[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[Martin John Packer]

I too have co-taught a research methods class - a two-semester course, at U Mich School of Education. A description of the course has been sitting for almost 20 years on an abandoned web page. It focuses largely on what was my responsibility, the interpretive component (less prestigious for sure, but more intriguing for some students), but contains quite a lot of detail and supporting materials (syllabi and handouts). I’m sure it’s now somewhat out of date, but perhaps it may be of some use to someone?

<http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/IR/IRlogic.html>

And thanks, David, for your kind comments.  :)

Martin

On Dec 20, 2017, at 4:27 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com<mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:

I was teaching a course in research methods back in 2012, and as a way of
trying to keep inter-necine tension over who would supervise whom to a
minimum, I did propose that one professor would teach and then
supervise the more prestigious quantitative studies and I would teach and
supervise the less prestigious qualitative studies (this worked out about
as well as you can imagine....). While I was trying to make this solution
work, I got Martin's book on qualitative research and read it, but what
Martin says about it is quite correct: it's not a "how to" book. Compare
with Keith Richards, "Qualitative Inquiry in TESOL" (Palgrave Macmillan) or
Johnny Saldana "Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers" (Sage). Richards
begins his collection of piecemeal accounts with horrifying "how not to"
vignettes of how he victimized his students for "misapplying" Conversation
Analysis: this is how not to teach ideas to students. Saldana is a little
better, but the closest he gets to good examples of how to be continent,
object-specific, and concrete is advice like "reflect on analytic codings".
Show me, Professor!

Martin's article isn't a demonstration of qualitative methods: it's on a
level of philosophical abstraction and historical specificity that a lot of
my (ex-)students would find hard to follow (e.g. the foray into the
difference between Bekhterev and Dilthey, mechanists and Deborinites). I
once tried rewriting it, using Vygotsky's five stages to describe the
expansion of the ZPD into a "bull frog that would be as big as a bull".
That didn't work either--students are an endless treasure trove of
misconceptions and misunderstandings. But Martin's article does have the
opposition between vulgar materialism and "interpretative" psychology we
are talking about. And it has more.

It's a pre-emptive reply to the "Revisionist Revolution". At the beginning
of 2016, I wrote a something I now regret a little about van der Veer and
Yasinitsky's "Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies", in which I tried
to summarize the book as seven things you always thought about Vygotsky
which turn out to be true after all. I think my posting captured the
sensationalist tone of the "Revisionists", but it missed something much
more important--what Sasha refers to as the right-Vygotskyan attempt to
rescue Vygotsky from Marx. Martin really manages to rescue Vygotsky from
the rescuers.

I don't know if I would try to reduce Vygotsky's "methods" to three as
Martin does. I know that Vygotsky himself does this in various places, but
he keeps coming up with three different methods. In Chapter Two of Pedology
of the Adolescent. Vygotsky first says that pedology borrows methods from
other, neighboring sciences, but transforms these by giving them a new
holistic object of study: not the child, but the age period of the child.

He lists:

A) Observation in a naturalistic setting (e.g. by parents and by teachers).
This has been widely used in the USSR by Molozhavy and by Basov (2-47).
Vygotsky points out that this method is more objective and more reliable
than unscientific reminiscences or imaginary reconstructions of childhood
(2-46). But unlike reminiscences and reconstructions, “vital facts” cannot
be produced on demand: the naturalism of the observation prevents the
researcher from inducing them.

B) Experiments (e.g. the Vygotsky blocks test). Since previous
psychological experimentation depended on self-observation, it had been
considered that experiments were not applicable to children. But Vygotsky
points out that well designed experiments (e.g. the functional method of
dual stimulation) do not require self-observation and allow researchers to
observe stages that simply disappear in naturalistic behaviour (e.g. the
formation of the choice reaction) (2-50~2-51).

C) Natural Experiments (e.g. experimental homework, experimental household
tasks). This is a synthesis of A) and B), something which is an experiment
for the researcher but not for the research subject (2-52~2-54).

D) Clinical Examinations and Tests (e.g. Piaget’s system of one on one
interviews to determine the child’s conception of reality, IQ testing,
etc.). This is widely used in defectology (2-55~2-59).

E) Testing (e.g. Cattell, Wechsler, and Binet’s “personality tests”).
Vygotsky points out three different purposes for mass testing (mental
giftedness, monitoring development, and school achievement) and two
different types of result (numerical and qualitative). (2-60~2-64)

F) Methode d’inquete (surveying). This is the use of questionnaires
(2-65~2-66).

H) Anthropometrics, the mass examination of a whole population (2-67).

G) Somatoscopy, the clinical examination of single individuals over time
(2-67)

H) Study of the Social Environment, the study of the socio-economic status,
the class environment, and the living conditions of children favoured by
A.B. Zalkind (2-68~2-69).

I) Document Collection, amassing a data base of child artworks, diary
entries, and other documents. (2-69).

