Truth, Lies, and Chiropractic
Creators: name: Senzon, Simon (Andrew)
Publisher: name: Southern Cross University
Year: 2022
Subjects: Chiropractic
Identity
Professionalization
Integral Theory
Mixed Methods Research
Critical Analysis
Social Network Analysis

description: The chiropractic profession is represented by over 100,000 practitioners and more than 50 teaching programs worldwide. Intraprofessional debates about the profession’s identity date to the early 1900s. More recently this debate has emerged as a discourse in the chiropractic peer-reviewed literature, which includes papers about chiropractic published in cross-disciplinary journals. This thesis set out to discover what could be determined about the profession and its dominant ideas and schools of thought from a critical analysis of the chiropractic peer-reviewed identity literature by examining it for flaws, strengths, citation patterns, and impact.
description: Methods: This thesis is guided by Integral Philosophy, which informs the Integral research strategy of inquiry, setting the boundaries for the parallel mixed methods and sequential mixed methods designs. Research methods include citation network analysis, thematic analysis, a novel critical analysis method (the CANDLE method), and a novel interpretation method (quadrangulation). New methods and integrations of methods were included to address the requirements of the Integral research strategy.
description: Results: The thesis constructed the chiropractic identity literature citation network, determined the most central papers, determined a coauthor network, and mapped the main research path. Objective methods were undertaken using thematic analysis to enact four themes and critical analysis to assess for bias, perspective, assumptions, scholarship, and intertextuality. Scholarship and bias ratings were completed on 10% of the most influential 300 in a network of 5,280 papers. A majority of papers analyzed included bias, flaws, and a total of 339 fallacies. The impact of these ratings on the quality and integrity of the citation network is substantial.
description: Conclusion: An Integral interpretation of the results led to three meta-inferences:
description: 1) The peer-review process enacting the chiropractic identity literature citation network is broken.
description: 2) The intellectual field of the chiropractic profession in its scholarly dissertation on identity is not coherent with the field of science, which may represent incomplete professionalization.
description: 3) The chiropractic identity literature does not functionally fit within science because too many influential papers fail to cogently portray truth, and thus this component of the professional chiropractic literature does not meet the expectation of a scientific discipline.
description: Ultimately, this thesis concludes that truth can be ascertained from a complex set of linguistic data guided by eight primary perspectives and methodological families using an Integral Methodological framework. Using multiple perspectives to enact truth claims arising from the results of multiple methodologies, the myriad phenomena have been integrated as a complex whole.