Positivism in Social Science Research

How can I expand or advance the conversation by new insight or perspective?

I agree with the idea that the ability to replicate a study is critical in being able to trust its conclusions. This is much more difficult in qualitative research, given that such a small, highly specific population is being observed by the researcher. But even quantitative studies face a so-called replication crisis. “When research papers are published, they describe their methodology…When another research team tries to conduct a study based on the original to see if they find the same result, that’s an attempted replication” (Piper, 2014, par.4). But one attempt to replicate studies from the popular scientific journals Nature and Science led to the conclusion that only 13 of the 21 results looked at could actually be replicated by outsiders, casting the findings in doubt as generalizable to outside of the specific study population (Piper, 2014). For larger-scale scientific studies that are used to set public policy or, for example to validate drug studies or specific treatments, this is particularly troubling, versus small, exploratory qualitative studies.

This highlights how it is not only that the subjectivity of the researcher’s perspective that can taint results, as in qualitative research (Lakshman et al., 2000). In quantitative results, the size of the sampling, a research design which does not filter out adequate numbers of variables, and other concerns can ultimately impact the ability of other authors to replicate a study. Regardless, as you note, it is critical to be able to do so to, and as research studies on a wide scale become more expensive and difficult to perform, and people’s lives and the direction of future research may be affected. Also, as you note, mixed methods study can provide triangulation of research, or different methods of support for conclusions, even though this brings the challenge of ensuring both the qualitative and the quantitative methods can be replicated.