J) Upbringing and Teaching Studies, presumably the kind of pencil-and-paper
studies that the Sterns did on their three children, or the kind of
classroom studies used in Chapter Six of Thinking and Speech. (2-70).
Then Vygotsky lists three methods which are really specific to pedology:
genetic, comparative, and "synthetic" method. In HDHMF, on the other hand,
he has a chapter on "Research Methods" which he then differentiates into
THREE chapters ("analysis", "genesis" and "structure"). And then the
analysis chapter speaks of conditional-genetic analysis
and experimental-genetic and even causal-dynamic  analysis (and criticizes,
phenomenology--something that Martin doesn't quite agree with). But the
main thing Vygotsky does in this chapter is warn against:

a) trying to distinguish analyzing a thing and analyzing a process
b) trying to distinguish description and explanation
c) beginning an analysis of a process with the product rather than with
the prehistory

I guess I think of the genetic, comparative, and synthetic method as three
ways rescuing ourselves from these. Genesis analyzes things as if they were
processes and processes as if they were things without ever forgetting that
neither is reducible to the other. Comparison is a way of arriving a
description that explains and explanation that describes. And what Vygotsky
really means by the "synthetic" method is what we now call triangulation,
but what Marx called the anatomy of the ape:description and explanation of
both process and product with the prehistory firmly in mind, but also with
a clear sense that the present only feels pre-determined: it's really just
as much the outcome of free will and chance as the future still is.
David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 10:31 PM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you so much, Martin.


On 19 December 2017 at 21:15, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>
wrote:

On Dec 19, 2017, at 5:09 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Michael,

I'd like to ask you a question alongside Greg's: What is Vygotsky's
path
to
knowledge, in particular, knowledge about the constantly unfolding,
evolving social world?

Thank you.

James

Hi James,

Much has been said about this question in this discussion group over the
years! Here are some notes I made some time ago. I am sure that others
will
jump in!  :)

Vygotsky viewed methodology as central to the kind of psychology he
wanted
to create: “the methodology,” he wrote, “will be the first step forward"
(2004 [1926-7], p. 242). And “Anyone who attempts to skip this problem,
to
jump over methodology in order to build some special psychological
science
right away, will inevitably jump over his horse while trying to sit on
it.”

There were three central aspects to the methodology that Vygotsky
envisioned for his “general psychology”: analysis, genetic inquiry, and
experimentation. They amount to a conception of qualitative research that
is significantly different from much of what goes by that name today. One
reason for this is that methodology for Vygotsky was not merely technique
but “the theory of scientific method” in which “practice and philosophy
are
united.” In other words it was a logic of inquiry, a paradigm which
involved assumptions about what exists (ontology) and how we can know
(epistemology).

The “analytical method” was of central importance to Vygotsky, and he
rescued it from phenomenology and from so-called Marxist psychologies of
his time. It is the study of the internal relations of a complex whole.
For
example, water should not be analyzed into its elements but studied as a
molecule in its qualitatively different forms: ice, liquid, vapor, etc.
(1987/1934). Analysis is “the highest form of induction.” It requires no
repetition, for it is the study of a particular case for the general
properties which are realized in it. Analysis is to “perceive the general
in the particular;” the particular phenomenon is maximally abstracted
from
its specific conditions. For example, Pavlov’s study of salivation in
dogs
was an analysis of reflexes in general, in animals in general. Vygotsky’s
model here was Marx’s analysis of the commodity, a form with internal
contradictions, through the selection of a unit of analysis, a “cell”:
the
commodity. Analysis requires the partition of a complex whole into its
aspects. In other words analysis is a form of case study, idiographic and
holistic. Its aim is to discern general laws; objective tendencies which
underlie the manifold appearances. Its products are not essences but
“generalizations which have boundaries and degrees.”

The second aspect is genetic inquiry. Vygotsky wrote that he agreed with
Marx that “the only science is history.” History meant “two things: a
general dialectical approach to things; in this sense, everything has its
history,” and, second, human history: “the uniqueness of the human mind
lies in the fact that history and evolution are united (synthesis) in it”
(1986). Genetic inquiry requires tracing the history of the development
of
a phenomenon, the path it has followed, to identify its underlying
objective tendencies. It attends to the process of sublation in which
earlier forms are both overcome and preserved. Furthermore, it is an
inquiry that is oriented by practical concerns, concerned to facilitate
the
leap from necessity to freedom by mastery of the tendencies that are
identified. A genetic account is a description, but also provides an
explanation. It weaves together ontogenesis (the process of
“individualization”), history (cultural evolution),  phylogenesis
(biological evolution), and microgenesis (experiment).

Indeed, Vygotsky's methodology includes a central place for
experimentation: what he called “Traps for Nature.” But this was not
experimentation in the sense of manipulation of variables,
standardization
of procedure, with the researcher as detached observer. On the contrary,
for Vygotsky an experiment was a collaboration between researcher and
participant as they together established the conditions for the
possibility
of the phenomenon of interest (e.g. the famous blocks task). An
experiment
is a form of analysis, it is “an analysis in action, as each analysis is
an
experiment in thought” (2004/1926-7). The unusual character of this view
of
experimentation is revealed by Vygotsky's statement that “every lyrical
poem is an experiment.” In Vygotsky’s view the artificiality of an
experiment is a merit, not a weakness. It allows us to reveal a
historical
process in abstracted form. Furthermore, an experiment provides a
historical analysis, through the opportunity to study the microgenesis
of a
phenomenon.  For Vygotsky, historical methods and logical analysis (the
logic of an experimental design) are not opposed, because logic is
sedimented history.

Martin




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