Action research is a participatory approach that is used in an array of contexts. From its first proposition it comprises four core principles: participation and collaboration; a constant spiral cycle of self-reflection; knowledge generation; and practice transformation. Praxis and emancipation are two important analytical categories in AR, but are conceptualized differently in the two existing AR traditions. These conceptualizations reveal different AR aims, which lead to either the use of AR as a method (Northern tradition) or as a methodology (Southern tradition). Much depends on the researchers’ interest and worldview. Our objective in this paper is to compare how emancipation and praxis are theorized in both traditions. This discussion intends to add insight into the methodological understanding and utilization of AR.
Access to information (ATI) and freedom of information (FOI) requests are an under-used means of producing data in the social sciences, especially across Canada and the United States. We use literature on criteria for quality in qualitative inquiry to enhance ongoing debates and developments in ATI/FOI research, and to extend literature on quality in qualitative inquiry. We do this by building on Tracy’s (2010) article on criteria for quality in qualitative inquiry, which advances meaningful terms of reference for qualitative researchers to use in improving the quality of their work; and illustrating these criteria using examples of ATI/FOI research from our own work and from others’ in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We argue that, when systematically designed and conducted, ATI/FOI research can prove extraordinary in all eight of Tracy’s criteria.
This article evaluates the relative contributions of diaries and interviews in multiple methods qualitative research exploring asexual identities and intimacies. Differentiated by three core differences: reflective time-frame (the day just had/lifetime), context (alone/with researcher) and mode (written/verbal), these methods had the potential to generate a multidimensional view of our topics. Using five cases in which data from both interviews and diaries were collected, this article explores how the intermeshed issues of identity and intimacy were constructed in each method, as well as reflecting on what was gained by their combination. Our analysis leads us to conclude that multiple methods do not always produce a fuller or a more rounded picture of individual participants’ lives. Nevertheless, the decision to collect data using different strategies did increase our chances of finding a method that suited individual participants, whether in style or focus.
The purpose of this article is to describe the process of creating an ethnodrama focusing on possible selves. Twelve older adult residents of an assisted living facility were paired with 12 nursing students to conduct semistructured interviews on the topic of possible selves. Interviews were analyzed in an iterative process involving in vivo and pattern coding. Themes relating to late life potential were identified, including hopes, fears, barriers, and aids to possibility. The ethnodrama was outlined from these themes and composite characters were created to represent findings. Ten final interviews were recorded with student adult dyads reading the script and providing feedback as member checks. The final draft was work shopped with a theatre company. Ethnodrama has the potential of increasing innovation in research but methodology must be clarified to improve consistency and rigor leading to greater acceptance in the research community.
The debate over what counts as theory has dominated methodological conversations in grounded theory research for decades. Four of the schools of thought in that debate – Glaserian, Straussian, Charmazian, and Clarkeian – hold different assumptions about what theory is and how it is made. The first two schools understand theory as an abstraction that exactingly accounts for exceptions. The second two schools understand theory as a process of describing voices hidden from public view. While Glaserian and Straussian coding processes focus on coding exceptions, Charmazian and Clarkeian coding processes focus on building a story of the participants or social phenomenon. This article attempts to clarify the goals of the schools in an effort to overcome the debate about which kinds of research count as grounded theory and which do not.
Researchers rarely write about the challenges that they confront and navigate while undertaking fieldwork. This is a missed opportunity for us to learn from each other. This is an article about some of the problems and hurdles that the author faced during her recent year in Bosnia-Hercegovina working with survivors of war rape and sexual violence. It discusses some of the main practical, ethical and personal challenges that arose. It is hoped that this article will benefit other researchers, and that it will make university ethics committees more aware of the fact that preparation for fieldwork needs to involve more than just the completion of an ethics form. Undertaking difficult and sensitive work in the field not only impacts on the individuals that we are interviewing, but also on us as researchers. This fact should be better recognized.
This article considers epistemological implications of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Bakhtin urged scholars in the human sciences to treat a text as having a voice of its own, to be attuned to its creativity and originality, and to resist conflating one’s image of the author with the actual person who has produced the text. Importing his ideas into the social sciences creates a site of tensions at the disciplines’ boundaries. Yet his characterisation of dialogue applies also to qualitative researchers’ interactions with nonfiction material. Bakhtin contended that a text as an utterance is a unique unrepeatable event; and that a voice is immanent in how the text itself operates: its placement in a dialogical sequence (answerability), its plan (purpose) and the realisation of the plan. Attention to these dynamics could constitute a formative step in the epistemic process of qualitative research, as concrete examples illustrate. A concept of a ‘dialogic triangle’ (utterance, response and their interrelation) is proposed.
In this article we propose a framework of credibility and approachability for researchers to use as they prepare for fieldwork and write up their data. Highlighting intersectional perspectives from two women and scholars of color, this framework translates the important theoretical critiques of dichotomous thinking (for example, insider-outsider) into methodological practice. We argue that credibility and approachability are not just performed by researchers, but are also perceived by respondents and placed on researchers’ bodies. By conceptualizing credibility and approachability as both performed behaviors and perceived characteristics, we are able to incorporate the researcher’s positionality, the standpoint of the researched, and the power-laden particularities of the interaction in our data analyses and fieldwork reflections for the benefit of both researchers and readers.
This article describes a series of studies of young children’s experience of place in which parents acted as co-researchers, collecting and analysing data. This approach to research resulted in an emphasis on sensory engagement and embodied experience, for both adults and children. As my own young daughter accompanied me during this research, the boundaries between parent and researcher were further blurred. As research progressed, parents became increasingly critical of pathologising discourses about parenting, and stated more strongly the expertise they possessed in their own children. Collaborative research with parents opened up new possibilities for understanding the perspectives of very young children, by drawing on the expertise parents have.
The interdisciplinary nature of conservation science has generated much discussion. Previous scholars have highlighted the lack of mutual understanding between the natural and social sciences in terms of theoretical knowledge and methodological practices. Due to this, the potential for the ‘tragedy of (un)common knowledge’ may hinder interdisciplinary scholarship within conservation science. While others have provided valuable insight on the scholarly and pedagogic challenges associated with interdisciplinary research, there has been little dialogue on the methodological components. Based on an ethnographic study on law enforcement rangers in a protected area in Uganda, this article provides key reflections on entrée, forming trust and rapport, establishing an identity, and data collection. It is argued that such methodological transparency will help foster dialogue between the natural and social sciences, while displaying the central role of qualitative methods in facilitating interdisciplinary research.
Participatory researchers advocate using presentational arts-based methods to collectively inquire into a social phenomenon. In a co-operative inquiry in an Australian rural community, ten community workers inquired into the ‘love ethic’ in their community work practice using narrative, performative and visual methods to gather, analyse and interpret data within cycles of reflection and action. Group members collectively and democratically chose to use presentational inquiry tools such as storytelling, dialogical performance, gift-giving, drawing and other non-traditional approaches to explore the topic and generate collaborative knowledge. These methods were engaging and empowering, and supported group members to develop a love-based framework of community practice. The group’s final collective drawing depicts the roots, trunk, fruit and saplings of a tree representing the values, process, outcomes and cyclical nature of the love ethic in community work.
This article presents a novel diagramming approach which employs aspects of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in the creation of ANT Analysis Diagrams (AADs). ANT is a socio-material approach which allows for the consideration of both human and inanimate entities in a social context. AADs provide a novel method for the analytical investigation of social situations, thereby both operationalizing elements of ANT and generating a visualization of a domain. It is the process of creating an AAD which is crucial, focusing attention on the characteristics of the entities involved and the nature of the relationships between them, thereby supporting the analysis of qualitative social data. As this article illustrates, AADs can be usefully applied to a wide range of social contexts and across scales, from the individual person, to groups through to broad social concepts.
The research ethics review systems within universities evolved from the positivist biomedical model but have expanded to include all non-clinical research involving human subjects. However, the application of the biomedical paradigm to qualitative research often creates significant problems. This article highlights the fundamental differences between biomedical and humanities and social science (HSS) research, illustrating that one size does not fit all when it comes to research ethics review. Recognising the resource constraints faced by many higher level education institutions, we develop a model which encompasses the traditional research ethics concepts without requiring separate oversight procedures. After its original construction based on extent research ethics literature, the model was evolved based on findings from qualitative interviews carried out with expert members of research ethics committees. The model can be adapted to multiple contexts through the application of different levels of tolerance in each domain. Our contribution is twofold: (1) to synthesise from the literature an explicit rationale for differentiating research contexts when it comes to research ethics oversight; and (2) to provide research ethics committees with a workable visual model that can be used to aid decision making in diverse research domains.
The turn to the body in social sciences has intensified the gaze of qualitative research on bodily matters and embodied relations and made the body a significant object of reflection, bringing new focus on and debates around the direction of methodological advances. This article contributes to these debates in three ways: 1) we explore the potential synergies across the social sciences and arts to inform the conceptualization of the body in digital contexts; 2) we point to ways qualitative research can engage with ideas from the arts towards more inclusive methods; and 3) we offer three themes with which to interrogate and re-imagine the body: its fragmenting and zoning, its sensory and material qualities, and its boundaries. We draw on the findings of an ethnographic study of the research ecologies of six research groups in the arts and social sciences concerned with the body in digital contexts to discuss the synergetic potential of these themes and how they could be mobilized for qualitative research on the body in digital contexts. We conclude that engaging with the arts brings potential to reinvigorate and extend the methodological repertoire of qualitative social science in ways that are pertinent to the current re-thinking of the body, its materiality and boundaries.
This paper focuses on the methodological challenges of ‘embodying’ qualitative research. While a substantial literature exists on theoretical aspects of the ‘turn to bodies’, there is little work which has grappled with its methodological implications. This article provides a brief overview and critique of approaches to embodied qualitative methodologies developed in the social sciences over the last decade. The paper also articulates theoretical-methodological strategies that could be useful in the effort to develop ‘embodied methodologies’. The theoretical-methodological strategies outlined include: theorising the embodied subject, problematizing transcription and using poetic representational and methodological devices. These strategies are discussed in relation to a research project exploring women’s narratives of childbirth and shows their use in tracing and representing the sensual body in qualitative analysis.
Building on observations from ethnography at the fin de siècle (Wellin and Fine, 2001), we address how ethnographers today approach their work tasks, incorporating new technology, emphasizing embodiment, sites of struggle, and increasing public engagement. We use the lens of the sociology of work to examine how ethnography has been shaped over the past 15 years, the lifespan of Qualitative Research. How do the challenges of occupational roles, places of research, and new forms of data gathering shape our collective work?
In this article we introduce tension as a means for qualitative data analysis based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theory. We first explain the foundations of Bakhtin’s theory and show the inevitability of tension in our lives and qualitative data analysis. We then offer a review of how Bakhtin’s notion of tension has manifested itself in qualitative research, which prompts us to establish a tensional approach to qualitative data analysis. Finally, we outline our framework for a tensional approach to data analysis and illustrate examples of putting this approach into practice in our own study. Our tensional approach (1) explores key moments of tension; (2) seeks out unease and discomfort; (3) involves researcher and research participants in ongoing dialogue; (4) and embraces multiple perspectives on a range of tensions during the data analysis process. It encourages uncertainties and questions instead of pursuing certainty of meaning and fixed conclusions.
