With the increasing focus on issues pertaining, for example, to race, class, and gender, social science studies have increasingly relied on postmodern theory. Postmodern critiques have enlarged in scope and increasingly confronted traditional social scientists with challenges: epistemic, methodological, and moral. This paper asserts that while…

The most important problem in psychology and the social sciences today is the failure to produce cumulative knowledge. This situation has led many to conclude that cumulative knowledge and general principles and theories may be impossible to establish in psychology, a conclusion suggesting that psychology can never be a science--only at best a…

Three network studies in education are reviewed in order to assess the current "state of the art." New directions for developing social network analysis (SNA) in education, based upon experiences from a study of school-community relations in Pontiac, Michigan, are suggested. One concern for the future of SNA stems from the elevation of…

Although field studies in human geography have some advantages over restricted classroom and laboratory studies, special methodological and ethical concerns arise. For example, field studies are able to take into account the complexity of events in natural settings as opposed to the controlled setting of a laboratory, particularly when subjects…

This paper explores the ethics of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism. Three ethical criteria commonly used in social research--informed consent, avoidance of harm to participants, and confidentiality--are identified and applied to a particular case of educational criticism in a study conducted on teacher coping strategies. The…

For various well-documented reasons, the feminist social movement has been critical of academia as a worksetting and of the social sciences as a set of disciplines. For these reasons, feminists claim that the assumptions underlying several research designs and procedures are sexist. They have developed a feminist methodology to examine these…

This paper is part of a symposium focusing on the Safe School Study recently completed by the National Institute of Education. The symposium attempted to delineate the critical methodological problems arising from ethnographic research in the school setting on school violence and delinquency, and to report recent findings from studies using…

A substantial number of published articles in speech communication research today is experimental/social scientific in nature. It is only in the past decade that scholars have begun to put the history of communication under the lens. Early advocates of the adoption of the method of social scientific inquiry were J. A. Winans, J. M. O'Neill, and C.…

Ethnographers find themselves among a family of researchers referred to as naturalists. This rather diverse family conducts research described by turns as qualitative, participant observational, case study, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, constructivist, and interpretive. The focus of the ethnographer's inquiry is on the mundane,…

Statistical significance tests (SSTs) have been the object of much controversy among social scientists. Proponents have hailed SSTs as an objective means for minimizing the likelihood that chance factors have contributed to research results. Critics have both questioned the logic underlying SSTs and bemoaned the widespread misapplication and…

Results suggested that socioeconomic factors were not major determinants of differences in infant mortality in Texas in the 1970's. Data on live births and infant deaths for 254 Texas counties were obtained from the Texas Department of Health for each of the 11 years from 1970 to 1980. Infant, neonatal, and postneonatal mortality rates were…

This paper identifies major theories prevalent in recent feminist scholarship, discusses biases inherent in these theories, and offers an original theoretical explanation for women's social and economic status. The major objective is to contribute to the body of feminist thought by exposing the biased conceptual tools used by many researchers to…

Methodological incarceration occurs when research and investigation are restricted by the traditional concepts of how a study should be designed and are hampered by those notions which dictate what research is. This paper examines several reasons why social science research in general--reading research in particular--is considered by some to be…

This paper discusses the difficulties encountered during research on the accomplishments of lesser known women for inclusion in a biographical dictionary of such women. The dictionary includes biographical sketches of 761 women representing 50 countries and 35 fields of endeavor from 1600 to the present. The paper focuses on the difficulties of…

L. A. Marascuilo and R. C. Serlin (1988) note that stepwise regression is a method used frequently in social science research. C. Huberty (1989) characterizes such applications as being "common". In support of this latter statement, a review of dissertations by B. Thompson (1988) demonstrated that dissertation students frequently use…