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Qualitative-Quantitative Research Methodology: Exploring the Interactive Continuum, by Isadore Newman and Carolyn R. Benz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. 218 pp. $14.95 paper. ISBN 0-8093-2150-5.
Social science is notorious for methodological division and controversy. This, after all, has been going on for a long time. Even in the early decades of this century, before much research had really been done, "statistics" vs. "case studies" was a heated issue. With greater research experience, the issues by mid-century had become more complex: surveys vs. fieldwork, experimentation vs. quasi-experimentation, and nonreactive vs. reactive methods, for example. More recently, the big division has been qualitative vs. quantitative research, with each style of work being conceived as involving not just different techniques and strategies but also different paradigms of inquiry.
Less widely known are social scientists' efforts to reconcile their methodological differences and to exploit the opportunities that a variety of methods affords. Isadore Newman and Carolyn R. Benz's book, Qualitative-Quantitative Research Methodology: Exploring the Interactive Continuum, as its title clearly suggests, is an effort of this kind. Newman and Benz argue that qualitative and quantitative methods as now employed in educational research, and...