Theories of youth resilience neglect youths’ lived experiences of what facilitates positive adjustment to hardship. The Pathways-to-Resilience Study addressed this by inviting Canadian, Chinese, Colombian, New Zealand and South African (SA) youths to share their resilience-related knowledge. In this article I report the challenges endemic to the rural, resource-poor, South African research site that complicated this Pathways ideal. I illustrate that blind application of a multi-country study design, albeit well-designed, potentially excludes youths with inaccessible parents, high mobility, and/or cellular telephone contact details. Additionally, I show that one-on-one interview methods do not serve Sesotho-speaking youths well, and that the inclusion of adult ‘insiders’ in a research team does not guarantee regard for local youths’ insights. I comment critically on how these challenges were addressed and use this to propose seven lessons that are likely to inform, and support, youth-advantaging qualitative research in similar majority-world contexts.
Militant ethnography is a burgeoning, deliberately politicised approach to qualitative research, that helps activist-researchers engage with the cultural logic and practices underpinning contemporary anti-authoritarian social movements. Despite its ascendancy amongst researchers investigating contemporary anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements, militant ethnographic approaches have had limited broader exposure amongst qualitative researchers.
With this in mind, my article serves three purposes. First, it acquaints a wider audience of qualitative researchers with militant ethnography. Second, and with reference to insights collaboratively produced during my own militant ethnographic research alongside Greek anarchists and anti-authoritarians, it shares some of the cultural logic and practices underpinning anarchist and anti-authoritarian activity in this space. Third, I make a novel case for the extended application of militant ethnography, so that it accommodates the dissemination of field-constructed knowledge and insights amongst kindred political networks in other locations.
Conducting research in the rapidly evolving fields constituting the digital social sciences raises challenging ethical and technical issues, especially when the subject matter includes activities of stigmatised populations. Our study of a dark-web drug-use community provides a case example of ‘how to’ conduct studies in digital environments where sensitive and illicit activities are discussed. In this paper we present the workflow from our digital ethnography and consider the consequences of particular choices of action upon knowledge production. Key considerations that our workflow responded to include adapting to volatile field-sites, researcher safety in digital environments, data security and encryption, and ethical-legal challenges. We anticipate that this workflow may assist other researchers to emulate, test and adapt our approach to the diverse range of illicit studies online. In this paper we argue that active engagement with stigmatised communities through multi-sited digital ethnography can complement and augment the findings of digital trace analyses.
Using the Canadian context as a case study, the research reported here focuses on in-depth qualitative interviews with 36 researchers, artists and trainees engaged in ‘doing’ arts-based health research (ABHR). We begin to address the gap in ABHR knowledge by engaging in a critical inquiry regarding the issues, challenges and benefits of ABHR methodologies. Specifically, this paper focuses on the tensions experienced regarding academic legitimacy and the use of the arts in producing and disseminating research. Four central areas of tension associated with academic legitimacy are described: balancing structure versus openness and flexibility; academic obligations of truth and accuracy; resisting typical notions of what counts in academia; and expectations vis-à-vis measuring the impact of ABHR. We argue for the need to reconsider what counts as knowledge and to reconceptualize notions of evaluation and rigor in order to effectively support the effective production and dissemination of ABHR.
This reflexive analysis of two sports ethnographers’ studies of an aerobics class and a swimming pool explores the effects of doing fieldwork on a physical activity that one loves. While using our bodies as phenomenological sites of perception initially created an epistemological advantage, researching the familiarly beloved not only ‘took the fun out of’ the activity, but also more profoundly challenged our ‘exercise identities’. Emulating poor technique, enduring interactional awkwardness, and deep acting role performances, combined to take their toll, so that ‘going native’ became a matter not just of intellectual disadvantage but of ontological destabilisation. Doing activity-based ethnography on something personally special is a double-edged sword: on the one hand elucidating awareness, but on the other depriving the researcher of pleasure and ‘spoiling’ aspects of their identity.
Engaging peer-interviewers in qualitative inquiry is becoming more popular. Yet, there are differing opinions as to whether this practice improves the research process or is prohibitively challenging. Benefits noted in the literature are improved awareness/acceptance of disenfranchised groups, improved quality of research, and increased comfort of participants in the research process. Challenges include larger investment in time and money to hire, train, and support peer-interviewers, and the potential to disrupt peer recovery. We illustrate, through case study, how to engage peer-interviewers, meet potential challenges, and the benefits of such engagement. We draw upon our experience from a qualitative study designed to understand men’s experiences of problem gambling and housing instability. We hired three peers to conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews with 30 men from a community-based organization. We contend, that with appropriate and adequate resources (time, financial investment), peer-interviewing produces a positive, capacity building experience for peer-interviewers, participants and researchers.
It has long been claimed that the police are the most visible symbol of the criminal justice system (Bittner, 1974). There is, however, a significant strand of policing – covert investigation that relies routinely on methods of deception – that resists public revelation (Ross, 2008). The growing importance of covert police investigation has profound implications for the relationship between citizen and the state in a democratic society, but it is relatively unexplored by police researchers. In this article, we describe the methodology of the first ethnographic study of how the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) – a piece of ‘enabling’ legislation that regulates the conditions under which law enforcement agencies can intervene in the privacy of individuals – has effected the conduct of covert police investigation in the United Kingdom. We describe our ethnographic experience in the ‘secret world’ of covert policing, which is familiar in many respects to ethnographers of uniformed officers, but which also differed significantly. We contend that the organizing principle of surveillance – the imperative to maintain the secrecy of an operation – had a marked impact on our ethnographic experience, which eroded significantly our status as non-participant observers and altered out reflexive experience by activating the ‘usefulness’ of our gender.
This article considers the sociological role of activities that seem to make no sense: what can be learnt from episodes ‘unhinged’ from the routines of everyday life? In particular, stressing a processual framework for the study of everyday life, these unhinged episodes are regarded as useful for accessing its virtuality. The paper draws on literatures on everyday life, the object and the event in order, firstly to contrast critique to speculation, and secondly to sketch out what a speculative method for the study of everyday life might look like. Along the way, a number of concepts are developed: including affordance (the combination of plan, body and object); idiocy (a positive responsiveness to that which makes no sense); and affect (an ‘exquisite sensitivity to the world’). This perspective is illustrated through a discussion of how everyday practical issues raised by the use of rolling or wheeled luggage might evoke new forms of sociality – a ‘technosociality’.
Football supporters worldwide organise protests, petitions, campaigns, workshops and congresses and are engaged in political lobbying. These expressions of supporters’ activism are nourished by both discontent with developments in football culture and an effort to change them. The aim of this methodologically driven article is to critically examine the role of digital ethnographies in exploring these processes. To reflexively explore the complex realities of recent transformations in football culture, this research study complemented offline data with online data. The use of digital data is discussed along the following dimensions: informational, representational, epistemological and relational. It is argued that the analytical dualism employed to critically discuss the relationship between online and offline spheres should be complemented with empirical duality to fully understand the role played by the digital sphere in social reality.
This article presents a participatory research project involving immigrant organizations and professional parenting support services in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The project combined local development aims with co-generative knowledge and mutual learning to produce socially and scientifically relevant knowledge. By using participatory components as ‘windows of understanding’ in a broader non-participatory research, previously excluded perspectives were included in knowledge production, while also producing local change. An analysis of the challenges and positive outcomes offers a methodological reflection that can contribute to future developments in participatory action research (PAR).
The paper is a discussion of my attempt to move beyond familiarity by using ethnomethodology – and the emotional impact of doing so; namely, the feeling of having a ‘dirty secret’. As a social work group member interviewing social workers, the process of fieldwork was all too familiar. However, during transcription and analysis, what I had considered to be ‘business as usual’ was revealed as something more complex. The paper describes how the ethnomethodological notions of being a member, the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and breaching worked to make the familiar strange and became key to my understanding.
Answers to the question just what is the ‘case’ partly defined the fields of sociology and social work in early 20th century Chicago. Drawing on the archives of the University of Chicago, I describe and appraise the way the ‘case’ figured in social work at Chicago and elsewhere. I ask the corresponding question of sociology. Finally, I briefly consider why not much came of social work and sociology ploughing similar territory in ways that served for a time to hallmark their identities. This analysis opens up ways of rethinking how social work and sociological research are distinctive to their fields, and allows a less ‘pre-tuned’ discussion of how practitioners of either might reciprocally pursue their profession.
In social research some places and populations are disproportionately targeted by researchers. While relatively little work exists on the concept of over-research those accounts that do exist tend to focus on participant-based research relationships and not place-based research relationships. Using interdisciplinary approaches and fieldwork experiences from a recently completed qualitative study of urban multiculture in England we develop the over-research debates in three key ways. First, the notion of ‘over-research’ carries negative connotations and we reflect on these as well as the possibility of more nuanced readings of research encounters. Second, we develop a more relational analysis, in which place – the London Borough of Hackney – is understood to be an animating force in the research process. Third, we argue that our experiences of the research provide evidence that many of the participants in the project were adept and confident in their engagements with the research process. In this way, the article suggests, disproportionate research attention may foster not research fatigue but a more knowing and co-productive research relationship.
This article analyses a collection of cases from video recordings of naturally occurring interaction in institutional settings, where members display an orientation to the presence of the recording equipment. Such instances have been treated elsewhere as evidence of contamination of the ecology of the setting. The findings suggest that participants do remain aware of the recording activity, but that they publicly display when they are attending to it. Indeed, it is used as one resource to occasion identity work as competent, knowledgeable members of a particular institutional community, displaying to one another their understanding of the research aims, and their knowledge of how these kinds of data are constituted. Investigating how observational research is oriented to and constituted by the observed allows for a better understanding of what at that moment and in that setting is deemed recording-appropriate or -inappropriate conduct, and offers a more nuanced perspective on how data are co-constituted.
This article interrogates instances of laughter in doing research from a methodological and ethical perspective. Both the theoretical insights of the ‘turn to affect’ and the methodological discussions concerning emotional reflexivity in social sciences are combined in order to explore the ambiguities unravelled by ‘uneasy laughter’ in the particular context of researching the Finnish anti-immigration debate. Through careful reflection, laughter can be recognised as a beginning from which to understand relations of power and the production of whiteness and class in the debate, and the changing place of the researcher in all this. Furthermore, it is suggested that understanding affects as embedded in power relations makes it possible to account also for those affective and emotional reactions that are deemed shameful and ‘wrong’ in doing research. Exploring laughter thus allows approaches in which unruly and ethically questionable affects can be made part of an ethically responsible research.
This article reflects on the use of a smartphone application (‘app’) in qualitative research following the experience of the FREE (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe) project, which investigated the lives of football fans in the UK. To meet this aim, a participant-focused audiovisual methodology was designed, featuring the use of an app to collect data. Fans were asked to take photographs and keep diaries to show the role football plays in their lives. The smartphone app was developed to allow fans to use their own mobile phones, capturing qualitative data in ‘real time’. The paper reflects on our experience of using the smartphone app in this qualitative research, analysing the advantages, disadvantages and the main risks that researchers will need to take into account when using smartphone apps in their future qualitative research projects. We encourage others to build on and advance this under-researched but potentially valuable tool.
This article promotes an interviewing technique that could be used when interviewing elite policy-making respondents who fear repercussions for divulging information and who, as a result, either become too emotionally unstable to allow for rapport or begin to resist disclosing information. Based on two independent research projects in Bulgaria and Cyprus, the article advocates the active use of a new type of research participant, the intermediary. This relatively new interview participant is used to introduce and vouch for the credibility of the researcher. The paper argues their inclusion in the interview decreases a respondent’s resistance by improving rapport and by preventing concealment of information. They achieve the former by: creating an aura of trust, by providing emotional support to the respondent and by converting the interview to a friendly conversation. They achieve the latter by intervening at the moments when they consider the respondent is deliberately or unintentionally withholding information.
