My research strategy is using a qualitative facilitative action research in an inductive approach, within a positivist tradition. To my best understanding, according to Oates (2006), and Tekin & Kotaman (2013), if a positivist researcher considers doing an action research, it is mostly feasible to do it in a quasi-experimental studies. However, this is somewhat incompatible to my approach. In line with my research strategy, Alvesson (2008) implied that an inductive qualitative research is possible within positivist tradition in general, but it has limitation when it comes to its measurablity and persistent critics against the independent rule.
From a positivist point of view, you would have hypotheses that you wanted to test, meaning that you would be using a deductive rather than an inductive approach. But using a positivist approach does not necessarily require you to use quantitative methods. In general, Guba and Lincoln treat positivism and post-positivism as "paradigms" that were related to how you think about issues such as the nature of reality (ontology) and the possibility of true knowledge (epistemology), but which did not reach down to the level of determining research methods.
So, the first thing I would recommend is to stop worry about whether or not your research is based and positivism, and instead concentrate on trying to link your research questions to your methods. What is it that you want to know, and what would be an appropriate way to reach that goal?
Thank you very much for the answer. If I may further try to clarify myself, I raised the issue of choosing a certain paradigm because of validity criteria I should have to follow along my research process. For instance, that means objectivity, reliability, internal and external validity--as far as positivism is concerned.
Focusing on your two questions, the purpose and the overarching research question of my study deals with understanding complex phenomenon of adopting glucose monitoring systems. Accordingly, quantitative data can not fully give me the rich insights I would need to have in order to answer my "why" and "how" research question (s). So, the appropriate goal of my study (i.e. considering minimum tensions of ethical dilemmas and possibilities of my access to data) would be having a loose attachment to theory and starting with empirical data. As I work on solving problems with my participants, we would finally choose which existing adoption theory suits best the phenomenon identified based on evidences from the empirical data gathered.
My concern is: does such data gathering and systematization (linking data with theory) allows me to keep the objective, reliable, internal, and external validity of my study?
The problem with things like reliability, and internal and external validity is that they are generally not well-defined for qualitative methods, but there are general consideration in this regard for a piece of qualitative research, taken was a whole. For example, see Morse et al. (2002) "Verification strategies for establishing reliability and validity in qualitative research."
I am not sure, however, see how these issues are related to using prior theory, which generally is about having and testing hypotheses. I suppose you might have standards for assessing threats to validity in testing your intervention (i.e., internal validity), but I don't know what those standards might be.
A quick reply: Thank you for giving me the relevant reference. I'm reading it now. Perhaps, could it be helpful to use control groups to identify threats to the reliability and validity of my study? What might be the alternative measures to assure such quality of the study based on your experience in doing a qualitative research? Thank you for your time.
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