Qualitative Research and the Post-Positivist Mind.

I want to reflect about the historical context and epistemological foundation of qualitative research as we now conceive it and to offer some comments about where our research efforts need to go in the future if they are to be as useful for music education as they deserve to be but have never actually been. Qualitative research is a child of the post-positivist world. It is a clear reflection of the mind-set underlying post-positivist beliefs. The most salient of these beliefs for us as researchers is that there are no pure data. Whether quantitative or qualitative, any data beyond arithmetic (and some would even include arithmetical data) are constructions of the human mind. Although arithmetical facts may be taken at face value (7 children, ranging in age from 5-9, completed the task within 3 minutes. . .), any construal of them any attempt to make meaning of them requires us to recognize that meaning itself is a human construct, peculiar to and limited by the particular kind of mental/physical organism humans happen to be. Objective truth truth having an identity independent of human construals is taken to be a comforting myth, useful for our narcissistic purposes, no doubt, but incapable of being sustained any longer as a viable basis for conceiving the world and our place in it. Knowledge, in the post-positivist belief system in which we now live, is not regarded as conclusive, verifiable, or external to the human psyche, but instead is assumed to be tentative and socially and individually constructed a matter of human imagination brought to bear on those perceptions that humans are capable of having. Knowledge is the basis of meaning. Meaning is a human invention. In the field of research, the positivist and post-positivist positions can be viewed clearly by putting them on a continuum, with dedicated or orthodox positivism at one end and equally dedicated or orthodox post-positivism at the other. Quantitative research historically has dwelled at the dedicated positivism end, whereas qualitative research arose as the alternative when post-positivist thinking began to hold sway. In the older positivist view, language was conceived to be adequate to represent objective reality the "real" beyond the limitations of human subjectivity. Language, although sufficient to mediate objective truth, is powerfully assisted in that task the task of research by numbers, which are capable of even purer approximations of truth-as-such. Numbers get us so close to the "real" to the objective, the verifiable, the factual, the actual, to being in essence, otherwise known as truth as to be identical with, or at least paradigmatic of, truth in essence. In the positivist mind-set, when using language we must push it as far as we can to the objective condition of mathematics, avoiding the sloppiness of subjectivity that can creep in if we are not careful, such as calling ourselves "I" rather than "the researcher," or calling the people we are researching "they" rather than "subjects," and so on. Positivist beliefs about research are alive and well, of course, in the continuing, underlying conviction so many people in our culture hold (perhaps most people continue to hold, including at least some people at this conference), that