Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

From practice to research
in relation to ‘practice’, the following were among those typically
offered: subjective, people, busy, messy, difficult, soft, warm, pressured,
flexible.
The researcher–practitioner split
The dichotomies between notions of objective and subjective and
between art and science seem to parallel the dichotomy between
the world of research and the world of practice. This dichotomy is
not new and has been the focus of a debate which has unfolded
over the past half century. The ‘researcher–clinician split’ which
occurred in psychology in the 1950s has been attributed to the
attack mounted by Eysenck on psychotherapy as pseudo-science
(Hersen & Barlow, 1976). Yet behaviourism strongly assisted in the
development of the clinician-researcher or practitioner-scientist
in psychology, with single subject research designs and other quasiexperimental
methods being refined for use in clinical settings.
In the 1970s extreme behaviourist positions were strongly
challenged by the rise of humanistic psychology. The faith in
empiricism to deliver knowledge for practice in the human services
was still strong in some quarters in the 1980s. ‘The issue of whether
one can measure the subtleties of human nature and interaction will
cease to be a problem once devised measurement rules can be
shown to have a rational and empirical correspondence to reality’
(Bostwick & Kyte, 1981, p. 677). Yet in the same era the emergence
of emancipatory and feminist research traditions pushed the boundaries
of research methods even further to address the power
imbalance between the researcher and the researched and to allow
the voice of the ‘subject’ to be heard through qualitative research.
In the 1990s the extension of ‘evidence-based practice’ from
medicine to the rest of the health field, as well as to education and
social welfare, gave empiricist approaches a new vigour in a context
of resource scarcity in which effectiveness and efficiency were
dominant concerns for government. Yet in the same decade the
growth of post-modernist traditions in the social sciences led to a
strong resurgence of interest in qualitative research and saw its
expansion into fields such as discourse and narrative analysis in
cultural studies.
A rapprochement of sorts is occurring between quantitative and
qualitative research methods within the social sciences. In recent
5