RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

134 VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY
It is not our intention in this chapter to
discuss all of these terms in depth. Rather the
main types of validity will be addressed. The
argument will be made that, while some of
these terms are more comfortably the preserve of
quantitative methodologies, this is not exclusively
the case. Indeed, validity is the touchstone of
all types of educational research. That said, it
is important that validity in different research
traditions is faithful to those traditions; it would
be absurd to declare a piece of research invalid
if it were not striving to meet certain kinds
of validity, e.g. generalizability, replicability and
controllability. Hence the researcher will need
to locate discussions of validity within the
research paradigm that is being used. This is
not to suggest, however, that research should be
paradigm-bound, that is a recipe for stagnation
and conservatism. Nevertheless, validity must be
faithful to its premises and positivist research
has to be faithful to positivist principles, for
example:
controllability
replicability
predictability
the derivation of laws and universal statements
of behaviour
context-freedom
fragmentation and atomization of research
randomization of samples
observability.
By way of contrast, naturalistic research has
several principles (Lincoln and Guba 1985;
Bogdan and Biklen, 1992):
The natural setting is the principal source of
data.
Context-boundedness and ‘thick description’
are important.
Data are socially situated, and socially and
culturally saturated.
The researcher is part of the researched world.
As we live in an already interpreted world, a
doubly hermeneutic exercise (Giddens 1979) is
necessary to understand others’ understandings
of the world; the paradox here is that the most
sufficiently complex instrument to understand
human life is another human (Lave and Kvale
1995: 220), but that this risks human error in
all its forms.
There should be holism in the research.
The researcher – rather than a research
tool – is the key instrument of research.
The data are descriptive.
There is a concern for processes rather than
simply with outcomes.
Data are analysed inductively rather than using
aprioricategories.
Data are presented in terms of the respondents
rather than researchers.
Seeing and reporting the situation should be
through the eyes of participants – from the
native’s point of view (Geertz 1974).
Respondent validation is important.
Catching meaning and intention are essential.
Indeed Maxwell (1992) argues that qualitative
researchers need to be cautious not to be
working within the agenda of the positivists in
arguing for the need for research to demonstrate
concurrent, predictive, convergent, criterionrelated,
internal and external validity. The
discussion below indicates that this need not be
so. He argues, with Guba and Lincoln (1989),
for the need to replace positivist notions of
validity in qualitative research with the notion
of authenticity. Maxwell (1992), echoing Mishler
(1990), suggests that ‘understanding’ is a more
suitable term than ‘validity’ in qualitative research.
We, as researchers, are part of the world
that we are researching, and we cannot be
completely objective about that, hence other
people’s perspectives are equally as valid as our
own, and the task of research is to uncover
these. Validity, then, attaches to accounts, not
to data or methods (Hammersley and Atkinson
1983); it is the meaning that subjects give to
data and inferences drawn from the data that
are important. ‘Fidelity’ (Blumenfeld-Jones 1995)
requires the researcher to be as honest as possible
to the self-reporting of the researched.
The claim is made (Agar 1993) that, in
qualitative data collection, the intensive personal