Qualitative Research, Power, and the Radical Right

Abstract

Recent legislative and executive orders that mandate preferred methods for evaluating the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 signal a much larger movement in the social sciences.Attacks stemming from the "culture wars" of the 1990s have spread to forms of research labeled "unscientific," including postmodern research and qualitative research. Examination of the sources of the attacks reveals a wide network of new and recent foundations with decidedly right-wing political views, the establishment and growing power of the National Association of Scholars, and other well-funded efforts to discredit research that uncovers and exposes deep inequities in social life and schooling on gender, race, social class, religion, and/or sexual orientation. Each of these well-funded sources of attack is discussed and the agenda of each is dissected.Qualitative researchers have long grown accustomed to answering for the kinds of research they produce to a variety of audiences: experimental researchers, philosophical positivists and postpositivists, statisticians, and others, many of whom simply do not understand the purposes, practices, products, or methods of qualitative research. This is not difficult to understand, as many senior researchers were never exposed to qualitative research training in graduate school, had few models to study, and have established for themselves strong reputations using conventional research methods and models. In the same vein, the attachment of educational research to earlier psychological models, which in the beginning of the 20th century adopted behaviorism from the natural sciences, creates a social infrastructure that precludes easy acceptance of a-experimental, qualitative, or any nonconventional paradigms or methods for research. We all continue to have colleagues who believe that the purpose of qualitative research is to provide information for future quantitative studies-who confuse inference and generalizability with constructs such as trustworthiness or credibility-who will go to their 175 Downloaded from graves claiming that cultural studies research in education is not research while at the same time accepting ethnography.However, despite the strong social norms surrounding rationalistic (or conventional) research, educational researchers have won for themselves a mature and sophisticated multiparadigmatic social context and the freedom to engage in research using a variety of models and methods. The result has been a rich, multiperspectival body of research, illuminating aspects of educational processes previously unseen or unremarked or deemed unable to be investigated.This multiparadigmatic condition has not yet penetrated all fields represented in academia, although some fear that it will happen. Wilson's (1999) beliefs are an excellent example, as he posited that "identity politics, radical feminism, multiculturalism, educating for difference, postmodernism and deconstruction" are destroying the university (p. 15). Research that has opened the door to different ways of experiencing, v...

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