COLLECTING AND INTERPRETING QUALITATIVE MATERIALS
i ^-^—^———
As this moment came to an end, the Vietnam War was everywhere presem in American society. In 1969, alongside these political currents, Herbert Blumer and Everett Hughes met with a group of young sociologists called the "Chicago Irregulars" at the American Sociological Association meetings held in San Francisco and shared their memories of the "Chicago years." Lyn Loŕland (1980) describes the 1969 meetings as a
moment or creative ferment—scholarly and political. The San Francisco meetings witnessed not simply the Blumer-Hughcs event but & "counter revolution."... a group first came to... talk about the problems or being a sociologist and a female.... the discipline seemed literally to be bursting with new . . . ideas: labelling theory, cthnomethodology, conflict theory, phenomenology, dramaturgical analysis, (p. 253)
Thus did the modernist phase come to an end.
Blurred Genres
By the beginning or the third stage (1970-1986), which wc call the moment of blurred genres, qualitative researchers had a full complement of paradigms, methods, and strategies to employ in their research. Theories ranged from symbolic interactionism to constructivism, naturalistic inquiry, positivism and postpositivism, phenomenology, ethnometh-odology, critical theory, neo-Marxist theory, semiotics, structuralism, feminism, and various racial/ethnic paradigms. Applied qualitative research was gaining in stature, and the politics and ethics of qualitative research—implicated as they were in various applications of this work— were topics of considerable concern. Research strategies and formats for reporting research ranged from grounded theory to the case study, to methods of historical, biographical, ethnographic, action, and clinical research. Diverse ways of collecting and analyzing empirical materials were also available, including qualitative interviewing (open-ended and quasi-structured) and observational, visual, personal experience, and documentary methods. Computers were entering the situation, to be fully developed as aids in the analysis of qualitative data in the next decade, along with narrative, content, and semiotic methods of reading interviews and cultural texts.
Two books by Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (1973) and Local Knowledge (1983), defined the beginning and end of this moment. In
^4
Introduction
these two works, Geertz argued that the old functional, positivist, behavioral, totalizing approaches to the human disciplines were giving way to a more pluralistic, interpretive, open-ended perspective. This new perspective took cultural representations and their meanings as its point of departure. Calling for "thick descriptions" of particular events, rituals, and customs, Geertz suggested that all anthropological writings are interpretations of interpretations.1'The observer has no privileged voice in the interpretations that are written. The central task of theory is ro make sense out of a local situation.
Geertz went on to propose that the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities had become blurred. Social scientists were now turning to the humanities for models, theories, and methods of analysis (semiotics, hermeneutics). A form of genre diaspora was occurring: documentaries that read like fiction (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castaneda), theoretical treatises that look like travelogues (Levi-Strauss). At the same time, other new approaches were emerging: poststructuralism Barthes), neopositivism (Philips), neo-Marxism (Althusser), micro-macro descriptivism (Geertz), ritual theories of drama and culture (V Turner), deconstructionism (Dcrrida), ethnomethodology (Carfinkel). The golden age of the social sciences was over, and a new age of blurred, interpretive genres was upon us. The essay as an art form was replacing the scientific article. At issue now is the author's presence in the interpretive text (Geertz, 1988). How can the researcher speak with authority in an age when there are no longer any firm rules concerning the text, including the author's place in it, its standards of evaluation, and its subject matter?
The naturalistic, postpositivist, and constructionist paradigms gained power in this period, especially in education, in the works of Harry Wolcott, Frederick Erickson, Egon Guba, Yvonna Lincoln, Robert Stake, and Elliot Eisner. By the end of the 1970s, several qualitative journals were in place, including Urban Life and Culture (now journal of Contemporary Ethnography), Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction, as well as the book series Studies in Symbolic Interaction.
