Rigor and Validity in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In this symposium, scholars will engage with difficult questions around the concepts of rigor and validity in response to post-qualitative inquiry’s continued influence on the discourses and practices of qualitative inquiry in educational research. Drawing on a variety of philosophically inflected theoretical perspectives, scholars will explore whether and how such inherently methodological concepts as rigor and validity are thinkable after the post qualitative, anti-methodological turn, offering new conceptual approaches to rigor and validity that can support AERA’s call for new, expansive possibilities for educational research. Scholars will emphasize how a post qualitative orientation towards rigor and validity might contribute to AERA’s broader goal of democratizing evidence, doing so through processual philosophies of connection, movement, and becoming.

Sub Unit

• Division D - Measurement and Research Methodologies / Division D - Section 3: Qualitative Research Methods

Chair

• T. Bradley Robinson, Texas State University

Papers

• Vigor, Not Rigor: Possibilities for Generative, Evaluative Constraints in Post-Qualitative Inquiry - T. Bradley Robinson, Texas State University

• Active Rigor and Relational Validity: A Post-Qual Call for Difference - Aaron M. Kuntz, Florida International University

• Rigor and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: An Argument for Relentlessly Returning to Reading - Elliott Kuecker, University of Georgia - Athens

• Post-Qualitative Inquiry's Reversal: Validity, Concepts and "Humans" - Travis Henry, University of Georgia - Athens

• Challenging Sameness in Educational Research - Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon

Discussant

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia