The Qualitative Manifesto

A Call to Arms

Norman K. Denzin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429832314
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Now issued as part of the Routledge Education Classic Edition series, The Qualitative Manifesto provides a "call to arms" for researchers from the leading figure in the qualitative research community, Norman Denzin. Denzin asks for a research tradition engaged in social justice, sensitive to identity and indigenous concerns, brave to risk presentation in forms beyond traditional academic writing, and committed to teaching this to their students and colleagues.

A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in research, society and in social justice since the publication of the original edition. Denzin looks to the past, present and future of the field, underlining the continuing importance of this brief, provocative book.

1

A GLOBAL COMMUNITY AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

The role of reason I have been outlining neither means … that one hit the pavement, take the next plane to the scene of the current crisis … buy a newspaper plant, [or] go among the poor. … Such actions are … admirable … but for social scientists to take them [up] is to abdicate their role and to display their … disbelief in the promise of social science and the role of reason in human affairs.

(C. Wright Mills, 1959, p. 192)

The global community of qualitative researchers is mid-way between two extremes, searching for a new middle, moving in several different directions at the same time. Contemporary qualitative, interpretive research exists within competing fields of discourse, the eight moments of inquiry discussed in the Introduction. These moments all circulate in the present, competing with and defining one another. According to Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003a, p. ix) we are in a third “methodological moment,” a time of disruptions, and emerging confluences (Lather, 2007; Guba and Lincoln, 2005), with mixed methodologies and calls for scientifically based research on the one side, renewed calls for social justice inquiry from the critical social science tradition on the other.

The evidence-based research movement, with its fixed standards and guidelines for conducting and evaluating qualitative inquiry, seeks total domination; one shoe fits everyone (St. Pierre, 2006; Morse, 2006; Denzin and Giardina, 2006). The heart of the matter turns on issues surrounding the politics and ethics of evidence, and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice. In the spirit of inclusion let us listen to our critics. But in doing so we must renew our efforts to de-colonize the academy, to honor the voices of those who have been silenced by dominant paradigms. Let us do this in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration and mutual self-respect.

So at the end of the first decade of the 21st century it is time to move forward. It is time to open up new spaces, time to explore new discourses. We need to find new ways of connecting people, and their personal troubles, with social justice methodologies. We need to become more accomplished in linking these interventions to those institutional sites where troubles are turned into public issues, and public issues transformed into social policy (Nespor, 2006, p. 124; Mills, 1959; Charmaz, 2005).

A critical framework modeled after C. Wright Mills, William James (1909), Paulo Freire (2001), bell hooks (2005), and Cornel West (1989, 1991) is central to this project. It privileges practice, politics, action, consequences, performances, discourses, methodologies of the heart, pedagogies of hope, love, care, forgiveness, healing (Pelias, 2004; Dillard, 2006, 2006). It speaks for and with those who are on the margins. As a liberationist philosophy, it is committed to examining the consequences of racism, poverty and sexism on the lives of interacting individuals (Siegfried, 1996, p. 271).

Moving forward, it is necessary to confront and work through the criticisms that continue to be directed toward qualitative inquiry. Each generation must draw its line in the sand, and take a stance toward the past. Each generation must articulate its epistemological, methodological and ethical stance toward critical inquiry. Each generation must offer its responses to current and past criticisms.

History, Politics, and Paradigms

To better understand where we are today, to better grasp current criticisms, it is useful to return to the so-called paradigm wars of the 1980s, which resulted in the serious crippling of quantitative research in education. Critical pedagogy, critical theorists, and feminist analyses fostered struggles for power and cultural capital for the poor, nonwhites, women, and gays (Gage, 1989).

Teddlie and Tashakkori’s history is helpful here. They expand the time frame of the 1980s war. For them there have been at least three paradigm wars, or periods of conflict: the postpositivist-constructivist war against positivism (1970–1990); the conflict between competing postpositivist, constructivist, and critical theory paradigms (1990–2005); and the current conflict between evidence-based methodologists, and the mixed methods, interpretive and critical theory schools (2005–present).¹

Guba’s (1990a) Paradigm Dialog signaled an end to the 1980s wars. Postpositivists, constructivists, and critical theorists talked to one another, working through issues connected to ethics, field studies, praxis, criteria, knowledge accumulation, truth, significance, graduate training, values, and politics. By the early 1990s, there was an explosion of published works on qualitative research; handbooks and new journals appeared. Special interest groups committed to particular paradigms appeared—some had their own journals.²

