These publications collectively assert that doing quantitative research is an ethical act. Taken together, they provide a collection of philosophical, historical, and sociological analyses of quantitative research practices and propose a pragmatist alternative to other kinds of quantitative research, one that is highly critical of naive positivism.
The historical ontology paper is useful for showing how, over long periods of time, ethics ends up embedded in quantitative methods. The paper is also useful for advancing a critique of the naive claim that these methods are value-free. It shows specifically how statistics and probability were used in an effort to eliminate uncertainty. Consequently, statistics and probability served as a conduit for formalising an assumed priority of logic-then-ethics. A consideration of means and ends, or what researchers ought to do, was yoked to a priority of statistics and probability. Uncertainty remains hidden in the logical acrobatics that quantitative researchers are required to perform (e.g. best practices, rules of thumb, p-values, etc.).
Relational validity
When discussing the validity of a study, quantitative researchers typically pay attention to measurement (e.g. construct, criterion-related, face, etc.) and representation (e.g. content, external, internal, etc.). They are concerned with the research frameworks they use and the best practices they adopt, implicitly or explicitly promoting the metaphysics of representation, correspondence and probabilistic inference.
We propose the term relational validity to encourage all researchers to consider the ethics of relations between the purpose of a quantitative study, the orientation that its quantitative researchers adopt, and the ways of doing quantitative research that its quantitative researchers use. We purposely introduce an alternative lexicon of terms so that relational validity does not end up hamstrung by the dogmatic metaphysics of other types of validity.
Orientations are what organise the practical activities needed to realise the purposes of a study. They are worldly affairs and conceptual but they come alive in quantitative research practices and discourses, or ways of doing quantitative research. Validity is relational because it can only ever exist in the constellation of all these things. And there can be many different constellations.
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