This article aims to explore the possibilities and limitations of contemporary qualitative methods for understanding materials and material culture and how these can be expanded through interdisciplinary approaches. Taking the case study of an interdisciplinary project into old jeans, the article first considers the use of object interviews and life histories to explore how people ‘speak’ the material. Second, it develops the possibilities afforded by inventive material methods, such as socio-archaeological approaches of ‘material imaginings’. Finally, the article discusses the interdisciplinary project through the dialogues that took place around the methods of design and of textile technology and the data produced. Focusing upon dialogues offers a means of exploring the tensions and also connections between methods as a site for expanding qualitative understandings of materials as ‘live’ and vibrant. It aims to widen the remit of qualitative research methods to incorporate the material.
In this article, we address negotiating interactions with hesitant participants who are public figures, yet do not traditionally fit within the category of the advantaged. We target new field researchers and rusty veterans by offering an applied approach to: (1) preparing for the field; (2) managing interactions with hesitant participants via finding common ground while drawing lines, connecting with key informants, and expanding on public information; and (3) working through failed interviews. We discuss the importance of power relationships, positionality, and ethical standards, particularly in relation to negotiating similarities and differences between researchers and participants.
Visual and arts-based methods are now widely used in the social sciences. In youth research they are considered to promote engagement and empowerment. This article contributes to debates on the challenges of using arts-based methods in research with young people. We discuss the experience of a multidisciplinary project investigating how young people imagine their futures – Imagine Sheppey – to critically consider the use of arts-based methods and the kinds of data produced through these practices. We make two sets of arguments. First, that the challenges of participation and collaboration are not overcome by using apparently ‘youth-friendly’ research tools. Second, that the nature of data produced through arts-based methods can leave researchers with significant problems of interpretation. We highlight these issues in relation to the focus of this project on researching the future.
Qualitative interviews are increasingly being utilized within the context of intervention trials. While there is emerging assistance for conducting and reporting qualitative analysis, there are limited practical resources available for researchers engaging in a group coding process and interested in ensuring adequate Intercoder Reliability (ICR); the amount of agreement between two or more coders for the codes applied to qualitative text. Assessing the reliability of the coding helps establish the credibility of qualitative findings. We discuss our experience calculating ICR in the context of a behavioural HIV prevention trial for young women in South Africa which involves multiple rounds of longitudinal qualitative data collection. We document the steps that we took to improve ICR in this study, the challenges to improving ICR, and the value of the process to qualitative data analysis. As a result, we provide guidelines for other researchers to consider as they embark on large qualitative projects.
It is recognised that transcribing is not merely a neutral and mechanical process, but is active and requires careful engagement with the qualitative data. Whether the researcher transcribes their own data or employs professional transcriptionists the process requires repeated listening to participants’ personal narratives. This repetition has a cumulative effect on the transcriptionist and hearing the participants’ personal narratives of a sensitive or distressing nature, can have an emotional impact. However, this potential emotional impact is often not something which is accounted for in the planning stages of research. In this article we critically discuss the importance of considering the effects on transcriptionists who engage with qualitative data.
Observation is an important component of research to examine complex social settings and is well-established for studying courtroom dynamics and judicial behaviour. However, the many activities occurring at once and the multiple participants, lay and professional, make it impossible for a sole researcher to observe and understand everything occurring in the courtroom. This article reports on the use of two researchers to undertake court observations, in two different studies, each nested in a different research design. The social nature of data collection and the value of dialogue between the two researchers in interpreting observed events, especially when studying emotion, are readily apparent in both studies.
Community-engaged approaches to research and practice continue to show success in addressing health equity and making long-term change for partnership relationships and structures of power. The usefulness of these approaches is either diminished or bolstered by community trust, which can be challenging for partnerships to achieve. In this research note we present an example process for recruiting, interviewing, and hiring community researchers as a starting place for capacity building and for laying the foundation for data collection and analysis in health-related community projects.
This research note discusses the effectiveness of using video internet technologies, like Skype, for qualitative interviews. Skype may present some challenges for interviewing, including dropped calls and pauses, inaudible segments, inability to read body language and nonverbal cues, and loss of intimacy compared to traditional in-person interviews. Based on reflections from 45 university student researchers, the following short paper details how to overcome such obstacles and to create a successful research partnership between the researcher and participant. Strategies include confirming a stable internet connection, finding a quiet room without distractions, slowing down and clarifying talk, being open to repeating answers and questions, and paying close attention to facial expressions.
Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just translators or interpreters. However, their contributions to and impacts on the research process and outcomes often remain unacknowledged or unaccounted for. We build on previous work that looks at the subjective relations between the researcher, research assistant and research participant to explore this issue. In particular, drawing on a political economy approach, we look at how research assistants, through their objective position, mediate relations between researcher and participants, and also how power relations and different configurations of roles influence the research process and outcomes. Our analysis concludes that ignoring the role of research assistants in empirical research will lead to flawed processes, biased data and possibly misleading results.
In this article I consider serendipity and chance in engaging with narratives in the archive. Why is it, I ask, that serendipity has become a sine qua non of archival research? Without downplaying the rarity and preciousness of chance, my argument is that we should not conflate the gift of the chance with the dim area of perceptive experience, which may or may not be conscious. In positing this argument I draw on Whitehead’s philosophy: more particularly I consider the notion of prehensions in exploring a particular storyline from my own archival research with the papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French trade unionist in the garment industry. In juxtaposing serendipity with the Whiteheadian lens of imaginative freedom, I chart storylines in the archive on a matrix of rhythmical vibrations and finally I consider narrative work through the synthetic activity of symbolic reference.
The influence of intersectional identities on social experiences is most often explored within research on minority populations (e.g. LGBT, African American women, etc.). However few, if any, studies have extended the subject of intersectionality to address the intersectional identities of researchers or their influence on the conduct of qualitative research in international settings. Through reflexive memoirs offered from student researchers that engaged in an international collaborative research project, this article highlights the challenges intersectional identities posed while conducting community-engaged qualitative research in Durban, South Africa. Within each memoir, particular attention is paid to (a) how the intersection of the student researchers’ perceived and actual racial, gendered, class, and national identities determined or obfuscated their statuses as ‘outsiders’ or ‘insiders’, (b) the influential nature of these mutually constitutive identities on the interview process, and (c) how the student researchers successfully or unsuccessfully negotiated the collective impact of their intersecting positions and identities in the field. By critically examining the complex and interdependent influence of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and class on researchers’ collection and interpretation of qualitative data, this article extends the application and relevance of the intersectionality framework to an international context and to the experiences of the interviewer/researcher.
Intersectionality has increasing traction in interdisciplinary inquiry, yet questions remain about qualitative intersectional methods. In particular, scholars have yet to consider how to write qualitative research in the service of intersectionality. Drawing upon my disciplinary training in communication studies, I argue that the field’s theoretical grounding offers useful resources for advancing intersectional writing. Because communication theory posits that symbols both reflect and make reality, it resonates with an intersectional desire to simultaneously describe and transform the world through critical analysis. Using exemplars from communication scholars, I highlight how this interplay of approaches can advance identity politics and trouble identity categories. Furthermore this approach can help qualitative writers to link what some perceive to be distinct ‘levels’ of analysis. By discussing techniques for coupling reflexivity and voice, I make communication theory intelligible for intersectional writing and also invite communication studies to become more intersectional.
This article, part of a larger study, began with an inquiry into the ways a small group of preteen boys and girls with diagnosed eating disorders discussed their ideas and attitudes about healthy bodies in individual interviews. Despite applying some of the usual analytic procedures, the data yielded little of significance in relation to body and health discourses, or to gender differences. We therefore wondered whether our underlying epistemological lenses and methodological toolkit had prevented us from seeing and hearing what was happening with this particular cohort. By shifting from a predominantly feminist post-structuralist, socio-cultural approach to one more inflected with varieties of feminist post-humanism and post-qualitative thinking, the data came differently into focus, and invited closer consideration. Employing a diffractive analysis then allowed some fresh, unexpected salience in the data to become more apparent.
Some male interviewees encounter difficulties when they try to express their emotions and overcome anti-feminist positions that transform the research setting into places where hyper-masculinities are reproduced. This research finds that critical dialogue is a persuasive tool interviewers can employ to challenge their participants to empathize with perspectives that contest and confront gendered violence, institutional coercion, and misogyny. Drawing on eight interviews I conducted with male security officers (all former colleagues of the author) who engaged in healthcare violence against male and female psychiatric patients at two hospitals in Ottawa, Canada, I discovered that dissent and the testament of past sufferings inspires people to reconsider their marginalizing standpoints, and helps participants and researchers who have experienced trauma before and during the research process to cope with their emotional suffering and find closure. This approach may encounter ethical problems such as researcher/participant re-victimization and distress, which may be resolved through debriefing exercises, and displays of empathy, compassion, non-judgement, and friendship.
Arriving in a foreign country with little knowledge of local languages presents the researcher with significant linguistic challenges. Our in-country contacts may suggest potential interpreters for us to hire, but how do we know if these interpreters can fluently speak the languages of our participants? Can we, lacking fluency in local languages, understand when the social position and lived experiences of our interpreter modify the discourses we seek to analyse? Drawing from my human geography research experience in Uganda, this article aims to share strategies to assess the linguistic skills of the interpreter and to understand his or her social position and subjectivity. Uniquely, this paper highlights differences in interpretation and links these differences to the assistants’ social position and subjectivity, highlighting the need to acknowledge that meaning can be filtered by interpretation and requiring that critical reflection be broadened to encompass interpreters in cross-language research.
A paradigm shift in disaster mental health research has renewed the emphasis on the survivors’ experiences of suffering and healing. This article highlights the importance of utilizing documentary analysis as one of the important qualitative methodologies to explore post-disaster distress of the survivors. Following Figueroa’s (2008) approach to the analysis of audio-visual texts, the methodological steps, outcomes and their salience have been illustrated through an analysis of a documentary produced by Rakesh Sharma titled Final Solution, based on post-Godhra riots in 2002 in India. The two-phased analysis involved constructionist grounded theory procedures with an initial focus on the documentary as a ‘whole’. The methodological steps, rigour and the resulting categories of survivors’ suffering (‘overwhelmed by losses’, ‘relational disruption’, ‘living a forced identity’ and ‘denial of justice and equity’) are discussed in the light of the damage a disaster causes to survivors’ experiences of self and social worlds.
This article addresses methodological questions concerning recruitment processes in research using qualitative interviews. The authors suggest that, as an active part of the research process, recruitment influences research results in sometimes unforeseen manners. They argue that recruitment processes should be better attended to – not least in research positioned within the epistemological landscapes of knowledge production and transparent reflexivity. The article draws on six studies in which qualitative interviews of ‘lay people’ were used as the sole or main source of data. Drawing on their own experiences, the authors discuss the ways in which research topics, pre-defined sample, mediators, and the researchers’ positionality and situatedness affect the recruitment of different interviewees, and, hence, also the knowledge researchers are able to produce.
