Abstract
<strong>Background:</strong> In engineering education research, we have made great strides in both our advanced qualitative research methodologies and the acceptance of qualitative research within the broader field. This shift in our community likely marks a shift in our epistemologies and a shift in our values, but we are still feeling a pull towards positivist epistemologies from funding agencies, journals, editorial boards, reviewers, and readers, which may be limiting our potential to conduct more critical and postmodern research and learn more about communities who are marginalized in engineering. <strong>Purpose: </strong>The purpose of this research project is to develop an understanding of qualitative researchers’ epistemological perspectives and values. The research question guiding this study is: Through an analysis of qualitative engineering education manuscripts published in 2019, what voices of researchers and participants appear in our work and what do they reveal about our EER community’s epistemologies and values? <strong>Method:</strong> The databases Engineering Village and Google Scholar were employed to identify journal articles that are qualitative, engineering education–focused, and published in 2019. This search resulted in 27 journal articles from eleven journals that served as the data for this project. The analysis was derived from discourse analysis and The Listening Guide and involved multiple readings. During these readings, we considered how the epistemologies present in qualitative engineering education research were reflected through a discursive examination of voices that emerged in the papers. <strong>Conclusions: </strong>Researcher and participant voices emerged in the analysis, including some that are more aligned with positivist epistemologies (e.g., apologetic, generalizable, and abstracted voices) and others that are aligned with more postmodern epistemologies (e.g., alongside, vulnerable, and storied voices). These voices provide some insight into epistemological and paradigmatic tensions within our qualitative engineering education research community.
Highlights
In 2019, our research team submitted a qualitative proposal in the postmodern paradigm to the National Science Foundation and, while it was not funded, it was reviewed positively
X, page 91 of 99 voices and emerged in our analysis demonstrates that our community values research with large data sets that minimizes or controls for researcher bias and/or subjectivities, and values generalizable research. This desire for generalizable research could be a reason that some people in our community value qualitative data less than quantitative data (Beddoes, 2014a) and could demonstrate that some qualitative researchers and reviewers are operating from a positivist or post-positivist epistemology, which situates them to value research that is generalizable and has minimal biases present
As more engineering education researchers begin to embrace postmodern and critical epistemologies while others continue to operate unknowingly with a positivist or post-positivist epistemology, the tension over quality work in EER may continue to be exacerbated, resulting in more frequent instances of the types of illegitimate questions that we presented at the beginning of this article
Summary
In 2019, our research team submitted a qualitative proposal in the postmodern paradigm to the National Science Foundation and, while it was not funded, it was reviewed positively. The most prominent example of positivism’s role in the formation and perpetuation of racism, white supremacy, and eugenics is American biological and psychological scholars’ body of work produced at the height of the moral dilemma surrounding chattel slavery and westward expansion during and following the Enlightenment period (Curran, 2011; Lombardo, 1987; Tyson & Oldroyd, 2019) These researchers weaponized positivist epistemological assumptions of objectivity and generalizability through the scientific method to fabricate evidence that situated African slaves and Native Americans as biologically, cognitively, Art. X, page 82 of 99
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