As more and more writing process oriented teachers must oversee, design, and execute classroom intervention studies, a discrepancy arises from the inappropriateness of the process style to the product orientation of research. In establishing experimental procedures, researchers try to account for all variables, but for process-oriented teachers, conducting research, this can result in additions, deletions, and changes throughout the study. With regard to writing evaluation, the process-oriented teacher's natural bent toward personal response often impedes a blind evaluation in the research. A final area of conflict relates to a process teacher's concern for individual performance rather than for group achievement. An alternative which avoids some of these problems can be found in ethnographic research. By observing children's natural behavior in the classroom, researchers can see the spontaneous act rather than the forced response and thus learn much from that store of information. Maintaining as nearly as possible a natural setting is an obvious yet elusive fundamental axiom. Situations wherein students are writing about writing, are then asked to think about their metawriting activity, and are furthermore asked to speak about this into a tape recorder seem to be a great distance from the natural act of writing. A second caution centers around the tendency of some of these studies to draw generalizations or conclusions unwarranted by this type of research. (HTH)