Crisis of Representation
A profound rupture occurred in the mid-1980s. What we call the fourth moment, or the crisis of representation, appeared with Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus &C Fischer, 19S6), The Anthropology of
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COLLECTING AND INTERPRETING QUALITATIVE MATERIALS
Experience (Turner & Bruner, 1986), Writitig Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986), Works and Liues (Geercz, 1988), and The Predicament of Culture (Clifford, 1988). These works made research and writing more reflexive and called into question the issues of gender, class, and race. They articulated the consequences of Gcertz's "blurred genres" interpretation of the field in the early 1980s.14
New models of truth, method, and representation were sought (Rosaldo, 1989). The erosion or classic norms in anthropology (objectivism, complicity with colonialism, social lire structured by fixed rituals and customs, ethnographies as monuments to a culture) was complete (Rosaldo, 1989, pp. 44-45; see also Jackson, 1998, pp. 7-8). Critical, feminist, and epistemologies of color now competed for attention in this arena. Issues such as validity, reliability, and objectivity, previously believed settled, were once more problematic. Pattern and interpretive theories, as opposed to causal, linear theories, were now more common, as writers continued to challenge older models of truth and meaning (Rosaldo, 1989).
Stolicr and Olkes (1987, pp. 227-229} describe how the crisis of representation was felt in their fieldwork among the Songhav of Niger. Stoller observes: "When I began to write anthropological texts, I followed the conventions of my training. I 'gathered data/ and once the 'data' were artanged in neat piles, I 'wrote them up.' In one case I reduced Songhav insults to a series of neat logical formulas" (p. 227), Stoller became dissatisfied with this fotm of writing, in part because he learned that "everyone had lied to me and ... the data I had so painstakingly collected were worthless. I learned a lesson: Informants routinely lie to their anthropologists" (Stoller 6c Olkes, 1987, p. 9). This discovery led to a second—that he had, in following the conventions or ethnographic realism, edited himself out of his text. This led Stolicr to produce a different type of text, a memoir, in which he became a central character in che story he told. This story, an account of his experiences in the Songhay world, became an analysis of the clash between his world and the world of Songhay sorcery. Thus Stoller's journey represents an attempt to confront the crisis of representation in the fourth moment.
Clough (1992) elaborates this crisis and criticizes those who would argue that new forms of writing represent a way out of the crisis. She argues:
While many sociologists now commenting on the criticism of ethnography view writing as "downright central to the ethnographic enterprise"
26
Introduction
(Van Maanen, 19SS, p. xij, rhc problems of writing arc still viewed as different from the problems of method or fieldwork itself. Thus the solution usually offered is experiments in writing, that is a self-consciousness about writing, (p. 136)
If is this insistence on the difference between writing and fieldwork that must be analyzed. (Richardson is quite articulate about this issue in Chapter 14 of this volume.)
In writing, the field-worker makes a claim to moral and scientific authority. This claim allows the realist and experimental ethnographic texts to function as sources of validation for an empirical science. They show that the world of real lived experience can still be captured, if only in the writer's memoirs, or fictional experimentations, or dramatic readings. But these works have the danger of directing attention away from the ways in which the text constructs sexually situated individuals in a field of social difference. They also perpetuate ''empirical science's hegemony" (Clough, 1992, p. 8), for these new writing technologies of the subject become the site "for the production of knowledge/power . . . [aligned] with . . . the capital/state axis" (Aronowitz, 1988, p. 300: quoted in Clough, 1992, p. 8). Such experiments come up against, and then back away ftom, the difference between empirical science and social criticism. Too often they fail to engage fully a new politics of textuality that would "refuse the identity of empirical science" (Clough, 1992, p. 135). This new social criticism "would intervene in the relationship of information economics, nation-state politics, and technologies of mass communication, especially in terms of the empirical sciences" (Clough, 1992, p. 16). This, of course, is the terrain occupied by cultural studies.
In this series, Richardson (this volume, Chapter 14), Tedlock (Volume 2, Chapter 6), Brady (this volume. Chapter 15), and Ellis and Bochner (this volume, Chapter 6) develop the above arguments, viewing writing as a method of inquiry that moves through successive stages of self-reflection. As a series of written representations, the field-worker's texts flow from the field experience, through intermediate works, to later work, and finally to the tesearch text, which is the public presentation of the ethnographic and narrative experience. Thus fieldwork and writing blur into one another. There is, in the final analysis, no difference between writing and fieldwork. These two perspectives inform one another throughout every chapter in these volumes. In these ways the crisis of representation moves qualitative research in new and critical directions.
