Qualitative And Quantitative Research: False Dualism By Richard Pring

Throughout this week, we read two articles. They are “What is this thing called Science?---Science as knowledge derived from the facts of experience” by Alan Chalmers and “Philosophy of Educational Research-- Quantitative and Qualitative Research: False Dualism” by Richard Pring respectively. From the first reading, the message that the author wanted to argue is that science is not exactly fact, and this is a common way that people identify science. They tend to think that facts are obtained through observation and experiments. Instead, science could be the experiences we have in our daily lives. An important quote from the reading is “all knowledge should be derived from the facts of experience”, which was originally by John Locke, George …show more content…
In traditional perspective, qualitative research help explain phenomena through intensive collection of narrative data, while quantitative research explain and predict, phenomena through focused collection of numerical data. A quote from the text is “One embraces a scientific model for understanding educational practice; the other emphasizes that human beings cannot be the objects of science”. (Pring 2000) The author pointed out an important idea that 'facts ' are created by the society instead of being discovered. It is important to figure out if the outcome ‘make sense’ instead of its ‘true’ state. The main argument that the author was trying to bring out is that the opposition (not the distinction) between quantitative and qualitative research is false, the dualism between the two researches is mistaken. The ‘naive realism’ attributed to those who support more quantitative methodology is not prove to be right. Qualitative research helps test and build block of quantitative knowing. Since ‘facts’ are created by the society and different societies have different cultures; therefore, the meaning changes from time to time and affects how people understand