Editorial: Living With Tensions

Debating and learning and growing from ongoing dialectical interactions are an important part of research methodology broadly conceived (i.e., methods and philosophy). Ideas become accepted in some domains, and over time they become challenged and replaced. That is the age-old dialectical process that goes back at least as far as Plato (429–347 BCE) and his nemeses the Sophists in ancient Greece. It was part of the disputations of the medieval philosophy of scholasticism, where religious and natural philosophy (i.e., science) were debated and sometimes integrated (contrary to popular belief). The growing and changing of ideas were reemphasized by the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Fredrick Hegel (1770–1831), which was ‘‘turned on its head’’ by the German materialist Karl Marx (1818–1883), who argued that it is material economic conditions that produce the nonmaterial superstructure of ideas and ideologies. More recently, mixed methods researcher Jennifer Greene (2007) has emphasized the importance of the ‘‘dialectic stance’’ in which researchers engage in ‘‘a respectful conversation among different ways of seeing and knowing’’ (p. 79). She points out that this ‘‘respectful conversation’’ and purposeful juxtaposition results in ‘‘enhanced, reframed, or new understandings’’ (p. 69). Because this dialectical process is integral to mixed methods research, Tony Onwuegbuzie and I coined the term commensurability validity to refer to the purposeful back-and-forth movement between qualitative and quantitative perspectives for the purpose of cross-paradigmatic understanding by a researcher or a team of researchers (Onwuegbuzie & Johnson, 2006). We made this validity one of our nine types because we believed that it should be a major criterion on which mixed methods studies are evaluated.