Educational Explanations: Philosophy in Empirical Educational Research by Christopher Winch

Author:Christopher Winch [Winch, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119816485
Published: 2021-12-28T15:27:14+00:00

CONCLUSION

Although the above may look like a relatively weak inductive procedure, it may be all that is feasible in the very complex causal conditions that are likely to be found in EER. Success is relatively rare and dearly bought. The costs of conducting studies in such a way may be high, but the costs of failing to do so will be most likely greater. One has no choice therefore but to work on the basis of informed hunches, relying on one’s knowledge of different cultures and jurisdictions to work out where the boundaries of a different populations which are relevantly similar to the original population under study are. Whether these hunches are derived from relatively informal observation in the course of conducting intervention studies or whether they come from more systematic parallel investigations alongside them, they are essential in the determination of relevantly similar populations. The process of testing out these hunches may be slow, incremental and littered with some disappointments, but they are a more reliable way of ensuring the external validity of intervention studies. RCTs have certain advantages over other intervention studies, but they cannot be a panacea, particularly in the area of explanation. They should also be combined with the use of meta-analyses in which the results of different RCTs can be analysed ‘…tending carefully to differences between study designs, to create an imaginary super population in which inference from differences in frequencies of outcomes to differences in probabilities is more secure’ (Cartwright and Hardie, pp. 36–37). We can also use systematic reviews or the review of high-quality studies of interventions in order to build up a comprehensive picture of the efficacy of a particular intervention. These can be RCTs but could also be other kinds of intervention study if we are confident that we have sufficient background understanding of the explanatory framework that lies behind the framework of the intervention study.24

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