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Wilcox and Hirschfeld (2007)

  • "Drawing out the policy implications from research is inseparable from establishing its trustworthiness or validity"

  • "it has become increasingly necessary for policy makers and academics to be able to classify and rate the methodological rigour of such studies, in order to assess what weight to place on the reported findings"

VALIDITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

RESEARCH

-and-

OTHER

CHALLENGES TO KNOWLEDGE

CLAIMS

by

Kathryn Barber

PD 90002

Check List:

  • Valid
  • Feasible
  • Ethical
  • Concrete

How do conceptions of validity in Social Science Research influence

policy

?

BUT.....

What about

  • Causality

  • Lack of Reflexivity

  • Objective truth

Presentation Outline

Question:

  • Causality?
  • Reflexivity?
  • Epistemological underpinnings of the public administration
  • Politics and Methodology
  • Neopositivism and the Conservative Right
  • Role for Quantitative Approaches?

Causality? Constructivism? .....Incommensurable!

Donmayer (2012)

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?

  • The positivist and constructivist paradigms are completely incommensurable
  • No role for ontological questions in constructivist paradigm
  • Functional or instrumental criteria
  • Causality as functional fiction, popular vernacular

REFLEXIVITY???

Mabry

"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."

Tears and rueful chuckles?

Epistemological Assumptions Underlying the

Public Administration as machine

Lincoln and Wyly

  • 1800's - 1950's

  • Professional public service built on the rational principles of efficiency and non-partisanship

  • Science could solve problems, reality could be known objectively

  • Politicians vs. administration, partisan beliefs vs. instrument fact

Torrance (2008)

Public Admin as Organsim

  • "Right" link qualitative research with academic evil 1) oppose objectivity; 2) subjective and without rigour; 3) highlights oppression; 4) align with marginalized and silenced voices

  • Attacks postmodern/qualitative research as "unscientific"

  • Emergence of wide and well funded network of "Conservative" scholars who seek to discredit postmodern/qualitative research
  • Political power is weighing in on acceptable methodologies
  • Qualitative traditions facing a global movement of neopositivist interest of "evidence-based" policy and practice
  • Policy environment in U.K. privileges "scientific" research (ie: randomized control trials)
  • Development of government "quality" standards

  • Objective analysis
  • Questioning of value/fact divide
  • Emphasis on observer/knower
  • Client-centered approach

  • Hierarchical structure
  • decentralization

Politics!

Wyly

Questions

  • Strategic Positivism
  • Positivist vs. "Post/Non"-Positivists
  • Generalization based on particular social and politically constructed world
  • Nexus of Positivism, Quantitative method & Conservative politics,
  • Latin etymological roots: "Criticus" discerning. "Contextus" to weave. "Objectum" a thing thrown (before the mind)
  • "Postpositivism" can be co-opted by conservative politics as easily as positivism
  • Movement to wholly reject quantitative methodologies

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?

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