This article contributes to methodological debates regarding the role of art in communicating research findings in the context of a completed research project on dementia activism. Previous work has focused on the value and effectiveness of using art to communicate research, rather than the actual transformation and creative process. As a result, there has been an inadequate exploration of how the art affects the scholarly endeavour. In this article, I report on a completed project involving a social scientist, curator, and installation artist, and research participants working in partnership to communicate research using art, specifically textile banners and documentary film, for an exhibition based on original research on dementia activism. I contend that art is a powerful tool for communicating research knowledge but it can overshadow the scholarly endeavour to both positive and negative effects. Researchers need to be aware of what art can offer, and what it cannot, when it comes to research communication.
Laughter is the most frequently transcribed paralinguistic feature in social research interview transcripts, occurring even where the transcriber gives no other indication of how words were said. It is thus a useful starting point for reconstructing aspects of interaction from the traces in standard social science research transcripts. First, we examine the practices of a transcriber in recording laughter by comparing transcripts from one project to the audio recordings. We then analyse the placement of these tokens in transcripts from other projects, considering their relation to the immediately preceding and following talk, drawing on Wallace Chafe’s (2007) interpretation of laughter as the expression of a feeling of ‘non-seriousness’. The laughter marks a transition away from and back to a serious frame. We argue that attention to the recording of laughter as a variable transcription practice can draw the attention of researchers using standard orthographic transcripts to interviewees’ orientations to topics and to the interview process itself.
The global research community has identified that, as society becomes ever more mobile and 24/7-oriented, data collection methods that reflect the day-to-day experiences of its participants need to be developed. This article reviews the success and issues of using a solicited email-diary, developed to investigate the impact on commuters of London hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. Research on the effectiveness of diaries as a method of data collection is limited, while there appears to be no analysis using email as a method of soliciting diary responses. The article identifies the research opportunities for an email-diary and the solutions it provides to a number of the problems and limitations experienced with a traditional pen-and-paper diary.
In this article, we consider the everyday practices and methodological and theoretical tensions of interdisciplinary, qualitative work. In particular, we discuss the varied interpretations of focus group data from Burundian men and women with refugee status and explore the consequences of representations that result in deficit-based understandings. We highlight how through our research process we learned that following participants, rather than leading with our disciplines, deepened our understanding and complicated our representations.
The role of emotions in qualitative research receives increasing attention. We argue for an active rather than a reactive approach towards emotions to improve the quality of research; emotions are a vital source of information and researchers use emotions strategically. Analysing the emotion work of researchers in the process of gaining, securing and maintaining access to the Swedish judiciary, we propose that the emotion work involved is a type of emotional labour, required by the researcher in order to successfully collect data. The particular case of researching elites is highlighted. Emotional labour is analysed along three dimensions: 1. Strategic emotion work – building trust outwards and self-confidence inwards; 2. Emotional reflexivity – attentiveness to emotional signals monitoring one’s position and actions in the field; and 3. Emotion work to cope with emotive dissonance – inward-directed emotion work to deal with the potentially alienating effects of strategic emotion work.
This article presents some of the emergent methods developed to fit a study of quality in inclusive research with people with learning disabilities. It addresses (i) the ways in which the methodology was a response to the need for constructive, transformative dialogue through use of repeated focus groups in a design interspersing dialogic and reflective spaces; and (ii) how stimulus materials for the focus groups involved imaginative and creative interactions with data. Particular innovations in the blending of narrative and thematic analyses and data generation and analysis processes are explored, specifically the creative use of metaphor as stimulus and the playful adaptation of I-poems from the Listening Guide approach as writing and performance. In reflecting on these methodological turns we also reflect on creativity as an interpretive lens. The paper is an invitation for further methodological dialogue and development.
‘Multivoicedness’ and the ‘multivoiced Self’ have become important theoretical concepts guiding research. Drawing on the tradition of dialogism, the Self is conceptualised as being constituted by a multiplicity of dynamic, interacting voices. Despite the growth in literature and empirical research, there remains a paucity of established methodological tools for analysing the multivoiced Self using qualitative data. In this article, we set out a systematic, practical ‘how-to’ guide for analysing multivoicedness. Using theoretically derived tools, our three-step method comprises: identifying the voices of I-positions within the Self’s talk (or text), identifying the voices of ‘inner-Others’, and examining the dialogue and relationships between the different voices. We elaborate each step and illustrate our method using examples from a published paper in which data were analysed using this method. We conclude by offering more general principles for the use of the method and discussing potential applications.
In an era of accelerated international mobility, migrant researchers are increasingly studying their migrant co-nationals in a language different from the language in which they report their findings. This raises very significant considerations regarding language experience and translation of research data. While crucial for understanding production of knowledge, these issues have not yet been given adequate attention. In response, this article focuses first on the challenges related to the assumed shared relationship with language between migrant researchers and their migrant informants. In doing so, it contributes to the discussion about positionality of a migrant researcher. Second, it recognizes the role of a translator researcher and discusses the implications of collecting data in one language and presenting the findings in another. As such, it addresses essential methodological queries many migrant researchers face when conducting studies involving their compatriot communities.
Delphi Groups are an increasingly popular method, not least because electronic communications have made it easier to assemble a ‘virtual’ expert panel, but there have been a number of review articles which have pointed to a lack of rigour. Using an extended case study of a Delphi Group designed to establish agreed policy recommendations and deriving from a project using observational and semi-structured interview methods, this article examines the value of Delphi Groups as part of a mixed method research design. The article includes a narrative of the sequence of events in the Delphi Group’s deliberations, a detailed examination of how the group process led to the modification of one draft policy recommendation, a further examination of a contested additional policy recommendation, and a list of pragmatic recommendations on the conduct of Delphi Groups in respect of size, composition, recruitment, contestation, timing, closure and scope.
Theorizing about how culture influences planned group formation and interaction can be tested through using focus groups as a research method. This article is not about the Omani population, but in higher education, it is useful to depict evaluative research as being cosmopolitan in its approach. Data obtained from eleven focus groups conducted in Oman with nurses assisted the authors of this paper to embrace what it means to respect another culture and enable understanding of that culture. The premise about reflexive methods is to promote the voices of the research team and by reporting a team approach a broader voice can be heard. This paper aims to inform an international audience that taking a traditional perspective when using focus groups can be stereotyped by cultural assumptions. Such stereotypical assumptions did not represent the reality of the design; the study was structured to be culturally sensitive and fit for purpose. Such assumptions can be dismissed if participants are given a choice within the study.
Synthesising qualitative research involves working through difficult practical issues. Drawing upon our collective experience of undertaking three meta-ethnographies, we consider the forms of work – the practical action and practical reasoning – comprising this kind of synthesis and the difference they make to a meta-ethnography. We detail the origins and aims of meta-ethnography, and present a review of existing meta-ethnographies with a specific focus on the methods the authors reported as central to the conduct of meta-ethnography. We consider the implications of these methods and the reason for the presence (and absence) of particular practices in reporting on meta-ethnographies. Drawing upon our own experiences of conducting meta-ethnographies we focus on the methods used in two key practices central to meta-ethnography: ‘reading’ and ‘conceptual innovation’. We conclude by discussing how the meta-ethnographic process requires active reading, a recognition of multiplicity, a realistic approach to conceptual innovation and, importantly, collaborative work.
We used a multiple-case study to investigate participants’ experiences in interviews from six qualitative studies that differed in interview orientations, designs, methods, participants, and topics. Roulston’s (2010a, 2010b) interview orientation heuristic guided our ‘paradigm-driven’ analysis of participants’ experiences. We found no differences in participants’ articulation of benefits and risks by interview orientation. Participants’ experiences differed based on the opportunity to reflect on their interview experiences, the sensitivity of the topic explored, and the number of interviews conducted. We discuss the implications of our findings for ‘paradigm-driven’ qualitative research and suggest ethical questions qualitative interview researchers can ask to maximize the benefits of their interviews.
Contemporary social science research is often concerned to engage with and promote particular forms of postmodern and innovative data production, such as photo-elicitation, autoethnography or free association interviews. This fascination with the latest and greatest techniques has been accompanied by an ever more fragmented range of research methods training for students where the week-by-week shift between approaches engenders a disjointed view of becoming the researcher. This individualisation of techniques has set up rival camps and critiques where the common ground of being embedded in traditional ethnography is often forgotten. For researchers, who began their academic careers in the ethnographic tradition, there is an appreciation of the holistic base of enquiry from which a family of methods can be effectively employed. However, more recently qualitative researchers have been distracted by ‘the technique’; a distraction that can blind them to the occupation of ethnography. Concurrently, there have been shifts in the social and economic expectations placed on qualitative inquiry that have acted to close down spaces of ethnographic teaching and practice. In response, this article focuses on the importance of the ‘waiting field’; an opportunity to explore the times where real lives carry on before they make room for the intrusion of the data production of ‘the technique’ and remind us that much qualitative research is, in fact, an ethnographic undertaking: one that encompasses the researcher within and beyond the field.
Process approaches are increasingly applied in qualitative studies in many fields within social sciences. Yet, few studies have seriously elaborated on the ontological premises of process theorizing. This study addresses this void by suggesting a process philosophical framework. The framework is ontologically grounded with the concepts of causality, spatiality, and temporality in process theorizing. We use these tenets for developing three process theorizing techniques – articulating, relating, and conjugating. Articulating denotes to effectively expressing the potential identifying and generative properties of the process. Relating is the technique by which one maintains continuous connections within and between reified properties of a process. Conjugating is the technique by which a process’ identifying and generative properties are pulled together from various temporal and spatial sites in order to form a novel nexus. Each of these techniques builds on process philosophy and process theory and is illustrated through examples from prior process studies.
Recent research on multimodal communication in the material world shows how things matter in social contexts and make a traceable difference in the unfolding of interactions. Interestingly enough, the artifacts typically used as tools of inquiry (i.e. the recording devices) are rarely deemed worthy of similar analytical attention, as if they were irrelevant or inconsequential to the organization of social interaction taking place in the field. Adopting a theoretical framework on distributed and hybrid agency, this article discusses and empirically shows how these objects play a crucial role in defining the institutional goal of the interaction and, therefore, contribute to the crafting of the data. The analysis of examples from a collection of references made to the recording devices in different research interactions illustrates the circumstances in which these references occur and the activities accomplished by participants by referring to these ‘embarrassing’ objects. In the discussion we propose that the analytical underestimation of the role of things ‘talked-into being’ in the research setting is consistent with and can contribute to a vision of research practices as a mirror of the social reality out there.
This article derives from my own fieldwork experience as a female anthropologist working in the field of gender and male sexual dissidence. Taking my early fieldwork in the 1990s as a departure point, and drawing on my recent fieldwork with Spanish Lesbian, Gay, Transsexual and Bisexual activists, I reflect on the researcher’s position, both in the field and in the construction of the field, through a discussion on ethnographic authority and management of the roles of insider/outsider. In adopting a critical perspective, I propose that the position of the researcher and of other actors in these social situations be continually and thoroughly negotiated, thus revealing the flexiblilty of the frontiers of/in research. This negotiation of positions is related to the complex process by which anthropological ‘difference’ is constructed, and to the dynamic configurations of ethnographic ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ in fieldwork. Positions, alterations, intersections and negotiations are seen to be permeated by the rational and the emotional construction of ‘otherness’.
