Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Sat, 26 Dec 1992 22:05:17 PST
From:         David Morgan <HJDM@PSUORVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Quant Journals, Pt. 1

   I hope after all the buildup that my actual advice on how to
publish in journals that typically emphasize quantitative is not a
letdown. It seems to me that two things are important in
convincing reviewers for these journals. First, you have to show
them that you take their research issues seriously; call this the
rhetorical issue. Second, you need to convince them that your work
was done in a careful and systematic manner; call this the
reliability issue. To keep this discussion from getting too long,
I'll cover the first of these issues here, and the second in a
separate posting.

   Although we have been exchaning more opinions about the
reliability issue, I am convinced that it is the rhetorical issue
that matters more. That is, if the reviewers think that you have
something new and useful to say about the issues that interest
them, then they are going to be more accepting of your approach,
whatever it is. Still, starting a paper by addressing someone
else's central set of problems can be problematic for qualitative
researchers.

   A key problem arises when we fundamentally disagree with the
methods that others have used to pursue these questions in most of
the previous literature. My advice would be to look beyond *how*
people have done the past research and focus squarely on the
questions that they are trying to answer. If you have something to
say that amounts to new knowledge in this area, then your goal
should be to introduce your research in a way that both takes the
past history of the field seriously and makes appropriate promises
about the new information that you can deliver.

   It should be obvious that the reviewers are likely to be senior
scholars in the area you are addressing, so ignoring the past work
in their field will land you in hot water immediately. I am
arguing do *not* have to agree with these past directions, all you
have to do is take them seriously. Even when you know that you are
going to reach conclusions that are fundamentally different from
previous approaches, don't *start* by rubbing their noses in it.
You should concentrate on promoting the value of what you are
doing, rather than tearing down what others have done (especially
when doing it has helped them rise to the top of their particular
heap).

   My favorite tactic is to phrase the issue in terms of a major
mystery within the field as it now exists. First, find some
favored hypothesis that has produced weak and inconsistent or even
backwards results, and then promise to offer new insights into why
this might be so. This amounts to targeting places where the
quantitative paradigm has reached its limits, and then claiming
that you can help them find new and more fruitful directions. My
favorite review of an article that I wrote in this fashion was the
survey researcher who stated that it was always interesting to
find out what their respondents "were really thinking."

   By offering new insights, you can play to an implicit strength
of qualitative research, as a high proportion of quantitative
researchers feel that qualitative data is an excellent means of
producing theory. (They may call this "generating new hypotheses,"
but you don't have to call it that if doing so makes you
uncomfortable.) Even in quantitative journals, the reviewers may
be relatively open minded about a claim that qualitative data can
produce innovative results. In any event, they more likely to
believe this when you phrase your argument in terms of resolving
their self-acknowledged problems, rather than attacking what they
consider to be their solid findings. (Save this last for your
discussion section, after you presumably have produced such solid
evidence that they will now be prepared to rethink a few of their
fundamental assumptions.)

  This general approach is most likely to create problems for
those who emphasize the emergent properties of their data. In
essence, this is asking these researchers to do their analysis in
one fashion but to write up their report in another fashion. Is
this really hypocritical? I think not, so long as you remain
honest about how you actually did your analysis. I labeled this
the rhetorical issue because what is really at stake here is the
rhetorical stance that you take in the first few pages of the
article. The goal should be to make it seem, from the reviewers'
point of view, that *how* you did your research is really much
less important than the fact that you have produced major new
insights that their field really needs.

   Let me wrap up this first posting with some thoughts about why
I am willing to do things this way. My personal point of view is
that the social sciences are not likely to ever have a single
methodology that is equally powerful and equally useful for all
purposes. Although this means that our larger disciplines need to
do a lot of different things, I also believe that we are better
off if each individual researcher sticks to what she or he does
best. This is not just because methods require specialization, but
also because we need to develop a number of different points of
view in order to study anything as complex as human social
behavior.

   This puts a premium of being able to share different points of
view. Right now, this is something that we are not very good at,
but I think we know more about how to do this than we often admit.
In particular, many of us claim to use a style of teaching that
begins from where the students are, with the goal of leading them
in the directions indicated by our hard earned knowledge, both
personal and disciplinary. What I am advocating here is not so
different. Thus the rhetorical issue that we face is how to
capture the reviewers' interest by starting things that they want
to know more about, even if the pursuit of this new knowledge
leads them into territory where they would not ordinarily go.


==>David Morgan hjdm@PSUORVM
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