The second paradigm conflict occurred within the mixed-methods community, and involved disputes “between individuals convinced of the ‘paradigm purity’ of their own position (Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2003b, p. 7). Purists extended and repeated the argument that quantitative and qualitative methods that postpositivism and the other “isms” cannot be combined because of the differences between their underlying paradigm assumptions. On the methodological front, the incompatibility thesis was challenged by those who invoked triangulation as a way of combining multiple methods to study the same phenomenon (Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2003b, p. 7). Thus was ushered in a new round of arguments and debates over paradigm superiority.

A soft, a-political pragmatic paradigm emerged in the post-1990 period. Suddenly quantitative and qualitative methods became compatible and researchers could use both in their empirical inquiries (Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2003b, p. 7). Proponents made appeals to a “what works” pragmatic argument, contending that “no incompatibility between quantitative and qualitative methods exists at either the level of practice or that of epistemology … there are thus no good reasons for educational researchers to fear forging ahead with ‘what works’” (Howe, 1988, p. 16). Of course what works is more than an empirical question. It involves the politics of evidence.

This is the space that evidence-based research entered. This is the battleground of war number three, “the current upheaval and argument about ‘scientific’ research in the scholarly world of education” (Scheurich and Clark, 2006, p. 401). Enter Teddlie and Tashakkori’s third moment: mixed methods, and evidence-based inquiry meet one another in a soft center. Mills would say this is a space for abstracted empiricism. Inquiry is cut off from politics. Biography and history recede into the background. Technological rationality prevails.

Reading Resistance

We are nearly a half-century down the road since the methodological conflicts of the 1970s and the 1980s. A familiar litany of criticisms is easily summarized:

• Qualitative Inquiry is nonscientific.
• Qualitative Inquiry is fiction.
• Qualitative Inquiry is soft journalism.
• Qualitative Inquiry is political.
• Qualitative Inquiry has no truth criteria.
• Qualitative Inquiry is armchair inquiry.
• Qualitative Inquiry is an anything goes methodology.
• Qualitative Inquiry is romantic postmodernism.
• Qualitative Inquiry only yields moral criticism.
• Qualitative Inquiry only yields low quality research results.
• Qualitative Inquiry only yields results that are close to common sense.
• Qualitative Inquiry signals the death of empirical science.
• Qualitative Inquiry is an attack on reason and truth.
• Qualitative Inquiry is not rigorous.
• Qualitative Inquiry is not systematic.
• Qualitative inquiry lacks an objective methodology.
• Qualitative Inquiry does not yield causal analyses.
• Qualitative Inquiry does not use randomized controlled experiments.
• Qualitative Inquiry does not produce work that can be replicated.
• Qualitative Inquiry does not produce work that can be generalized.
• Qualitative Inquiry has no well-defined variables.
• Qualitative Inquiry produces no hard evidence.

At best, case study, interview, and ethnographic methods offer descriptive materials that can be tested with experimental methods. The epistemologies of critical race, queer, postcolonial, feminist and postmodern theories are rendered useless—relegated, at best, to the category of scholarship, not science (Ryan and Hood, 2004, p. 81). It is also important to remember that criticisms of the new writing were linked to identity politics and feminist theory, and in anthropology to postcolonial criticisms. These criticisms involved a complex set of questions, namely, who had the right to speak for whom, and how (Clough, 2000, p. 283).

The need to represent postcolonial hybrid identities became the focus of experimental writing in ethnography, just as there has been “an effort to elaborate race, classed, sexed, and national identities in the autoethnographic writings of postcolonial theorists” (Clough, 2000, p. 285). These debates about writing, agency, self, subjectivity, nation, culture, race and gender unfolded on a global landscape, involving the transnationalization of capital and the globalization of technology (Clough, 2000, p. 279). Thus from the beginning, experimental writing has been closely connected to gender, race, family, nation, politics, capital, technology, critical social theory, and cultural criticism; that is to debates over questions of knowledge, and its representation and presentation.

Interpretive critics contend that the positivist endorses a narrow view of science, while celebrating a “neoclassical experimentalism that is a throwback to the Campbell-Stanley era and its dogmatic adherence to an exclusive reliance on quantitative methods” (Howe, 2004, p. 42; Maxwell, 2004). Interpretive critics contend that evidence-based researchers fail to understand that all facts are value-and theory-laden; there is no objective truth.