We used participant-produced photography to investigate everyday commuting practices in Cambridge, UK. Photovoice served as an observational method for producing ethnographically rich data. A total of 19 participants produced over 500 photos about their journeys to and from work and took part in photo-elicitation interviews. Three themes emerged. First, many images depicted ‘well-being’ in commuting, for example, beautiful landscapes. Second, during elicitation interviews, participants described positive images that they intended but failed to capture in photos. Third, those participants who did not depict well-being described a lack of choice in their commuting, while those who acknowledged well-being seemed to do so in order to make practices of commuting meaningful and habitable. While our interpretations of photos of well-being could be subject to a methodological fallacy relating to a preference for positive over negative images in lay photography, we nonetheless suggest that the rich visual and oral narratives indicate a ‘real’ experience, albeit elicited through the photovoice.
Meta-narrative review developed by Greenhalgh and colleagues is a new interpretive systematic review approach within an expanding portfolio of evidence synthesis methods that focus on context, meaning and process. Informed by Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms, the method seeks to develop storylines of how research on a given topic unfolds over time, highlighting key discoveries and insights. This article reports how we drew on the meta-narrative approach in a review that examined the changing and contested nature of ‘community’ as understood across disciplines and research traditions. We discuss the challenges that arose in our review and the strengths and limitations of our approach. We conclude that the meta-narrative approach provides a useful framework for making sense of the multiple and changing conceptualisations of community while accounting for historical context. We recommend that an avenue for further development of the method is to consider Foucault’s sociological approach to tracing knowledge.
This article ruminates on a research project comparing the relationships between two mass participation running events (MPREs) – Newcastle’s Great North and Addis Ababa’s Great Ethiopian Run – and their public health, development and place promotion objectives. It argues that the disjuncture between the intentions of the research framework and the actions necessitated by the reality of the field facilitates a deeper engagement with the two interwoven conceptual spheres within which the research is situated: comparative urbanism and event studies. Moreover, it contends that the persistent neglect of the pragmatic challenges of event research within the literature risks underplaying the multi-dimensional networks that link MPREs, their host cities and an emergent global political economy of running and runners. As such, a critical engagement with the methodological conundrums posed by event-led comparative research is not to admit its failure, but rather to demonstrate the importance of flexibility and openness when working across diverse contexts.
This article examines the responses to an exercise administered over a 10-year period to graduate-level psychology students in an advanced methodology seminar, to explore one of the central questions of qualitative research: What theories about identity do we bring to our analyses of first-person interview narratives? It suggests that researchers’ interpretations of what appear to be inconsistent and/or conflicting statements by interview subjects about their experience within the course of an interview can serve as a conceptual touchstone reflecting core assumptions about identity. Students’ responses to the exercise, which asked them to interpret two statements by an interview subject that seem to self-contradict, have consistently favored the type of dichotomous analytical paradigms associated with modernist conceptions of a unified self. This trend may be reflective of an insufficiently developed interpretive lexicon within postmodern narrative analysis. The author offers an interpretive approach termed ‘strong multiplicity’ to reflect the possibility of finding legitimate expressions of identity among seemingly inconsistent self-representations.
Drawing from experiences in Northern Indigenous Canada, Uganda, and Vietnam, we discuss the challenges encountered while trying to communicate relevant results to local communities with whom we work. Wavering between participatory and advocacy research, we explore how we grapple with finding the right audience with whom to share results, our attempts to craft communication to be relevant within specific contexts, and dilemmas over self-censorship. We also document our struggles to manage our own expectations and those of the communities with whom we work regarding the ability of our research to broker change. This article emerged from our frustration at wanting to be accountable to our interviewee communities, but finding few academic articles that go beyond ideals to examine how researchers often struggle to meet these expectations. While participatory approaches are increasingly mainstreamed in social science work, we argue that advocacy research can be a more appropriate response to community needs in certain cases.
The article argues for fostering sociable forms of dialogue in qualitative research. Conventional research shares an emphasis on extracting narratives with judicial and invasive state modes of enquiry rather than on learning from a genuine two-way dialogue between participants and researchers. Using a study of young migrants, we show how involving participants as observers and shapers of analytical dialogue can produce circulations of communication oscillating across the researcher’s and participant’s horizons of understanding. This produces new insight, beyond the limits of qualitative investigation, that extracts information from participants, and in so doing, has the potential to affect shifts in perception that animate and enchant experience. It has consequences for rethinking authorship that share, credit and specify responsibility. Developing such an approach opposes the ‘ethical hypochondria’ characterising qualitative research culture, where ‘automatic anonymity’ is limiting the potential of research to travel, connect people and engage the public imagination.
This article discusses three qualitative research traditions concerned with ‘multimodal’ and ‘multisensory’ methods, namely: i) ethnomethodology, ii) multisensory ethnography and iii) social semiotics. These have been selected not because they are the only research domains in which qualitative multimodal methodology is currently developing, but because a comparison between them allows for discussion of methodological and theoretical issues of key importance for advancing the field. Each is argued to rely on a distinctive underlying epistemological commitment – to the study of action, experience and communication, respectively. Each combines linguistic and non-linguistic data to try and get closer to the object of research, but involve different ontologies of closeness. The differences include how the object of research is defined, the role of context, the nature and locus of meaning, the nature of evidence and the relationship between researcher and the object/subject of research. These in turn have implications for how time and space are conceived. The discussion ends by indicating how the respective insights and advantages of each might be synthesised to suggest a new, integrated perspective for this kind of qualitative research.
Informed consent is a key issue in qualitative research. Conducting qualitative research longitudinally adds further complications to obtaining and maintaining informed consent. This paper illustrates how essential qualities of longitudinal research can be conceptualized as a resource to enhance ethical practice. In a research project on intimate relationships conducted with a cohort of participants, informed consent was addressed orally throughout the duration of the project. Following completion of the longitudinal data gathering, the formalities required as evidence of informed consent were only then conducted with each participant. With the written component of informed consent pending throughout the two year period of data collection, ongoing reflexivity during ethically important moments was enhanced. The author proposes that marking the conclusion of data gathering by obtaining written evidence of informed consent affords a means of enhancing ethical practice.
Teaching qualitative research methods on the one hand, and Martial Arts, on the other, seem to have only little in common: one is academic, and one is not; one is essentially somatic and kinesthetic, and the one is not. Yet during two decades of teaching and practicing both I repeatedly noticed a fruitful interaction between these ‘arts’, which I experienced as exciting embodied insights that shed light on both spheres. In this article I wish to ‘translate’ three concepts used in martial arts pedagogy, specifically in Aikidō, to the teaching of qualitative methods and methodology.
This paper details a narrative analysis strategy called critical resistance analysis (CRA). The aim of a CRA is to bring forward the kinds of subjects participants draw on when talking about themselves in narrative interviews and to make explicit how those subjects are resisted and desired. The CRA is distinguished from other narrative analyses of self in that it focuses on resistance in both its structural, anti-hegemonic and ‘poststructural’, self-refusal forms. The latter kind of resistance is what Hoy (2005) refers to as ‘critical’ resistance; the desire to undo oneself. A CRA looks for participant resistance in narrative and antenarrative (Boje, 2001) data. Antenarratives are incomplete stories that are often too fragmented to analyze using traditional narrative methods and can be seen as powerful examples of meaning-making in progress. A CRA newly brings an antenarrative understanding to the study of self in four analytic foci: deconstruction trace, discourse-argument, resistance and intersubjectivity analysis. Together these analytic foci reveal the subjects narrative participants seek (not) to be and afford a more complex understanding of how participants struggle with and against themselves.
This paper describes the foundations, introduces a conceptual model, and discusses uses of the commonplace journey methodology, an innovative and mobile qualitative research and pedagogical approach based on existential hermeneutic phenomenology. Using this mobile methodology, the researcher placed a theoretical approach to human–environment relations from outside the scholarly field of outdoor recreation and education in dialogue with travellers’ lived experience, activities, and understandings during an extended canoe expedition. Examples from the data and findings are used to further describe the processes, benefits, and challenges of this phenomenological methodology. Finally, the author describes four analytical techniques used to anchor interpretation and written theoretical accounts in lived practice and physical context.
This study develops a behind-the-scenes understanding of the people and organizations that are depended upon to provide survey data. A data collection event— in this study, a pilot coverage measurement survey conducted after the United States 2010 Census—provides an ideal environment to gauge respondents’ reactions to the survey process. Relying on the conceptual guidance of script formation, these reactions are studied using a focus group and interviews with staff. Using a combination of constant comparative method and ethnographic theme analysis the results generated a grounded theory of situated refusal that identifies specific scripts that respondents used when completing a self-administered survey. The findings describe the role of sensegiving and sensemaking in the fluid decision-making context of survey participation. The major themes for sensemaking include time, redundancy, and education, while the themes for sensegiving are organizational messages and organizational relationships. In addition to this contribution to qualitative and survey research, this study also provides a cognitive perspective on the current understanding of ethnostatistics—the qualitative study of quantitative processes.
Constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methods render an interpretive portrayal, a construction of reality, strengthened when the process of construction is acknowledged. An Irish team study uses CGT to explore intergenerational solidarity at individual, familial and societal levels, and their interface. The study data comprise interviews with 100 people from diverse socio-economic and age groups. The article contributes insights on applying CGT in team-based interview research on a topic with such breadth of scope. This contrasts with the more usual focused inquiry with a defined population. Adapting the method’s guidelines to the specific inquiry involved challenges in: framing the topic conceptually; situating research participants in contrasting social contexts to provide interpretive depth; and generating interview data with which to construct theory. We argue that interrogating the very premise of the inquiry allowed for emergent reconstruction, a goal at the heart of the method.
The focus is an ethical dilemma that arises, in an acute form, in interviews for studies using constructionist forms of discourse analysis. Informants typically assume that researchers are aiming to document their experiences, feelings, perspectives, etc., as features of a collectively shared world; an assumption that is probably reinforced by the rationales researchers provide, and by their behaviour. Yet, in such studies, the purpose of interviews is actually to generate displays of discursive practices, rather than to elicit information about the world or about people’s individual subjectivities. This discrepancy amounts to deception, but attempts to remedy it are likely to be counterproductive because of the gap between the natural attitude and a constructionist analytic orientation. From the perspective of some currently influential views about ethics, relating to informed consent and doing research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people, this would disqualify such research. However, these views are by no means beyond challenge. In these terms, discourse analysis poses important questions about currently accepted views of research ethics.
In recent years, archival research in the social sciences is emerging as a vibrant field of qualitative research, with contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, epistemological standpoints, theoretical insights and methodological approaches. In this article, I explore archival research strategies in life-history research, drawing on my experience of working at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, reading the letters of Dora Carrington (1893–1932), an English painter, who lived and worked in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group. The archive in my analysis is theorized as a spatial and discursive apparatus of experimentation, whose configuration has an impact on the type of data and the kind of knowledges that will derive from it. Drawing on neo-materialist approaches in feminist science studies, what I suggest is that the researcher’s questions, interpretations, theoretical insights and analytical tropes emerge as intra-actions between space/time/matter relations and forces within the archive.
Dyadic interviewing is a qualitative approach that recognizes there exists an interdependent relationship between individuals, embracing this phenomenon as a source of information rather than attempting to control for it. Informed by a Critical Disability Studies ideology, this dyadic interview technique has been adapted to address some of the difficulties that present when conducting interviews with individuals with intellectual disabilities. The interview structure consists of a dyad that includes the individual with intellectual disability and the person they identify as their key support person. Currently, researchers have embraced dyadic interviewing as a method of triangulation. However, it also has potential to be used as an important method of accommodation for people with intellectual disability that promotes choice and self-determination in research participation.
