Bravado, Blind Spots, and Blunt Force: Making the Case for Reflective Researchers

Abstract

Being a journal editor, I read numerous manuscripts and many published articles. As such, I occasionally step back and gauge whether certain patterns or trends are emerging in music education and music teacher education scholarship. One area of concern I have identified is the tendency for some researchers to focus on establishing the veracity and certainty of their findings, while neglecting the ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction that is endemic to the research process, regardless of method. Among fellow quantitative researchers, this orientation often is revealed by an adherence to specific significance levels (regardless of effect sizes), an emphasis on findings that conform with theory and past research while ignoring counterintuitive or confounding results, and the misguided belief that complex designs and sophisticated statistical tools always provide the best path to data nuances or interpretive intricacies. Qualitative researchers are also culpable. While qualitative research is positioned to deal with the “squishy” elements of reality by virtue of how the researcher role is defined, the expressed desire to describe and understand rather than explain in definitive terms, and the emergent nature of research questions, there is an ample amount of qualitative work in which authors appear hell-bent on employing a distorted lens, coding capriciously, and/or converging only on themes that serve to confirm a priori rhetorical positions. Rather than unpacking an issue or, in colloquial terms, pealing back layers of the onion, such researchers parse a phenomenon or experience in ways that present only a partial understanding or a narrow/slanted interpretation. There may be critique, but no context for framing the critique or suggesting alternative paths. I suspect many of my former graduate students are able to quote various adages verbatim that I employ to poke at such behaviors. Here are some examples of those Austinisms: “One study, let alone one analysis, does not establish anything”; “If you