On Writing Qualitative Research
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On Writing Qualitative Research

Living by Words

Margaret Anzul, Maryann Downing, Margot Ely, Ruth Vinz

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eBook - ePub

On Writing Qualitative Research

Living by Words

Margaret Anzul, Maryann Downing, Margot Ely, Ruth Vinz

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About This Book

This text is both about writing up qualitative research and is itself a qualitative study. The written reflections of students on the writing process and the interpretations and presentations of their findings provide a base of data which the authors have, in turn, analyzed and incorporated into their text. They have added accounts of their own experiences, and those of their colleagues and other published authors. All of these are woven into a theoretical framework that discusses them in detail.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2003
ISBN
9781135715410
Edition
1

Chapter 1
To You From Us

This was not going to be our next book. Definitely. But then, we didn’t know we were pregnant already.
Perhaps we should have had an inkling of what was in store when we received Dan Rose’s reply to our bid to enlist him on our team in what we felt was a splendid concept for an ensuing writing project about qualitative researchers who were studying themselves. We were rather puzzled that Dan’s long and detailed response scarcely mentioned our grand vision. He talked instead of the need for a book about and to people who write research—a book similar in spirit and tone and presentation to the one that two of us had just completed. So, we took Dan’s response to be his more pressing musings as a researcher and teacher rather than as a direct message to us and called him to discuss our original idea. After all, there are so many books—interesting, useful books—about writing. Do we need another one? From this vantage point, we can now see how events already afoot and those soon to come would convince us unfalteringly that the book you are holding is the only one we cared to write. Our project with Dan will have to wait.
We write as a team and often think as a team. Nevertheless, each of us has a different life story and different professional concerns. As we each thought through the implications of this project, our starting stances emerged:
The key for qualitative research writers is to breathe into our words the life we have experienced. How to communicate this fires my imagination and resolve. I want to help to produce a text about process, strategies and feelings that places writing in a broad humanistic context. (Margot)
I have a growing appreciation that qualitative reports are inevitably ways of telling stories, and that the wealth of literature in narrative theory has much to say to writers of qualitative research. (Margaret)
I have continuing professional concerns for the barriers and stumbling blocks we place in our own ways as writers, and a conviction that examining these might help us remove them from our own paths and the paths of others. (Maryann)
We have something to say that will contribute to the growing literature on writing research, and this contribution derives largely from the impetus of our own need as writers to find ways to evoke the stories of others and to tell the stories of ourselves as researchers. (Ruth)
Margot and Margaret were two of five people who wrote Doing Qualitative Research: Circles within Circles, published by Falmer Press in 1991. In that book about the qualitative research process as a whole, the authors examine processes of ‘research’ not only through their eyes but also through the eyes of other researchers, both less and more experienced. Even as they were finishing that project, however, they were aware that there was much more to say about the writing and presentation of research narratives. Realizing the complexities of the process, Margot has expanded a Qualitative Research Methods course to two semesters to allow sufficient time for doctoral researchers to work through some of the issues surrounding writing during and toward the final phases of field study. Margaret has for some years been working as a research consultant, primarily with doctoral students who need specific help when writing their dissertations. Maryann has also been involved with this work as well as with the development of process writing curricula in classrooms. Ruth has been a researcher, a teacher, and a prolific author with a particular interest in writing. All four of us have our own writing and research agendas. Thus, our interest in the writing of research is powered by both theoretical and intensely practical considerations.
Our concern with writing parallels a surge of interest in writing seen throughout the entire qualitative community. Within the past few years, as we have been considering writing more deeply among ourselves and with our students, our own thinking has been extended and challenged by such works as Wolcott’s Writing Up Qualitative Research (1990), Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986), and Atkinson’s The Ethnographic Imagination (1990). Moreover, in our teaching and consulting we have found ourselves synthesizing and adapting insights from this rapidly growing body of literature. In this book we have, in short, followed a similar process to that used when writing Doing Qualitative Research: Circles Within Circles (Ely, Anzul, Friedman, Garner and Steinmetz, 1991). We want to challenge, model, question, illustrate and examine the processes as well as the rhetorical devices and other tools for writing qualitative research.
Our goals are very specific. This book is powered by the writing and reflections-on-writing of students of qualitative research as they emerge as researchers in the process. This is quite intentional. Perhaps because these people are new to this area we find their insights particularly vibrant and on-target. For those of us who may by now take much for granted about research writing, they allow us to see the essentials once again. Their writings provide a database which we have, in turn, presented in this book. To that base we have amalgamated accounts of our own experiences, those of our colleagues, and other published authors. All of these are woven into a framework that illuminates for us, and that we hope will illuminate for you, some of the ways in which writers work to evoke the complexity of the experiences within their studies.