Drawing on a recent field study in a secure care institution for young offenders, this article analyses how an apparent failure to obtain data was based on pre-established ideals of what ethnographic data are. Despite much recent constructionist ethnographic literature explicitly dealing with the role of the researcher in data collection, little focus is given to how data are constructed in the research process. I thus started my study with ideals of obtaining rich data in the form of extensive written documentation. Shifting my focus to field interaction and relational experiences rather than the actual written documentation created an understanding of data as situational and relationally constructed. While this new understanding of what data are made possible analyses uncovering why certain meaning structures appear, it also revealed non-verbal experiences as valuable data.
Researchers who have attempted to make sense of silence in data have generally considered literal silences or such things as laughter. We consider the analysis of veiled silences where participants speak, but their speaking serves as ‘noise’ that ‘veils’, or masks, their inability or unwillingness to talk about a (potentially sensitive) topic. Extending Lisa Mazzei’s ‘problematic of silence’ by using our performativity–performance analytical method, we propose the purposeful use of ‘unusual conversational moves’, the deployment of researcher reflexivity and the analysis of trouble and repair as methods to expose taken-for-granted normative frameworks in veiled silences. We illustrate the potential of these research practices through reference to our study on men’s involvement in reproductive decision-making, in which participants demonstrated an inability to engage with the topic. The veiled silence that this produced, together with what was said, pointed to the operation of procreative heteronormativity.
This research note investigates the potential of digital and instant film photography as distinct approaches to research documentation. It argues that the quality of visual evidence provided by photographs may depend in part on the researcher’s ability to reliably link images with other sources of data. The research note goes on to contextualize instant film photography as a tested documentation technique, though one not commonly used in qualitative research. Benefits and constraints associated with instant film technology are also discussed. It concludes that instant film photography could have advantages over digital photography when used for multimodal documentation of fast-paced research processes.
Drawing on ethnographic data about 15 juvenile offenders, collected before and after my own pregnancy, this article shows how becoming a mother enabled me to access a previously closed-off research site while studying young male offenders on Chicago’s South Side. In this study, I introspectively reflect on the obstacles female ethnographers may encounter as they are trying to build rapport in a male-dominated setting. My narrative shows that the apprentice role, often adopted by male ethnographers of the American inner city, may be challenging for women to take on. Sexual advances and limited access to male-only spheres can significantly impede data collection. Yet, as I will demonstrate, women can alternatively rely on nonsexual, gender-specific roles, such that of a mother, not only to build rapport but also to broaden the perspective on field sites that have largely been explored from a male point of view.
This article draws on case studies undertaken in doctoral research at AUT University. It seeks to address a number of issues impacting supervisors and graphic design research candidates who employ autobiographic approaches when developing practice-led theses. When employed as a framework, autobiographic inquiries offer a rewarding yet challenging system for connecting investigation with the researcher’s personal experience. This article provides a discussion of the nature, advantages and challenges of autobiographic research in relation to two recent Doctor of Philosophy theses in graphic design. Through this, it seeks to provide a useful reflection on cautions and opportunities inherent in the methodology.
When conducting qualitative research, the modern-day researcher has a variety of options available in order to collect data from participants. Although traditional face-to-face interviews remain prominent, innovative communication technologies, such as Skype, have facilitated new modes of communication. While potential research populations have become increasingly geographically dispersed, technological advancements and software have made communicating over large distances more feasible. Because of this, research is no longer limited to face-to-face accessible participants, as online methods have facilitated access to global research participants. This article presents the experiences of two PhD researchers using Skype to interview participants. While findings show that there are benefits and drawbacks to the utility of Skype, this article argues that synchronous online interviewing is a useful supplement or replacement to face-to-face interviews. Concluding comments acknowledge that more research is required to more comprehensively understand how technologies challenge the basic assumptions of the traditional face-to-face interview.
The ubiquity of digital technologies has led to an increase in the use of video-based research, the development of multimodal methodologies and the analysis of this material across a range of perspectives. The possibilities that multimodal research approaches exploring the interplay of image, talk and movement create, however, are reliant upon a less-than-multimodal way of publishing such work. This article considers how ‘enhanced eBooks’, which can incorporate text, audio and audiovisual material as one complete document, may allow for the inclusion of multimodal data to enrich qualitative research, providing a model for how this can be accomplished. To do this, multimodal materials from a study in which vulnerable adolescents revisited places of personal importance and recorded the narratives such visits elicited via camcorder are examined. The transcript, audiovisual clips and analysis presented provide an insight into the possibilities that multimodal publications herald, with discussions reflecting the challenges and possibilities it generates.
Collective memory studies have been growing in production of knowledge, but conceptual and methodological advances remain scarce. This research note contributes by presenting an innovative and interactive group method that seeks to analyze how collective memories are constructed by different generations in their interactions with four memory sites related to the Military Dictatorship in Chile. The theoretical and methodological conceptualizations that led to the proposed method are discussed. The method includes a dialogical accompaniment and triangular groups that enable the study of people’s interactions at and with memory sites. Methodological challenges encountered are discussed, as well as interesting findings regarding the construction of generational memories. The complexity of studying collective memory processes and generational discourse at memory sites in countries with traumatic pasts like Chile demands the construction of innovative methods. Researchers designing memory studies should dare taking methodological designs a step forward in order to generate challenging new methods.
This article explores a dilemma encountered by the author when collecting data from a child protection local authority while working for the same agency as a social worker. Favoured by ethnographers for being able to capture something that is uniquely different, the method of ethnography was chosen in this study to use the author’s insider positioning to access material that may prove to be rich and original in content. Despite feeling prepared for the challenges that lay ahead, the unexpected hidden dilemma that did emerge encouraged the author, as a result, to closely examine certain perplexities that then followed. These would not only affect established relationships with colleagues within the field but also impact her own professional identity by forcing her to question certain values and loyalties expected from the agency for which she worked. However, by adopting a dual role and taking up the position of outsider in another similar setting, it was found that enough distance and space were created to encourage the author to employ reflexivity and overcome the difficulties experienced as a ‘native’ at home.
Findings from knowledge-building and theory-generating qualitative systematic reviews have the potential to help guide policy formation and practice in many disciplines. Unfortunately, this potential is currently hindered by the fact that rigorous data analysis methods have not been consistently used and/or articulated for purposes of conducting these types of reviews. Content analysis is a flexible data analysis method that can be used to conduct qualitative systematic reviews; however, its application in this context has not been fully explicated. Qualitative systematic reviewers who aim to build knowledge and generate theory are urged to adapt content analysis methods to accommodate data that are, by nature, highly organized and contextualized. In addition, they are encouraged to use reflective memoing and diagramming to ensure valid integration, interpretation, and synthesis of findings across studies. Finally, reviewers are advised to clearly and fully explain their data analysis methods in research reports.
Attention in ethnographic fieldwork, and particularly in multi-sited studies, has traditionally focused on the movement of people, things and ideas across distributed points. Recently, interest has gained purchase, particularly in mobilities and science and technology studies, on how the researcher physically gets from one place to another for the purpose of exploring the bearing, if any, mobility decisions and positionalities have on the nature of study and findings. The article contributes to this literature by defining four kinds of ethnographic mobility and focusing specifically on how a researcher gets there and back, or what can be termed ethnographic commuting. It draws on research conducted in two groups of backyard technologists in Australia (an initial study of a grassroots wireless network, which, as a result of my ethnographic commuting, grew to include a freakbike community). I discuss how cycling, initially adopted as a convenient form of transport between fieldsites, became an unexpected tool of enquiry, opening up new sites for study, providing entry into related social groups, catalysing new ways of thinking and, ultimately, (re)shaping my research. I highlight lessons learned and offer suggestions for approaching the ethnographic commute.
Craigslist.org is a website devoted to classified advertisements as well as discussion forums with locations in more than 700 sites in 70 countries. At an estimated 30 billion page views per month and more than 50 million new classified ads posted monthly, craigslist ads have the ability to reach a wide audience. Although wildly popular, no studies to date have investigated the use of craigslist ads for qualitative research study recruitment. In this research note, I offer my own experiences from 2011 to 2012 using craigslist ads (N = 77) to recruit obese respondents (N = 38) for qualitative interviews in one major metro area in the southern United States. I also discuss some advantages and limitations of using craigslist as a recruitment tool. Overall, I invite social science researchers to consider craigslist as an innovative tool to recruit respondents for qualitative research.
Most applications of think-aloud protocols have been conducted from theoretical perspectives that prioritize knowledge that is predictable and controlled by the researchers. In this article, we present an augmented form of the think-aloud method in which we aim to gain situated and participant-generated knowledge. The context for our study is examination of the problem-solving processes used by engineering students. We illustrate how our adaptation of traditional think–aloud protocols provides insights into participants’ thoughts and beliefs and how such think-alouds can increase social scientists’ understandings of complex phenomena such as learning or problem solving. In contrast to a typical focus on researcher-defined processes or an analysis of the products generated by students, our approach to think-aloud utilizes think-aloud procedures in combination with follow-up interviews to expand participants’ perspectives and investigate their experiences more deeply.
This article examines how speakers orient to interactional problems in research interviews. These are marked by disfluencies in talk, with interviewees asking questions of the interviewer, declining invitations to elaborate on questions posed, or providing minimal responses. The article argues that interactions in which interviewees choose not to elaborate or challenge interviewers by asking questions provide valuable insights into research topics that complement the ‘rich’ descriptions that are usually sought by researchers in qualitative studies and evaluation projects. By examining how speakers manage interactional problems, researchers can identify trouble sources and important issues for further exploration. This examination of interviewers’ and interviewees’ talk shows that the accomplishment of both intersubjective understanding and generation of data for topical analysis is sensitive work to which speakers keenly attune on a turn-by-turn basis, underscoring the collaborative work that is necessary to do research interviews.
The literature on qualitative methods assumes that researchers will conduct interviews in the course of a participant-observation study but not that extensive observations of interviewees might happen to take place during an interview study. In this article, I raise questions about interview study methodologies, using the example of a life history interview project in which the interviewer stayed at interviewee’s homes, met with them for meals, encountered them at events, and kept careful field notes on all of these incidental ethnographic encounters. Reflecting on the ambivalent status of such incidental ethnographic encounters, I argue that qualitative interview methods suffer from the limitations of positivism because the interview encounter is privileged as the sole source of knowledge. I call for a more flexible approach to qualitative interviews that can accommodate and derive knowledge from the full range of encounters between the researcher and participant.
Textbooks on research methods generally emphasize the need to collect data with high validity, reliability, and in the case of qualitative research, authenticity. Yet, field research often poses unanticipated challenges, particularly when the research is conducted in less-than-well-documented milieus. This article outlines field challenges encountered by the authors when doing a qualitative study of a slum community in the Philippines. Acceptable Western standards for gaining entry into a research community, for participating in local community life, and for the language and dress code used in the field had to be re-evaluated by the authors according to the prevailing Filipino cultural norms and the norms used in the local slum community. Lessons learned in this research can inform those doing qualitative research generally, but particularly those considering research in non-Western cultures.
Reflecting on a research project that focussed on male student nurses, this article explores how far the philosophy and procedural steps of Grounded Theory enable a hidden voice to be heard. Developing a theory about the minority voice captures concepts underpinning pedagogic voicing. Males are a minority in nursing and hence project a smaller but representational voice to articulate their views on learning. Data obtained from two types of interviews are used to illustrate the analysis performed through the chosen analytical framework. The general message is not to take any analytical strategy at face value but to comprehend how the process produces a theory grounded from the data. This article discusses whether Grounded Theory is best considered as an analytical strategy and not a method using elements of Charmaz’s approach and how the strategic steps preserved the voice of the male nursing student.
