Abstract: HRD scholarship has attempted several ways to investigate the complexity and ambiguity of the phenomenon of interest – learning and development at individual, community, organization, and societal levels (Lynham, 2000; Storberg-Walker, 2006; Marsick, Nicolaides, & Watkins, 2014). Despite the continuous effort in the scholarship, however, some lament the lack of innovative methodologies in the field of human resource development that possibly reduce the complexity of learning and development during the research process (Reio, 2010), soliciting for diversification of methodology using not only quantitative or qualitative but also mixed-methods approaches (Onwuegbuzie & Corrigan, 2014; Seo et al., 2019). The imperative to diversify the methodological approaches to the complexity of learning and development is even pronounced with the intensified impact of macro-level challenges on the work environment and increasing the complexity of the context of HRD scholarship, including climate change, social justice, artificial intelligence, economic inequality to name a few (Cho et al., 2022). We translate the imperative of restoring the HRD scholarship’s interest in diversifying research methods into bridging the disparity between quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. The dominance of the logic of the quantitative research paradigm over the HRD scholarship is acutely shown by Onwuegbuzie and Corrigan’s (2014) review of the empirical studies published in the Human Resource Development Quarterly from 2000 to 2014. According to them, almost three-quarters (73%) of the 230 studies utilized quantitative methods, and the rest of the studies use qualitative methods and mixed-methods (Onwuegbuzie & Corrigan, 2014). The critique that assesses the HRD scholarship as being perpetuated by “the ingrained ways of thinking about research, methodological practice, and theory building (Grenier, 2015, p.332)” sounds oddly indisputable. The dominance of the quantitative research paradigm that mostly engages hypothetical-deductive understanding of phenomena has built the scholarly enterprise of the HRD (Seo et al., 2019), echoing the business literature (McAbee et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2021). Both fields respect evidence-based reasoning and act against the empiricist approach to research, which cannot guarantee scientific credibility and generalizability. Nonetheless, the empiricist approach also matters as it facilitates new thinking by focusing on evidence and generating new insights. Learning and development, the phenomena of interest in HRD scholarship naturally encompass ambiguity and complexity (Lynham, 2002; Storberg-Walker, 2006), and thus, more context-driven and situated research methods with inductive orientation are required to better capture the multiplicity of the phenomena. However, the invention and engagement of inductive ways of knowing in the HRD scholarship are deterred arguably because of the widespread fear of losing the methodological rigor that is purportedly defined in the quantitative research paradigm. Indeed, the qualitative research paradigm that endorses situational and interpretive knowledge-production is deemed to be incommensurable with the quantitative research paradigm that upholds the criteria of validity, replicability, and generalizability (Burman, 1997). In some sense, it can be said that the remnants of the qualitative and quantitative paradigm war that has persisted in social science (Bryman, 2008; Bendassolli, 2013) still exist in the HRD scholarship. Even with the past efforts to employ alternative ways of researching otherwise, resisting the hypothetical-deductive approach (Cho et al., 2002; Glibkowski et al., 2013; Callahan, 2009; Sambrook, 2001; Lawless et al., 2012), the HRD scholarship still has a long way to go to conduct a multiparadigm inquiry that bridges the qualitative-quantitative silos and contributes to the knowledge production that sheds lights on the real practice. As a way to enact the multiparadigm inquiry that can complement the methodological incompleteness of both quantitative and qualitative research paradigms, we suggest a mixed use of computational text analysis and qualitative inquiry. The adoption of computational text mining techniques in the HRD scholarship augments the interpretative nature of qualitative inquiry on several accounts. First, the capacity to conduct a big data analysis of computational text mining techniques enables more data-driven inductive reasoning in organizational studies (McAbee et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2021). Also, it has a higher chance to reflect the real-time voices of employees, not reducing the multiplicities residing in employees’ cognitive and affective engagement with the organization (Chungade & Kharat, 2017; Gelbard et al., 2018). Thus, this paper will suggest a methodological framework that mixes computational text analysis with qualitative inquiry and clarifies the potential areas of inquiry that can emerge in conducting a multiparadigm inquiry. We will illustrate how selected qualitative research principles can be further incorporated into computational text analyses, in which now most decision criteria and suggestions follow a hypothetical-deductive paradigm, particularly in topic modeling or sentiment analysis.
