How do I respond to Cresswell (2003; ch1)?
In a nutshell, with visceral revulsion. It seems to me that this is philosophical mumbo-jumbo intended to create an aura of intellectual superiority that is completely irrelevant to the real world.
Taking the distinction between qualitative and quantitative as a starting point… There’s abundant literature demonstrating how experimental design can be applied to qualitative data, that it can promote unbiased interpretation of such information and therefore produce more widely relevant answers than single case studies based on observational data.
Suppose that I am interested in using images to reduce risk-taking behaviour in young adolescents. Perhaps, I decide to test what response a range of images will provoke in this target audience. I can easily use a fully-saturated partial factorial experimental design (available since 1940) to ensure that I gather information which precisely identifies the images’ effect on this group. My ‘controls’ might involve different age groups, people not exposed to the images, some exposed to them once and others exposed many times. I might differentiate between resultant changes in females compared to males. Of course, what works in a seaside community might differ from a city sample, so I build those factors in. The ‘data’ could easily be metric, but equally it can be (or include) anecdotal responses. I could reverse this and use the narrative to inform the quantitative. I could use the narrative as it stands, or quantify it using tools like NVIVO.
I expect researchers to be informed about these things, better still to have access to people who can advise them. Pondering over my ‘world view’, let alone my ‘epistomological’ viewpoint, wastes valuable time and resources in investigating something that could save lives.
Some people will be excited to know that this puts them into the ‘pragmatist’ mold, personally, it reminds me of an encounter with a student 40+ years ago, who was asked by someone what subject he was studying. His response (he was an American studying in Britain) went something like; “Aw Gee! I don’t like to be categorised!”
Frankly, I would be highly sceptical of any researcher who had any different worldview. To me, they are intrinsically biased in their work, driven by either ignorance of possibilities, fearful of change, or ill-advised.