This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search for and locate their rough-sleeping client group. Outreach workers are experts in the terrain in which they operate; maps of their movements, therefore, might be said to entail a mapping of knowledge, enacted in movement, and our informants do not move randomly, but knowledgeably. Our argument, however, grounded in an attention to the way in which knowledge and movement combine in the street-level practices of urban outreach, provides a foundation for a critique of mapping as an analytic practice in and through which relations of knowing and going can be shown and understood.
This article explores the relationship between ethical procedures and ethics in practice in a research project with parents and children from 27 families who had received a social intervention based on their substance misuse and concerns about the protection of their children. We draw on the ‘ethics of care’ to argue that ethical practices are relational, interactive, responsive and, at times, reciprocal. While ethical regulation provides an important opportunity to anticipate ethical issues and build safeguards for participants and researcher, the regulatory process tends to focus on the ethical actions of the researcher rather than the researched. In this article, we demonstrate how ethical decisions were made through, by or alongside participants, drawing on examples of access, consent, protection from harm and negotiating the presence of others in interviews.
Research with mothers who snowboard generated emotionally rich data. In this article, we make the case for combining diaries and interviews in research concerned with understanding the fluid and complex nature of emotions and subjectivities. The diary-interview method can also enable participants to exert greater influence over the interview agenda than they might if they simply engaged in a one-off interview. In the first part of the article, we provide an overview of the literature about the use of diaries in research before discussing the combination of diary and interview. In the second part of the article, we draw on the data produced by one participant, to illustrate how the diary-interview method can facilitate the sharing and collection of emotional data, and provide a glimpse of the constitution of subjectivity. While we found that the diary-interview method proved insightful, we add a note of caution about the potential for intrusion and/or harm.
This article contributes to the still small corpus of scholarship about team research through a brief literature review and a case study that aims to provide insights into knowledge production within the context of a research team. In mapping theoretical–methodological shifts in the author’s understandings of the (im)possibilities of an investigation of infants’ lives in early education settings, it describes a form of ‘becoming’ that offers possibilities for transcending the often instrumentalist drivers of team research.
Since the reflexive turn in sociology and social anthropology, ‘identity negotiation’ and the ‘insider/outsider’ dilemma have been central topics of ethnographic literature. Much of the writings have exposed how the sociocultural biography and the identity of Western researchers interact, contradict and collaborate with the constructed ‘self’ of the participants of research. However, African development researchers have largely focused on describing the substantive component, with only scant analysis of the research process. In this article, illustration of the author’s experiences in the process of undertaking fieldwork on Amhara Credit and Savings Institution, a microfinance institution located in Ethiopia, and its clients, demonstrates that African development ethnographers’ interaction with participants of research is affected by their methodological preference and by their political and cultural identity. The article exemplifies that African development ethnographers are partially inhibited in research process and interpretation by boundaries imposed by their own research orientation and by their political and cultural identity.
A short three-act play interrogates George Catlin’s highly popular 19th century traveling Indian Gallery, examining Catlin’s paintings, and his use of Native Americans as actors in his plays.
The purpose of deliberation as a research technique (as opposed to policymaking or public consultation) is distinctive: to uncover the public’s informed, considered and collective view on a normative question. Such questions often arise in relation to research on poverty and inequality, where there is a need to justify the thresholds and concepts adopted on a deeper basis than convention alone can offer. But can deliberative research provide the answer, and if so in what circumstances? By comparing deliberative research to more traditional methods, such as in-depth interviewing, attitudinal surveys, ethnography and participatory approaches, this article reveals that deliberative designs involve a number of assumptions, including a strong fact/value distinction, an emphasis on ‘outsider’ expertise and a view of participants as essentially similar to each other rather than defined by socio-demographic differences. Using an example of deliberative research in which the author was involved, developing a list of ‘capabilities’ for monitoring inequalities in Britain, it also demonstrates that normative decisions permeate the design and implementation of deliberative research in practice. Thus, while deliberative research has the potential to provide uniquely considered, insightful and well-justified answers to the problem of defining a collective position on key questions in social science, it is currently under-theorised as an approach, and transparency at all stages of the process is essential to avoid the charge of simply reflecting the researchers’ implicit values.
This article is a reflexive analysis of the impact of researcher characteristics such as gender, age, ethnicity and status on doing police research in conflict zones. The reported research explored perceptions of front-line police officers working in left wing extremism-affected areas in India. I suggest five working propositions that emerge from this work. First, power is necessarily negotiated between the interviewer and the interviewee throughout the interview process. Second, while researcher gender and age do influence the research process, it is proposed that status dominates power negotiations in hierarchical organisations. Third, working in conflict zones places many restrictions on the researcher and the research process, which impact research design and outcomes. Fourth, the microgeography of the interview site is relevant to how power negotiations are conducted. Finally, guidelines to resolve ethical dilemmas rarely provide solutions to tricky field research situations.
This article introduces and reflects on a group discussion method for public engagement exercises and for qualitative research into citizens’ practices of developing and negotiating positions on emerging technologies. The method consists of card sets and a specific choreography in order to facilitate the development of citizens’ imaginations on nanotechnology and society in the Austrian context. Drawing on concepts from Science and Technology Studies, we discuss the method’s design as well as how citizens in four discussion groups appropriate the setting. The cards’ materiality, their content and the discussion choreography invites participants to move between individual and collective positioning work, to creatively engage with the elements available and imagine how an emerging technology – in our case nanotechnology – could develop in future. For the analyst, it allows reconstructing participants’ ordering, assessment and projection practices. The article concludes with reflections on the potential and limits of the method and how it could be employed as a tool for qualitative research more broadly.
This article examines a research collaboration in which an Australian and an Italian researcher came together in order to develop a project with young children to document their standpoints on the quality of their experiences of the early childhood services they were attending. As such, this article provides a reflection on working from different international viewpoints and narrates a research story that identifies some of the questions met, both in the conceptual framework and in the research design. In order to realize this research project, the collaborators’ challenge was to construct a shared understanding of their work, which meant addressing philosophical, ethical and practical points of tension. These points are described in the article as they emerged within the research endeavour, rather than being theoretically illustrated. The aim here is to offer the reader a lived experience example of meaning-making: how the researchers worked together, exploring the commonalities and differences that characterized each individual’s research practice, with the aim to construct a synergistic approach to working with children in research.
The adoption of countertransference, an idea drawn from psychoanalytic theory, by qualitative researchers is examined. It is argued that its definition in the qualitative research literature has often been muddled due to the too-simple mapping of a clinical concept into the research setting. Most definitions either examine countertransference in terms of feeling states or behaviours that participants ‘put into’ or ‘project’ into researchers, or make a sharp distinction between this interpretation of countertransference and another that involves the activation of the researchers’ own neuroses. Various manifestations in the research setting that have been described as potentially containing elements projected from the participant are outlined, such as changes in feeling and bodily states, or ‘mistakes’ on the part of the researcher. Alternative suggestions for the use of the researcher’s feeling and bodily states are put forward. These include, cross-comparing these data with other elements and seeing them as potentially created in the intersubjectivity between participant and researcher.
The Ethics Application Repository is an open access, online repository of exemplary Institutional Review Board (ethics committee) application forms donated by scholars who want to gift some of their expertise and wisdom to novice researchers in the spirit of a public good. This article describes the background for the genesis of the project, the building of The Ethics Application Repository as a proof of concept and the initial supportive and critical feedback from graduate students, graduate advisors and Institutional Review Board members. The article also serves as a call for donations from qualitative researchers to enlarge and develop stage 2 of the project, the development of special collections featuring children, information research, innovative methodologies and community-based participatory research.
This article addresses potential effects on reflexivity of researcher’s social position (e.g. gender, age, race, immigration status, sexual orientation), personal experiences, and political and professional beliefs. Because reflexivity is a major strategy for quality control in qualitative research, understanding how it may be impacted by the characteristics and experiences of the researcher is of paramount importance. Benefits and challenges to reflexivity under three types of researcher’s position are discussed and illustrated by means of case examples: (1) reflexivity when researcher shares the experience of study participants, (2) reflexivity when researcher moves from the position of an outsider to the position of an insider in the course of the study, and (3) reflexivity when researcher has no personal familiarity or experience with what is being studied. Strategies are offered for harvesting the benefits of researcher’s familiarity with the subject and for curbing its potentially negative effects. Directions for future research are suggested.
Participant selection is one of the most invisible and least critiqued methods in qualitative circles. Researchers do not just collect and analyze neutral data; they decide who matters as data. Each choice repositions inquiry, closing down some opportunities while creating others. After reviewing the selection literature, we present critical vignettes of our selection choices in three separate studies, examining how those choices directed meaning making within and beyond the studies. Our analysis across these vignettes uncovered a constant interface—and often a struggle—between our personal situations and social agendas as qualitative researchers. Four aspects of this Reporting In/Reporting Out tension are discussed: trusting qualitative research, building the story, dealing with powerful others, and accepting unintended consequences. We encourage qualitative researchers to critically think forward their selection choices before and during the research process, to be mindful that selection is a constitutive method of the data collection and analysis process.
The article considers various dimensions of researcher–informant relationships arising while leading research in Vietnam, which inevitably influence the fieldwork done among the Vietnamese. The specificity of the relationships between the anthropologist and the researched is caused by one of the most characteristic features of Vietnamese language – the complicated system of terms of address and reference, based on such factors as sex, age and social position of the interlocutors. Due to the relational nature of Vietnamese terms of address, speakers entering into interaction are forced to define their own role and its relation to the role of the interlocutor. Adopting the interaction strategy imposed by the features of Vietnamese language brings twofold methodological implications. On one hand, the anthropologist experiences serious limitations of her ability to control the research situation, while on the other hand, she gains the opportunity to approximate the experience of being in a particular role: that of a woman subordinated to a man, a ‘niece’ subordinated to an elderly aunt or an ‘older sister’ whose status is higher than a younger man’s.
This article discusses a number of epistemological dilemmas faced by a Black female hearing researcher while conducting research with culturally Deaf women during a PhD pilot study. It makes some comparisons with experiences of research with Black women in the same study. It uses a theoretical framework of ‘Africanist Sista-hood in Britain’ to reflect issues of privilege and power in research relationships as well as issues of commonality and difference. It takes the specific experiences of the researcher’s reflections to add to current discourse on insider/outsider positions in research, by applying some of the debates to the discourse of Deaf/hearing relations. It both begins with and ends with perspectives on research as interpretive partial and situated when undertaking any qualitative research study.
In this article, we report on a follow-up session that was organised to share findings with children about a participatory research project they had been involved in a few months earlier. This was motivated by the ethical concern that it is the children’s right to be informed about the results of the research. In the process of reflecting on the research project, however, the children diverted the researcher’s focus onto aspects of the research that mattered to them. Rather than discussing the results and the benefits of the research, the children were keen to discuss issues of representation, questioning the researcher about pseudonyms, transcribing and their role and presence in the dissertation. The follow-up session opened up a transformational space where both the child participants and the adult researchers gained new understandings about research processes and relationships. We argue that such retrospective reflection can be a beneficial tool to explore children’s post hoc interpretations about the research, while developing researcher reflexivity.
