The Science of Qualitative Research 2nd Edition

Book Preface

This is an exciting time to be writing about the character of inquiry in social science for there is a growing interest in and openness to new forms of inquiry. Researchers throughout the social sciences are increasingly working with qualitative data – interview transcripts, verbal reports, videos of social interactions, drawings, and notes – whether they view these as “soft data” (Ericsson & Simon, 1984), “messy data” (Chi, 1997, p. 271), or “the ‘good stuff’ of social science” (Ryan & Bernard, 2000, p. 769). Research projects that include such empirical material are becoming increasingly popular. In addition to self-styled “qualitative researchers,” investigators in the learning sciences, developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and even in survey research, as well as many other areas, have turned to nonquantitative material and are exploring ways to collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from it.

At the same time, a strong backlash has developed against this kind of inquiry. In the United States, as in England and Australia, the funding priorities of government agencies emphasize “evidence-based” research. We are told repeatedly that there is a “gold standard” for research in the social sciences, the randomized clinical trial. Other kinds of research – typically cast as naturalistic, observational, and descriptive – are viewed as mere dross in comparison, good only for generating hypotheses, not for testing them. They are seen as lacking the rigor necessary for truly scientific research and as failing to offer practical solutions to pressing problems. Clinical trials, in contrast, are seen as relevant because they test treatments and interventions, and as rigorous because they involve direct manipulation, objective measurement, and statistical testing of hypotheses. Any suggestion that there might be research that follows a logic of inquiry different from that of traditional experimental research is dismissed. The possibility that complex human phenomena might require a kind of investigation that traces them in time and space and explores how they are constituted is not considered.

In the 1980s, there was general agreement that the “paradigm wars” had ended (Gage, 1989). For many, the correct way to proceed seemed to be with “mixed methods” that combined qualitative techniques with aspects of traditional experimental design and quantification. Arguments against mixing 1 “qual” and “quant” are often dismissed as an unnecessarily belligerent perpetuation of the conflict. But now the “science wars” are being fought over much the same territory (Howe, 2005; Lather, 2004). It seems we need to revisit the arguments against applying a naive model of the natural sciences to human phenomena. Today we are in a much stronger position than at any time in the past to articulate the logic of a program of research that explores a more fundamental level of phenomena than can be studied using clinical trials. Important theoretical and empirical work across the social sciences but also in the humanities – in history, philosophy, linguistics, and literary theory – now enables us to define a program of investigation that is focused on “constitution,” a term I shall define in a moment. Researchers must bear some responsibility for the evidence-based movement. There is, for example, a bewildering variety of types of qualitative research. For some this is a potpourri to be savored and celebrated, but for others social science research has “become unhelpfully fragmented and incoherent,” divided into “specialist domains … that are too often treated in isolation” (Atkinson, 2005). This plurality makes it difficult to establish criteria for evaluating research or to design curricula for teaching research methods. It creates the impression that nonexperimental research cannot provide genuine knowledge. The enormous number of “how to” books currently published is one indication of the profusion of approaches to social scientific research and also the huge appetite for guidance. But, at the same time, the sheer number suggests that this appetite hasn’t been satisfied. Readers find themselves left with fundamental confusions and buy book after book in a search for clarification.

In the face of all this, the student who wants to learn how to do qualitative research, or the more experienced researcher who wants to try something new or better, could be forgiven for being confused. This book is an attempt to bring some clarity to the subject. It is not a book on how to do qualitative research – it is not a “how to” book at all. Instead it raises the question that must come first: why are we doing qualitative research? Once we have figured out why we are doing research, we will have much more clarity about how research should be conducted because in any activity we can’t really know what to do if we don’t know what we’re aiming for. Only when we are clear about what we are doing and why can we figure out how to do it well. Qualitative research is, in my view, frequently misunderstood. It is often equated with any kind of investigation that doesn’t use numbers, but we will discover that quantification has its place, in the descriptive phase of qualitative inquiry. It is often defined as the objective study of personal experience, but we will see that such a view – for example, in empirical phenomenology, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and grounded theory – gets helplessly tangled in the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity. Finally, qualitative research is often seen as the ethnographic study of culture and intersubjectivity,  but here the problem turns out to be the uneasy combination of participation and observation.