If the opposition to positive science by the poststructuralists is seen as an attack on reason and truth, then the positivist science attack on qualitative research is regarded as an attempt to legislate one version of truth over another.

A Standoff?

A half-century? Yes. Same criticisms? Yes. Any change? Yes. What? In the traditional and golden ages of qualitative inquiry positivism reigned. All inquiry was judged against a narrow set of criteria, objective, valid, reliable, accounts of the “Other” and his or her way of life. Today, that picture has been shattered. The myth of the objective observer has been deconstructed. The qualitative researcher is not an objective, politically neutral observer who stands outside and above the study of the social world. Rather, the researcher is historically and locally situated within the very processes being studied. A gendered, historical self is brought to this process. This self, as a set of shifting identities, has its own history with the situated practices that define and shape the public issues and private troubles being studied.

In the social sciences today there is no longer a God’s-eye view that guarantees absolute methodological certainty. All inquiry reflects the standpoint of the inquirer. All observation is theory-laden. There is no possibility of theory- or value-free knowledge. The days of naive realism and naive positivism are over. The criteria for evaluating research are now relative.

A critical social science seeks its external grounding not in science, in any of its revisionist, postpositivist forms, but rather in a commitment to critical pedagogy and communitarian feminism with hope but no guarantees. It seeks to understand how power and ideology operate through and across systems of discourse, cultural commodities, and cultural texts. It asks how words, and texts and their meanings play a pivotal part in the cultures “decisive performances of race, class [and] gender” (Downing, 1987, p. 80).

We no longer just write culture. We perform culture. We have many different forms of qualitative inquiry today. We have multiple criteria for evaluating our work (see Appendix 2). It is a new day for my generation. We have drawn our line in the sand, and we may redraw it. But we stand firmly behind the belief that critical qualitative inquiry inspired by the sociological imagination can make the world a better place.

Changing the World³

Qualitative inquiry can contribute to social justice in the following ways:

1. It can help identify different definitions of a problem and/or a situation that is being evaluated with some agreement that change is required. It can show, for example, how battered wives interpret the shelters, hotlines, and public services that are made available to them by social welfare agencies. Through the use of personal experience narratives, the perspectives of women and workers can be compared and contrasted.
2. The assumptions, often belied by the facts of experience, that are held by various interested parties—policy makers, clients, welfare workers, online professionals—can be located and shown to be correct, or incorrect (Becker, 1967, p. 239).
3. Strategic points of intervention into social situations can be identified. Thus, the services of an agency and a program can be improved and evaluated.
4. It is possible to suggest “alternative moral points of view from which the problem, the policy, and the program can be interpreted and assessed” (see Becker, 1967, pp. 239–247). Because of its emphasis on experience and its meanings, the interpretive method suggests that programs must always be judged by and from the point of view of the persons most directly affected.
5. The limits of statistics and statistical evaluations can be exposed with the more qualitative, interpretive materials furnished by this approach. Its emphasis on the uniqueness of each life holds up the individual case as the measure of the effectiveness of all applied programs.

Critical scholars are committed to showing how the practices of critical, interpretive qualitative research can help change the world in positive ways. They are committed to creating new ways of making the practices of critical qualitative inquiry central to the workings of a free democratic society.

This commitment rests on the importance of interpretation and understanding as key features of social life. In social life there is only interpretation. That is, everyday life revolves around persons interpreting and making judgments about their own and other’s behaviors and experiences. Many times these interpretations and judgments are based on faulty, or incorrect understandings. For example, persons mista...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Classic Edition
• Introduction
• 1 A Global Community and the Sociological Imagination
• 2 Critics and Bricoleurs
• 3 Back to the Future
• 4 Pedagogical Practices: Teaching Qualitative Inquiry
• 5 Ethical Disclosure, or, in the Forest, but Lost in the Trees, or, a One-Act Play with Many Endings
• 6 Reading, Writing, and Publishing the Experimental Text
• 7 Templates for Social Justice Inquiry
• 8 Coda: A Call to Arms
• Appendix 1: A Teaching Template
• Appendix 2: An Ethical Code for Qualitative Researchers
• References
• Index