{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02074074074074074, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002962962962962963, 'mean_word_length': 5.120845921450151, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Striving for Engagement

As the associate editor of Journal of Adolescent Research (JAR), I am delighted to have the opportunity to help Jeff Arnett create a new kind of adolescent journal—a journal that is truly devoted to publishing qualitative articles that reveal the vitality of adolescent lives. I have been trying to reveal such vitality in my qualitative research with urban adolescents over the past 17 years. There are, however, numerous challenges to doing and to publishing qualitative work in a quantitatively biased field such as psychology. One of the primary challenges has been to articulate the ways in which qualitative researchers often rely on a set of assumptions about good science that is different from the assumptions shared by more quantitatively based researchers. Although it appears that the difference between these two methodological approaches is simply one of numbers versus words, the distinction is often more philosophically based. For this issue of JAR, Jeff asked me to write about some of these foundational issues that distinguish the beliefs of many (but not all) qualitative researchers from more quantitatively based researchers in psychology. Although there are many such issues, I chose for this issue of JAR to focus on the one issue that I believe cuts to the heart of the tension between qualitative and quantitatively based research—namely, the concept of objectivity. The most common criticism of qualitative research is that it is too subjective. Too subjective is also a way of saying unscientific. Quantitative research, in contrast, is considered more objective, neutral, and ultimately trustworthy. Although there have been a vast number of critiques of the concept of objectivity within the social sciences (e.g., Gergen, 1985), the field of psychology continues to pursue the objective ideal. I hear the yearning for objectivity in my students’ papers, in my colleagues’ papers, in the papers I review, and in reviewers’comments to my own papers. Although most social