Defending Qualitative Research

Design, Analysis, and Textualization

Mario Cardano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429875014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Focussing on the phases of qualitative research which precede and follow fieldwork – design, analysis, and textualization – this book offers new theoretical tools to tackle one of the most common criticisms advanced against qualitative research: its presumed lack of rigour. Rejecting the notion of "rigour" as formulated in quantitative research and based on the theory of probability, it proposes a theoretical frame that allows combining the goals of rigour and that of creativity through the reference to theory of argumentation. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in qualitative research methods.

1
A premise about two crucial issues

Invisibility and method

The issue of invisibility, or rather the paradoxical idea of observing the unobservable, seems at least at first glance quite inappropriate for an empirical science like sociology. However, what we know about society is based only to a minor extent on observable phenomena, while the majority of our data refer to unobservable ones. To recognize an authoritarian attitude in a political leader or to identify his/her supporters in a specific social class implies the reference to invisible objects (although with a different kind of invisibility). Authoritarianism, as a trait of the individual personality, cannot be observed directly but only ascribed through “symptoms” gathered from speech behaviours – both online and offline – political decisions (if the leader is part of the government) and other signs. Similarly, nobody can directly observe a social class, social classes being a theoretical construct. The way in which we obtain information about invisible entities seems particularly relevant, and in this respect qualitative research can make a specific contribution to the credibility of the representations of these elusive entities.

The necessity to tackle the issue of invisibility is not specific only to qualitative research. It also invests the other Muse of social sciences, quantitative research. Before tackling the features of qualitative research in detail, a short discussion of the similarities and the differences between these two approaches to social research seems appropriate. This comparison demands for the reshaping of two crucial notions. The first is related to how a distinction between them can be marked out: by using bimodal logic or multimodal logic? The second is related to the notion of method: what notion of method seems more suitable to compare qualitative and quantitative research and – following the new agenda – to combine them?

1.1 The visible and the invisible

From its origins, science has had to confront the intriguing paradox of observing the unobservable, with the necessity of invisible entities invested with the responsibility of describing and/or explain observable phenomena. Starting from the force of gravity, at the heart of Principia by Sir Isaac Newton, to the luminiferous aether thought by James Clerk Maxwell to be the mean through which electromagnetic waves propagate, to mention two of the most prominent figures in the history of physics. But, from a cultural point of view, the expression of less celebrated invisible theoretical entities is also interesting; first of all, the mysterious phlogiston, the principle of inflammability defined by the physician and alchemist Johann Joachim Becher, and then deprived of its ontological status by the father of modern chemistry, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, who substituted the poetical phlogiston with the more prosaic oxygen.

In the broad field of humanities, the paradox of the observation of the unobservable seems a constant, with the interesting exception of psychology, where we can observe a distinctive oscillation between two different orientations. The main expression of invisibility in psychology is the mind or, to be more precise, the cognitive and emotive processes that – silently – take place in the heads of individuals. The first movement of the pendulum goes toward the eradication of the relevance of mental processes. This last was the solution proposed by the Behaviourist School, animated by John Broadus Watson, Edward Lee Thorndike and Burrhus Frederic Skinner. According to these American scholars, the objects of a scientific study of human behaviour must be focussed only on observable properties, mental processes being irrelevant (see the “manifesto” of behaviourist psychology, published by Watson in 1913). In the long run, the stimulus-response approach showed relevant weakness, and psychology scholars oriented their attention to the hyphen that connects stimulus and response, namely the cognitive and emotive mediations between observable properties. Thus, psychologists, particularly social psychologists, invested (and still invest) a lot of time and resources in the measurement of attitudes and cognitive processes, developing a vast amount of validated scales devoted to measuring – through an evidential path (see what follows) – the invisible aspects of the mind.