Our intention is to write a book for qualitative researchers, at all stages of experience and sophistication, and for teachers of research methods, a text that encourages its readers to study, explore, create, and take some leaps of faith, all in the service of writing worthwhile research. We are writing to people who see themselves as ongoing learners of qualitative research, open to reviewing what they believe they know; to those who may just be starting to learn about qualitative research writing; and to those who have completed research pieces but who are still eager to continue questioning, honing skills, and deepening their grasp. We talk in this book about primary and natural human activities—thinking, analyzing, storying, lifting, interpreting—activities we often take for granted. What may be our particular twist is that on these pages we attempt to cast these human activities into sharp relief as we consider the whole business of research writing.
Our plan at the beginning was that each of the four of us would speak primarily in first person as we crafted what we then thought would be our individual chapters. However, as we met in our writing group in order to respond, discuss and produce ongoing text, our first drafts went through a metamorphosis of cohesion. We wrote to each other’s work, added pieces or larger sections to all chapters, increasingly claimed an overarching stake in the entire presentation, committed to far greater revising than we had envisioned. In essence, our writing process was surfacing our stances about authorial ownership and responsibility as well as the sticky conundrum of how best to move toward an equitable sharing of power. Our writing was demanding more we-ness and less I-ness and we followed where we had led ourselves. Other research writers have also grappled with these issues:
In collaborating on writing this book we searched for a single voice—a way of submerging our individual perspectives for the sake of a collective ‘we.’ Not that we denied our individual convictions or squelched our objections to one another’s points of view—we argued, tried to persuade, even cried at times when we reached an impasse of understanding—but we learned to listen to each other, to build on each other’s insights, and eventually to arrive at a way of communicating as a collective what we believe. (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule, 1986, p. ix)
Throughout this book, then, there is a communal base. Our four voices do enter separately as we share individual accounts to highlight facets of each chapter, but overall this book comes to ‘you’ from ‘us.’
In this book the quotations that we have blended in are essential to what we intend to communicate. Far from being embellishments, these quotations often carry primary meaning. To miss them would be to miss the heart of the matter. They should be read with that in mind. Our publisher has supported our vision by printing quotations so that they are clearly important and readable. Most of the quotations appear one time only. Some very few are repeated in different sections of the book. This is a conscious strategy. The same statement may and does take on different shades of meaning when it appears in different contexts. A quote may support or illuminate more than one idea. Then again, a statement may be so powerful, in our opinion, so essential, that its very repetition signals the reader to attend both to its message and ours.
In addition to repeating a small number of quotations for specific reasons, we also tackle a small number of topics in more than one chapter so as to view each from different angles. This happens, for example, when we discuss personal stance and writing community. Based on our attempts to interweave in these ways, you might now understand why we have a second Table of Contents, a Version Two.
We have asked those qualitative researchers who provide many of their writing pieces to mask identifiers in the material such as names, titles, places. This is to protect, as far as possible, the privacy of their participants. Our work presents you with examples and quotations from a great variety of fields since this book speaks to interdisciplinary interests and endeavors. In the long run, however, while this may add color and seasonings, it is not as important as our primary messages about research writing. These, we feel, pertain to all fields. In one sense, then, you can consider the examples and quotations as modules that you can slide out and replace with your own or others. Working in another way, you might track the stories of individual researchers that run through several chapters by using the name index. Actually, if you did enter into the conversation this way, we’d judge our book a success.
We would like to share with you some of the assumptions that undergird our work. The qualitative fold embraces such a range of philosophies, intellectual traditions, and points of view that it seems only fair to our readers that we try to explain where along that range we place ourselves. There have been many attempts to trace the development of various qualitative traditions—in anthropology, in sociology, in psychology, in the professions. We will look at some of the historical movements and theoretical perspectives in Chapter 5. All of them, however, represent steps away from the positivist position traditionally espoused by researchers who work within the quantitative paradigm. At the heart of the differences between the quantitative and qualitative paradigms are assumptions about how humans know, about what can be known, about what are suitable approaches to inquiry.
