Dewey and the Qualitative

DEWEY AND THE QUALITATIVE Rodman B. Webb and Robert R. Sherman University of Florida Qualitative research in education apparently has come of age. There is a growing recognition that quantitative study, though important, does not do justice to the complexity of human reality. As a consequence, new courses, new programs, and new line items for qualitative researchers are appearing in colleges of education. At the University of Florida, for example, we recently approved a 12-hour qualitative research track for doctoral students. Three qualitative research methods courses are offered in the college and three more can be taken in the departments of Anthropology and Sociology and in the College of Nursing. We will offer a new graduate course in Qualitative Educational Psychology in the fall of 1987. In January 1988, The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education will be launched, sponsored by the University of Florida and published by Taylor and Francis in London. Two issues of the Journal of Thought recently were devoted to qualitative research methods.1 The articles in these issues, together with previously unpublished material, will be published in book form by Falmer Press in 1988.2 Despite the new enthusiasm for qualitative research, there is as yet no agreed-upon meaning for the term "qualitative research." Most of us use the phrase as a synonym for a specific research methodology, usually ethnography. Such narrowness not only drums out of the qualitative corps a small legion of time-honored methods, but it also prohibits inquiry into the nature of qualitative study. Such an inquiry might reveal that all qualitative methods have some important things in common. Ethnography, history, biography, life history, social philosophy, curriculum criticism, critical theory, phenomenography, literary criticism, and other qualitative methods certainly are different from -54- -55one another. But there may be an underlying unity in this variety that tells us some important things about educational research. In order to explore this possibility, we have asked a number of experts to discuss specific forms of qualitative research in the issues of the Journal of Thought cited above. Each clarified the nature and process of their method, discussed what it had contributed to the study of education, and explained what made the method distinctively qualitative. We believe that seven characteristics can be found in every qualitative research methodology: • First, all qualitative methods resist the "context stripping" that characterize so much of positivistic social science. • Second, the contexts described and analyzed in qualitative research are not contrived or modified, but are natural and must be taken as they are found. Social contexts are not predefined by researchers and findings are not forced into preestablished categories. Further, most qualitative methods are non-interventionist. • Third, attention is given to the socially constructed reality of actors in their natural settings. There is an interest in the mundane, quotidian, taken-for-granted nature of everyday life. • Fourth, qualitative research deals unashamedly with human experience. Our last three characteristics can be more easily explained by turning to John Dewey's work for illustration. Dewey accused positivistic social science of having an unreasonable "devotion to physical science as a model, and a misconception of physical science at that." He pointed out the difference between physical and social facts. A fact in the physical sciences, he said, ". . . is the ultimate residue after human purposes, desires, emotions, ideas and ideals have been systematically excluded. A social fact, on the other hand, is a concretion in external form of precisely these human f a c t o r s . D e w e y contends that human experience must be studied in context, as a whole. This means that experience must be understood in the context of a situation and that situations, in turn, must be understood in the context of a larger institutional and -56cultural setting. In our inquiry, the fifth characteristic of qualitative research was a devotion to whole-ism. Capturing experience whole-istically, i.e., in context, is a tricky business , entailing as Geertz has stated: . . . a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring both into view simultaneously. . . . Hopping back and forth between...