Opinion: Paradigms, methods, and the (as yet) failed striving for methodological diversity in educational psychology published research

Citation: Kaplan A (2015) Opinion: Paradigms, methods, and the (as yet) failed striving for methodological diversity in educational psychology published research. In his March 2015 inaugural editorial, incoming Journal of Educational Psychology (JEP) editor Steve Graham explained his intention to build on the leadership of esteemed previous JEP editors, but also to go beyond " the status quo " to making " JEP even better " (p. 1) by setting criteria for the manuscripts that would pass the bar for peer review. Graham explicated highly commendable criteria, including adequate description of participants, and setting that would allow appropriate contextualization, replication, and generalization; demonstration of reliability and validity of measures within the context of the reported study, particularly measures of student achievement; demonstration of the fidelity of interventions, as well as description of " what happened in control and comparison conditions " (p. 2) in order to support any causal claims; and utilization of appropriate statistical analyses and report of descriptive statistics, confidence intervals, and effect sizes. In addition to those specific criteria, Graham made another important statement highlighting the goal of enhancing JEP's methodological diversity: " Another way we plan to make JEP even better is to communicate to the field our interest in publishing high-quality research involving multiple methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, single-subject, and mixed-methods designs " (p. 2). Enhancing methodological diversity in JEP would help to reflect the diverse nature of high-quality educational psychological research: " The world of educational psychology is very diverse in its interest and approaches to scholarship. We hope that during our watch, JEP can become even better at capturing this complexity " (p. 2). Other prominent scholars see the value of methodological diversity in published educational psychology research. More than a decade ago, then JEP incoming editor Harris (2003) made a similar call in her editorial— " We are also committed to communicating to the field our strong interest in publishing research of the highest quality across multiple methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and single-subject designs " (p. 451). Unfortunately, her call seemed to have had no apparent meaningful effect. A quick search in PsychArticles for articles in JEP with the term " qualitative " during the 12 years following Harris' editorial returned only 10 articles among hundreds, within which qualitative data were collected in six (the other four used the term qualitative theoretically), and the methodological approach was qualitative/interpretivist in only one (an …