Researching Interpersonal Relationships

Qualitative Methods, Studies, and Analysis

Jimmie Manning, Adrianne Kunkel

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781452203904
• eBook ISBN: 9781483314181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This accessible book explores and demonstrates methodological tools used to guide qualitative relationships research, especially studies of interpersonal communication. Researching Interpersonal Relationships introduces both classic and cutting-edge methodological approaches for qualitative inquiry and analysis, including opening chapters with accessible overviews of interpretive theory and research design. Additional chapters feature a detailed overview of a specific method and analytical tool and are illustrated by original research studies from leading scholars in the field, each in a different interpersonal communication context. Post-study interviews with the researchers are also provided to allow new and experienced researchers a better understanding of how qualitative research approaches can expand and solidify understandings of personal relationships. This groundbreaking book is the first of its kind written especially for relationships researchers on qualitative research, and it makes a welcome addition to advanced undergraduate and graduate student classrooms as well as any serious qualitative relationships researcher?s bookshelf.

CHAPTER 1

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Understanding Personal Relationships Through an Interpretivist-Oriented Lens

We spend considerable time in this opening chapter identifying and unpacking the metatheoretical elements that come together to make up an overarching body of interpretivist theory. Interpretivist theory collectively refers to the metatheoretical elements of interpretivism in all of its various traditions, much like communication theory is an umbrella used to collectively describe the various traditions that come together to constitute communication studies. We also make use of the term interpretivist-oriented qualitative research to acknowledge the full range of metatheoretical perspectives associated with qualitative research and to recognize that qualitative data can also be considered through realist paradigms such as postpositivism. As that indicates, the forms of qualitative analysis we examine in this book tend to align with interpretivism. To make all of these ideas clearer, this chapter explores some of the most common research traditions and approaches that fall into an interpretivist orientation. The chapter then considers how interpretivism can be used in interpersonal communication research studies and what such studies may offer to the development of interpersonal communication theory. We begin with a brief history of interpretivism.

INTERPRETIVISM EXPLAINED

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Interpretivism, as a methodological paradigm, focuses on understanding individuals’ interpretations of social actions and their social worlds (Baxter & Braithwaite, 2008; Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Given that both communication and interpersonal relationships are fraught with meaning and action, it makes sense that studying relationships through an interpretivist-qualitative lens allows deeper insight into how meaning and action work together to constitute relationships. To do that, a deeper understanding of interpretivist theory is in order. This exploration begins with the presentation and discussion of Blumer's (1969) three core premises of symbolic interactionism that constitute a canonical understanding of interpretivism.

The pragmatist work of William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and George Herbert Mead was moving toward symbolic interactionism for decades, but the idea crystallized with Herbert Blumer's (1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Blumer's monograph offered 12 chapters exploring what would come to be called an interpretivist paradigm, and the ideas explored across the book all rested on three foundational premises. Blumer's first premise theorizes that “human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings which these things have for them” (p. 2). Such an idea is intuitive, as Blumer notes in presenting it—but even so, the idea that action is purposeful and based on meaning was ignored or played down by social sciences at the time. Blumer felt psychological studies especially missed the mark, noting that researchers took meaning for granted and had a tendency to

treat human behavior as the product of various factors that play upon human beings; concern is with the behavior and with the factors regarded as producing them. Thus, psychologists turn to such factors as stimuli, attitudes, conscious or unconscious motives, various kinds of psychological inputs, perception and cognition, and various features of personal organization to account for given forms or instances of human conduct. (p. 2)

Psychology, then, was treating meaning as an effect instigated by different internal or external factors.

Although sociology (the other dominant social science at the time) took a slightly different approach using rigidly conceived notions of construct variables such as social roles, status demands, or norms, meaning was still accounted for by causal explanations (Blumer, 1969). As such, both psychology and sociology largely ignored meaning in designing and interpreting their studies. Rarely, and at best, meaning was accommodated for by either conflating it with or embedding it into initiating factors and any resulting behaviors or by treating it as a neutral link that intervenes between any initiating factors and the alleged behaviors they produce, almost as if it were a sort of transmitter (Blumer, 1969). In short, possibilities for meaning to be central to social interaction (or, more precisely, social action in general) were not considered in the social sciences; and as such, the idea that people act purposively based on the meaning they assign things—as intuitive as that seems—was ignored or dismissed.

