To address the question of musical identity, the research the author mainly draws on takes the form of qualitative, in-depth interviews with people about how music fits into their everyday lives and musical biographies. In this the author adopts a largely biographical and social constructionist perspective, asking people to reflect on important…

This paper is a personal account of the use of the focused interview technique to collect data on the factors that facilitated and inhibited the research productivity of faculty members in vocational education. A brief literature review is followed by an explanation of how the researcher was urged to abandon her original intention of interviewing…

This paper takes as its data the assumptions, processes of deduction, and data types used in leading publications of historiometric studies of creativity. The paper uses this data to question the philosophical assumptions of the historiometrics of creativity from within its own positivist paradigm and to argue that its conclusions are…

A theory of policy intervention in social problems is needed to enhance our understanding of the processes of change when investigated by social engineers. The development of such a theory could encourage the integration of basic and applied research. (Author/RLV)

The first half of this paper concentrates on the need for the institution of evaluation methods which stress the systematic use of both quantitative techniques and qualitative, direct observation methods. In this way, a more comprehensive picture of the events under consideration may be presented, and changes in student learning and behavior may…

Among the problems are disagreement on how much information should be collected and, because of the use of broad-band tests, the difficulty of deciding who is an applicant for particular job. (Author/IRT)

Speech communication workers have been reluctant to use physiological variables in their work. The arguments against their use have ranged from a fear of invading the realm of the psychologist or physiologist, thereby damaging the uniqueness and disciplinary identity of speech communication, to a feeling by certain scholars that the appropriate…

Three general approaches are available to help discipline the use of qualitative methods in educational research without sacrificing subjective understanding, according to this paper. The most private, least confirmable, yet richest approach is the intuitive, which depends on the researcher's thorough immersion in the field setting and…

The document describes the use of weather maps and data in teaching introductory college courses in synoptic meteorology. Students examine weather changes at three-hour intervals from data obtained from the "Monthly Summary of Local Climatological Data." Weather variables in the local summary include sky cover, air temperature, dew point, relative…

Cultural anthropology's methods of "emic" and "etic" analysis have potential applications in the theory, research, and practice of educational administration. In "emic" analysis the native informant is made the ultimate judge of the researcher's descriptions and analyses. In "etic" analysis, however, the…

A dilemma faces the ethnographer whose discipline forces the creation of an objective text from an intimate participatory experience. There have been three ways in which ethnographers have attempted to solve the dilemma of producing the objectivity of a scientific text while acknowledging their presence in the field. The first approach is the…

After the terms "qualitative research" and "quantitative research" are defined, this paper considers why it makes sense to integrate these approaches, at least under some circumstances. This discussion necessitates attention to the issue of whether quantitative and qualitative research are inextricably linked to incompatible…

Three issues must be addressed when discussing the standards needed to judge the methodological rigor of naturalistic approaches to administrative research. The first issue involves defining naturalistic inquiry. In contrast to the scientific paradigm, naturalistic inquiry emphasizes, first, the inseparability of variables or events from their…

This paper takes the position that the oral history approach has great value for educational research, not as a replacement of other procedures, but to augment other data collection approaches. In arriving at this position, various definitions of and theories about oral histories are reviewed, controversy over the validity of the limitations of…

In recent years, many in anthropology have been challenging the positivist paradigm that dominated the field, with its assumption of the researcher as a transparent data gatherer and the notion of data as something to be collected through fieldwork. Questions of qualitative research methodology are also surfacing in education even as the divisions…