JAC Volume 9

As members of a young and hybrid field, we need to be as epistemologically ecumenical as possible. This means being aware of our blind spots, especially if we don’t fully understand the “model of knowing” of our colleagues. In order to identify and begin to solve many of the pressing problems that confront learners from a variety of socio-cultural backgrounds at all levels of our school system, it’s necessary to learn what we can from specialists in a variety of fields—and this includes colleagues in the social sciences, especially educational research. For this reason (among many others), I believe that Janice Lauer and J. William Asher’s Composition Research: Empirical Designs is long overdue.

The publication of Composition Research coincides with what seems to be a genuine effort among many composition scholars and researchers to enter into productive discourse regarding differences among seemingly incompatible assumptions and methodologies. For example, the “research network” preconvention workshop at CCCC has been instituted by a group of composition specialists with the express purpose of bringing together empirical and hermeneutically oriented inquirers to discuss the epistemological bases of their differences. It is in this spirit of ecumenicalism that I suggest that Lauer and Asher’s book be read by those who find “empirical designs” smacking of positivist hegemony, as well as by those who are genuinely interested in engaging in empirical research or in learning to read research studies as informed readers.

Composition Research meets a real need among people whose graduate training has not prepared them to undertake research that calls for using and understanding empirical research methodology. (By empirical I mean those methods of inquiry that call for some form of systematic observation and which the investigators report in sufficient detail so that others may replicate their procedures.) Lauer and Asher’s goal in this respect is ambitious. They propose to “enable readers without prior empirical training to discriminate among types of research, to examine studies with useful criteria, and to select designs appropriate for their own situations” (3). To the extent that they succeed, the authors will have empowered a generation of teachers and novice researchers to read research reports with understanding, to entertain rival hypotheses, to question research designs, and to interpret and evaluate the knowledge claims they read in professional journals and hear at conferences. And perhaps Lauer and Asher will also help teachers who have questions that they would like to translate into research designs. This process involves making teachers’ deeply felt questions operational, determining the most appropriate research techniques, and collaborating when necessary with colleagues who have backgrounds in quantitative research.

A central purpose of Composition Research is, therefore, to produce informed readers and consumers of research. The book presents numerous research designs, from descriptive research (such as case studies and ethnographic studies) to the controlled experiment. Undergirding this organization is the authors’ view that the process of empirical research occurs in stages. According to their model, research progresses from (1) developing constructs (that is, abstractions which characterize elements of behavior or cognition), to (2) defining the constructs operationally as variables, to (3) measuring and analyzing relationships between variables, to (4) ascertaining or qualifying the generalizability of these relationships to other situations—all other things being equal. Although in the human sciences “all other things” are rarely, if ever, equal, the theoretical basis of Lauer and Asher’s taxonomy is sound.

It is very difficult to generalize from one set of findings unless researchers employ the kinds of procedures that can be replicated. And if the researchers’ purpose is to see their hypothesis tested further, then generalizability is a necessary criterion so that future studies can be conducted. However (and Lauer and Asher do point this out), not all studies are hypothesis-testing. Qualitative research, for example, may be “hypothesis-generating"—the researcher gathering and then reducing the data in order to make inferences, which he or she must then check through examining other sources of data, methods of observation, or the findings of other observers. This research process, known as triangulated observation, is aimed at developing grounded observation or theory. Researchers using ethnographic techniques, on the other hand, are more likely to seek phenomenon recognition than disconfirmotion. Thus, depending on whether the roots of the investigation are phenomenological or logical-empiricist, the research design will necessarily be different, as will be the generalizability of the findings.

Lauer and Asher present a sequence of eight different designs, ranging from the qualitative case study and ethnography to quantitative designs such as quasi-experiments and true experiments. Two final chapters follow. The first of these is on meta-analysis—the systematic summarizing of overall findings of one particular body of research literature. The last chapter deals with program evaluation that may make use of any or some combination of the designs previously described, depending on the purposes of the evaluators. This last chapter will be particularly useful to writing program administrators who must be sensitive to the most appropriate means for evaluating instruction as it occurs under local conditions. Each chapter concludes with a useful bibliography that includes articles discussing the research design presented in the chapter, as well as representative studies appearing in dissertations, journals, and edited collections of articles.

The authors walk their readers through a number of studies, illustrating why one kind of study was conducted rather than another. This format helps readers understand how a particular design functions to answer questions or problems existing in the field (as discussed in various disciplinary forums), or to help the researcher represent new problems or questions that need to be identified and addressed. The authors also devote considerable space to discussing the shortcomings of many studies and analyzing various researchers' difficulties. I find this material invaluable because it helps readers see the process of research as well as the many kinds of difficulties that can beset even the most carefully planned and piloted study.

Reading Composition Research requires a fair amount of patience in wading through terminology. Technical terms and related procedures (re­gression analysis, Chi-square, and multivariate analyses, for example) are often difficult to grapple with outside of the context of actual practice. But Lauer and Asher have anticipated the kinds of intellectual difficulties readers are likely to encounter, and they provide both a glossary of technical terms and an appendix which presents a detailed discussion of statistics and measurement. This appendix includes the names and purposes of most major statistical analyses used in social science research and is intended to help readers understand material in the chapters on descriptive and experimental design. Unfortunately, the information in the appendix is sufficiently technical in conception and terminology to further confuse and frustrate some readers. However, despite these problems, many readers will find this explanatory appendix to be an important resource. As many graduate students in rhetoric and composition programs will attest, this is precisely the kind of discussion that has been missing in the introductory level textbooks that they have had to use in research methods courses.

In short, Composition Research: Empirical Designs contains a wealth of information for both new and veteran researchers in composition and rhetoric. It promises to become a standard textbook in many graduate programs. Many teachers of research methods courses have had to rely on social science textbooks that are not particularly useful to the novice composition researcher. These textbooks have presented difficulties that inevitably arise when students are learning a methodology outside of the specific contexts in which they would be likely to use it. Under these circumstances, readers must constantly extrapolate the information they need to know to conduct research projects or to evaluate the various studies that are assigned reading.

Composition Research should also help dispatch the academic boogieman of scientism that seems to hinder genuine dialogue among academics of different persuasions. To read Lauer and Asher’s book is to become acquainted with the “model of knowing” that underlies much empirical research, especially studies whose authors base knowledge claims on quantitative findings. It’s important to be able to discriminate between good and not-so-good research, and to do this academics must enter into the universe of discourse of the empirically trained researcher. A graduate student in the rhetoric program at Carnegie-Mellon, from whom I learned a great deal about entering such a universe, put the matter very succinctly: “You have to know something from the inside before you can fairly criticize it.” Becoming an informed reader and consumer of empirical studies is a first step in that direction.