Social constructionists consider interviews as mutually co-constructing meaning. But what if the interlocutors do not seem to agree on what they construct? What if the interviewee has a particularly strong agenda, far from the intended research topic? Are these ‘failed’ interviews? We address this issue using a ‘deviant’ interview in a study of ‘being a neighbour’. First, we add to the discussion of interviewees’ category representativeness by acknowledging a situation when the interviewee insists on representing a category not intended by the researcher. Second, we address the notion of asymmetries of power, where it is often assumed that the interviewer has the upper hand. Through this case, we argue that the opposite may well be true. Finally, we argue that cases where the interviewee pursues a strong agenda may suggest new research areas. After all, strong efforts of resistance may indicate deeper cultural concerns.
In this article, we present a general overview of the state of qualitative research in psychology by analyzing publications found in the Institute for Scientific Information’s Web of Science database. Our objective is to provide a global perspective on the use of qualitative methods in data analysis and the frequency with which they are used in the journals. In total, 4840 articles were analyzed. We used bibliometrics methods to describe the publication patterns. We find a considerable increase throughout the 1990s in the number of publications using qualitative methods. Specifically, content analysis, grounded theory and discourse analysis steadily increased. The most representative qualitative publication in psychology uses content analysis and is most likely published in a journal indexed in the Social Sciences edition of the Journal Citation Reports. The data that we have obtained seem to indicate that qualitative research publications will continue increasing in the coming years.
This article addresses a methodological controversy regarding the question of whether couples should ideally be interviewed together or apart. It draws on three different studies in which joint couple interviews were used either as the sole source of data or in combination with individual interviews. The authors focus on the specifics and strengths of joint couple interviews, and they argue that interviewing couples together has several advantages, such as solving the ethical problems of anonymity and consent among interviewees, and results in the production of rich data, including observational data. Furthermore, the authors point to the practical advantages of conducting joint interviews with couples. In taking a relational view of the self and of what is produced in research interviews, the authors propose to apply the concept of family display, originally proposed by Janet Finch. It is argued that the researcher may be seen as one of many possible audiences for this type of family practice.
This article aims at offering a contribution to context-related methods in anthropological fieldwork. The multidimensional realities of ethnographic fieldwork require much creativity in adapting research strategies to peculiar research contexts. This idea is illustrated with a description of a variant on the elicitation method as developed during research on Marian pilgrimage. Researchers studying religion come across specific problems such as peoples’ profound emotions and private suffering that may strongly inhibit communication with the researcher. The elicitation method as used in the project explicitly aimed at overcoming the problem of silence and outburst of tears among emotionally touched respondents, which seriously hampered initial interviews based on verbal stimuli. In contrast to this, emotional responses to the iconographic stimuli appeared to evoke stories revealing important religious meanings, whereas precisely this emotional dimension made it difficult for the people to express themselves when approached by the use of conventional interview techniques.
The aim of this article is not only to discuss how the interview method has implications for the construction of aged identities, but also how the research area conditions the positionings that are made within the interview. Drawing on a set of qualitative semi-structured interviews with persons identifying as, and having experiences of volunteering as ‘class grandparents’ in schools for children, this article highlights and investigates three regimes that proved central in these interviews and that affected the construction of the data: the ‘confessional mode’, the ‘use of life scripts’ and the ‘theoretical identifications’ affecting the interview conversations.
Anonymity – its desirability and perceived difficulty divides the domain of qualitative research. This article shows that such divisions are associated with discrepancies in assumptions about what the power relations between the researcher and the researched, as well as the desired goals of the research, should be. This article questions the assumption that anonymity is necessary only for ethical reasons and identifies three additional functions of it in qualitative research: anonymity as ‘ontology’, anonymity as ‘analysis’ and anonymity as ‘independence’. First, ontologically, anonymity is a way of turning into ‘data’ what someone has said or written. Second, anonymization as ‘analysis’ turns the participants into examples of specific theoretical categories, and as such is a part of the data analysis. Third, anonymity as ‘independence’ enables the researcher to interpret the data irrespective of the participants’ wishes. As a conclusion, this article argues that anonymizing research participants has an influence on the overall quality of research and therefore is also useful when no ethical risks are perceived, when participants wish not to remain anonymous or when their anonymity cannot be guaranteed.
This article is an exploration of the tensions inherent in the interaction between ethics and methodological innovation. The authors focus on three cases of innovation in qualitative research methods in the social sciences: netnography, child-led research and creative research methods. Using thematic analysis of data collected through semi-structured interviews with the innovators and commentators on the innovations, they discuss issues of ethical responsibility, democratisation of research, empowerment and the relationship between research and the academy. This article highlights the ways in which innovation is about reflexivity as well as new techniques. It shows how innovation may be about managing risk rather than taking risks: the innovators are cautious as much as creative, operating within a culture in which procedural ethical regulation acts to limit methodological development and in which they (and other users of their method/approach) communicate the safe qualities alongside the innovative qualities of their approach.
Tensions have been highlighted, particularly in disability rights research and activism discourses, between the demands of the academy, the needs of vulnerable research participants as active contributors in research and between researchers themselves who are often caught in multiple dilemmas regarding these conflicting demands. This is particularly the case in research governance and practice terms when ‘top down’ pressures (e.g. from the academy, from funders) are often at odds with the need for a ‘bottom up’ approach to vulnerable research participants who often require adaptive, more inclusive and sometimes individualistic (case-by-case) qualitative methodological approaches. These issues are the focus of this article, which draws specifically on evidence from participatory studies with vulnerable groups and participatory photographic studies, in particular, to demonstrate the need for more collaborative and democratic approaches to research praxis.
The involvement of children in research has gathered significant momentum following the almost universal ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the emergence of new theoretical interests that challenge conceptions of children as irrational, incompetent, vulnerable and unable to know and articulate what is in their own best interests. However, seeking the views of children and responding to what they have to say are heavily circumscribed by social and cultural norms and values that must be known and respected in order to ensure that the research is ethically and methodologically sound. This article reports on the experiences of a team of researchers undertaking a project that sought the views and perspectives of children in relation to learning and education in a rural province of Vietnam. It discusses the reflexive nature of such an endeavour that required a deep recognition of the influence of Confucian culture, particularly in relation to issues of who has authority to speak and on what matters, as well as detailed attention to children’s existing experience of being consulted.
A researcher’s emotional labour is inextricably linked to the methodological and ethical underpinnings of ‘doing’ sensitive and some feminist research. However, a key component of the emotional labour theory does not fit with the emotional labour enacted by some researchers. This article sets out to extend the theory of emotional labour in order to make it more applicable to sensitive and feminist methodologies, and in doing so, it reveals the importance of incorporating emotion in the refinement of theory. Drawing on 20 interviews with female in vitro fertilisation patients, and extracts from a systematically recorded reflexive diary of the researcher, this article contests a key aspect of Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour in its application to sensitive and feminist qualitative researchers. Instead of estrangement from the emotional self as a result of enacting emotional labour, this article suggests that the emotional and biological selves of the researcher can be foregrounded, sometimes unwillingly. The investment of emotional labour must be acknowledged by institutions, managers and methodologists, and further theorising is required to incorporate the critical presence of emotional labour in social science research.
This article presents an interactive research methodology for young people’s participation in research. A model of the research circle, based on the Scandinavian study-circle tradition with democratic ideals, was created and is described. The empirical example is from Sweden. Academic researchers invited young people to be research partners in a research circle. The asymmetrical relationship between the researchers and the young research partners made asymmetric responsibility and respect into central parts of the methodology. The interactive process in the research circle concerns research fundamentals: developing methodological knowledge, designing a study, how to formulate the research questions from the viewpoint of young people, how to analyze from a generational insider perspective, and how to handle institutionalized and asymmetric power relations in social knowledge formation.
We examine the power that is manifested between interviewers and interviewees in research interviews. Our empirical examples are drawn from interviews conducted with: (a) a vocational teacher; and (b) a senior researcher. We analysed the manifestations of power both in the course of the interviews and across interviews. We found that power is exercised and distributed diversely and situationally between the interview participants (interviewer and interviewee) during the interviews. It appeared that in a given interview, the interplay between individual backgrounds and the interview setting was connected to the activities through which power was manifested, and that these activities played a role in shaping the subsequent course and content of the interview. Our findings contribute to discussion concerning the shifting significance of difference and sameness between interview participants with regard to power relations, what is conveyed in interviews, and the manner in which it is conveyed.
In this article, I explore the epistemological and methodological dimensions of my research regarding representation and identification in the context of the National Street Children Movement in Brasília, the capital of Brazil. The research, carried out between 2005 and 2008, is theoretically informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Realism. My aim is to show the relations between research dimensions, research questions, methods and ontological components, in accordance to this theoretical background. In order to do so, I also describe the methods used in the field and discuss some of the research outcomes.
Accessing research participants is often presented as unproblematic. However, the authors’ experiences of recruiting 30 chains of grandfathers, fathers and grandsons, spanning three different ethnic groups, Polish, Irish and white British, highlighted the realities of research practice. This article draws on a study of fathers across three generations in three ethnic groups to explore the sampling challenges and complexities. The recruitment methods used raised particular issues for each of the three groups and had to be adapted accordingly. Key methodological issues for inter-generational research with specific ethnic groups include gender and ethnicity of the researchers, modes of access to potential participants, gaining trust, and flexibility in approach. The authors conclude that the amount of time, resources and ‘emotional labour’ called for when recruiting a sample in this type of research should not be under-estimated.
This paper attempts to demonstrate that a grounded theory textual analysis yields results that are equally important as more traditional forms of inquiry, such as archival research. The research employed a grounded theory approach in a CAQDAS1 textual analysis of the published minutes of three communist party meetings, held in Hungary, Serbia and the Soviet Union in 1988. The purpose of the analysis was to reveal nuance in delegates’ speeches at a time when, officially, ‘monolithic unity’ in the party required members to express wholehearted support for their leaderships’ policies, and yet at the same time these regimes were in the process of liberalizing, and party members had begun expressing their own preferences. But, the few speakers at these meetings who advocated far-reaching changes often chose to allude to taboo subjects in a coded way, while their hardline, conservative superiors sprinkled their speeches with terms that are traditionally associated with liberal democracies. Interpretive coding of text enabled recording of a more fine-grained reading of these minutes, while the application of grounded theory provided a tabula rasa which generated a model that was common to all three cases.
In the light of the changing landscape of social research, this article explores the role of the analytic imagination in the process of qualitative data analysis. It argues that while team research, secondary data analysis and the use of computerized qualitative data analysis packages may be altering the ways in which research and analysis are carried out, this need not change the processes of interpretation that are at the heart of qualitative data analysis. Here, as the article explores, imaginative acts are key to the analytical craftsmanship involved in interpretive analysis. This a process illustrated through the analysis of parent and child narratives gathered during a project about families and food.
At the same time that research tells us of empirical conditions, the process of conducting research illuminates underlying social conditions as well. By considering the differing approaches necessary in multiple research sites, this article argues that access, as a continually negotiated process, reflects localized socially embedded conditions and practices. From the initial access the researcher has to a site, to the repeated negotiations necessary to remain in the field, this article demonstrates that the researcher must be constantly aware of, and respond to, these conditions and practices if he or she wishes to remain in a particular setting. Based on a broader study of minority children in two different communities in Japan, this article also considers the approaches taken to minority issues as a contributing factor in accessing field sites. Finally, it argues that the process of research should be considered in conjunction with the empirical outcomes of research.