International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

Vol. 21, No. 6, November–December 2008, 551–553

How to be an inspired qualitative methodologist: learning from Egon

Guba and his work

When the Qualitative Studies in Education editors included me in their invitation to

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10.1080/09518390802489014
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jude@uga.edu
JudithPreissle
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Journal of Qualitative
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Studies in Education

contribute a reflection on Egon Guba, as a scholar who either knew him or was influenced
by his work in qualitative research, I was pleased to be asked. I have enjoyed sorting out
recollections of Egon and sifting through how he, together with Yvonna Lincoln of course,
has affected my own practice of qualitative research methods and design. This has
provided me an instructive journey through Egon’s oeuvre (see attached bibliography) and
an illuminating reconsideration of my own orientations over the years. My goal for this
piece is to focus on the Guba work rather than my own, but these contributions must
inevitably be memoirs rather than biographies – accounts of our experiences with Egon
Guba and his scholarship.
In the four years from 1971 to 1975 that I was a doctoral student at Indiana University
(IU), I never met Professor Guba. Everyone I studied with knew him and respected his
contributions to education, but the Guba reputation I learned about was lodged in evalua-
tion, educational change, and leadership. Recruited to IU with the promise of being able to
tailor a program for myself in educational anthropology, I had settled into working with
Judith Friedman Hansen in anthropology and Dorothy J. Skeel in elementary social studies
education. They helped me fashion and complete a microethnography of a third-grade
classroom in a rural Indiana elementary school, and my focus, in contrast, was description,
educational continuity, and children. None of these led me to seek out Egon Guba at that
time, and the loss was undoubtedly my own.
Taking a position in 1975 at the University of Georgia where I still work, I taught
elementary and early childhood social studies methods while building the qualitative
research program here and also contributing to our social foundations of education program.
For my first qualitative research course in 1976 I relied on ethnographic sources in cultural
anthropology and on qualitative sociologists: anthropologists James Spradley, Harry
Wolcott, and Jacquetta Hill Burnett and sociologists Norman Denzin, John Lofland, and
Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss. Little material was available at that time on qualitative
methods and design in education. My syllabus for the course specified that students were
‘expected to distinguish between normative and interpretive paradigms of scientific
inquiry,’ and I struggled with those binaries because of my difficulties in locating examples
of competent qualitative research in education and other fields that clearly fit one or the
other. The qualitative studies actually done seemed all muddled to me, framed partly in
interpretive and partly in normative assumptions.
What inspired many of us around the world in the 1970s and 1980s was the handful of
scholars in education who spoke to the void on qualitative research and design in the educa-
tional literature and who were unafraid to muddle in the muddles, so to speak. In 1980 I
happened on Egon Guba’s paper presented at the American Educational Research Associa-
tion, Naturalistic and Conventional Inquiry. The paper contrasted Egon’s postulations of

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552 J. Preissle

the scientific and naturalistic paradigms for generating knowledge, and it considered the
kinds of problems each paradigm was best suited to address and what he believed to be the
unexamined associations between qualitative and quantitative methods and these two
epistemologies. He referred in this paper to his 1978 essay Toward a Methodology of
Naturalistic Inquiry in Educational Evaluation, and I began to see the 1978 piece cited quite
a bit. Eventually and belatedly I got round to asking him for a copy of it. I quote his
response, dated 1 October 1984, in full because I believe it represents some essential
qualities of Egon’s deportment:

I’m sorry that I cannot comply with your request for a copy of the monograph, Toward a
Methodology … , which is available only from the Center for the Study of Evaluation at
UCLA. As a matter of fact, I doubt very much whether it is still in print. In all events, I would
at this moment not recommend that document to anyone – I have changed my mind (and I
hope, improved it) on many things I said there. For me it has historical interest only.

My wife Yvonna Lincoln and I recently sent the MS for our forthcoming book to Sage, who
should have it on the streets before much longer. May I suggest you have a look at it when it’s
available? Our ideas are much more fully developed there.

Thanks for your interest.

P.S. Please excuse the typos. My secretary’s pregnancy came to term before she or anyone else
expected it, and I am temporarily without clerical help. What you get here is my own effort at
typing – and I’m not that good at it.

