You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Research Methods' tag.
“Validity is a complicated and changing theoretical construct that has evolved
significantly over the past fifty years. While traditional positivistic conceptions of
validity tended to characterize it as one or more characteristics of a test that could
be definitively determined, contemporary theorists have reconstructed the con-
cept. In a now-classic chapter on validity, Samuel Messick (1989a) extends the
definition of validity to focus on the interpretation of scores and to encompass
social consequences:
Validity is an integrated evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of inferences and
actions based on test scores and other modes of assessment. (p. 13) “
“this study does not fall into the ‘conventional’ categories of ‘method-driven’ or ‘problem-driven’ research (Sullivan & Porter, 1993, pp. 229-30). It did not begin with choosing a standard method to observe practice, nor did it begin with a research question drawn from that practice or from a theory. Rather, the study is better described as ‘praxis,’ in which the methodology functions ‘in a middle ground between theory and practice, as a heuristic set of filters…for both theory and practice’ (Sullivan & Porter, 1993, p. 229).”
“Content analysis is the identifying, quantifying, and analyzing of specific words, phrases, concepts, or other observable semantic data in a text or body of texts with the aim of uncovering some underlying thematic or rhetorical pattern running through these texts…content analysis’s emphasis on semantic or meaning-based patterns distinguishes it from more purely formal stylistic approaches such as register analysis (Biber & Finegan, 1994) or textlinguistic stylistics (Sandig, 1986). Content analysis makes no claim to being a rich, definitive, or comprehensive method of analysis, as some critics have alleged. Given Its limited scope, it cannot be so. Rather, content analysis typically serves only to provide empirical grounding for other more sophisticated methods, such as those detailed in other chapters of this book,” (14).
