Dissolving Dualisms: How Two Positivists Engaged with Non-Positivist Qualitative Methodology

Abstract

This is the story of how a chemical engineer and a medical microbiologist overcame their positivist training and deeply held disciplinary attitudes to engage with non-positivist qualitative methodology. Through a series of facilitated reflections they explored what helped and hindered their transition from positivist to non-positivist inquiry. To move forward they needed to acknowledge the extent and nature of the transition they were making, find metaphors to dissolve troubling dualisms, and balance a desire to reach out to others with the need to manage the very real sense of vulnerability that came with embracing subjectivity. Their experiences suggest that pragmatism may be a useful bridging framework for the growing number of academics from the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines turning to qualitative methodologists for help to move beyond positivist research.

Conflicts and Configurations in a Liminal Space: SoTL Scholars' Identity Development

“…Socialisation into a discipline or community of practice (Wenger, 1998) can provide the type of unambiguous, supportive, and highly salient identity scripts on which it is easy for academics to draw. Engagement with SoTL, however, oft en means these identity scripts are challenged as we negotiate a new language for interdisciplinary communication, navigate alien epistemologies, methodologies, and concepts or take on a whole new way of looking at the world (Kelly, Nesbit, & Oliver, 2012;Oliver, Nesbit, & Kelly, 2013). Yet a SoTL identity may also be hard to access because deconstructing one's own teaching, wandering outside the sphere of disciplinary expertise, or operating in conditions in which SoTL is devalued can bring uncertainty and a loss of status and may not immediately fit with how we see ourselves.…”

Title: Playing Telephone: Understanding the state of medication decision making in growing healthcare teams in the time of electronic health records (Preprint)

“…We took a pragmatic stance recognizing that constructivist view of truth can be tempered with the need to conduct research that informs health care decision making. 13 Our analysis was guided by the framework analysis method that provides both a systemic and flexible approach to multi-disciplinary data analysis. 14 We conducted interviews in community pharmacies and primary care clinics.…”

Some Epistemological Groundwork for a Qualitative Analysis of a Communication Community of Practice

“…As Jonte Bernhard and Caroline Bailie observe, researchers tend to question the value of qualitative approaches to research in engineering education (EER) because of a lack of standards by which to evaluate such approaches [1][2] [6] [9]. This lack of standards for assessing qualitative approaches is to some extent a reflection of the situation within qualitative research; as Mirka Koro-Ljungberg and Elliot Douglas observe in a 2008 study, many qualitative studies found in the Engineering Education Research literature lack careful reflection on their methodology, and rely on inconsistent epistemological assumptions [7].…”

“…As scholars in humanities, we are used to evaluating knowledge claims based on qualitative research, yet pursuing our research in a college that traditionally requires knowledge claims to be evaluated through quantitative research prompted us to reflect carefully on the epistemological foundations of qualitative research and consider how these foundations determine and constrain our procedural choices. While there is indeed a fair degree of diversity (and disparity) in qualitative studies (and, to be fair, quantitative studies to a certain extent as well), a lack of clear standards is not the only factor in the hesitancy of engineering faculty to recognize the value of qualitative approaches; the professional identity of engineering faculty naturally encourages allegiance to particular types of inquiry: "Quantitative methodologies, large samples, precise parameters, and the elimination of confounding variables are still the hallmarks of rigorous research in most science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines" [9]. In spite of the tendency to favour quantitative research and maintain reservations about qualitative research, researchers with STEM backgrounds are beginning to see the need for research in engineering education that can explore the "highly complex social interactions" that learning requires [9].…”

“…While there is indeed a fair degree of diversity (and disparity) in qualitative studies (and, to be fair, quantitative studies to a certain extent as well), a lack of clear standards is not the only factor in the hesitancy of engineering faculty to recognize the value of qualitative approaches; the professional identity of engineering faculty naturally encourages allegiance to particular types of inquiry: "Quantitative methodologies, large samples, precise parameters, and the elimination of confounding variables are still the hallmarks of rigorous research in most science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines" [9]. In spite of the tendency to favour quantitative research and maintain reservations about qualitative research, researchers with STEM backgrounds are beginning to see the need for research in engineering education that can explore the "highly complex social interactions" that learning requires [9]. Because of this tendency to distrust qualitative research, whether because of it's perceived epistemological and methodological inconsistencies or the tendency of the audience to discount the evidence it presents, qualitative researchers such as Donald E. Polkinghorne assert that we must examine our epistemological and methodological assumptions in order to persuade an audience of the validity of narrative research (11).…”