Content area
Full Text
Research cannot be conducted without the conscious or unconscious use of underlying theoretical perspectives. These perspectives inform methodology, guiding theory, questions pursued, and conclusions drawn. The relationship between the philosophy, theory, and methods of different research paradigms is explored in this article. Specific theoretical perspectives, critical theory, postmodernism, critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory are explored in the context of their political values and implications for qualitative research.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, a methodology challenged the then-dominant practice of quantitative analysis. At the time, qualitative research, though possessing a 75-year-old history in the social sciences of sociology and anthropology (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998), was relatively "new" to educational research circles. The upstart mentality of this new approach persisted despite the fact that qualitative methods had been used in education as early as the late 1800s (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992). Becker, Blanche, Hughes, and Strauss's (1961) Boys in White, Clark's (1960) The Open Door College, Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982), and Chickering's (1969) Education and Identity are higher education and student affairs classics in which the authors used qualitative methods in their analyses (Crowson, 1987). Despite a long history and undeniable contribution, opponents of qualitative methods dismissed them as radical, nonrigorous, subjective, and perhaps even flaky (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b).
The presence of qualitative research as a bona fide research practice in student affairs became clear with the 1991 special edition of the Journal of College Student Development (Caple, 1991b). Followed closely by Stage's 1992 text, Diverse Methods for Research and Assessment of College Students, it was clear by the mid1990s that qualitative methods were here to stay. An "almost exclusive reliance on quantitative methods" (Caple, 1991 a, p. 387) in student affairs was transformed by prominent researchers' (e.g., see Kuh, Schuh, & Whitt, 1991) reliance on this yet to be fully accepted approach. In the six issues of the Journal of College Student Development published in 2001 (volume 41), nearly 25% of the research studies used qualitative approaches as their primary or exclusive methodology.
CURRENT PHILOSOPHICAL AND PARADIGMATIC ISSUES IN RESEARCH
The debate about the value of quantitative versus qualitative methods has been accompanied by a debate about their underlying paradigms, which are often at odds with one another....