The reframing Blumer (1969) offers with his first premise alone allows meaning to be laden across a social scene and the action in it rather than conceptualized as a simple effect in one's mind or as located solely within an object. That is not to suggest that people do not bring meaning to objects, but that the meanings people assign to objects in a social scene are not given. As Blumer articulates with his second premise, meanings come from “the ways in which other persons act toward the person with regard to the thing” (p. 4). Simply put, interaction creates meaning for an object. Objects, as defined by Blumer, include the physical (e.g., doors, trees, cars, hydrants), the social (e.g., friend, preacher, cousin, neighbor), and the abstract (e.g., justice, philosophies, marriage, virginity). Again, Blumer's notions were in opposition to dominant academic understandings that conceived meaning as “emanating from the intrinsic makeup of the thing that has meaning” or as “arising through a coalescence of psychological elements in the person” (p. 4). In other words, interpretivism holds that meaning is not innate or even inevitable for any object. Further, meaning is not dependent on a person's psychological traits or tendencies; instead, it is learned, shaped, and negotiated (even if it still feels static and tangible to a person) even as it continues to be reproduced and, consequently, reshaped.

As such, Blumer's third and final premise theorizes that meanings are understood in and modified through a process used by a person to understand and act toward objects he or she encounters. This third premise not only makes interpretivism distinct as a philosophy but also is a key link to how interpretivist theory can undergird interpersonal communication research. As the premise implies, meaning happens through an interpretive process dependent upon interaction. Blumer points out two steps in this process of interpretation (p. 5). First, an actor notices an object toward which she or he is acting. This is not simple psychological interplay, but is more of a person talking to herself or himself in order to make meaning about a perception in a social situation. Second, the social actor “selects, checks, suspends, regroups, and transforms the meanings in the light of the situation in which he is placed and the direction of his action” (p. 5). The first part of this formative process may seem highly internal, and in many ways it is. The second part of the process, however, makes a clear connection to understanding social interaction. Actors in a social scene are purposefully interacting in consideration of each other, constantly reassessing and renegotiating both meaning and action. This process should not suggest that one is always rational and in complete control of the meanings he or she makes. In fact, it is quite the opposite—meanings people bring to a social scene can be complex and deeply emotionally laden. An interpretive approach to interpersonal communication studies should carefully consider the communication inherent in such a scene.

A Family of Interpretivist Theories

As anyone who has studied interpretivism or any of its related concepts can probably attest, theorists across these spectra (some that precede interpretivism) have developed rich, nuanced, and oftentimes complex philosophical inquiries into the differences, similarities, evolving assumptions, controversies, and driving forces undergirding each paradigm (see Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011, for an excellent overview; or Miller, 2004, for an understanding of the historical development relevant to the communication discipline). Some of the identified differences between paradigms can have profound effects upon how research is conceptualized and data are interpreted (Ellingson, 2009, 2011); other disagreements about these philosophies likely have more impact at a metatheoretical level rather than a level that threatens the validity of the research (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Theory textbooks often place these various approaches or paradigms together into a sociocultural tradition of communication studies (Craig & Muller, 2007; Griffin, 2012; Littlejohn & Foss, 2008) based on Craig's (1999) essay identifying dominant traditions of the field, although rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, and critical theory—traditions Craig sets apart from a sociocultural tradition—may also have interpretivist leanings. The different branches of interpretivism, and the traditions contained within them, often lend ideas to each other, and this generally works as long as the ideas are meaningful to the context and situation of a given study and can be clearly explained (Maxwell, 2009). As such, many researchers have focused on the shared and least contested operational elements of these theoretical bodies to use in qualitative research studies.

Because of these overarching similarities across these paradigms, we use the term interpretivist-oriented approaches to note all of the nonrealist research paradigms involved with the qualitative research family. Like others in the past who have used umbrella terms to describe this family of qualitative approaches (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Lincoln et al., 2011; Tracy & Muñoz, 2011), we mean no disrespect by grouping these approaches together. Of course, we also realize that this muffles some of the qualities of the diverse and vibrant approaches that are interpretivist oriented but have considerable differences from traditional interpretive studies. As such, we review some of the most common variants here.

