JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. This article proposes a general explanation for social backgroundrelated inequality. Educational attainment research indicates that the later an education transition, the lower the social background effect. While some suggest life course changes in the parent-child relationship or between-family competition explain this pattern, others contend the result is a statistical artifact, and that the analytic strategy presupposes agents are irrationally myopic. This article addresses these criticisms by framing educational transitions in terms of students' movement through the stratified curriculum. Students select their stratum, one of which is dropping out. To make these choices, they consider their most recent salient performance. Using time-varying performance measures to predict students' track placement/school continuation sustains the validity of the educational transitions approach and suggests substantively important social background effects even for nearly universal transitions. Results are consistent with the general perspective termed effectively maintained inequality.Two distinct literatures have developed to examine students' movement through secondary school. One strain of research uses ethnography and statistical analysis to focus on students' placement in the stratified curriculum or, in other words, students' track location. This literature treats track location both as a determinant of important factors such as achieve-1 I thank Adam Gamoran for comments on an earlier draft, and Aimée Dechter and three anonymous reviewers for additional helpful comments. All analyses were conducted at
Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) appears to offer a systematic means for case-oriented analysis. The method not only offers to provide a standardized procedure for qualitative research but also serves, to some, as an instantiation of deterministic methods. Others, however, contest QCA because of its deterministic lineage. Multiple other issues surrounding QCA, such as its response to measurement error and its ability to ascertain asymmetric causality, are also matters of interest. Existing research has demonstrated the use of QCA on real data, but such data do not allow one to establish the method’s efficacy, because the true causes of real social phenomena are always contestable. In response, the authors analyze several simulated data sets for which true causal processes are known. They find that QCA finds the correct causal story only 3 times across 70 different solutions, and even these rare successes, on closer examination, actually reveal additional fundamental problems with the method. Further epistemological analyses of the results find key problems with QCA’s stated epistemology, and results indicate that QCA fails even when its stated epistemological claims are ontologically accurate. Thus, the authors conclude that analysts should reject both QCA and its epistemological justifications in favor of existing effective methods and epistemologies for qualitative research.
Three proposals explicate the social origins/education transitions association. Maximally maintained inequality (MMI) (Raftery and Hout 1993) claims the association declines only at transitions high origin persons universally or nearly universally make. Relative risk aversion (RRA) (Breen and Goldthorpe 1997) suggests broader inequality reduction is possible and depends on changing costs and norms. Effectively maintained inequality (EMI) (Lucas 2001) contends meaningful inequality reduction is elusive because qualitatively different types of education maintain consequential inequality, even at universal transitions. Each proposal has evidentiary support, yet because proposals highlight different association indices, most are described informally, and their distinctiveness is disputed, comparative evaluation requires a prior, clarifying, formal analysis. Formal analysis reveals that MMI is non-falsifiable. RRA and EMI are falsifiable and are potentially but not necessarily complementary. Future research should investigate whether and why RRA, EMI, both, or neither, apply.
In-depth interviewing is a promising method. Alas, traditional in-depth interview sample designs prohibit generalizing. Yet, after acknowledging this limitation, in-depth interview studies generalize anyway. Generalization appears unavoidable; thus, sample design must be grounded in plausible ontological and epistemological assumptions that enable generalization. Many in-depth interviewers reject such designs. The paper demonstrates that traditional sampling for in-depth interview studies is indefensible given plausible ontological conditions, and engages the epistemological claims that purportedly justify traditional sampling. The paper finds that the promise of in-depth interviewing will go unrealized unless interviewers adopt ontologically plausible sample designs. Otherwise, in-depth interviewing can only provide existence proofs, at best.Keywords Ontology · Epistemology · In-depth interviewing · Sampling · Probability sampling · Non-probability sampling · Snowball sampling · Purposive sampling · Theoretical sampling What can we learn from in-depth interviewing? Surely, an interviewer can ask multiple respondents myriad questions, but what justifies attending to the answers or analysis? This question motivates the investigation. Because methodological justifications depend crucially on the match between ontological conditions and epistemological assumptions, addressing this question requires assessing the plausibility and coherence of key ontological and epistemological assumptions of in-depth interviewing.Although multiple assumptions ground every method, the study focuses on case-selection for in-depth interview (IDI) studies. Because all researchers must select cases for study, case selection is of broad interest.
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