Butterflies and black swans: metaphors that provide new perspectives to understand quantitative models in educational research

摘要

Metaphor has been used throughout this book as a way of constructing meaning to illustrate and communicate concepts. This is most often utilised in relation to qualitative methodology in education research. This chapter utilises two metaphors, butterflies and black swans as a conceptual tool to explain the quantitative approaches of complexity theory and probability theory respectively, in order to communicate how these approaches were used to develop a quantitative model of risk-taking in decision-making by school principals. The chapter aims to illustrate the use of a traditionally qualitative tool, the use of metaphor, in a wider context in educational research to bridge the gap in understanding of research methods and provide an interpretative aspect to quantitative modelling. The use of metaphor to explain probability theory and complexity theory may assist in making the results of education research on risk-taking in decision-making more relevant to qualitative researchers and encourage broader use of these approaches.