CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: McLuskie, E. (2003, May). Replacing the qualitative-quantitative distinction with the critique of ideological methodological practices. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Diego, CA.
© Ed McLuskie (2003).

INTRODUCTION:
I require my undergraduate and graduate students to read the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists. A typical assignment is a variation of the question, “What unites the critical theorists?” This often leads to the mistaken interpretation shared by the most naïve undergraduate and the most entrenched and well-known Ph.D.’s in communication studies. As one student put it this semester, “critical theorists . . . stand united only in their opposition to empirical positivists.” This tendency to portray critical theory in opposition to empirical research has its counterpart in the suggestion that critical theorists are opposed to quantitative research. Yet critical theory is opposed to neither. It has been opposed to administrative research due to research alliances with ideological practices in support of domination, largely through the theory-practice connections of the capitalist marketplace. Furthermore, the tendency to associate critical theory with an aversion to empirical and quantitative research is a convenience: it keeps themes of domination out of the picture, thus perpetuating the ideological practices that often but not always occur within the ranks of the empirically and quantitatively minded. Such is the background that informs my remarks for this session today.

PROBLEM:
The distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is entrenched within the academy today. It is a distinction that contains some flawed assumptions but which expresses an intention to be on the alert for methodological practices that are ideological. A major problem is that the distinction no longer is clear, if it ever was, about the intent to critique ideological methodological practices.

The distinction has a history that once justified the opposition: A-theoretical quantitative research dominated communication studies and demanded that all research describe things, so to speak, “as they are” with a conception of “precision” that was taken to be synonymous with “rigor.” “Qualitative” research was introduced into communication studies under severe conditions of hegemony. In this context, the distinction made sense. Over the years, however, we came to see that quantitative and qualitative methodologies can easily serve ideological purposes. In other words, neither is immune from impulses to support whatever one considers to be “the prevailing order.” Thus we are left today with a series of assumptions in this history that must be explicated and answered, as well as with a reframing of the problem: At what point, we should now be asking, does any methodology become ideological?

A KEY ASSUMPTION IN DISPUTE:
THAT QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH, AS A SPECIES OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH,
IS THE ONLY RESEARCH ENGAGED IN THE WORLD:
Understood as “realistic” rather than “speculative,” the assumption often fails to see that “reality” is a speculation about the durability of the way things are, and about our accessibility to such things. This is the contribution of quantitative research to the never-ending circle of dispute.

ANOTHER KEY ASSUMPTION IN DISPUTE:
THAT QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IS CLOSER TO REALITY THAN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH:
We have learned that the answer to this one is, “It depends.” It depends on whether or not human actors are on the scene. Often they are not, having been reduced, not to nodal points of behavior this time, but to “texts” to be “read”—just as disembodied as quantitative data. This is the contribution of qualitative research to the never-ending circle of dispute.

A SHARED AND DECISIVE ASSUMPTION:
THEORY WAITS ON REALITY:
Many versions of qualitative research adopt an inductive strategy just as do more traditional, quantitative approaches to research. In this respect, prevailing reality is privileged. The idea that theory is a basis for transforming reality beyond that which prevails is lost. This commonality between quantitative and qualitative methodologies renders both equally uncritical and suggests that their differences may not make much difference after all.

A NEW PROBLEM:
At what point does any methodology become ideological? What are some of the signs of an ideological turn in methodology? This is an open-ended vista for which I invite discussion, and offer these modest suggestions.

First, as I take it varieties of sense-making research argue, the minute process becomes product, the minute becoming is treated as finished, “what is” is legitimized, regardless of whatever other intentions and practices are underway. Whether quantitative or qualitative, it is important then to be alert to this tendency, to favor instead a notion of “reality” as an unfinished project.

Second, processes have histories that inform the present and which may, but not always, suggest an orientation toward the future. Methodologies, then, that stick to the present and ignore history probably are ideological as well. A major theme for ideology is the project to recognize and reinterpret the dominating conditions of the past. Failure to incorporate the past into any methodology creates enough of a blind spot to warrant the charge of an ideological methodological practice. I take it that much in sense-making research aims to bring the past into the present, perhaps to avoid this issue.

Finally, human actors can easily disappear from the scene of methodological practices. Once the human subject (or, as I prefer, the “intersubjective subject”) is reduced to a variable of behavior or to the mere text of a reading, both the bearers and producers of history are lost in an ideological eclipse. [1] It is my understanding that sense-making research, at the heart of its methodologies, works to keep the intersubjective subject in view—as a human being as well as a resource for knowledge claims about the social world.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The emergence of intersubjectivity in philosophy and social theory awaits a critical-intellectual history that articulates its importance for critical theory and critical cultural studies in communication, as well as in other fields. I have offered a modest contribution to such a history in the May 2003, issue of Javnost/The Public, “Reading Humboldt through the Theory of Communicative Action: The Democratic Potential of Symbolic Interaction” (in press).

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistmcluskie.html