Phenomenological and Dialogic Approaches

Phenomenology is a body of diverse philosophical perspectives initiated by German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19th century. When phenomenology was introduced to communication studies, three key uniting principles were noted: individual consciousness is where knowledge is found, not from external experience; the potential for a particular experience or object in a person's life is what allows meaning; and meaning is developed from language, the channel through which the world is largely experienced (Deetz, 1973). Beyond those key principles, phenomenological approaches largely depend on whether they involve a transcendental (where the taken-for-granted is considered) or social (where how people typify constructs is considered) phenomenological background (Miller, 2004). Although phenomenology has played an important role in the development of qualitative research (see Lindlof & Taylor, 2011, for a detailed overview), it has played a small role in interpersonal communication studies. Perhaps what is more important is how scholars involved with the movement—especially Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz—helped to illustrate how dialogue is a key communicative tool for experiencing others (Craig & Muller, 2007). Dialogue has been explored often in consideration of relationships, especially by philosophers such as Buber, Gadamer, Habermas, and Bakhtin (see Anderson, Baxter, & Cissna, 2004). Collectively, their theoretical musings have made an ally to or even constituted the dialogic approach often used in interpersonal communication research. A dialogic approach to qualitative work focuses on discourse, but rather than examining effects of discourse or even how two people come to make meaning through discourse, the focus is instead on participation (Deetz, 1992) and how the “play of discourses constructs meaning” (Baxter, 2011, p. 13).

In a dialogic approach, meaning is not in the minds of those involved with the discourse but rather found in the discourse itself. This play of discourses allows the notion that “the selves in communication are not preformed, autonomous entities but instead are constituted in communication” (Baxter, 2011, p. 12). In other words, it moves beyond a person's perception of self and motivations for communicating to focus solely on the discourse produced by that person. And so unlike most interpretivist-oriented approaches, a dialogic approach does not focus on intersubjectivity or how people negotiate understanding with each other but instead on how the discourses themselves allow meaning. A key consideration for a dialogic approach (which, as discussed in Chapter 7, is not exactly the same as a discourse analytic approach) is the utterance chain. Simply put, an utterance chain suggests that many forces (e.g., time, presence) impact the production of a discourse, and examining a discourse through this lens moves interpersonal communication studies beyond the idea that a discourse is created by two all-controlling actors in a social situation (see Baxter, 2011, for a full explanation). Researchers should be careful in labeling all dialogic approaches as interpretive, as some scholars (including Baxter, 2011) seem to draw a line between interpretivism and dialogism. For an excellent exemplar of how dialogism can be used in qualitative interpersonal research, see Norwood's (2012) examination of trans-identity. The study uses relational dialectics theory (Baxter, 2011; Baxter & Montgomery, 1996), a respected theory in interpersonal communication based on the dialogic perspective, to understand how families negotiate a sense of loss when a family member comes out as transgender.

Critical Approaches

Critical approaches to qualitative research are those that seek to analyze and critique unjust social structures and perhaps offer a sense of restitution and emancipation (Lincoln et al., 2011). As Lindlof and Taylor (2011) note, in the communication discipline critical is often an umbrella term that includes multiple approaches related to social justice and the elimination of hegemonic assumptions. As evidenced by critical theory's overwhelming lack of representation in Tracy and Muñoz's (2011) state-of-the-art account of qualitative methods in interpersonal communication, as well as critiques from scholars that point out the subdiscipline's lack of exploring marginalized voices (Fassett & Warren, 2006; Foster, 2008; Manning, 2009b), it is evident that critical theory itself is being silenced in interpersonal communication studies. As discussion panels at communication conferences continue to explore the roles critical research can play in interpersonal communication studies (e.g., Eckstein, 2012; Eckstein & Frey, 2011), it is also evident that many critical approaches to personal relationships may also be finding other subdisciplines in communication more friendly to the research's axiological motives: namely, performance studies, language and social interaction, or generalist qualitative outlets. We suspect that, just as Bochner's (1985, 1994) arguments regarding the value of qualitative research methods for interpersonal communication have gained traction and allowed for an expanded—if not necessarily level—playing field for qualitative inquiry in the subdiscipline, critical theory will soon see its own transformation.