Starting from the 1980s, a new wave of research has contributed to the reshaping of the issue of invisibility in a challenging although controversial way. Through the use of sophisticated technologies, mental processes – or their shadows (Abend 2017) – become visible, depicted in coloured images of the brain, that show which of its areas are activated when, for instance, an individual faces a moral dilemma (e.g., the trolley problem, Abend 2011: 148–149), experiences spirituality, makes an economic decision or expresses an aesthetic judgment (Guillermo Del Pinal and Nathan 2013; Abend 2017). The area of neural activation of the brain is located by a machine for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The working of this machine benefits from the association between what our brain enables us to do – feel, think, perceive, and act – and the oxygen consumption and regional blood flow in a specific area of the brain. This information, associated with a map of the brain that locates mental functions, allows us, for instance, to decide whether the solution of an ethical dilemma is based on cognitive or emotional reasoning (see Guillermo Del Pinal and Nathan 2013: 237). This new tool creates both enthusiastic and extremely sceptical answers. The enthusiastic scholars see in this technology the tool that can guarantee a neural foundation of human behaviour and by doing so to explain everything. The sceptical scholars (see, for instance, Uttal 2001; Abend 2011, 2012; Satel and Lilienfeld 2013), maintain that knowing what brain area is activated during a specific activity is very far from recognizing its meaning.¹

Besides the technological sophistication of the “machine” that delivers a coloured image of the brain, suggesting the neural correlates of cognitive activities, the methodological design of these studies is quite basic. Most of the research on this area is based on laboratory experiments in which an individual – in isolation from his/her social world – is interrogated about the appropriateness or inappropriateness, or about the moral acceptability or unacceptability of certain behaviours such as: “Eating people”, “Setting a cat on fire”, “Cheating on your taxes” (Abend 2011: 149, 152). Thus, the complexity of the machinery that bolsters the myth of the transparency of our minds is coupled with a radical simplification of the research design and the theoretical frame. Studying individuals in perfect isolation parenthesizes what we have learnt from the Symbolic Interactionism School. Adopting a simplified version of cognitive processes, based on the “okay-ness” or “not-okay-ness” (150), does not allow inferences about the neural correlates of more complex cognitive processes which are institutionally or culturally dependent.²

In sociology, the field in which I find myself most comfortable, the issue of invisibility has been tackled – at least until now – without any special technology. The temptation of the behaviourist solution opened up, among sociologists, more than one breach, but always avoiding the heroic assumption of the irrelevance of mental processes. What happened in this direction was the choice to focus only on observable “trans-subjective phenomena” (Sorokin 1928: 619) with two different options. The first one is characterized by the explicit renunciation of any interpretation of the association detected among observable variables. This is the way of sociography which delivers surface information, in many cases very useful, at least to orient more in-depth study. In my research experience, I met this kind of approach in several studies on the relationship between social position and health that convincingly document the observable lowering of life expectancy moving from the upper classes to the working class. What is frequently missing here is an explanation of this socially and ethically relevant correlation. The second option moves from the analysis of trans-subjective phenomena, adding to the association detected among the variables a conjectural interpretation or explanation, not always adequately underpinned in empirical evidence. We can recognize this modus operandi in the classic study by Émile Durkheim on suicide, at least when the French sociologist skims the individual level of suicidal behaviour and tries to interpret it.

