This paper has three purposes. First, it places in scientific perspective the growing acceptance in educational administration research of alternative methods to empiricism by an explication of chaos theory and its assumptions. Second, it demonstrates that chaos theory provides a scientific basis for investigation of complex qualitative variables by focusing on individual and peculiar properties of a system. Finally, it synthesizes the major assumptions of ethnomethodology and phenomenology that have been applied to educational administration and shows how these assumptions and the assumptions of chaos theory are compatible. It also demonstrates how chaos theory thus provides a scientific basis, but not justification, for alternative means of looking at reality. (LMI)