ABSTRACT
During the past several decades, those who engage in research in the social and behavioral sciences have witnessed the paradigm “debates,” or “wars,” between the constructivist and naturalist positions on the nature of inquiry in one camp and positivist/rationalist positions in the other. These paradigms, or worldview discussions, have engaged questions related to the nature of reality, the nature of the knower and knowledge, and the nature of inquiry. In the long term, time and those who engage in the history and philosophy of science will judge whether these worldview discussions represented a minor border dispute or a significant shift in our thinking about science and inquiry. In the short term, however, one thing that has clearly increased, in part as a result of these worldview debates, has been discussions about the nature of multimethods research.