Besides this behaviourist path, mainly present among quantitative researchers, although not only among them,³ there is a widespread tendency to enter – so to speak – into the minds of individuals to study their internal states such as beliefs, attitudes, values and the meaning they attribute to their actions. This effort unites quantitative and qualitative research, but as I will say in what follows, in the study of invisible, qualitative research has a special advantage. The relevance of entering people’s minds is soundly defended in a milestone of sociological theory, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, published about 100 years ago by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918). This seminal book introduces the notion of “definition of the situation”, a cognitive category (defined as attitude by the authors) which guides the actions of individuals. When deciding the course to be imprinted on one’s actions, individuals do not react mechanically to the environment of which they are part (to the stimulus, in behaviourist jargon) but rather to their mental representation of the environment. This idea is expressed with crystal-clear clarity in the famous so-called “Thomas theorem” which states that if an individual defines certain situations as real, they will be real in their consequences. If during a visit to a Scottish castle, out of the blue I become convinced that it is inhabited by a cruel ghost who, for reasons needless to explain, hates Italian tourists and wants to kill them, I will be invaded by a mortal terror. The fright causes me to rush out the castle, running at breakneck speed along some steep stairs, to fall and break my leg. Thus, regardless of the soundness of my conviction, its consequences – the mortal terror, the breakneck running speed and the broken leg – become real. If we assume that at least one of the purposes of sociology (not necessarily the main one) is the “interpretive understanding of social action” (Weber 1922, English translation 1978: 4), the reconstruction of the individual definition of situation and, more broadly, individual internal states that determine his/her way of being in the world seems crucial.⁴ The centrality of these internal states is clearly expressed by the French anthropologist Dan Sperber:

The project of scientific anthropology meets with a major difficulty: it is impossible to describe a cultural phenomenon, an election, a mass, or a football game for instance, without taking into account the ideas of the participants. However, ideas cannot be observed, but only intuitively understood; they cannot be described but only interpreted.

(Sperber 1982, English translation 1985: 9)

The way along which the journey toward the invisible territories, or – less poetically – toward individuals’ inner states of mind, shows a close analogy with the modus operandi of the nineteenth-century physician. Devoid of the instruments of contemporary medical technology which allow the observation of internal organs, nineteenth-century physicians reached diagnoses through meticulous observation of the signs of the disease accessible to their eyes and of the symptoms reported by patients in their discourses. The physicians observed, for example, the condition of the skin and that of mucous membranes, the patient’s posture and gait. Then, with the help of a watch, the physician measured the heart rate, and with a stethoscope auscultated the chest to hear how the respiration worked. These signs were usually integrated with the reconstruction of symptoms through the discourses of patients opportunely solicited for this purpose. In the reading of these discourses, a version of “illness narratives” (Kleinmann 1988; Bury 2001) which emerges in an “institutional context” (Hydén 1997: 62), the physician, besides overcoming his/her scepticism about patients’ versions of their suffering experience (48), has to face some obstacles, familiar to any social researcher. Patients can have some difficulties in expressing their experiences in words, particularly if they are not educated or, in broader terms, if they do not share the physician’s communication code. Memory can be another source of difficulty: patients can forget some relevant details of their bodily experiences or reshape them in a confusing way. Emotions can interfere with the recall of suffering experiences and with their expression in a discourse. Finally, the psycho-dynamic aspects must be remembered: a patient may deny or modify aspect(s) of his/her illness experience in order to protect the Self.

At any rate, through the combination of this information, the physician arrives at a diagnosis based on a conjectural representation of the conditions of internal organs which allow recognition of a specific syndrome and prescribe a therapy. Helped only by a decidedly rudimentary set of instruments, the physician accesses the invisible following the model of medical semiotics, based on what Carlo Ginzburg (1978, English translation 2013) defines as an “evidential paradigm”. Ginzburg recognizes the ancestral roots of this model of knowledge in hunting practice. It was through this model of knowledge that primitive man learned “to reconstruct the shapes and the movements of his invisible prey from the tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors” (Ginzburg 1978, English translation 2013: 93). It was the same cognitive style which guided the Mesopotamian art of divination and the Hippocratic medical school, access to the invisible through traces, signs, clues. At the end of the nineteenth century, the evidential paradigm emerged with more strength, through the works of three different intellectuals, Giovanni Morelli, Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud. Giovanni Morelli was the inventor of a singular method for the attribution of pict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A premise about two crucial issues: invisibility and method
• 2 Qualitative research: a portrait
• 3 The theory-of-argumentation survival kit
• 4 The qualitative research design
• 5 On qualitative data analysis
• 6 The textualization
• Index