Naturalistic Inquiry

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Despite shying away from specifically defining what “naturalism” is, Lincoln and Guba assert that it requires certain interpretations and perspectives. They state that naturalism is first and foremost a function of what the investigator does; in other words, how research is conducted both in terms of data collection and analysis. They characterize the actions of researchers in two dimensions: the first is the extent of the investigator's influence upon the antecedent conditions of the behavior studied, and the second is the extent to which investigators impose their own views and beliefs upon the behavior studied. These two dimensions are melded into two tenets of naturalistic inquiry, that the inquirer (1) does not manipulate the phenomena of interest and (2) imposes no a priori units on the outcome.

Lincoln and Guba explain the need for a naturalist paradigm by outlining challenges and critiques of positivism. They portray these as so significant as to essentially kill positivist thought:

• Inadequate conceptualization of science. Positivism is imbalanced in its concern with a context of justification rather than a context of discovery. In other words, theory testing is privileged over theory generation in the positivist tradition, thereby constraining the possible uses or purposes of science.
• Oversimplified theory–fact relationship. Positivism has trouble with induction, which creates the possibility of many conclusions being reached given certain premises. By privileging deduction, there is no room for positivists to see facts that are not determined by some kind of theory.
• Overdependence on operationalism. Positivism evaluates truth claims by posing empirical questions, leading to a need to operationalize. This results in replacing the phenomenon under study with something that measures it.
• Inevitable determinism and reductionism. Positivism has these two very serious consequences: Determinism has significant implications for human agency, and reductionism portrays all phenomena as subject to a set of rules.
• Ignores “humanness.” Positivism exhorts exogenous research, that which is driven by the researcher rather than the subjects being researched. It therefore excludes emic research and the wide range of topics of study associated with it.
• Inability to deal with emergent formulations. Because positivism is based on validating theoretical relationship, it is silent on the process of understanding novel relationships and phenomena.
• Flawed assumptions. Positivism is shown to rest on several flawed assumptions: that there is an objective ontological reality out there to be discovered, an ease of separation between the observer and the observed, assumptions of temporal and contextual independence of observations, and seeing no possibility other than linear causality of events and an axiological assumption of value freedom.

It is these problems associated with positivism that provide the foundation for Lincoln and [Page 602]Guba's alternative, naturalistic paradigm. At the time their book was written, the idea of postpositivist and interpretive paradigms would have been quite novel, and acted as a challenge to a very entrenched way of seeing and studying the world around us. Lincoln and Guba argue for a type of paradigm shift, one that replaces positivistic inquiry and its associated problems with a more enlightened naturalistic one that takes us into the post-positivistic world that rests on five

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