are taught, that if they use any numbers in their research then they must be positivist
or realist in philosophy, and they must be hypothetico-deductive or traditional in style
(see, for example, such claims by Clarke, 1999). If, on the other hand, students
disavow the use of numbers in research then they must be interpretivist, holistic, and
alternative, believing in multiple perspectives rather than truth, and so on. Sale,
Lohfeld, and Brazil (2002), for example, claim that ‘The quantitative paradigm is
based on positivism. Science is characterized by empirical research’ (p.44). Whereas,
‘In contrast, the qualitative paradigm is based on... multiple realities. [There is] no
external referent by which to compare claims of truth’ (p.45). Such commentators
‘evidently believe that the choice of a research method represents commitment to a
certain kind of truth and the concomitant rejection of other kinds of truth' (Snow,
2001, p.3). They consider that the value of their methods can be judged completely
separately from the questions they are used to answer.
What is ironic about this use of the term ‘paradigm’ to refer to a methods- and value-
based system in social research is that it has never been intended to be generally
taken-for-granted, in the way that ‘normal science’ is. Rather, it splits the field into
two non-communicating parts. Therefore, a paradigm of this kind cannot be shifted by
evidence, ideas, or the fact that others reject it. It becomes divisive and conservative
in nature, leading to ‘an exaggeration of the differences between the two traditions’
(Gray & Densten, 1998, p.419) and an impoverishment of the range of methods
deployed to try and solve important social problems.
It is somewhat impractical to sustain an argument that all parts of all methods,
including data collection, carry epistemological or ontological commitments anyway
(Frazer, 1995; Bryman, 2001). So, researchers tend to confuse the issues, shuttling
from technical to philosophical differences, and exaggerating them into a paradigm
(Bryman, 1988). No research design implies either qualitative or quantitative data
even though reviewers commonly make the mistake of assuming that they do - that
experiments can only collect numeric data, observation must be non-numeric, and so
on. Observation of how work is conducted shows that qualitative and quantitative
work are not conducted in differing research paradigms, in practice. The alleged
differences between research paradigms (in this sense) prevail in spite of good
evidence, not because of it (Quack theories, 2002).
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