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Clinical Mode of Inquiry                        

Nature of "Knowledge"

The Clinical method can be said to represent the nomothetic Experimental method's idiographic complement. The Experimentalist seek generalizable laws, patterns that hold for whole populations. Clinicians, on the other hand, are concerned with what is unique and particular in some unit within a population (a writer, a teacher, a writing tutorial), with the manifestation of those general laws in particular instances.  They discern tentative cause/effect relationships, the value of which can later be determined by genuinely Experimental designs.

As a method that lies, however uneasily, between Experimental and Ethnographic inquiry, Clinical knowledge can be characterized in hybrid terms. It has a canonical structure built around an identifiable set of texts held together not by a dialectic but by a paradigmatic logic. A paradigmatic logic is one that regards any contributed piece of knowledge as a portion of a larger pattern. A mode of inquiry guided by it will assemble, through a gradual process of accumulation, a composite image. As positivists, Clinicians assume that there is only one possible "correct" solution to this puzzle; but for a long time they can only put pieces together by guesswork, looking for congruences that make sense in terms of the ones they do have.

First-level inquiry are studies that seek to contribute a piece to the larger jig-saw puzzle.
Second-level inquiries are ones putting the pieces together to see the large picture.

In contrast to the Experimental method, it approaches the world it studies by examining phenomena again and again, looking at them from different angles, probing them in different ways, aiming to render a composite, or, to make its ties to Ethnography clearer, holistic image.  The advantages of this framework: an investigator doesn't have to control variables, just account for them; replicability isn't important. Comprehensiveness, not replicability, is where the power of Clinical knowledge resides. It has marketability—first level Clinical inquiry can result in satisfying full portraits.

Clinicians have been beset by a self-image problem. For all their influence, the Clinicians have so far been reluctant to fully recognize the power of their method for what it is, and so not claimed any substantial methodological authority of their own. It holds an uneasy position between Experimental and Ethnographic methods and its knowledge tends to be regarded by other communities as the result of a bad compromise: an impure method birthing a bastard knowledge.

Inquiry—Clinical Inquiry

  1. Identifying Problems
  2. Designing the Study
  3. Collecting and Analyzing Data
  4. Interpreting the Data: Contributions to the Canon
  5. Drawing Conclusions: Implications for Research and Teaching

Emig's study as the prototype:
Clinical studies have usually been defined within some combination of these four boundaries:

  1. Some portion of the writing act
  2. Some set of subjects
  3. The kind of discourse being produced (e.g. Emig's three stimuli leading students to write in two major modes)
  4. The setting for the writing—physical and/or rhetorical sense

Conflict in methodology—treat subjects as organisms to be artificially stimulated and then observed or treat them as individuals.

The peculiar combination of idiographic motives and positivists assumptions: The idiographic motives impel Clinicians toward validity. To discover what writing is, and how it works, they need to be sure they study writing itself, real and whole, as it is manifested in particular, unique individuals. However, because they work from a fundamentally positivist perspective, they also assume that, within instrumental limits, this process of writing is measurable and recordable. Complex though writing may be, the essential uniformity of human beings—the lawfulness of the universe—assures Clinicians that people writing are people writing. Clinicians use a wide variety of data in their efforts to get at the problem they study; but one technique needs to be especially reliable or valid by itself. It is the comprehensiveness, more than replicability, that matters in the making of Clinical knowledge.

North's final take:
The Clinicians' primary concern must be the individual writer, whole and in-depth, not the type (not "twelfth graders" or "unskilled writers"). The larger image, the canonical theories, will emerge in due course. Let me try to make it axiomatic: To claim the authority that is rightfully and most usefully theirs, Clinicians need to recognize—and indeed, to revel in—the power of idiographic inquiry.
(Sounds like a call for Quantitative research!)

Leading figures: Janet Emig, Sondra Perl, Carol Berkenkotter, lots of others

 

 

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This site contains direct excerpts from The Making of Knowledge in Composition by Stephen North. Portsmouth: Heineman, 1987.
Lirvin Researching | Site created by Lennie Irvin, San Antonio College (2007) | Last updated August 20, 2007