Qualitative Inquiry and Global Crises

Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611320213
• eBook ISBN: 9781315421599
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This plenary volume from the Sixth International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (2010) highlights the variety of roles played by qualitative researchers in addressing global communities in crisis. It shows how qualitative researchers can bridge gaps in cultural and linguistic understanding to address issues of disparity in race, ethnicity, gender, and environment in the interests of global social justice and human rights. Authored by many of the world's leading qualitative researchers, the signature articles in this volume point qualitative researchers toward a research stance of ethics, meaning, and advocacy.

Part I: Theory

Chapter 1

Teaching Qualitative Research Responsively

Judith Preissle

Kathleen deMarrais

Learning and teaching how to inquire, to conduct research, and to enact the various traditions of qualitative research was an informal, trial-and-error, ad hoc process in the social and professional sciences until well into the latter half of the twentieth century. Scholars learned by doing, by chatting with their colleagues, and, if they were lucky, by apprenticing with their more experienced teachers. With the expansion of higher education that began midway through that century, graduate students pursuing research degrees began to outnumber their teachers and apprenticeship became an inefficient, nearly impossible model for teaching and learning research. In the early 1970s, when Judith Preissle was a doctoral student at Indiana University, qualitative research approaches were discussed toward the end of the sociological research methods course, and in the anthropological field methods course they were buried among pressing concerns for learning indigenous languages and for adapting to different diets, sanitation practices, and etiquettes.

In this chapter, we advocate curriculum and instruction for qualitative research design, methods, and traditions highlighting philosophies, theories, and practices that capture the essence of the apprenticeship and learning-by-doing experiences while providing scaffolding and supports for research in the twenty-first century. Our overall approach is called “qualitative pedagogy,” a term coined by Kathleen deMarrais in the late 1990s to refer to ways of teaching and learning qualitative research generated cooperatively by the qualitative methodologists at the University of Georgia. It assumes that the principles guiding the practices of qualitative research should guide instruction in qualitative research, and it represents an overall approach to teaching qualitative research to novices and others new to qualitative traditions. Our position is that we ought to teach our research practices in ways faithful to how we practice research and scholarship. The qualitative pedagogy we advocate is responsive, reflexive, recursive, reflective, and contextual (Preissle & deMarrais, 2009). Our focus in this discussion is what we call “qualitative responsiveness.”

Responsiveness is a quality characteristic of many, but not all, qualitative research traditions. It refers to an interaction between researcher and research participant that generates the information or data sought and where knowledge flows both ways between researcher and participant. Responsive research places the researcher as self, as I who acts, in the midst of a research process (Wax, 1971; Wolcott, 1994, 2002) where the participant is what Buber ([1923] 1970) calls thou to emphasize the relationship between humans not customarily present when humans consider, study, or interact with inanimate objects:

The form [of another person] that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. … And it is an actual relation; it acts on me as I act on it. … Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. (p. 61)

Responsiveness contrasts with the external position required by much experimental and survey designs that depend on removing the researcher from the world studied but requires directive positions from the outside. Scholars are acting on, intervening, manipulating, and controlling, but in these approaches they are rarely relating. Qualitative research traditions vary in the extent to which responsiveness is valued and has been practiced. The ideal for much early fieldwork in sociology and anthropology was that participant observers should take a fly-on-the-wall position (Preissle & Grant, 2004). Researchers should be unobstrusive and endeavor to disturb the social scenes observed as little as possible. Initial field reports were often written from an omniscient position that took the researcher out of the site altogether. However, these were sometimes followed later by more candid accounts from the same scholars, reflecting about their relationships with participants (e.g., Malinowski, 1967; Mead, 1977). Relationships with participants have become more commonly reported in recent fieldwork in sociology and anthropology (Adler & Adler, 1987), and responsiveness is central in participatory action research (Torres, 1992), in some poststructural work (Davies & Gannon, 2009), in many feminist traditions (Reinharz, [1979] 1984), and in autoethnography (Chang, 2008).

Much research of all kinds involves both responsive and directive dimensions, but the emphasis varies from one study to the next or even across phases within studies. For example, some highly directive survey studies may result from cordial relationships between survey researchers and leaders in an organization seeking current information about the membership of their group. Responsiveness itself in the conduct of most qualitative research also varies. It is arguably strongest in the highly intensive interactions of lengthy clinical interviews, but it may ebb and flow across the course of a participant observation study. It may be most subtle in scholars’ use of document analysis where self-conscious consideration of reader response theory (Rosenblatt, 1978) may assist researchers in exploring how they are relating to the material they are examining.

