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...Trickett, 1996), and even a cursory examination of any of the field's main English-language journals reveals articles using a variety of methods, approaches, and paradigms. Furthermore, one of the Society for Community Research and Action's four principles explicitly mentions using "multiple methodologies" (SCRA website, n.d.). So, it would therefore perhaps seem that further discussion of the pluralist approach in community psychology is now superfluous.
However, there are two qualifications to this statement. First, the field's long-standing self-examination on the place of traditional scientific approaches to enquiry, which this special issue continues, is evidence that there is still heat in the debate about which way the field ought to head. Second, although almost all community psychologists would support a pluralistic position in principle, there has been little attempt in the literature to detail its implications for how community research is conducted and appraised.
The present paper therefore seeks to develop further the implications of the methodological pluralist approach for research in community psychology. First, it briefly examines the characteristics of the pluralist approach. Second, it outlines some possible criteria for how research might be evaluated. Finally, it addresses different models of pluralism within the field. It attempts to draw together ideas from several other sources, both within and outside of community psychology. Its intended contribution is one of synthesis: to integrate methodological ideas drawn from disparate areas with the particular concerns and values of community psychology.
SOME PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS
As Kelly (2003) observes, the place and role of "science" within community psychology has been debated since the founding of the field, and the term itself has become loaded with much surplus meaning. It is therefore useful in the interests of precision to briefly address the usage of this term and our other key notion of "pluralism."
Science
"Science" is a natural language term, of which no precise demarcation is possible. It may be helpful to distinguish two senses of the term as commonly used in the literature. The first, more restrictive sense emphasizes systematic observation and experimentation, and the formulation of general theories or laws of nature. Commonly associated with such laboratory-based disciplines as physics and biology, it is the image of science at the heart of the positivist program. The second, more inclusive sense is the "human science" definition: that the ambit of science can be widened to encompass many different kinds of systematic ways to advance knowledge. It is in this vein that we have political science, social science, and, indeed, community science (Wandersman, 2003). These two senses of the term are sometimes blurred. In case of ambiguity, this paper will indicate the first sense by the qualification "traditional science."
Debates about an area's scientific standing, or lack thereof, are of course not unique to community psychology. They have permeated the whole field of psychology (Driver-Linn, 2003) and allied disciplines, such as sociology. This debate has deep historical roots in the epistemological divisions between rationalists and empiricists. However, what gives it a unique dimension in the present context is the value-laden nature of our field. Community psychologists evaluate research not only by academic criteria, but also by a template of social, political, and moral criteria (Prilleltensky, 2001).
The debate over the role of science matters because it has implications for the research and development of the field: what knowledge can practicing community psychologists draw upon to support their activities, and what activities do researchers in community psychology carry out to advance the field's knowledge base? In other words, the debate concerns the nature of evidenced-based practice, and the relevance of practice-based evidence.
Methodological Pluralism
The core idea behind methodological pluralism is that knowledge accumulates from a variety of sources in a variety of ways. Pluralism is an embracing of those possibilities: a finding of value in methodological diversity (Fiske & Shweder, 1986). The pluralist stance is that traditional scientific approaches (usually quantitative, often experimental) and their alternatives (e.g., qualitative, narrative, post-modern) all have their place and are all to be valued. Rather than pitting one approach against another, it is more productive to follow a strategy of fitting the method to the research question (Campbell, 1974, cited in Tebes & Kraemer, 1991).
Interest in the possibilities of pluralist approaches was crystallized by Fiske and Shweder's (1986) edited volume, to which a number of leading thinkers in the epistemology of social science contributed. Within community psychology, Kelly (1990), Trickett (1996), and Tebes and Kraemer (1991) were early advocates of pluralistic methods in what was at the time a more traditional quantitative discipline. Tolan et al.'s (1990) community research methods volume helped to move the balance more towards non-traditional methods. The 1990s saw a number of social science publications advocating combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, from a pragmatic, mixed methods position (e.g., Steckler, McLeroy, Goodman, Bird, & McCormick, 1992; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998). The first editions of some pluralistically oriented social research methods textbooks were also published in the 1990s: Bryman (2004) and Robson (2002) being two noteworthy British examples (current editions cited). We will examine these ideas about putting pluralism into practice more fully in the final section of this paper.
We have elsewhere defined methodological pluralism as the belief "that no single approach to research is best overall, rather, what is important is that the methods be appropriate for the questions under investigation. No single research method is inherently superior to any other: all methods have their relative advantages and disadvantages" (Barker, Pistrang, & Elliott, 2002, p. 245). It is the converse of the belief that certain research methods are inherently more scientifically valid or respectable than others.
The remainder of this paper attempts to develop the implications of the pluralist position for the conduct and evaluation of community research.
QUALITY STANDARDS UNDER PLURALISM
Riger et al. (2004), concluding their commentary on issues in participatory action research, pose the question "Whose standards are used to evaluate [research] quality, and what are those standards?" (p. 237). This section attempts to address these issues of research quality. It will focus on the second of the questions (what standards?), but it is worth being explicit that, in line with the existing literature, our responses to the first question (whose standards?) mostly concern the standards of academic audiences. We believe that there is a substantial overlap between these standards and those of people outside academia (e.g., research stakeholders, research participants), but it is beyond the scope of the present paper to address this.
The practical issue of how to make judgments about the quality of diverse styles of research is constantly faced by journal editors and reviewers appraising manuscripts and grant proposals, and by community organizations who are prospective stake-holders in research activities. One common criticism of a pluralistic stance is that it is not possible to maintain standards across different genres of research. What standards can be used to evaluate a piece of ethnography as well as a randomized experiment? If no such comprehensive standards exist, is pluralism thus equivalent to anarchy, a way of saying that that everyone just goes ahead and "does their own thing?"
In our view, there is a difference between methodological pluralism and methodological anarchy. Pluralism is distinct from the relativistic "anything goes" stance which Feyerabend (1975) proposes in his aptly titled book Against Method. Pluralism and rigor are...
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