Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Fri, 25 Sep 1992 21:58:00 CDT
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         "Jim Thomas (tk0jut1@niu.bitnet)" <TK0JUT1@NIU.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Replication

ELLISON@UFPINE.BITNET  writes:

  >>Jim Thomas wrote:
  >>
  >>    Replication isn't "stepping in the same river," though. It's
  >>    more like mapping the contours of the where a river runs.


  >Granted my note about Hegel (or whoever it "really" was) was a
  >bit obscure. But my point is a bit more serious than Jim Thomas
  >recognized.

One of the quickest ways to shift the tenor of a discussion from
amicable to hostile is to accuse a participant of failing to
recongize, failing to understand, failing to ______ (fill in your own
blank).  Serious points are rarely made in a glib (and inaccurate)
one-liner that distort the original posts and distort as well Hegel's
thought.

     >"Replication" is a construct, a model.

"Replication" is an act, a process, a means of verification,
corroboration, or re-visiting.  It's a kind of "doubling back," of
evaluating, and of expanding. The *process* and *techniques* by which
we replicate are the models and constructs.

   >Although Hegel may not have coined the phrase, he did write in
   >his Phenomenology about the misperception of stasis in the world.
   >The misperception facilitated a view that there were "constants"

   >that could be manipulated, controlled, so that experiments for
   >instance (this is totally my paraphrase) could be "replicated."
   >His point, and the point that I meant to make, is that we may
   >assume replication is possible (even with statistical margins of
   >error accepted), but this seems to be a model that can stand
   >problematizing. Of course mapping the banks of a river is
   >different than stepping into the water. Or is it? River banks
   >change with considerable persistence. We set up illusions of
   >stasis, and are thus surprised by "obvious" changes.

Hegel's point was that whether one steps into the river once or twice
is irrelevant. Careful readers of Ency. of the Phil. Sciences, Phen.
of Mind, and Phil. of Mind understand that his point is that knowlege
derives from concepts and reason, not from sense data. Empirical
studies give us neither concepts nor "truth." To paraphrase Hegel in
Phen. of Mind, which the above poster claims is relevant, empirical
studies give us appearances, reason gives us reality.

I can think of *no* replication in which an author claims to be
reproducing an isomorphic context, nor is that the purpose of
replication, as other posters in this thread have explained.  I have
no doubts about the seriousness of the original poster's intent, but
if one adduces Hegel's philosphy to make a point, it helps to a) get
it right and b) more carefully lay out the implications of
(presumably) the Hegelian dialect for contemporary empiricism.
If the poster wishes to develop a Hegelian line of thinking, then it
seems that the issue is *not* so much the value of replications,
but the utility of *any* empirical research.

The point of my "contours" analogy in describing replication was to
continue the metaphor of "terrain" and to suggest that it is fully
possible to engage in replication without falling into the trap of
assuming invariance. The relevance for qualitative research has been
laid out by Glaser & Strauss (and many, many others): "Replication" is
re-examining the adequacy and accuracy of concepts, not simply the
reproduction of identical results. If, for example, we claim that an
organization's goals are "loosely coupled" to the activity of the
participants in General Motors, we supply and describe concepts that,
if "replicable," are useful for understanding organizational behavior
in other settings. The point is not to mirror an exact replica of
behavior in two disparate orgs, but to provide a set of similar
heuristic constructs by which organizational behavior in different
settings can be understood.

This is quite different than quantiative replication, in which the
goal of replication is to match empirical findings.

Sorry this is wordy and a bit off the mark, but as a former
Hegelian scholar, I'm sensitive to perceived swipes that I've
failed to understand.......

jt