People often make interpretations when they believe they are providing factual descriptions. To demonstrate unintentional interpretation, the author showed a brief ambiguous video clip and asked students to write descriptions of what they saw and heard. When students evaluated their responses, they discovered that 96% of the class wrote…

In educational research, rigid distinctions between the relative merits of quantitative research often rest on positivistic dogma. In contrast, post-positivistic thought eliminates the intractable problem engendered by positivistic epistemology of a forced choice between value-laden and value-free research methods. (KH)

In a study of the relationship between moral reasoning and teenage drug use, problems arose in an attempt to reduce qualitative data to a quantitative format: (1) making analytic sense of singular and universal responses; (2) the mistaken logical inference that each pattern of judgment should have behavioral indicators; and (3) construction and…