ABSTRACT
During the last two decades, the field of educational and social research has undergone a great deal of intellectual and methodological turmoil. Putman (1981) alleged that we were beginning to see the ‘demise of a theory [positivism] that lasted for over two thousand years’ (p. 74). No longer would educational research be considered worthy simply because social scientists possessed a unitary method for discovering ‘truth’. As Fiske and Shweder (1986) noted,
There was once a time, not so long ago, when the very idea of rationality was equated with the results and findings of positive (i.e., objective) science… [Today, there are a] wide range of alternative positions concerning science and the subjectivity/ objectivity that one might credibly adopt in a post-positivist world, (pp. 16-17)
Lather (1988) draws attention to the fact that there has been an avalanche of new ideologies that researchers have used in their efforts to study, understand, and learn from social reality. Phenomenology, hermeneutics, neo-Marxist, feminist, constructionist, and post-modernist are just a few ‘frames of reference’, currently being used in educational and social research. In rejecting the positivist view of social reality and methodology for examining this reality, educational researchers are faced with an expansive propagation of contending ideas that raise serious questions regarding the legitimacy and authority of scholarly practice (for example, Marcus and Fischer, 1986). Gone are the days when substantive issues of conducting research can be taken for granted due to the universal consensus imbedded within positivist methodology.
