Paradigms and the research report: Making what actually happens a heuristic for theory

The contention is that in providing an account of the intervention process beyond the usual parameters of reporting, Weinstein and her colleagues have helped bring to the fore issues in the conduct and reporting of intervention research which are anomalous to most current theories and accounts. Taken seriously, the issues openly discussed could provide a useful step toward reducing the discrepancy between how we carry out interventions and how we say we carry out interventions. Through attempts to incorporate these issues into theory, we increase the verisimilitude of our ideas and develop a more differentiated filter for our community work. If, as Cronbach asserts, “social science is cumulative, not in possessing ever-more refined answers about fixed questions, but in possessing an ever-richer repertoire of questions” (1986, p. 91), accounts such as those provided by Weinstein and her colleagues can indeed serve as a heuristic for theory by telling it like it was.