RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

METHODS AND METHODOLOGY 47
too easily becomes simply an ‘affirmatory text’
which ‘exonerates the system’ (Wineburg 1991)
and is used by those who seek to hear in it only
echoes of their own voices and wishes (Kogan and
Atkin 1991).
There is a significant tension between
researchers and policy-makers. The two parties
have different, and often conflicting, interests,
agendas, audiences, time scales, terminology,
and concern for topicality (Levin 1991). These
have huge implications for research styles.
Policy-makers anxious for the quick fix of
superficial facts, short-term solutions and simple
remedies for complex and generalized social
problems (Cartwright 1991; Cook 1991) – the
Simple Impact model (Biddle and Anderson
1991; Weiss 1991a; 1991b) – find positivist
methodologies attractive, often debasing the
data through illegitimate summary. Moreover,
policy-makers find much research uncertain in
its effects (Cohen and Garet 1991; Kerlinger
1991), dealing in a Weltanschauung rather
than specifics, and being too complex in
its designs and of limited applicability (Finn
1991). This, reply the researchers, misrepresents
the nature of their work (Shavelson and
Berliner 1991) and belies the complex reality
which they are trying to investigate (Blalock
1991). Capturing social complexity and serving
political utility can run counter to each
other.
The issue of the connection between research
and politics – power and decision-making – is
complex. On another dimension, the notion that
research is inherently a political act because it is
part of the political processes of society has not
been lost on researchers. Usher and Scott (1996:
176) argue that positivist research has allowed a
traditional conception of society to be preserved
relatively unchallenged – the white, male, middleclass
researcher – to the relative exclusion of
‘others’ as legitimate knowers. That this reaches
into epistemological debate is evidenced in the
issues of who defines the ‘traditions of knowledge’
and the disciplines of knowledge; the social
construction of knowledge has to take into account
the differential power of groups to define what is
worthwhile research knowledge, what constitutes
acceptable focuses and methodologies of research
and how the findings will be used.
Methods and methodology
We return to our principal concern, methods and
methodology in educational research. By methods,
we mean that range of approaches used in educational
research to gather data which are to be
used as a basis for inference and interpretation,
for explanation and prediction. Traditionally, the
word refers to those techniques associated with the
positivistic model – eliciting responses to predetermined
questions, recording measurements, describing
phenomena and performing experiments.
For our purposes, we will extend the meaning to
include not only the methods of normative research
but also those associated with interpretive
paradigms – participant observation, role-playing,
non-directive interviewing, episodes and accounts.
Although methods may also be taken to include
the more specific features of the scientific enterprise
such as forming concepts and hypotheses,
building models and theories, and sampling procedures,
we will limit ourselves principally to the
more general techniques which researchers use.
If methods refer to techniques and procedures
used in the process of data-gathering, the aim of
methodology then is to describe approaches to,
kinds and paradigms of research (Kaplan 1973).
Kaplan suggests that the aim of methodology is
to help us to understand, in the broadest possible
terms, not the products of scientific inquiry but
the process itself.
We, for our part, will attempt to present
normative and interpretive perspectives in a
complementary light and will try to lessen the
tension that is sometimes generated between
them. Merton and Kendall (1946) 7 express the
same sentiment:
Social scientists have come to abandon the spurious
choice between qualitative and quantitative data:
they are concerned rather with that combination of
both which makes use of the most valuable features
of each. The problem becomes one of determining at
Chapter 1