Issues of Validity in Openly Ideological Research: Between a rock and a soft place

In this paper, I attempt to reconceptualize validity within the context of openly ideological research. ~ The usefulness of this reconceptualization is tested by apply-ing it to examples from three explicitly value-based research programs: feminist research, neo-Marxist critical ethnography, and Freirian "empowering " research. 2 Finally, validity issues within research committed to a more equitable social order are discussed. The Context From Which I Speak The attempt to produce value-neutral social science is increasingly being aban-doned as at best unrealizable, and at worst self-deceptive, and is being replaced by social sciences based on explicit ideologies. Mary Hesse (1980) To say that positivism remains the orthodox approach to doing empirical research in the human sciences is not to deny that we are in a postpositivist era? Thomas Kuhn wrote that "rather than a single group conversion, what occurs [with a paradigm shift] is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances " as prac-titioners of the new paradigm "improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it " (1962, pp. 157-158). The foundation of postpositivism is the cumulative, trenchant, and increasingly definitive critique of the inadequacies of positivist assumptions in the face of th