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Method A earned higher test scores than students who received Method B) are likely to apply to
the population.
The physical sciences have achieved prominence arnong the academic disciplines
because of their deinonstrated ability to discover highly generalizablelaws that explain
featurcs of physical reality. The social sciences and allied professional disciplines such as
education have not achieved the saine level of respect and authority because their ability to
discover general laws retnains in doubt. If one subscribes to the assumption of
postpositivist epistclnology that Incaning is elnbcdded in local, immediate contexts, it
folloxvs that generalizations about features of social reality necessarily will be difficult
and tentative. The positivist assumption or an objective, relatively constant social reality
leads to the more optimistic view that general laws governing social reality can be
discovered.
Quantitative thinking generated Inany inventions, including mechanical clocks that break
time into ticks of equal length; geometrically precise maps in which gridlines mark off
equal units of the earth's surface; double-entry bookkeeping in which goods and services
are represented as monetary units; and the use of algebraic notation to indicate known and
unknown quantities.
The analysis of reality into quanta is so embedded in contemporary society that- ive
take it for granted. The colnputcr. digital sound, and digitai video represent reality in the
simplest of quanta—Is and Os. Western capitalism depends on the capacity to create quan
titative representations of property. goods, and services. (Hernando De Soto found that
underdeveloped countries have an enormous amount of capital, but cannot access it because
they lack this capacity-31 ) Most research advances in the physical and social sciences that
we read about in the news involve the quantification of reality and mathematics, especially
statistical analysis. in education, too, Inuch of the research that is considered newsworthy
involves students• perfonuance on tests, which represent quantification of learning and
aptitude.
The use of quantification to represent and analyze features of social reality is consistent
with positivist epistemology. Because this epistemology assumes that features of
28. Crosby, A. W. (1997). The measure of realio•: Quantification and Western society. 1250—1600. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univel sit! Press.
29. Ibid.. p. 28.
30. Ibid.. p. 228.
31. De Soto. H. (2000). The ofcapital: capitalism triunzp/zs in the Illest and fails everyudzere else. New hOrk: Basic Books.
As applied to our example, Wartofsky's analysis raises the question of whether class size
and student off-task-behavior are features of the social environment that can be
quantified. but that are not particularly significant for understanding how classrooms
work and what makes them work well or poorly as arenas for instruction.
Postpositivist epistemology raises another concern about quantification. The
operational definition of class size as a count of the average number of students enrolled
in a class over the course of a school year assumes that values of this variable have the
same meaning across classrooms. Postpositivist researchers, however, would question
this assumption. Two teachers both may have 25 enrolled students. In Teacher A's class,
though, some of these students may have behavior disorders and may have been assigned
to the teacher without her consent. In Teacher B's class, all the students may be able
learners, whose presence in class the teacher welcomes. Thus, the number 25 has two
different meanings in these situations. For Teacher A, 25
represents an oppressive teaching situation, whereas for Teacher B, 25 represents a
comfortable teaching situation. If researchers conduct an investigation to determine
whether increases in class size make
instruction more difficult, they may be misled because a particular value of the
variable class size may not have the same meaning for the teachers in all the
classes having that value.
Postpositivist researchers attempt to avoid the created by quantification of
features of the social environment by focusing their investigations on the study of
individual cases and by making "thick" verbal descriptions of what they observe. If
possible, they also record events on videotape or audiotape, which preserve the events in a
fairly authentic Inanner for subsequent data analysis. The data analysis. too, is primarily
verbal rather than statistical. The researcher searches for just the right words to represent
the themes and patterns that she discovers in the data.
Analytic induction is involved in this process of discovery. Analytic induction means
that the researcher searches through the data bit by bit and then infers that certain events
or statements are instances of the same underlying theme or pattern. Thus, themes and
patterns are induced from the data. In contrast, a deductive approach would involve
identifying themes and patterns prior to data collection and then searching through the
data forinstances of them.
This verbal, visual, inductive approach corresponds to hon- people in general get to
know a person or a situation. In our society, we ask lots of questions (a verbal technique)
and get lots of answers (verbal data) in return. We also may take photographs or make a
videotape for later reflection. Later, if someone asks what the person or situation we
studied is like, we give a verbal description that attempts to be faithful to the original
situation. If we are describing a person, we may recount things she said and stories she
told about herself. If we have a photograph of the person, we may show it. As you will
find in Chapter 14, case study research in education uses similar r."aethods.
Though verbal and visual methods of representation and data analysis appear to
avoid the problems with quantification noted above, they have several drawbacks.
The words and form of speech that a researcher uses to interview an informant in
the field setting being studied may not have the same meaning for the informant as
for the researcher. Furthermore, one informant may use the same words as another
informant, but with different meanings. In addition, although language is highly
versatile. it may not represent all the important features of a social environment.
For example. some social science re- searchers have theorized that certain
important features of social life are invisible:
"What is happening here?" Inay seem a trivial question at first glance. It is not trivial since
everyday life is largely invisible to us (because of its familiarity and because of its
contradic(ions, which people may not want to face). We do not realize the patterns in our actions
as vee perform them. The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn illustrated this point with an
aphorism: "The fish would be the last creature to discover water."33
[f it is true that certain features o! the social environment are invisible to those
who.participate in it. then they. and the researcher as well, may lack the language to make
them visible. Mechanical, Interpretive, and Structural Views of Causation
Explanation is a major goal of scientific inquiry. As researchers, we want to know not only
what happened, but why. Also, we want to understand the consequences of alterations in the
social environment. That is, we want to understand the causal connections among social
phenomena. For example, what factors cause some students to do well in reading or others to
do poorly? 'What are the effects of learning to read well or poorly?
34. For a more complete explanation of scientific realism, see: House, E. R. (1991), Realism in research.
Educational
Researcher. 20(6), 2—9. 25.
structures that can interact to produce the observed eflect. The goal of inquiry. according to
scientific realists. is (0 discover how these causal structures work
As applied to education and other social science disciplines, scientific realisln
postulates that the real causes of human behavior are underlying causal structures.
Discovering what these structures are is difficult because they may or may not
have observable effects in particular situations. For example. suppose a teacher
thinks about how to react to a student who is inattentive. He considers various
alternatives and. in (he end, rejects (henn all- "There is no observable behavior
that tells the researcher what causal entities might have been at work. Examples of
possible entitieS might be: the teacher's decision-Inaking process in such
situations, the teacher's store of knowledge about consequences of past responses
to student inattention, the interpersonal dynarnics of this particular classroom, and
the teacher's knowledge of the student's home environrnenr and academic
performance- Each of these is a potential causal structure that can interact with the
other causal structures to produce an effect. Because of the complexity or possible
interactions, researchers will not be able to tnake precise predictions of human
behavior. They only will be able to determine trends and probabilities. The
various research traditions that have developed in qualitative inquiry
particularly well suited for discovering what these causal structures might be in
educa(ional environments. In fact. research traditions such as structuralism and
cognitive psychology (both discussed in Chapter 15) make explicit reference to
structures that underlie behavior and influence it.
To sununarize. positivist epistemology assumes a mechanistic causality among social
"objects." Postpositivist episternology assumes that individuals' interpretations of
situalions cause them to take certain actions. Scientific realism assumes that there are
multiple layers of causal •structures. which are real objects that in teract with each other
to cause people to take certain actions or, in some cases, to take no action.