RESEARCH IN PSYCHOLOGY
What counts as'' good'' quantitative research and what can we say about when to use quantitative and/or qualitative methods?
1. How interpretation enters into inquiry
To set the stage for discussing the scope of'' good'' quantitative research, I will briefly reconsider the role played by interpretation in the process of inquiry. In my position paper, I argued that when we try to understand psychological phenomena, we have to take as bedrock the practices in which people are engaged. These practices are concretely meaningful in a way that cannot be explained by other, supposedly more basic, terms. I also pointed out that this idea is very closely linked to the view that psychologists themselves are participants in the world of practices. Inquiry in psychology is itself practical activity. As I discussed elsewhere at some length (Westerman, 2004), practices of inquiry in our field are based in part on the ways in which we learn about things in everyday life (eg, a teacher trying to discover the best way to teach 7-year-olds how to read) and also on the practices in which we participate in our lives in general (eg, all the practices in the given culture in which reading plays a role). Two points follow from this view of interpretation that will provide the basis for my responses to issues raised in the commentaries. The first point is that research in psychology is irreducibly interpretive. It cannot be a transparent process of learning what human behavior is'' really like'' in a final sense-the kind of understanding an uninvolved subject might garner from a removed point of view. On this point, all three commentaries at least appear to agree with me. Stiles directly asserts his agreement with this idea, and Dawson et al. and also Stam argue against the notion that research can provide us with a'' view from nowhere.''
The second point that follows from what I have said so far concerns what it means to say that research is interpretive. Most often, calls for an interpretive approach to research-for example, by proponents of qualitative methods-emphasize the subjective appreciation of meanings. We see this in the fact that almost all qualitative studies are based on interviews aimed at learning about participants 'subjective experiences. But this approach also appears when we go beyond interview-based research and consider efforts that emphasize the investigators ''' views'' of the phenomenon of interest, for example, themes they identify in their research.
In contrast to this focus on how we think about or experience things, my understanding of '' Interpretation'' emphasizes how research irreducibly refers to how we do things as participants always already engaged in p...
