A researcher's dilemma- philosphical and methodological pluralism

In many research textbooks the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is inadvertently linked with philosophical perspectives. This in essence creates a mutually exclusive relationship between method and philosophy. Initially researchers are led to believe, from these textbooks, that research is neatly divided into mutually exclusive categories, these being quantitative and qualitative research and ‘never the twain shall meet’. This divide is further strengthened with the inference that the relationship extends further; associating deduction with quantitative methods and similarly induction with qualitative methods. What happens in most texts is that qualitative research methods and quantitative research methods are set against each other as polar opposites (Crotty 1998, p19). This paper argues that methodological pluralism is acceptable but what is not acceptable is philosophical pluralism. By naively linking methods and approaches to specific philosophy researchers and students may miss out on potentially innovative or creative data collection methods. Alternatively and more importantly by feeling tied or constrained by their philosophical stance to particular methods and approaches, associated with them by textbooks, they may in fact reduce the credibility, validity, and or significance of the research. There maybe an elective affinity between certain philosophies and methods but this should not necessarily constrain the methods chosen

Gifts in Psychotherapy: Practice Review and Recommendations

The presentation of gifts in psychotherapy, whether to or from the therapist, does not happen frequently, but its occurrence may nevertheless be quite provocative. This practice review summarizes theoretical and clinical perspectives regarding gifts in therapy, reviews the minimal extant literature on this topic, and offers recommendations for practice and research

Abstraction and its Limits: Finding Space for Novel Explanation.

Several modern accounts of explanation acknowledge the importance of abstraction and idealization for our explanatory practice. However, once we allow a role for abstraction, questions remain. I ask whether the relation between explanations at different theoretical levels should be thought of wholly in terms of abstraction, and argue that changes of variable between theories can lead to novel explanations that are not merely abstractions of some more detailed picture. I use the example of phase transitions as described by statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to illustrate this, and to demonstrate some details of the relationship between abstraction, idealization, and novel explanation

A Compactness Theorem for Riemannian Manifolds with Boundary and Applications

In this paper we prove weak L^{1,p} (and thus C^{\alpha}) compactness for the class of uniformly mean-convex Riemannian n-manifolds with boundary satisfying bounds on curvature quantities, diameter, and (n-1)-volume of the boundary. We obtain two stability theorems from the compactness result. The first theorem applies to 3-manifolds (contained in the aforementioned class) that have Ricci curvature close to 0 and whose boundaries are Gromov-Hausdorff close to a fixed metric on S^2 with positive curvature. Such manifolds are C^{\alpha} close to the region enclosed by a Weyl embedding of the fixed metric into \R^3. The second theorem shows that a 3-manifold with Ricci curvature close to 0 (resp. -2, 2) and mean curvature close to 2 (resp. 2\sqrt 2, 0) is C^{\alpha} close to a metric ball in the space form of constant curvature 0 (resp -1, 1), provided that the boundary is a topological sphere.Comment: 17 pages; comments welcom