How then should we understand qualitative research? It seems to me that fundamental mistakes are made today in many approaches to qualitative inquiry and that important opportunities are being missed. Researchers are not asking the right questions. We are not asking sufficiently difficult or interesting questions – we are not aiming high enough. At the same time, we are not digging deep enough; we are not questioning our basic assumptions about human beings and the world in which we live, our assumptions about knowledge and reality. I have been practicing and teaching qualitative research for over 30 years, working to make it accessible and comprehensible, and although it is gratifying to see this kind of research becoming increasingly widespread, at times I find myself frustrated that the potential of qualitative research is not being realized. This potential is, I believe, profound. Attention to human forms of life, to the subtle details of people’s talk and actions, to human bodies in material surroundings, can open our eyes to unnoticed aspects of human life and learning, unexplored characteristics of the relationship between humans and the world we inhabit, and unsuspected ways in which we could improve our lives on this planet.

I will try to demonstrate this potential by introducing the reader to debates that often do not cross the boundaries between disciplines and to historical, conceptual, and ethical aspects of qualitative research that have frequently been forgotten or ignored. I will examine the central practices of qualitative research – interviewing, ethnographic fieldwork, and analysis of interaction – in order to tease out the assumptions embedded in these practices and suggest new ways to think about, collect, and analyze qualitative material. I will suggest new kinds of questions we should set out to answer and outline the general form of a program of qualitative inquiry. Qualitative research is sometimes viewed merely as a set of techniques – a toolbox of procedures for the analysis of qualitative materials – but in my view it is something much more important, the basis for a radical reconceptualization of the social sciences as forms of inquiry in which we work to transform our forms of life. An important part of this reconceptualization is a new sense of who we are. Humans are products of both natural evolution and history. As products of evolution, we are material beings, one kind of biological creature among many others, participants in a complex planetary ecological system. The long-standing belief that we are somehow not only different from but also better than other animals has been complicit in an attitude towards our planet as merely a vast repository of raw materials, resources that we can exploit for profit. We are witnessing the dire consequences of this attitude and are running up against the limits of this lifestyle of “development.”

A change in attitude will require a change in our understanding of our place in nature and our responsibilities as stewards of the planet, a role that we have forced on ourselves as a consequence of our efforts to satisfy a craving for power over nature.

As products of history – and of evolution – we are cultural beings, and in this regard we do differ from other living creatures. We share 99.5% of the genetic material of the Neanderthals who lived until 40,000 years ago, but our lives are 100% different. We can shape our environment in ways that Neanderthals never dreamed of and that other animals are unable to compete with, and our environments have changed us in return. Our continuing naive beliefs in “human nature” fly in the face of important cultural differences and the deep penetration of our being by cultural practices, and they serve to justify our dangerous tendency to demonize people whose way of life is different from our own. Each human group tends to presume that it is internally homogeneous and identical and that the only significant differences are those that distinguish it from others. This attitude fosters a simplistic conception of good and evil and a destructive impulse to “civilize” other peoples and impose our values on them. A change in this attitude will require the recognition that humans are not identical, that there is no universal mental apparatus, and that different traditions, customs, and ways of living have created a variety of ways of living: ways of thinking, seeing, and being. Forty years ago, proponents of qualitative research (e.g., Dallmayr & McCarthy, 1977; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979) wrote of a crisis in the social sciences that they linked to an underlying human crisis – the lack of meaning that the failure of Enlightenment rationality had exposed. In the 18th century, thinkers such as the Austrian philosopher Immanuel Kant – still sometimes described as the most influential philosopher ever – proclaimed the existence of a universal capacity for reason, the same for all cultures and all times, that could provide an objective foundation for knowledge, morality, and ethics. Every book needs a villain, and mine will be Kant. The model of human beings that he defined has caused many more problems than it has solved. It is a model in which each individual constructs personal and private representations of the world around them. It separates people from one another and divides mind from world, value from fact, and knowledge from ethics. It is a big mistake!

