Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Relativism: The Case for Qualitative Methodologies in Educational Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent decades, the innovative approaches of qualitative modes of inquiry advocating the use of naturalistic and/or critical ethnographic techniques for the narratologically driven study of phenomena in pedagogical contexts have succeeded in beckoning for a reexamination of traditional views of research methodologies based upon the foundationalism of empiricist science within the dominant paradigm of quantitative forms of analysis. Reframing the discourse of the debate around the key issue of objectivity, and by implication subjectivity and relativism also, this essay addresses epistemological questions about the nature of ontology, theoretical questions concerning the knowledge of sense perception(s), and methodological questions regarding the scientific truth-effect of procedure(s) integral to arguments for and against the use of qualitative forms of analysis as a viable and effective means for conducting educational research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.563 | 0.434 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.216 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.054 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".