Designed Generalization from Qualitative Research

Generalization from Qualitative Inquiry 1 Generalization from Qualitative Inquiry

Qualitative inquiries normally take pains to make clear that they are not generalizable" (Kilbourn, 2006, p. 534). I disagree that this is or should be the norm for qualitative research in education. In this article, I discuss the kinds of generalization that come from qualitative inquiry. I argue that there are several well-established means of in which warranted generalizations can be produce...

Generalization in Qualitative Research on Behalf Of: British Sociological Association

Earlier treatments of moderatum generalization (e.g. Williams, 2000a) explicitly addressed interpretivist sociology. This article extends that earlier argument by examining some of its implications for a wider range of qualitative research methods. It first adopts an empirical approach, providing concrete illustrations from the most recent volume of Sociology of what sociologists actually do wh...

Generalization in quantitative and qualitative research: myths and strategies.

Generalization, which is an act of reasoning that involves drawing broad inferences from particular observations, is widely-acknowledged as a quality standard in quantitative research, but is more controversial in qualitative research. The goal of most qualitative studies is not to generalize but rather to provide a rich, contextualized understanding of some aspect of human experience through t...

A pluralist view of generalization in qualitative research

Logics for Qualitative Inductive Generalization

The paper contains a survey of (mainly unpublished) adaptive logics of inductive generalization. These defeasible logics are precise formulations of certain methods. Some attention is also paid to ways of handling background knowledge, introducing mere conjectures, and the research guiding capabilities of the logics.