Module 1 - Qualitative Research Field Journal

I'm waiting anxiously for the second of my text books to arrive in the mail - Chapters said it was shipped on December 12th ... should be here.  In the meantime, I've focused my reading on the Willis book - chapter one this week, looking at paradigms, qualitative versus quantitative research, and the differences between the two.  I think that I need to make a huge map to lay out all of the terms and see how they are interrelated - what is a subset of what.  It was interesting to read that qualitative research could be construed as a derivative of quantitative research (p. 7  Valsiner article).  I appreciated the clear description of the differences between the two with the main distinguishing factor being the paradigms on which they are based, or world views,  rather than the method of data collection per se (i.e. quantitative research doesn't necessarily mean 'numbers as data' and qualitative doesn't necessarily exclude numbers as data).  The terms Qualitative and Quantitative are used to describe two different world views or paradigms for research.  "The major difference between these approaches is not the type of data collected.  It is the foundational assumptions, the givens that are assumed to be true" (Willis, 2997, p. 7). 


 Three major research paradigms are introduced:

• Postpostivism (positivism) - scientific method, empirical research
• Critical theory - interpreted through an ideology; against social injustice, purpose is emancipation?
• Interpretivism - response to positivism and empiricism - social research - most interpretivists are relativists rather thean idealists - would argue that "wwhta science "takes" to be a universally enframing account of knowledge of the world is always, in fact, located within an institutional and socio-culturally determined community" (p. 50); "methodology is only ever neutral insofar as it conforms to the world-view of the community which develops it" (p. 51). "Our expereinces, our tools such as language, and our culture are filters that shape and help define the reality that we construct" (Every, 1998 - p. 51, Willis text).

Descriptions of Ontology and Epistemology are also given - which are two major aspects of a branch of philosophy called Metaphysics.  As noted on p. 9, metaphysics is concerned with two fundamental questions:  'What are the characteristics of things that exist?  and 'How can we know the things that exist?' Metaphysics - deals with how we describe reality.  Okay, now to get the definitions of ontology and epistemology straight:
Ontology - deals with the nature of reality (or being or existence) - materialistic ontological position (all that is real is the physical or material world) and idealistic ontological position (idealism - reality is mental and spiritual rather than material), metaphysical subjectivism (perception, what we perceive through our senses, creates reality and there is no other reality than what is in our heads)- reflect different prescriptions of what can be real and what cannot.  Reality

Epistemology - deals with what it means to know - is concerned with what we can know about reality and how we can know it. Knowledge


Interesting terms/Researchers:

Phronesis: practical wisdom (Aristotle)
Donald Schon - advocate of reflective practice - reflection in action, reflection on action
Interpretivism:  rejects the positivist idea that the same research methods can be used to study human behavior as are successfully used in fields such as chemistry and physics - humans are also influenced by their subjective perception of their environment -- their subjective realities.  For interpretivists, what the world means to the person or group being studied is critically important to good research in the social sciences.
Paradigm: a comprehensive belief system, world view, or framework that guides research and practice in a field
Dualism:  material and mental entities exist (Descartes)