Valuing scholarship's essential paradigmatic differences and inherent contradictions: A rejoinder to Wallace and Louden
✍ Scribed by William C. Kyle Jr.; Stephen M. Caliendo
- Book ID
- 101267443
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 11 KB
- Volume
- 34
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-4308
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
John Wallace and Bill Louden (1997) raise many intriguing issues in the context of their response to our editorial, "Establishing the Theoretical Frame" (Caliendo & Kyle, 1996). The editorial generated several interesting conversations during the 1996 NARST Annual Meetingit was our hope that it would do so. Since that time we have received comments from individuals in a variety of disciplines. We are pleased that the editorial is being integrated into several introductory research courses, current issues courses, and prospectus development courses. And, when used in conjunction with a series of articles oriented toward creating dialogical communities (French, 1995;Kyle, Abell, Roth, & Gallagher, 1992, 1995), collectively they serve to create a broader and more accepting image of research possibilities, rather than a narrower or more stringent perspective as feared by Wallace and Louden. Herein we wish to address concerns raised by Wallace and Louden.
We sought to offer a rationale for the importance of explicating clearly the theoretical frame in the context of scholarship. We juxtaposed scholarship and journalism as a means of distinguishing between genres of work, not as a means of offering scholarship-privileged social status. Both genres possess a relationship to social change and social action, yet the applicable scope of each genre's representation of reality differs.
We are intrigued that the notion that authors ought "to develop more clearly and articulate the theoretical frame underpinning the essence of the inquiry" (Caliendo & Kyle, 1996, p. 225) led Wallace and Louden to invoke the politics of the traditional academic and disciplinary resistances to qualitative research (i.e., the qualitative-quantitative debate). We chose to offer a rejoinder because we wonder how many readers share the inference gleaned by Wallace and Louden (1997) who "fear, however, that what it [the above quote] really means is that qualitative researchers are required to conform to the canons of quantitative research" (p. 320); or, that we were more concerned with the implication of this notion as it applies to qualitative researchers vs. quantitative researchers.
While our original editorial was motivated by the frequent requests of JRST reviewers for authors to explicate the theoretical frame, such requests originate from reviewers who share theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methodological research traditions (see Kyle, 1996).