The range of methodological choices appropriate to adult education research is surveyed in this study. The most central consideration is the conflict between emphases on quantitative techniques and various approaches to researchable areas which are not grounded in positivistic/empirical designs. Skills, talents, defects, and ideologies reflected by these other approaches to research are explored and classified. Methodological conflict in adult education research is compared to similar dissensus in other educational and social science disciplines, including history, criminal justice, sociology, and competency-based teacher education. Areas other than quanto-techniques which are discussed include various descriptive techniques in policy analysis models, analytical philosophy, ethnomethodology, the cluster of psychohistory, historiography, and case study methods as well as exegetical and hermeneutical dimensions. A case against exclusive ideological commitment to single genres of method is presented, utilizing completed and ongoing reports of research to illustrate how such commitment may result in data production which generates artifacts of design and technique, rather than revelations of actual events, relationships, and experimental consequences. (Author/TA)