Rejecting Choices: The Problematic Origins of Researcher-Defined Paradigms within Qualitative Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paradigms are often presented as a way of distinguishing various qualitative and experimental research approaches. But carefully tracing their adoption through the work of Egon Guba, we can see that the model of researcher-defined paradigms used within qualitative research also arose from the replacement of a more open conception of naturalistic inquiry (N/I); the anthropomorphizing of ideal research types; the inclusion of the subject matter in the characterization of different types of researchers; that it is the inclusion of the subject matter in Guba’s conception of a naturalistic inquirer that necessitates his appeal to philosophy (i.e., ontology and epistemology) as the basis for selecting methodology; and that by doing so Guba violates his own concerns about researchers choosing their methodology before considering their subject matter, something that he referred to as the law of the hammer. The adoption of researcher-defined paradigms also rejects the position that the appropriateness of a methodological approach, including N/I and qualitative approaches, is primarily determined by the subject matter and researcher’s objectives, something Patton has referred to as the paradigm of choices. This review of the origins of researcher-defined paradigms problematizes and defamiliarizes this core concept within some models of qualitative research. Given that Guba’s model and its appeal to philosophy as the basis for selecting methodology still underlies a fundamental division within conceptions of qualitative inquiry, reconsidering its development and potential alternatives will allow current researchers to better appreciate the model of qualitative research they choose to work under.
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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 | 0.458 | 0.414 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.135 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".