Today we are facing a crisis more profound than a loss of meaning, the crisis of mounting environmental damage and escalating war between civilizations. It would be naive to suppose that qualitative research alone could provide a solution to worldwide crises. But we can at least ask that qualitative inquiry counter, rather than bolster, the attitude of seeking to dominate not only other peoples but the planet as a whole. I will argue that qualitative research has the potential to change our attitude of domination because it is sensitive to human forms of life in a way that traditional research cannot be. It can draw on powerful new conceptions of human rationality, alternatives to Kant’s model. In this book, I will trace a line of theoretical and empirical work that has developed the proposal that the basis for rationality and order of all kinds is the hands-on know-how, the embodied practical and social activity, of people in a form of life. This line of work leads to new ways of conceptualizing social inquiry. It might seem strange to link a form of research to a moral imperative. Yet traditional social science has just this kind of linkage, although it is disguised. As we shall see, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1971) has argued that scientific knowledge is never disinterested and that the sciences, both natural and social, are generally motivated by a “technical” interest, an interest in fostering our instrumental action in the world and increasing our mastery of our planet. To some degree, qualitative research has succeeded in adopting a different attitude, one that Habermas calls (rather misleadingly) a “practical” interest: an interest in understanding other people. This is certainly an admirable goal, but one of the points I will make in this book is that too often this understanding has
been based on the reduction of others to the status of objects for objective observation. Studying humans as objects – albeit complex and sophisticated objects – is not the same as studying humans as beings who live in particular cultural and historical forms of life and who are made and make themselves as specific kinds of subjects. What we need is a human science that is able to grasp this “constitution.” Such a science would not abandon objectivity in favor of relativism, either epistemological or cultural. Rather, it would adopt a moral and epistemological pluralism resting on what has been called a “plural realism” (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 262). Such a science, I suggest, is exactly what qualitative inquiry is, properly understood.

What is needed is a kind of inquiry that is motivated by neither a technical interest nor a practical one but rather what Habermas called an “emancipatory” interest. How can we create this? The imperatives to change our paradigm – to assume a new ontology, to adopt a new view of understanding and knowledge – emerge within qualitative inquiry as much as they are demanded by the crisis we face. Much qualitative research is stuck in contradiction and anxiety, and it is crucial to understand why. By refusing to abandon a posture of detached neutrality, much qualitative inquiry today continues to bolster the attitude of domination. Neutrality is equated with objectivity and viewed as genuine knowledge. This kind of research promotes a way of knowing other people that leaves them feeling misunderstood and treated as objects, and fails to recognize either the political and ethical dimensions of understanding or its own transformative power. When we understand another person, we don’t merely find answers to our questions about them (let alone test our theories about them) but are challenged by our encounter with them. We learn, we are changed, we mature. Contemporary qualitative research, with a few welcome exceptions, fails to recognize these changes or even allow space for such recognition in its repertoire of techniques and its methodological logic.

I believe that if we think carefully about what we are doing, if we examine our own conduct carefully, we will see the inconsistencies in our current research practices and will start to notice where new possibilities lie. We will start to ask new kinds of questions, become able to see different kinds of connections and different kinds of causality, and perhaps view ourselves and our planet in a new light. This book, then, is a wide-ranging review and overview of types and varieties of qualitative research throughout the social sciences. It is selective rather than exhaustive; indeed, the qualitative research literature is now so extensive that trying to cover it comprehensively would be impossible. But in this literature certain issues and dilemmas recur. Studying them can help us envision a new program for qualitative research.