and educators must be aware of threats to both of its forms. Whether an educator chooses single-group, experimental, or quasi-experimental designs for his or her research, they must still assess its validity. Within each design, one finds different weaknesses and different strengths, i.e., “threats to validity” (Mertens, 2015, p.129). | |
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| Single-group designs have no control group and therefore “you [educators] are limited in your ability to claim the effectiveness of your treatment” (Mertens, 2015, p.138). Experimental designs remove this difficulty by providing a control group, but some can be quite cumbersome, e.g., “factorial design” (Mertens, 2015, p.144). Quasi-experimental designs do utilize a control group but they contain “intact groups” instead of randomized participants. | |
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| No doubt you appreciated the rather brief and clear synopsis of the first twenty-three pages. I’m sure this will allow you to understand exactly what I found to be the most interesting part of the chapter, namely, “challenges to using experimental designs in educational and psychological research” (Mertens, 2015, p.149). Let me now share some of the intellectual nuggets from researchers that Mertens refers to in the closing section. | |
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| Feminism and feminist challenges to experimental and quasi-experimental research. Permit me to share these nuggets and allow you to make your own conclusions. In Comment: “Science” Rejects Postmodernism, St. Pierre (2002) makes her intentions clear and states “this author urges researchers to be on guard against those who would reject diverse epistemologies and methodologies in educational research” (St. Pierre, 2010, p.25). | |
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| St. Pierre (2002) continues with her scathing critique writing “The very dangerous claim that is made here is that a single epistemology governs all science. With this not-so-subtle Hegelian appropriation, Difference is assimilated into the Same.” If it was not clear she emphasizes that “The NRC report should scare us all to death” (St. Pierre, 2002, p.27). | |
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| St. Pierre (2002) concludes “This latest attempt to marginalize certain epistemologies and methodologies in order to discipline and control science, to reduce it, to center it, cannot go unanswered. Fortunately, post modernism is firmly entrenched in educational research.” St. Pierre (2002) makes no bones about her anti-take on the matter, “science does not obstruct but enables the proliferation of knowledge.” | |
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| And that was just one of the scholarly articles that Mertens referred to by St. Pierre. In Poststructural feminism in education: An overview, St. Pierre (2000) notes | |
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| Since man first began to believe that he, as well as God, could, through the proper use of reason, produce truth and knowledge, humanism has spawned a variety of knowledge projects. It has, in fact, been used by liberals, Nazis, feminists, Marxists, Christians, Catholics and other groups in the production of truth. (p.478) | |
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| That’s just one of the authors that Mertens cited who challenges experimental and quasi-experimental research. How about another? Let’s consider Lather (2004), in This IS Your Father’s Paradigm: Government intrusion and the case of qualitative research in education, who exclaims: | |
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| But over the last year or so, I have found myself sucked into an alphabet soup of OERI, NRC, DOE, NSF, Senate Subcommittees on this or that, even something dubbed “web scubbing” where the U.S. Department of Education is deleting research, including ERIC digests, that it deems unsupportive of Bush administrative agendas. (p.15). | |
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| Or, to be a little more erudite about it all, Lather (2004) settles down to say “This paper is an effort to make sense of the Federal government’s incursion into legislating scientific method in the realm of educational research via the ‘evidence-based’ movement of the last few years.” Even more exciting than her research is her description of the in fighting in the research community, which she chooses to call “Science Wars” (Lather, 2004, 15). | |
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| Naturally, no discussion about feminism and challenges to research would be complete without some politics, so Lather (2004) relates rather surreptitiously how “It is of particular interest how conservative think tanks have ratcheted up their focus on education issues since the late 1980’s and how entrepreneurial interests are at work.” She goes on a little later to say it outright, “It appears that science, money and politics have combined” (Lather, 2004, p.21) | |
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| And Dr. Lather also talks about language itself and responds to feminists who call for overtly plain publications to reach a wider audience, and in Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language, states “what might come of encouraging a plurality of discourses and forms and levels of writing in a way that refuses the binary between so-called ‘plain-speaking’ and complex writing?” (Lather, 2004, p.528). Hmmmm … the challenge to research is also a challenge to academic language and elitism. | |
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| I was at first unsure as to whether she finally agreed on writing plainly or not until I arrived at her most turgid conclusion “Rather than resolution, our task is to live out the ambivalent limits of research as we move toward something more productive of an enabling violation of its disciplining effects” (Lather, 2004, p.541). Forgive me … but what the heck does that mean? And who knew that feminists were busy arguing about academic language for the last twenty years. Amazing. Count me in … | |
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| I find myself extending the concept of challenge so much that perhaps I entered the arena of a digression. But perhaps not because in reading this piece from above I was inspired to find other works of hers, e.g., Critical Frames in Educational Research: Feminist and Post-structural Perspectives, where she first began to earn some dirty notoriety. The first line reminded me of what my mother – also a feminist – always said, “my sense of career ‘choice’ [as a woman] included nursing and teaching.” Now I get the challenge. Amen to that false binary. | |
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| Wow … the challenges are sincerely felt. Lather (1992) explains “This article explores how qualitative and feminist inquiry are reconfiguring educational research.” A little later she slips in this nugget of wisdom, “My argument here is not so much against such practices [i.e., quantitative research] as it is to their hegemonic status in the doing of social science, their status as ‘the’ scientific method” (Lather, 1992, p.89) | |
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| I wonder what Gloria Steinem, Camille Paglia, and Patti Lather would talk about if I hosted a symposium? … I digress again. Dr. Scott-Jones was another cited author who challenged the ethics of experimental research in Ethical Issues in Reporting and Referring in Research With Low-Income Children. Scott-Jones (1993) noted that “Perceptions of the research enterprise among racial and ethnic minority and low-income populations are important. Because of the role they have played in research, members of minority and low-income communities may be wary of psychological research” (Scott-Jones, 1993, p.106). | |
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| Scott-Jones (1993) did not however go as far as Lather and St. Pierre and instead concluded that “Research should not be divorced from programs of action for low-income and minority populations (see Willie, 1983), although the standard treatment – control intervention design needs to be reconceptualized” (Scott-Jones, 1993, p.106). I wonder how far Scott-Jones would take this, however, and it brings to mind Mark and Gamble (2009) who actually proposed “payment for participation” in research as a quality of culturally sensitive ethics (as cited in Mertens 2015). I’m not sure about that. | |
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| Well, no journey into challenges to experimental and quasi-experimental research would be complete without some effort being put into what those on the other side are saying. In Objecting to the Objections in Using Random Assignment in Educational Research, Cook & Payne (2002) argue against oversimplified challenges stating: | |
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| This epistemological critique is overly simplistic. Even if observations are never theory-neutral, this does not deny that many observations have stubbornly reoccurred, whatever the researcher’s predilections. As theories replace each other, most fact-like statements from the older theory are incorporated into the newer one, surviving the change in theoretical superstructure. (p.155) | |
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| I focused on challenges to experimental and quasi-experimental research design, and tried to narrow in on four authors that the source text proposed as feminist challenges to the aforesaid design. Reading the references of those authors helped me find the ‘backlash against the backlash,’ notably Mosteller & Boruch (2002), editors of Evidence Matters: Randomized Trials in Education Research. Overall, I have concluded this is a highly complex and I refrain from judgment at present. How about you? | |
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| --- //[[netcmnd@jonathanhaack.com|oemb1905]] 2017/05/16 01:18// | |
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