Qual/Quant Wars

I’ve been reading Ely’s (1991) Circles Within Circles to help me firm up my data analysis paradigm, and I keep thinking about the following quote from Pollan’s (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The quote in question is:

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery…gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine” (147-8)

I find this passage a pithy and elegant summary of how I feel about research. I am not inexorably opposed to mixed methods or quantitative work by any means. However, the type of questions I am interested in simply cannot be answered by reducing a phenomenon like curricula to an input/output paradigm. People are not machines, and it bothers me to no end that we (Ed. researchers) treat them as such.

I know this topic was also the subject of my last post, but it’s what has been consuming most of my mental energy for the past few days. In fact, this issue seems to concern the entire staff of the summer program where I am a participant-researcher. A few days ago (Thursday night), one of my peers (I’ll call her P.) was sitting in our faculty lounge (on the faculty floor of our dorm) reviewing Judith Butler’s work. This peer is a participant in my study. She and I attended the same undergraduate program and M.Ed program, taught in the same county, and taught the same subjects in public school and in this summer program. In fact, I was the one who told her to apply for a position at this summer program. While P. and I disagree on a good deal in regards to gender theory (she’s a womanist, and I’m more of a postmodern feminist), we’re very sympathetic to each other’s views. At any rate, another teacher—a white, heterosexual male who teaches Math—asked P. what the book was about. P. began to explain performative gender theory…and then it was like a bomb exploded. The Math teacher began to vehemently disagree with P. He claimed that biology was destiny and that women were simply different (read: inferior) to men in certain ways, and that gender was an innate disposition, not a social construct.

Other faculty who were hanging out began to jump in, including another white male teacher who is very supportive of Butler’s theory. More and more faculty came into the lounge to see what was so interesting. At the peak of the discussion, there were 14 faculty members crowded onto sofas, sitting on the floor, or jumping up and down, contributing their voices to the discussion. It lasted from 10:15 p.m. until almost 3 a.m.

The discussion was interesting in large part because of how the sides were divided. The Butler camp had its strongest voices in:

Me (Gender studies/English degrees)
P. (Gender studies/English degrees)
Both Theatre teachers (MFAs and performance studies)
Dance teacher (MFA in Dance)
Music teacher (BA in Music Education)
Two English teachers (one of whom specializes in gender theory)

The opposing camp, which I’ll call the Essentialists, was largely composed of:
Two Math teachers
Natural Science teacher

What was so interesting to me is how the discussion ended. The Butler group was trying to explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Derrida’s theory of texts, and how words are intrinsically loaded—i.e., that this discussion cannot be conducted in neutral terms, because words like “mother” or “baby” or “pro-choice” were so wrapped up in cultural contexts. The Essentialist group flatly denied this view of the world and insisted that “mother” was the same thing as “a female homo sapien who gives birth.”

It was a fascinating moment for several reasons. It seems to me that researchers and intellectuals on both sides of this divide need to come together and begin to talk to one another about basic premises of their disciplinary worldviews. There is simply no way I can come to a consensus or have a productive discussion with, say, an extreme positivist, unless we define terms very carefully beforehand. We need to understand very deeply where the other camp is positioned, how they view their research, what types of questions they think are important, and what are the best methods for answering these questions.

In this case, the bonds of collegiality remained intact at the end of the discussion. I attribute this to several things. First, we live together, and thus the pressure to maintain friendly relations keeps us from ad hominem attacks or just walking out. Secondly, many of us have built strong friendships with one another throughout our years here. We are more inclined to listen to each other and genuinely respect the ability and integrity of one another, even when we are on opposite sides of a discussion. However, I think that this ability to disagree and walk away friends is rare. If we all happened to be strangers at a conference, I think a few punches would have been thrown before the night was over. We as researchers have got to stop behaving as if we were opposing armies. We need to begin to find ways to work together to communicate. I do not expect that we will come to a consensus—in fact, I sincerely doubt it. However, we can’t just keep yelling across the aisles at one another and hope that something productive will get done in the meantime.