Whether such transformation will emerge primarily based on approach (engaging minoritized or stigmatized people and communities) or both approach and theory (engaging critical theories in conjunction with interpersonal concepts) remains to be seen, but a move forward holds potential for allowing voices into interpersonal communication research that may not otherwise be heard or embraced. This is not to be confused with the increased sense of voice qualitative research generally allows. Many interpretivist interpersonal communication studies, especially those using interview or survey methods, will allow for or encourage some form of voice that participants may not always feel they have—especially those frustrated with their relationships (Manning, 2010a). Although this sense of voice can be an important and illuminating way of emancipating people from unsatisfactory relationships, it would not likely be seen as a critical emancipation by many of the scholars committed to critical research stances. Rather, critical approaches often allow voice to those with marginalized identities, and in interpersonal communication research that especially applies to people whose marginalized identities may hamper or even dehumanize their relationships.

Examples of interpersonal communication studies using a critical approach include Castle Bell and Hastings's (2011) study interviewing 19 interracial couples about how they negotiate face threats; Manning's (in press-a) survey-driven study of positive and negative communicative behaviors in coming-out conversations; and Eckstein's (2004) study of adolescent-to-parent domestic abuse that used 20 in-depth interviews to consider, in part, communication's role in the escalation and progression of abuse episodes. For some good examples of studies that use critical theory in addition to a critical approach, one might consider viewing Allen, Orbe, and Olivas's (1999) use of feminist standpoint theory (and clever method of using their own e-mails to each other as data) as they explore perceptions of difference, especially race; and Endres and Gould's (2009) use of document analysis to consider how students perform whiteness in service-learning situations.

The majority of this text does not hone in on critical theory or approaches, but the methods and analytical tools demonstrated in the later chapters are metatheoretically compatible with the tenets of critical research. As is evident in the later chapters of this book, some of the studies have a critical edge to them. Laura Ellingson and Patty Sotirin's study on aunting is influenced by their feminist leanings, taking an analytical tool (emotion coding) that is quite rigid and loosening it up to value fluidities in understanding—something many feminist scholars strive for in their work. The study would not likely be considered a critical qualitative study, however, because aunts are not typically viewed as a marginalized group (although one could certainly make the argument that women family members are sometimes disadvantaged or advantaged in particular situations and contexts). Jennifer C. Dunn's study involving women from the Moonlight Bunny Ranch has a critical sexualities–studies edge, allowing insight into the women behind a commonly constructed identity of “sex worker.” Dunn does not directly embrace critical sexuality theories, but the spirit of those theories can be felt in her work. The study in our book most indicative of a critical approach is Dohrman, Buzzanell, and colleagues’ study involving women engineers. This study is certainly emancipatory, as it examines how mentoring relationships for women in engineering workplaces help to alleviate some of the sexist attitudes and behaviors that can permeate such dwellings. This particular study is also the only one to take on an explicitly postmodern edge.

Postmodern Approaches

For interpersonal communication scholars—or, perhaps, for most social scientific communication scholars in general—postmodern approaches to qualitative research seem to be met with the most suspicion. Critiques against postmodernism in the communication discipline tend to conflate postmodern tenets with other theoretical traditions (particularly critical approaches; Mumby, 1997), and many reduce postmodernism to a simple claim that there are no truths (or realities) to be found (Leslie, 2010). While a few postmodern scholars may claim absolute relativism or an inability to have any form of meaning, this vantage point does not seem to characterize most published or presented postmodern qualitative work. Sweeping dismissals of postmodernism should, like most sweeping dismissals, be taken with a grain of salt, as postmodernism as a philosophical approach is much too diverse (and fractured) to be characterized by any simple statements that define or reduce it to core criteria (Best & Kellner, 1997; Leslie, 2010). Perhaps it is the embracing of uncertainty and openness that many find to be so frustrating about trying to grasp postmodernism as a concept or approach.

Rather than trying to describe the numerous aspects o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Embracing a Full Spectrum of Interpersonal Communication Research
• 1 Understanding Personal Relationships Through an Interpretivist-Oriented Lens
• 2 Method and Analysis in Qualitative Relationships Research
• 3 Interviews, Emotion Coding, and a Family Communication Study
• 4 Focus Groups, Values Coding, and a Romantic Relationships Study
• 5 Open-Ended Surveys, Taxonomic Coding, and a Friendship Study
• 6 Ethnography, Dramaturgical Coding, and a Sexuality Study
• 7 Discourse Analysis, Thematic Analysis, and a Study of Computer-Mediated Communication
• 8 Narrative Inquiry, Crystallization, and a Study of Workplace Relationships
• 9 Writing and Presenting Qualitative Interpersonal Communication Studies
• References
• Index
• About the Authors