Tracking the history of qualitative research is to some extent a personal journey, reflective of the individual's own experience in the field. Many scholars participated in the ongoing dialogue around the shift from a solely positivist model of research to a multiple-models context. There still remain some philosophical and practical problems,…

All social science serves some agenda: social science research is a value-bound, value-determined, context-situated, and ideologically loaded enterprise. Each researcher makes choices in the following areas, whether tacitly, implicitly, or deliberately: (1) a paradigm choice, either conventional (rationalistic) or emerging (naturalistic); (2) the…

The revolution in hard sciences is explored, from the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview to the Heisenbergian universe, and consideration is given to whether the conventional, Cartesian model is a serviceable one for research in the social/applied sciences. Five axioms comprising the existing paradigm of logical positivism are outlined (reality,…