The best of scientific research gives us perfect certainty about how world works.

The goal of science is descriptive or causal inference.

The procedures used in scientific research are public.

Scientific research is perfectly objective.

Design research to illuminate or evaluate unquestioned assumptions in the literature.

Attempt to resolve or provide further evidence of one side of a controversy in the literature—perhaps demonstrate that the controversy was unfounded from the start.

Choose a hypothesis seen as important by scholars in the literature but for which no one has completed a systematic study.

Choose an accepted hypothesis in the literature that we suspect is false (or one we believe has not been adequately confirmed) and investigate whether it is indeed false or whether some other theory is correct.

Qualitative research is almost always vastly superior to quantitative research.

Qualitative and quantitative research each belongs to a completely different sphere of inquiry; they are and should be kept separate.

Quantitative research is almost always vastly superior to qualitative research.

They represent two different styles of empirical research, with the same underlying logic.