Yvonna Sessions Lincoln (born May 25, 1944) is an American methodologist and higher education scholar. Currently a Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Lincoln holds the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership. As an author, she has been largely collected by libraries.
Lincoln is best known in social science research for her contribution to qualitative methodology. With her late husband, Egon Guba (March 1, 1924 - March 26, 2008), Lincoln wrote Naturalistic Inquiry in 1985. The book offers a critique of positivism and suggests the ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology, and methods that comprise a "naturalistic" paradigm for inquiry. Since its publication in 1985, Naturalistic Inquiry has been translated into 8 languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
Early life
Lincoln was born Yvonna Sessions in Tampa, Florida. One of five children born to Edgar Eugene Sessions, Sr. (a welder for Atlantic Coastline Railroad) and Mary Bond Brown Sessions (an insurance rater for Metropolitan Life Insurance), Lincoln was the eldest daughter.
Lincoln graduated from Hillsborough High School in Hillsborough County, Florida in 1962 and attended Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan for undergraduate studies. At Michigan State she majored in history and sociology earning her A.B. in 1967. Lincoln earned an M.A. in Medieval and East European History from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1970 and a doctorate in higher education, organizational theory, and program evaluation at Indiana University (1987)
While studying at Indiana University, Lincoln met and later married Egon Guba. It was this professional and personal relationship that gave birth to Naturalistic Inquiry, which "began the earthquake-like revolution in educational research which resulted in the growth of qualitative research methods in education."
Naturalistic Inquiry
In their preface, Lincoln and Guba explain that
"We [researchers, scientists, and laypersons] are all so imbued with the tenets of science that we take its assumptions utterly for granted, so much so that we almost cannot comprehend the possibility that there might be other ways of thinking. And when other ways are suggested, we are inclined to shut our ears, feeling that merely to listen to them is, quite literally, a heresy." Provocatively, Lincoln and Guba then "[propose] such a heresy." The goal of Naturalistic Inquiry was not to introduce previously unconsidered ideas as much as it was to aggregate, streamline, and sell a "palatable" and "reasonable" alternative to traditional positivist research. In Naturalistic Inquiry, Lincoln and Guba "[contrast] postpositivist and naturalist paradigms on philosophical and methodological dimensions."
The major naturalist axioms include: Realities are multiple, socially-constructed, and holistic (ontology). Knower and known are interactive, inseparable (epistemology). Only time- and context-bound working hypotheses are possible (generalizability). All entities are in a state of mutual simultaneous shaping, so that it is impossible to distinguish causes from effects (causality). Inquiry is value-bound (axiology).
Additionally, Naturalistic Inquiry offers instructions to researchers wishing to engage in its paradigm. Chapters are devoted to "Designing a Naturalistic Inquiry," "Implementing the Naturalistic Inquiry," "Establishing Trustworthiness," "Processing Naturalistically Obtained Data," and "Case Reporting,Member Checking, and Auditing."
Criticism
Early criticism of Naturalistic Inquiry resulted from perceived inconsistencies in the subjective nature of the paradigm and the objective evaluation strategies of trustworthiness. Holt (1991) argues that while Lincoln and Guba "advocate that the field researcher follow certain techniques that increase the trustworthiness of the research (dimensionalized as credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability)...the trustworthiness criterion and associated techniques proposed by Lincoln and Guba and Wallendorf and Belk contradict the nature of the interpretive task, and furthermore, pose insurmountable problems in application."