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COLLECTING AND INTERPRETING QUALITATIVE MATERIALS
A Triple Crisis
The ethnographer's authority remains under assault today (Behar, 1995, p. 3; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 16; Jackson, 1998; Oriner, 1997, p. 2). A triple crisis or representation, legitimation, and praxis confronts qualitative researchers in the human disciplines. Embedded in the discourses of post structuralism and postmodernism (see Vidich & Lyman, Volume 1, Chapter 2; and Richardson. Chapter 14, this volume), these three crises arc coded in multiple terms, variously called ;ind associated with the critical, interpretive, linguistic, feminist, and rhetorical turns in social theory. These new turns nuke problematic two key assumptions or qualitative research. The first is that qualitative researchers can no longer directly capture lived experience. Such experience, it is argued, is created in the social text written by the researcher. This is the representational crisis. It confronts the inescapable problem of representation, but does so within a framework that makes the direct link between experience and text problematic
The second assumption makes problematic the traditional criteria for evaluating and interpreting qualitative research. This is the legitimation crisis. It involves a serious rethinking of such terms as validity, gen-eralizability, and reliability, terms already «theorized in postposirivist (Hammcrilcy, l992),constructionist-naturalistic(Gubafic Lincoln, 1989, pp. 163-183), feminist (Oiesen, Chapter 8, Volume 1), interpretive (Denzin, 1997), poststructural (Lather, 1993; Lather fit Smithies, 1997), and critical (Kincheloe & McLaren, Chapter 10, Volume I) discourses. This crisis asks. How are qualitative studies to be evaluated in die contemporary, poststructural moment? The first two crises shape ihe third, which asks, Is it possible to effect change in the world if society is only and always a text? Clearly these crises intersect and blur, as do the answers to the questions they generate (see in Volume 1, Schwandt, Chapter 7; Ladson-Billings, Chapter 9; and in this volume, Smith fie Deemer, Chapter 12).
The fifth moment, the postmodern period of experimental ethnographic writing, struggled to make sense of these crises. New ways of composing ethnography were explored (Ellis ÖC Bochner, 199Ŕ). Theories were read as tales from the field. Writers struggled with different ways to represent ihe "other," although they were now joined by new representational concerns (see Fine ct aL, Chapter 4, Volume 1). Lpistemologics from previously silenced groups emerged to offer solutions lo these problems. The concept of the aloof observer has been abandoned. More action,
26
/n traduction
participatory, and activist-oriented rcsciirch is on the horizon. The search for grand narratives is being replaced by more local, sinali-scale theories fitted to specific problems and particular situations.
The sixth (pustcxperimental) and seventh (the future) moments arc upon us. Fictional ethnographies, ethnographic poetry, and multimedia texts arc today taken for granted. Poste x peri mental writers seek to connect their writings to the needs of a free democratic society. The demands of a moral and »acred qualitative social science arc actively being explored by a host uf new writers from many different disciplines (see Jackson, 1998; Lincoln fie Denzin, Chapter 6. Volume 1).
Reading History
We draw four conclusions from this brief history, noting that it is, like all histories, somewhat arbitrary. First, each of the earlier Imioncal moments is still operating in the present, either as legacy or as a set of practices that researchers continue to follow or argue against. The multiple and fractured histories of qualitative research now make it possible for any given researcher to attach a project to a canonical text from any of the above-described historical moments. Multiple criteria of evaluation compete for attention in this field (Lincoln, in press). Second, .in embarrassment of choices now characterizes the field of qualitative research. There have never been so many paradigms, strategies of inquiry, or methods of analysis for researchers to draw upon and utilize. Third, we are in a moment of discovery and rediscovery, as new ways of looking, interpreting, arguing, and writing are debated and discussed. Fourth, the qualitative research act can no longer be viewed from within a neutral or objective positivist perspective. Class, race, gender, and ethnicity shape the process of inquiry, making research a multicultural process. It is to this topic that we now turn.
