ABSTRACT
Validity regards how scientific knowledge is made credible. As a social construction, the very calculus of credibility has shifted across time, place, and various fields. Discourse practices of validity in contemporary qualitative research exemplify a proliferation of available framings. A post-epistemic focus situates validity as the power to determine the demarcation between science and not-science, for example, recent moves by the federal government to warrant experimental design as the "gold standard" for good science. In contrast, qualitative researchers argue that the "problem" of validity is about deep theoretical issues that technical solutions cannot begin to address. Across the earlier naturalistic and constructivist paradigms of Lincoln and Guba to discourse theory, ethnographic authority, critical, feminist, and race-based paradigms and more recent poststructuralisms, validity in qualitative research ranges from correspondence models of truth and assumptions of transparent narration to practices that take into account the crisis of representation.
