[quoting Hart, 19 Mar 97] Another reason for the lack of acceptance of qualitative research, as I said in my paper, is that the gatekeepers distrust it. One of the reasons may be the influence of Psychology on educational technology research as opposed to Sociology or Anthropology. It is interesting that qualitative thinking and methodology have gained a great deal of popularity in the health professions, particularly Nursing. All the best developments of Strauss and Glaser's grounded theory approach have been in health research.
If research that depends exclusively on statistical method is still preferred by the "gatekeepers," remember that those methods were appropriated from agriculture, not psychology (historically speaking, psychology is rather more grounded in qualitative methodology than quantitative). If there is discontent with the range of methodological options open to IT researchers, my suggestion would be to look to methods already used in research that may be more closely related to the phenomena we are interested in than peas and corn or kinship groupings. There are plenty of other "paradigms" from which to borrow.
Consider geology. Many (most) geological processes either occur too slowly to be directly observable, are too massive or extensive to be seen all at once, or are hidden beneath forests, topsoil, surface rocks, or water--just like that "black box" we call, for lack of a better term, the mind. Like many exterior natural phenomena, the mind cannot be measured or observed directly, but it can be modeled, just as ancient deposits or the movements of magma or ocean sediments or the processes of plate or mountain tectonics can be and are regularly modeled. Although geologists use quantitative techniques to measure and calculate thickness, depth, volume, area, etc., the data geologists collect consist largely of observations of small samples of the substantive record of events and processes that must be interpreted, interpolated, and modeled (mapped), because they cannot be observed directly. These are not statistical methods, yet no gatekeepers are suggesting they are internally or externally invalid.
A significant difference between what geologists do and what human subject researchers do is to be found in the sophistication of the instrumentation and the theory that supports and is supported by that instrumentation. I suggest that we need more sophisticated instruments--if not like the remote sensors used to sample the depths of the earth or the surfaces of distant planets, then perhaps more like those employed in biomedical research. And we need to build new theory that is based on measurement, observation, and modeling of subjective experience within complex social, political, and technological environments.