♦ Qualitative Research as Process
Three Interconnected, generic aciiviues define the qualitative research process. They goby a variety of different labels, including theory, method, analysis, ontology, efjistemology. and methodology. Behind these terms stands the personal biography of the researcher, who speaks from a particular class, gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic community perspective. The
29
COLLECTING AND INTERPRETING QUALITATIVE MATERIALS
gendered, multicultural^ situated researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework {theory, ontology) that specifies a set or questions (epistemology) that he or she then examines in specific ways (methodology, analysis). That is, the researcher collects empirical materials bearing on the question and then analyzes and writes about them. Ever)' researcher speaks from within a distinct interpretive community that configures, in its special way, the multicultural, gendered components of che research act.
In this volume we treat these generic activities under five headings, or phases: the researcher and the researched as multicultural subjects, major paradigms and interpretive perspectives, research strategies, methods of collecting and analyzing empirical materials, and the art, practices, and politics of intctpretation. Behind and within each of these phases stands the biographically situated researcher. This individual enters the research process from inside an interpretive community. This community has its own historical research traditions, which constitute a distinct point of view. This perspective leads the researcher to adopt particular views of the "other" who is studied. At the same time, the politics and the ethics of research must also be considered, for these concerns permeate every phase of the research process.
♦ The Other as Research Subject
Since itsearly-20th-century birth in modern, interpretive form, qualitative research has been haunted by a double-faced ghost. On the one hand, qualitative researchers have assumed that qualified, competent observers can, with objectivity, clarity, and precision, report on their own observations of the social world, including the experiences of others. Second, researchers have held to the belief in a real subject, or real individual, who is present in the world and able, in some form, to report on his or her experiences. So armed, researchers could blend their own observations with the self-reports provided by subjects through interviews and life story, personal experience, case study, and other documents.
These two beliefs have led qualitative researchers across disciplines to seek a method that would allow them to record accurately their own observations while also uncovering the meanings their subjects bring to their life experiences. This method would rely upon the subjective verbal and written expressions of meaning given by the individuals studied as windows into the inner lives of these persons. Since Dilthey (1900/1976),
30
Introduction
this search for a method has led to a perennial focus in the human disciplines on qualitative, interpretive methods.
Recently, as noted above, this position and its beliefs have come under assault. Poststructuralists and postmodernists have contributed to the understanding that there is no clear window into the inner life of an individual. iVny gaze is always filtered through the lenses of language, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective observations, only observations socially situated in the worlds of—and between—the observer and the observed. Subjects, or individuals, arc seldom able to give full explanations of their actions or intentions; all they can offer are accounts, or stories, about what they did and why. No single method can grasp all of the subtle variations in ongoing human experience. Consequently, qualitative researchers deploy a wide range or interconnected interpretive methods, always seeking better ways to make more understandable the worlds of experience they have studied.
Table 1.1 depicts the relationships we sec among the rive phases that define the research process. Behind all but one or these phases stands the biographically situated researcher. These five levels of activity, or practice, work their way through the biography of the researcher. We take them up briefly in order here; we discuss these phases more fully in the introductions to the individual parrs or this volume.
Phase 1: The Researcher
Our remarks above indicate the depth and complexity of the traditional and applied qualitative research perspectives into which a socially situated researcher enter,?. These traditions locate the researcher in history, simultaneously guiding and constraining work that will be done in any specific study. This field has been characterized constantly by diversity and conflict, and these are its most enduring traditions (see Greenwood & Levin, Chapter 3, Volume 1). As a carrier of this complex and contradictory history, the researcher must also confront the ethics and politics or research (see Christians, Chapter 5, Volume lj. The age or value-free inquiry for the human disciplines is over (see in Volume 1, Vidich oc Lyman, Chapter 2; and Fine et al., Chapter 4). Today researchers struggle to develop situational and transsituational ethics that apply to all forms of the research act and its human-to-human relationships.
3