This writing team and most of our readers (we suppose) were educated within the positivist tradition so we grew up believing that knowledge was fixed and objective and that good students were expected to absorb it passively. Even when we read literature we knew that there was one ‘right’ interpretation and that our task was to ‘learn’ it. There was for each of us a point at which we stepped away from that position and moved toward an appreciation of knowing as an active process, with the knower at the heart of the construction of her or his knowledge. We recognize that our individual positions now fall along a continuum of qualitative theoretical constructs. These range somewhere between the ‘posts’—postpositivist, constructivist, interpretive, critical, feminist, to poststructural. We all accept enough of these perspectives to work well together and at the same time we recognize that our differences at times vary as relativists, feminists, or postmodernists. We would like you, the reader, to know that we are no more interested in prescribing within these pages adherence to one or another of the possible qualitative positions for you than we are for one another.
Increasingly we found references in the literature to the eclectic nature of the qualitative enterprise. Further, each researcher is seen as structuring the research project by using to a large extent whatever is called for during the emergent processes of data collection, data analysis, and the construction of the final document. We are intrigued with the use of the term ‘researcher-as-bricoleur’ when qualitative work is characterized (see for example, Denzin and Lincoln 1994, pp. 2–3). Each of us is highly aware of herself as the carpenter of her own personal, continually evolving theoretical constructs. Like the process of bricoleurs, our qualitative works, as well as our lives, are products that we ourselves build from materials that we find most appropriate to what we believe.
We are struck, in addition, by what we see as great chunks of overlap in many qualitative research positions that are posited to be distinct and unique. In our experience it is an unending task—an often maddening one—to tease out where the similarities and differences lie. When we set about constructing the theoretical or methodological framework for a study, or when we consider what our personal theoretical frames of reference are for our scholarly work as a whole, we tend to blend compatible positions, looking out all the while for consistency. This job is anything but haphazard or specious.
A perspective we’ve found useful, and probably ingrained as a result of our experience, is that of transaction as posited by John Dewey and Arthur F.Bentley (1949). In the light of transactional theory, all knowing is viewed as taking place in transaction between what’s ‘out there’ and the ‘self.’ When Louise Rosenblatt (1978) delineated her transactional theory of the literary work, she argued that the transaction between reader and text produces the ‘poem-asevent’ (see page). Each of us must recognize that whatever any thing-in-itself may be ‘out there,’ it exists only as we know it. As will be seen in the pages that follow, this has implications for us as researcher/writers. We transact as observers, as writers, and as readers of our own logs; we transact again as we shape the findings in our logs into a more finished product, we transact as we write and our readers transact with what we have written. We hope.
Not that all four of us subscribe with equal enthusiasm to the entirety of transactional theory of literature or to its terminology. We do, however, as you will see in the chapters that follow, subscribe to the importance of the transactive, emotional, experiential, aesthetic aspects of writing. A theme that runs through each of the chapters of this book is that all of the powers of the mind are at work and play in every aspect of writing qualitative research. The living stuff of our research and our writing on it are presented mainly in a linear fashion in a book, however, and when we want to consider any one aspect of it in detail we must lift a thread out of the mesh of life and distort it somewhat by looking at it in isolation.
The universe of qualitative research and its writing is a rapidly expanding one. We have our own Big Bang! This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for mere mortals to keep up. We suppose, however, that the effort counts for something. Keeping that in mind, and remembering that some key characteristics of qualitative researchers reside in their flexibility and openness to well-reasoned change, we will at times share with you some changes in our own positions, our own points of view over the last ten years or so. Some of these changes, often so subtle that they are seen only in a shift of emphasis, center around our convictions about the substance and presentation of qualitative research writing, the sharing of self, the representation of others in our writing, what counts as credibility-acceptability, issues about our responsibility to and with participants, and to action in broader society.
Lest we leave you with the idea that we believe change is the only useful process to reach for, we add hastily that, to us, the steady enduring commitments, processes and insights are crucial—those that we test and affirm over time and experience. They demand attention and documentation. In essence, one way to conceptualize this book is to see it as a product of where we are at this moment.
This book asks much of you, our reader. To get full value, as they say, this is not an easy read to slide through in an hour on the beach. This book requests that you join into our thinking, consider a variety of lenses on research writing, ponder about where and how you stand, allow your emotions/mind full sway as you enter into the sometimes heart wrenching, sometimes humorous, and we hope always pertinent bits about other people’s research, try some writing experiences, mesh a flow of ideas within and across the chapters, assess your place in qualitative research writing endeavors, create your own plans and solutions as you see fit, and take some chances.
It was our conscious intent in writing this book to reach out to you in this manner. Not as an exercise but because all of our experiences tell us that this is the only way to go. In a sense we four are talking to ourselves. We talk to those things we have learned over the years, to those things that devil us, puzzle us still, to those unfinished raw issues that get clearer as we write. We invite you into our continuing conversation. We hope you enter the dance. We sincerely invite you to share your experiences and thoughts with us as you work to shape your materials. We need to be part of the widening circle—from ‘you’ to ‘us.’ It is no accident that we have subtitled our book Living by Words.
Margot Ely
Ruth Vinz
Maryann Downing
Margaret Anzul
March, 1997