As an attribute of human relationships, responsiveness combines cognitive and affective dimensions, operating interactively in the position or stance of researcher to research topic and research participants and in the interaction among researcher, what the researcher believes the study to be about, and whomever the researcher is studying. We consider cognitive responsiveness to be the adaptation of topic and questions to research situation, to what is studied, whereas affective responsiveness is the openness of researcher to whoever is studied. Affective responsiveness centers on the social and emotional relationship of research to participants. Being in a relationship is a central source of information and understanding.

In an early piece on classroom ethnography, for example, Erickson (1973) discussed how researchers’ emotional responses in interactions with participants are clues to what may be important in a research situation:

Really “being there” means experiencing strong relationships with whoever else is “there” (one’s “informants”). Some of these relationships may feel good and others may hurt. All of them affect me and change me [emphasis in original]. … This is the ethnographer’s tour de force: to “make sense” of “outrageous” behavior complexes … by placing the behavior complex in its socio-cultural context. To pull this off as an ethnographer one must not suppress a sense of outrage while in the field, but still stay in there, and take advantage of one’s rage, using it as a barometer to indicate high salience. … The method is not that of “objectivity” but of “discipline subjectivity.” (p. 15)

What Erickson does in this text is link the affective to the cognitive. The responsive researcher watches and listens to those studied, monitoring his or her own emotional variations, and changes research questions and topics according to participant interpretations and meanings. What may result, then, is primarily cognitive.

Not all scholars can tolerate the challenges of affective responsiveness and being in relationships with participants. Ethical decisions are further complicated by relationships. Priorities of knowing may conflict with the priorities of caring. When researcher identity becomes part of what must be studied, research conduct becomes more difficult and complex. Reconciling inevitable pressures for objectivity—from the researcher’s expectations of her- or himself, from professional demands, from public expectations of credible research—with the realities of social and personal subjectivity requires tolerating ambiguity, uncertainty, and instability.

Finally, responsive researchers seek to generate not only rich description of who, what, where, when, how, and why (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993), but also to achieve Geertz’s (1973) thick description of the participants’ perspectives on these facets of social experiences. Research problems and issues integrate participant views and meanings so that what is represented is a production with many actors, although typically only one or few playwrights.

Teaching qualitative research responsively requires that qualitative methodologists position themselves as learners and researchers, more skilled and experienced than the students, but on similar journeys to understand the world. We also study our instructional practice to better understand our teaching and learning. We also must tolerate, if not celebrate, ambiguity, uncertainty, and instability. We are teachers and learners; we are researchers but also participants: We must follow our students to be able to lead them in their own research journeys.

Qualitative methodologists study students as they-as-qualitative-methodologists study research participants. Responsive qualitative instructors seek to learn the students’ goals in their learning, the backgrounds they bring to learning qualitative research, the skills and talents that support that learning, and the scholarly disciplines and perspectives from which they are drawing. To an extent this is necessitated by the diversity of academic fields represented in many courses in qualitative methods, where students enroll from across the social and professional sciences. However, even within single academic areas like sociology or education, students pursue a host of different questions, lines of research, and subfields. To connect research methods to student interests and developing specialties, methods instructors must learn something about those interests and specialties.

To accomplish this, qualitative methodologists may study other responsive pedagogies such as Dewey’s (1902) progressive and pragmatic approach to education, Rousseau’s ([1762] 1966) premise of the natural maturation of the individual, Montessori’s ([1948] 1967) assertion that learning occurs in interaction with the environment, or Du Bois’s later formulations of individual uplift requiring efforts of a whole community (see Alridge, 2008). These approaches to instruction place the learner in a relationship with the teacher where what is to be learned develops in and from their interaction. Research design, methods, methodologies, and philosophies are studied and enacted within various social transactions. Instructional practices essential to a responsive qualitative pedagogy include an inclusive curriculum, multiple and varied instructional activities, and experiences in different kinds of role taking.

An inclusive curriculum in qualitative research methods and design includes scholars from around the world who represent varied identities (nationalities, genders, races, etc.); novice scholars must be able to find themselves among qualitative researchers and methodologists. They must encounter work by scholars similar to them and different from them and methodological issues and concerns familiar as well as strange. Scholarship in all area...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Theory
• Part II: Method
• Part III: Performance
• Index