Evidence That Applied Researchers Need Methodologists

• In Event: Methodologists, Who Needs 'Em?

Abstract

By its most generic definition, methodologists are scholars who have focused their careers on research methodology. They conduct studies that create and investigate methodological approaches to research, and/or they provide methodological consultation to applied researchers (e.g., Leeper, 2018).

After engaging in professional interactions with methodologists for more than 10 years, my perspective is that methodologists often have to defend their scholarship. They rarely have to defend their consultation work, as the benefits of that work are directly apparent to applied researchers. However, with respect to methodologists conducting their own research, arguments abound about whether they are necessary scholars. The arguments may be that all scholars use methodology and, hence, all scholars are methodologists; or that methodologists are too distant from applied research to advance methodology. Whatever the argument, my engagements with methodologists have consistently indicated that many applied researchers are unaware of the critical role that methodological research plays in the scholarly advancement of knowledge.

The objective of this commentary is to argue that the existence of methodological scholars is prerequisite to research-based advancements in knowledge. The technique for supporting this argument is a series of reflections on an alternate reality, one in which there are no methodological scholars in the past, present, or future. I use data sources and evidence spanning the past 60 years of educational research published by quantitative methodologists. I have narrowed the scope of the evidence to quantitative research to stay within my realm of expertise. However, in the full commentary I encourage future work of this nature on qualitative and mixed methodologists both in and outside of educational research fields.

The results of the full commentary are segmented into three parts. First, I suppose an alternate reality in which methodologists from the past never existed. An example from this section is a discussion of Donald T. Campbell, whose career shift toward methodological research had countless influences on our ability to adapt research designs from physical science settings to educational settings (e.g., Campbell, 1979). I reflect with the reader, “How would educational research have fared had not he focused his scholarly work on methodology?” Second, I suppose that present methodologists are absent from the population of educational scholars. An example from this section describes some of the recent successes of applied educational researchers that hinged upon Jessica Spybrook’s work toward improving the quality of educational research designs in the presence of classroom and school clusters (e.g., Spybrook, 2008). Third, I imagine a future without methodologists. I pinpoint some current methodological challenges to pressing scholarly topics in educational research (e.g., developing teacher evaluation methods that do not hinge on tests scores (Campbell & Ronfeldt, 2018)), asking the reader to reflect on questions such as, “Who will have the time and expertise to tackle these methodological challenges if educational methodologists go extinct?”

The full commentary has significance not only for promoting recognition of the important work of quantitative educational methodologists, but also for promoting future scholarly endeavors of applied educational researchers who benefit from methodological innovations.

Author

• Anne Corinne Huggins-Manley, University of Florida