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How do conceptions of validity in Social Science Research influence
policy
?
Can social science knowledge generated within a constructivist paradigm be used to indicate the simplistic "causal" relationships needed for policy-makers to base their decisions on?
"Evaluation, as an applied branch of social science, suffers acutely the postmodern disquiet. Of all social science inquiry, evaluation occurs in the most intensely political contexts. Social and education programs are enactments of policy and ideology.. Findings regarding program continuation or termination, etc. are decisions of real consequences, whatever one’s view of reality"
"Clients have little or no appetite for endless quandries about reality or representation, or the oppressions of methodology, or the authority of the author. But postmodern questions run deep. Whose reality of the program should be represented – the evaluator’s? Which sites, issues, and details should be portrayed? Whose experience, perspective, values, criteria should take precedence in judging program quality?"
"Evaluators are typically charged to deliver unbiased truth about the quality of programs while post modernists insist there is no truth and no sure claim to the requisite authority… Evaluators are charged to document, but programs are too complex and words too impoverished, their meanings too indeterminate, for satisfactory representation. Evaluation hide political subtexts – some their authors recognize and others they do not – and they often become political instruments. Recognition of the politics of evaluation raises postmodern distrust of all evaluation and the front line issue of validity."
Lincoln and Wyly
1. Do you think Wilcox's checklist is an effective tool for policy makers to understand validity? How do you think Wilcox's conception of validity corresponds to Lather or Kvale's conception?
2. Wyly and Donmayer both seem to take issue with the straw man that the positivist school has come to represent within "post/non"-positivist circles. Do you believe in the nexus of positivist epistemology, quantitative methodology and Conservative politics? Do you think that their arguments for the importation of "positivist" type vernacular into post-positivist inquiry are convincing? Are they a necessary evil to withstand the neoliberal, Conservative attack on the academy described by Wyly and Torrance?
3. Do you think that the public administration as a mechanism of power is truly capable of fully adapting some of the approaches that we have talked about in class?