Reflections on Research Guidelines, Categories, and Responsibility

Bibliographic Data

ID10816692
AuthorsElana Shohamy (0000-0003-3462-1588, Tel Aviv University, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume38
Issue4
Pages728
Publication date2004-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTESOL Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0039-8322 • E-ISSN: 1545-7249
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3588291
OpenAlexW2028328865
LanguageEN
Citations received15

N The guidelines for quantitative and qualitative research, published in TESOL Quarterly, are comprehensive, detailed, informative, and broad in scope. They present a variety of research designs and approaches, especially regarding qualitative research. They are useful for planning research, writing up research articles and reports, and reading research critically. At the same time, however, the guidelines raise a number of questions: Does the field need strict boundaries for research designs? Are the categories so distinct from one another? Can qualitative research designs be differentiated from one another in such ways? For example, is narrative research so different from critical ethnography, or conversational analysis? Can researchers not address these qualitative designs quantitatively as well? Do these categories represent research designs, research traditions, research paradigms, or methods of data analysis? Related to these questions is whether researchers need such detailed guidelines. What message do these guidelines send them? The guidelines are based on the assumption that research is fixed, finite, and follows a clear order. Yet, in an era when research is opening up to a variety of options, well beyond those included in the guidelines, such a prescription may be perceived as an imposition or a dogma of how research should be done. What is the right way to do research, anyway? When qualitative research emerged not long ago, positivists rejected qualitative methods because they felt such methods could not be trusted-that it was not real research. (Some journals still do not publish qualitative studies.) Researchers doing qualitative research rejected that criticism, however, claiming that quantitative research is restrictive and prescriptive, and it cannot address deeper insights and understandings of language phenomena. As the guidelines show, qualitative approaches are nowadays very widely accepted. Thus, TESOL researchers must be cautious that the guidelines do not restrict innovations in research designs by imposing

Linguistics · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub