Defending interpretivist knowledge claims in engineering education research

Context: In interdisciplinary research, tacit epistemological differences can influence how research is interpreted and judged as trustworthy or otherwise. One example is in education research in engineering. A complication in the development of engineering education research as a field is that many of its practitioners have moved into education research from a background in traditional engineering, underpinned by a positivist epistemology with established criteria of research rigour. However, an arguably similar consensus has not been reached for criteria of research quality in education, at least not in inter-disciplinary areas like engineering education. One consequence is that researchers from such a positivist tradition can be dismissive of interpretivist research findings, and only find positivist research trustworthy. Purpose: How to defend interpretivist knowledge claims in engineering education research? Approach: Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam (2013) used an analogy with quality management in engineering to develop a process-oriented framework for interpretive research quality. Instead of judging only the quality of research outcomes, as is typical in positivist research, they focused instead on the processes of both making and handling data. In this paper, this framework is unpacked and used to defend the results of the authors' previously published phenomenographic study of lecturing (Daniel, 2016; Daniel, Mann, and Mazzolini, 2016). Results: In this paper, the reliability and validity of the outcomes of a previous phenomenographic study of ways of experiencing lecturing are established. This is achieved through reference to established conventions in phenomenographic research, thick descriptions of how the data was collected and analysed, and comparison to the results of similar studies, all within the framework of interpretivist research quality developed by Walther et al. (2013). Such thick descriptions of data collection and analysis are often omitted from phenomenographic publications, whereas detailing this process can lend weight to such research's reliability. Conclusions: Interpretivist methodologies have an important role in engineering education research. By taking pains to establish the validity and reliability of interpretivist research outcomes, it is hoped they will be accepted more widely amongst researchers, regardless of whether they come from a positivist or interpretivist background.