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In recent decades, Political Science as a scholarly discipline has been periodically overwhelmed by debates between positivists who champion emulating the natural sciences and interpretivists who side with approaching the study of politics along the lines of more humanistic forms of inquiry. Competing positivist and interpretivist epistemologies have spawned distinctive methodologies with separate logics of inquiry, varying preferences for different methods of data collection, and debates about a number of other issues including, most commonly, the value of quantitative versus qualitative data. Most recently, debates between positivists and interpretivists have been complicated by interventions by others who do not situate their investigations in either camp. This group has included a growing number of scholars who refuse to accept that they must limit their research to either a positivist or interpretivist methodology. Mixed-methods researchers have been joined by others who stress...

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-007-9056-7

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