A Reluctant but Necessary Rebuttal to a Rebuttal

This commentary is in rebuttal to David Morgan’s (2018b) rebuttal to Martyn Hammersley’s (2018) commentary on Morgan’s (2018a) article on the “value of distinguishing between qualitative and quantitative research.”

Let me begin by saying that this response is not something I wanted to do. I had read Morgan’s (2018a) article when it first appeared online, was amazed at its outright misrepresentation of my (and others’) arguments regarding the qualitative/quantitative (QL/QN) binary but decided not to give it any more importance or exposure by responding to it. Sometime later, Martyn Hammersley sent me a draft of his single-authored commentary to ensure I had read Morgan’s article and that his commentary had not misrepresented my position; I replied that he had faithfully captured it.

Yet I now feel compelled to respond to Morgan’s rebuttal to Hammersley’s commentary. Morgan based his rebuttal in part on a transcript I have neither seen nor authorized, which he constructed from a tape-recording he made of the 2016 keynote address I had delivered at the 2nd Mixed Methods International Research Association (MMIRA) Conference. This keynote address included exchanges with the audience in a Q&A session that followed. My concern derives from the fact that when I give any oral address, I do not speak from a prepared, written document that can be read by others but rather speak extemporaneously, using PowerPoint slides (seen by the audience) as reminders about what I want to say in an organized manner. Along with Journal of Mixed Methods Research (JMMR) readers, I therefore have no way of knowing the exact wording, timing, and circumstance of the quotes Morgan offered at the end of his rebuttal. I do know that written transcripts can never capture everything that occurs in a speech event. Transcription is a highly interpretive affair placing a great burden on the transcriber accurately to represent not only words but also tone, nonverbal communication, and elements of the social context in which those words are spoken. Those who create and use transcripts of speech have great authority as editors, translators, and interpreters. Transcripts are accurate and useful to the extent that users understand their constructed reality, the judgments made concerning what to preserve about a speech event, and the purposes for their creation. I can only guess why Morgan decided to make and then use a transcript of an oral presentation I delivered to close his rebuttal instead of the articles I authored on the topics of mixed methods research and the QL/QN binary readily available to JMMR readers.

My commentary here is to address both what is in the public record and what is not about my understanding of methodological differences. What I have advanced in various ways in Sandelowski (2012, 2014, 2016), which Morgan (2018a) cites in his article, and elsewhere in, for example, Sandelowski (2011) and Sandelowski, Voils, and Knafl (2009), was that the differences in mind-set, methodology, and techniques that must be negotiated in mixed methods research simply do not lie on the QL/QN divide. As will be evident in the published record, neither have I ever argued that no methodological differences exist nor have I resorted to “extreme[s]” (Morgan, 2018b, p. 260) to argue against the QL/QN binary. Indeed, I offered extended ordinary examples of the differences that do matter in the conduct of research, none of which fall on the QL/QN line. Along with other authors and with examples, I maintained that the QL/QN binary is a serious impediment to creative and meaningful MMR because it reifies false distinctions between so-called QL and QN research while ignoring the vast differences within research approaches designated as either QL or QN. Along with others and with examples, I contended that the QL and QN labels were used to refer to too many entities (e.g., paradigm, methods, techniques, and even data) to be useful.

At the end of his rebuttal, Morgan quotes me as saying in my 2016 MMIRA keynote address that “there really isn’t any such thing as QUAL and QUANT data.” What he neglects to quote is what else I said afterward that is likely very close to what I wrote in my 2014 editorial (with citation to another author), specifically, that “data are neither QL nor QN, but rather aspects of experiences or phenomena transformed into words, numbers, visual forms, and the like, each of which may in turn be transformed again into other forms” (Sandelowski, 2014, p. 5). Morgan quotes me as saying in my 2016 MMIRA keynote address that “I don’t think there are any such things as qualitative and quantitative [research] questions.” What he neglects to write is what I then likely indicated—as I do every time I address this topic—that research aims and questions are not divisible by method but rather by the knowledge sought, and that any research purpose or question might be addressed by diverse research methods. Morgan quotes me as saying in my 2016 MMIRA keynote that:

Reading my notes on my PowerPoint slides, I see that I listed with examples a number of distinctive contributions mixed methods research could make such as developing and illustrating specific strategies to engage with and manage a host of methodological differences. I recommended that mixed methods research drop the uninformative QL/QN labels and instead specifically name and describe each of the inquiry approaches to be used (e.g., not QL interview or QL analysis but rather the actual name and description (with citation) of the particular species of interview or analysis used). I advocated—as I had in my published papers—a mind-set less preoccupied with mixing so-called QL and QN elements and more attentive to what makes sense for answering significant research questions.

In short, contrary to Morgan’s suggestion in his rebuttal regarding my supposed “retreat” and “ambiguity,” I have retreated from none of my arguments about the serious impediment the QL/QN binary poses to mindful and meaningful inquiry of any kind. And my position is clearly stated in the published papers Morgan cited and did not cite. When I stated in my 2014 editorial that “in my effort to unmix mixed-methods research here, I am not positioning myself against mixed-methods research qua research, or proposing that theories and methodologies cannot or should not be distinguished from each other” (p. 6), I was not retreating but rather urging that the focus of MMR should be on the acquisition of knowledge of the opportunities, limits, and diversity in the application of methods and on the development of the imagination to configure methods into assemblages uniquely fitting to addressing significant problems.

Morgan appears also to have a special problem with my argument against another divide—the strong/weak binary—often used to justify mixed methods research whereby the strengths of one method are said to offset the weaknesses of another method. As I detailed in Sandelowski (2012), this position is wholly untenable as the terms strong and weak designate idiosyncratic judgments about modes of inquiry, not attributes of them. What is ignored here is that when such judgments are made they are always based on the assumption of some a priori standard against which strength and weakness can be assessed and of some a priori parameters for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of two or more entities. Individual interviews are different from focus group interviews by virtue, in part, of the former allowing the elicitation of more detailed individual accounts and the latter generating responses in group interaction. Although certainly different from each other in purpose, mode of conduct, and analytic treatment, individual and group interviews are neither stronger nor weaker in comparison to each other in any absolute sense. A hammer is neither stronger nor weaker than a screwdriver because of what it is; both are implements intended for different purposes and if users fail to use them for the purposes for which they are intended, that is a weakness of the user not the implements.

In conclusion, in an earlier editorial I addressed the serious problem in academic publications of authors misrepresenting the views of other authors (Sandelowski, 2010). I stated that scholarly criticism means first and foremost getting the author’s ideas right. I invite JMMR readers to read all the original papers from all of the authors Morgan (2018a) cited in his article that led to Hammersley’s commentary and ultimately to this reluctant but necessary rebuttal to a rebuttal.