Chapter 2
What Is There about Writing?

Consciousness, I suggest, is in part defined by the way it always reaches beyond itself. (Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination)
This book is about creating research writing that is useful, believable, and interesting. Toward that end, we connect what we’ve learned through our own writing of research with the strivings of others, both experienced and novice, who are trying to understand how writing helps us compose and represent meaning from data. However, this book is not a treatise on theories and strategies about writing in general. Many others have produced these, and we’d only create detours and possibly some ennui and irritation were we to go down that path. Our aim in this book, our contract with you, our readers, is to highlight those aspects of writing that help us compose meaning from our research data and present it in meaningful ways for others.
We’ve had a very hard time coming to grips with what to exclude. We are, after all, academics! What to include? What to winnow? Here we attend to a very select number of issues about writing research and foreshadow some others to be developed later on. We focus on these issues precisely because we believe that they constitute the heart of the considerations that must be faced and internalized by writers of qualitative research. We discuss how the act of writing itself involves us in a quest. Writing helps us attend to the odd intersections or unexpected corridors of meaning and to the unexamined echoes and resonances that lead to sense-making as we write our way through various versions of understandings. Aware, then, of the importance of writing in composing and articulating meaning, we suggest ways in which the writing leads toward intensified discovery and representation.

Why Write?

While one premise of this book is that there are some ways and means that make writing more do-able and worthwhile, we cannot—we do not wish to—escape saying that writing demands commitment, serious intent, and hard work. It seems almost embarrassing to put these words on paper. However, we feel that in a society much given to offering painless ways to do hard things—lose 20 pounds in three weeks, do five minutes of these daily exercises for a wonderful body, use this cream and shed your wrinkles, read this book and rejuvenate your marriage—it is worth emphasizing that writing takes great dedication and effort. Out of the writing itself may come understandings that enhance our lives, insights that stun and energize, products that touch us and others deeply, and pleasure in the writing that is narcotic in its call to stay at it—but not without effort.
In our work with other qualitative researchers we’ve found this committed spirit present more often than not. Many of us burn to tell well-crafted stories, and we’re aware of the price—perhaps more as we go along than at the beginning. This makes perfect sense. One novice researcher, Sally Smith, explained that through continuous writing she came to understand her data differently:
Meta-thoughts about writing rarely occurred to me at first: Writing was transcribing. Looking more closely at the field logs, I began to pull out themes to analyze, to look at my own stance toward this new experience. At the end of this phase, I wrote an article— which required me to step back from the field—in it I explored an important metaphor— messiness, the often awkward, confusing untidiness of making one’s way in qualitative research, the messy quality of knowledge/learning in general.
After a tim...

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