The Past as Prologue

During the final quarter of the 20th century, educational researchers, along with researchers in a number of other fields in which quantitative methods had been used almost exclusively, became increasingly interested in exploring the potential of qualitative research methods. For some, such as Miles and Huberman (1984/1999), methods were merely methods; others, however, saw the embrace of qualitative methods as symptomatic of much more significant changes in the research landscape. The indisputable leaders of this second group were Lincoln and Guba; their 1985 book, Naturalistic Inquiry, profoundly influenced a whole gener-ation of qualitative researchers in a number of fields. In Naturalistic Inquiry, Lincoln and Guba (1985) argued that the embrace of qualitative methods signaled the emer-gence of a new research paradigm. And taking a cue from Kuhn (1962/1996), who earlier had argued that new physical science paradigms were incommensurable with the paradigms they eventually supplanted, Lincoln and Guba made the same claim about the paradigm they suggested was emerging in the social sciences. One of the incommensurable differences between the new and the old paradigms involved the notion of causality. Lincoln and Guba, in fact, titled one of the chapters in Naturalistic Inquiry, “Is Causality Viable? ” After providing an impressive philosophical critique of the concept of causal-ity, they conclude that causality—at least as that idea had been conceptualized by most of the research community in the past—is not a viable concept for qualitative researchers who were embracing the new, emerging paradigm they described. The historical importance of Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) paradigm talk should not be underestimated. Within the educational research field, at least, paradigm talk helped qualitative methods (and qualitative researchers) gain accep-tance in an academic culture that historically equated the notion of research with quantification, experimentation, and statistical inference (Gage, 1963). As someone who became a qualitative researcher at about the time that Lincoln and Gub