I have not reproduced the typos from that type-written, not word-processed, letter
because Egon took the time to meticulously correct each of them by hand. His letter
indicated to me a kindness in responding to others and a careful attention to detail. Most
importantly he modeled what I have come to believe to be a crucial attribute of sound
scholarship – learning from thinking, doing, and engaging in research. This same quality is
evident in the attached bibliography of his publications and presentations. Browsing
through some of these materials, I found similar statements in his published materials
about coming to different views, positions, and assessments.
Having been an undergraduate history major, I did seek out the 1978 monograph for
historical as well as methodological interest, and I believe it deserves the interest it generated
in the educational and evaluation research community at that time and that it continues to
contribute to ongoing discussions about conceptualizing design. The newer publication Egon
mentioned in the 1984 letter is undoubtedly the now classic text with Yvonna Lincoln,
Naturalistic Inquiry, published early the following year.
What is also striking about the 1984 letter is Egon’s candor, another crucial element in
effective scholarship. He said what he thought about his previous work, whether to someone
in a personal letter or to others in a public forum. Here he is, responding to how Elaine
Lindheim characterized his views on evaluation:

Lindheim’s analysis has helped me see where I was 10 years ago. (Guba 1979b, 139)

I grant that Lindheim did an excellent job of reconstructing me as I probably was a decade ago
(in fact, probably a better job than I could have done, since she had the advantage in this case
of complete objectivity), however, that reconstruction does not reflect my 1978 posture. … I
would hope that these changes come as something of a surprise, but not totally so. It should
not, after all, be so surprising that my thinking has changed a bit over 10 years. Consistency, it
is said, is the hobgoblin of small minds. We all reserve the right to change our minds.
Hopefully, in this case, it is because my thinking has matured. (Guba 1979b, 140)
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 553

This passage also reveals some of Egon’s impish humor, another quality that enriches our
scholarship. In 1986 he invited me to be the discussant for a symposium he had organized
for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. That may have
been the first time I spoke with him face to face. I was taken aback at first by one of his
comments. I had characterized my own work as philosophically eclectic, as is much schol-
arship by US anthropologists. He responded that someone would have to be schizophrenic
to be able to operate from more than one paradigm – that is the point of paradigms, that we
are so deeply framed by them that we cannot operate outside them. Or maybe he just said I
must be schizophrenic. So these days I tell my students to try some schizie thinking when
they get stuck or especially when they get too certain. Given Egon’s insistence on learning
and changing his views, I am sure he would appreciate that.
Egon’s candor, humor, and openness affect us all. A couple of years later, in 1988, Elliot
Eisner and Alan ‘Buddy’ Peshkin invited 30 scholars, roughly 10 presenters, 5 commenta-
tors, and 15 listeners, to Stanford University to consider the state of qualitative research in
education. I was there as a listener, and Egon and Yvonna were two of the five commenta-
tors. Each commentator responded to two presentations, which were organized in five cate-
gories: subjectivity and objectivity, validity, generalizability, ethics, and uses of qualitative
inquiry. We got caught up in a powerful account by one of the presenters on validity, and
the complex, metaphoric presentation that preceded it was lost in the discussion that
followed the papers and their commentary. Twenty years later I recognize the metaphoric,
literary style often labeled postmodernist, but at the time I was mystified. When the author
of the ignored paper challenged the group for feedback, we were silent for some time.
Finally, Yvonna spoke for us all when she said that we had said nothing because we did not
understand the paper. This is, of course, an Yvonna story rather than an Egon story, but I
believe both these pioneers of the qualitative research endeavor reflect the best of what our
scholarship offers: a commitment to others whether research participants, colleagues, or
collegial participants; a zeal for learning and for rethinking and reformulating ideas for
different insights; a compassionate humor that guards against taking ourselves too seriously;
and a devotion to the little ‘t’ truths of our experiences and to the authenticity and trustwor-
thiness that can support our little truths.
I have been blessed with disagreeing with Egon Guba and with learning from his
challenges. In a world where research methods and methodology have been newly re-
politicized, not that they were ever apolitical, I will miss the civility of disagreements with
Egon and the insights of how we differently arrived at our agreements. Fortunately he has
left the legacy of his work, his students, and his colleagues. We are faced, in this first
decade of the twenty-first century, with pursuing a scholarship under attack from two
sides – those who dismiss qualitative endeavors as not science and those who denigrate it
as bad science. When the narrow approaches to educational research failed to provide
answers to the federally funded projects of the 1960s and 1970s, Egon was among those
to explore alternative means to document the influences of these efforts. Forty years later
educational practice is again under attack, and I doubt that clinical trial research can
provide robust assurances about the value of education that the public is demanding. It is
time to explore alternative means, and I believe the qualitative research community is
prepared to contribute to that effort.

Judith Preissle
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
jude@uga.edu