In chapter 1, she defines the following terms:
- Research: “inquiry guided by specific research questions actively explored by a discernable method” (24)
- Scientific Inquiry/Methods: “research methods that engage in hypothesis-testing and employ statistical analyses of data gathered from measurements of identified, controlled variables within the research context” (24)
- Empirical: “research…[like] case studies, naturalistic observations, surveys, protocol studies, correlational studies, experiments, historical studies” (25)
- Naturalistic Inquiry/Methods: “those research methods that seek to describe and/or narrate events, people, phenomena, and experiences as completely as possible by including all variables gained through dialogue and/or observation” (25)
- Narrative: “any text that presents a temporal ‘telling’ of some event(s0 or phenomenon, a telling that will often have a ‘personal voice’ or personal involvement on the part of the writer” (25)
- Positivism: “a view of knowledge ‘characterized…by the use of mathematics, logic, observations, experimentation, and control’ such that the ‘scientific method is the only source of correct knowledge about reality’” (25)
- Humanism: “a research point of view [that] rejects methods that involve mathematics and that attempt to control variables, preferring instead methods that involve, for example, dialogue and observation in natural settings through ethnography, case studies, and interviews’ (25)
She goes forward with the following assertions (direct quotations from pages 26-7):
- Contemporary composition theorists have erroneously blamed a scientific epistemology for the failed current-traditional paradigm.
- The current explosion of interest in a social-constructivist epistemology and its accompanying research methods has further shifted researchers’ attentions and questions away from contexts that could benefit from scientific inquiry.
- Shifting away from scientific inquiry has resulted in newly accepted modes of research in composition that are valuable for answering certain kinds of questions in certain contexts.
- Formal training in the humanities has not prepared composition specialists for scientific investigations, has constructed a body of knowledge seemingly foreign to and separate rom the scientific, and has developed an axiology in which controlled, scientific inquiry is less valued.
- Most texts that seek to guide researchers in composition are inadequate in their explanations of research design, in their choice of sample studies, and in their treatment of statistics.
- All research methods are limited in the kinds of questions they can answer and depend on the contexts in which those questions are asked; similarly, all research methods have value within certain ranges of research contexts and questions.
The following figure is Johanek’s Contextualist Research Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition:
- There are no predetermined answers for any of the questions in the matrix. Researchers must answer these questions n the specific context of their own research.
- Each cell in the matrix, though focused on a particular kind of question, cannot be explored without the others. In other words, no question in any cell can be asked and answered without all of the others being asked and answered as well. Such is the relationship of evidence, method, form, writers, and audience – dependent on each other.
- The questions presented in the matrix do not have to be asked in any particular order, as all research could potentially have any starting point, depending on individual contexts” (111-2).
In Chapter 7, Johanek recommends the following courses of action: “reconsidering MLA as a style manual [and using APA instead], understanding the exclusionary voices of our storytellers, incorporating our research in a our teaching, training our researchers more completely in a wider range of research methods and statistics, and embracing numbers as natural phenomenon” (190).