INTRODUCTION

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2 11INTRODUCTIONThe Discipline and Practice of Qualitative ResearchNorman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. LincolnThe global community of qualitative researchers is mid-way between two extremes, searching for a new middle, moving in several different directions at the same Mixed methodologies and calls for scientifically based research, on the one side, renewed calls for social justice inquiry from the critical social science tradition on the other. In the method-ological struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, the very existence of qualitative research was at issue.

itivist-constructivist war against positivism (1970–1990); the conflict between competing postpositivist, constructivist, and critical theory paradigms (1990–2005); and the current conflict between evidence-based methodologists and the mixed meth-ods, interpretive, and critical theory schools (2005–present).2

  Critical, Theory, Constructivist, Critical theory