Epistemology and Metaphysics for Qualitative Research

Tomas Pernecky

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781446282397, 9781446282380
• eBook ISBN: 9781473987708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This clearly written and provocative text outlines the wide range of epistemological and metaphysical pillars of research.

In a clear, easy to follow style, the reader is guided through an array of concepts that are defined, explained and made simple. With the aid of helpful examples and case studies, the book challenges the prevailing modes of thinking about qualitative inquiry by showcasing an immense variety of philosophical frameworks. Armed with a strong understanding of this philosophical backbone, students will be able to choose and defend a 'pick and mix' of research methods that will uniquely complement their research.

• Empiricism
• Rationalism
• Realism
• Skepticism
• Idealism
• Positivism
• Post-positivism
• Idea-ism
• Hermeneutics
• Phenomenology
• Social Ontology
• Quantum Mechanics 

Essential reading for new and experienced researchers, this 'must' for any social science bookshelf will help unlock a new level of research creativity.

PART I Qualitative Inquiry and Philosophy

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above.

(Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2014)

One Introduction: Situating Metaphysics and Epistemology in Qualitative Research

Epistemology and metaphysics are the fundamental philosophical pillars of any research. While most human beings make epistemological and metaphysical judgements on a daily basis, unless engaged in a scholarly activity, the average person does not contemplate complex philosophical questions, such as whether invisible subatomic particles can be said to exist or the possibility of social reality. Rather, we1 trust our senses and take our perceptions for granted. This introductory chapter prepares the ground for our inquiry centred on the problem of knowledge and reality within the wider qualitative landscape. The chapter begins by signposting some of the key views and events that have contributed to the ways in which qualitative research unfolds today. A secondary, but no less important, aim is to provide a critical assessment of the increasingly challenging philosophical terrains students and academics must navigate. It will be argued that most conceptual schemata are limited in their capacity to capture the complexity and richness of the diverse streams of philosophical thought that have emerged and evolved over the past two millennia, and that those schemata responsible for the current paradigmatic dominance are too limiting to accomplish this task. As qualitative research becomes a more heterogeneous blend of various philosophical stances in an intricate web of interests, principles, ideals, and values, it is no longer sufficient to speak of only one way of embracing realism or absolutism, of only one type of objectivism, or to take a univocal approach to constructionism,2 idealism, hermeneutics, or phenomenology. There are a multitude of philosophical and methodological horizons which require us to think in terms of flows and continua as opposed to rigid frameworks. Although there have been a number of useful conceptual structures devised to assist scholars in blending philosophical decisions with methodologies and methods, and although these models will continue to play an important role in qualitative research, they come with limitations. In order to demonstrate the various ways in which philosophical assumptions can be organized to guide research, this chapter will concentrate on Crotty’s (1998) structure of the research process, Lincoln and Guba’s (2000) outline of alternative inquiry paradigms, and Lally’s (1981) anatomy of metatheoretical and epistemological assumptions in social science. These frameworks have been selected for their popularity and to demonstrate their conceptual range. This chapter concludes with a delineation of the core concerns raised along the way, upon which subsequent chapters are built.

Multiple histories of qualitative research

Qualitative research, as defined for the purposes of this book, is a mode of inquiry capable of accommodating a wide array of philosophical perspectives and methods, stretching on an attitudinal continuum from means to orientation. This notion is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8, nonetheless it is imperative to establish upfront that it would be too simplistic to conceive of qualitative research purely in terms of choosing a set of methods. Rather, there are a number of considerations which determine the shape and scope of one’s project, including the research aims; the researcher’s or one’s own philosophical assumptions, values and moral sensitivities; the impact on local communities and co-researchers’ lives; and, for some, also the critical engagement with issues of emancipation, empowerment and silencing – intertwined with the act of inquiry. Therefore, there is no single correct approach to qualitative research, and this text does not seek to offer a simple definition that would accurately capture the immense variety of qualitative works. Such a reductionist ideal would miss the point and be counterproductive for the task before us.

To articulate the different discourses and to show that qualitative research is a vibrant area benefiting from a multitude of voices, Brinkmann, Jacobsen and Kristiansen (2014), who refer to it as a ‘field’, have chosen to offer not just one historical account of it but a variety of histories. Their multi-faceted approach yields as many as six types of historical accounts of qualitative research: conceptual, qualitative, internal, marginalizing, repressed, social, and technological. In this section we briefly explore some of their differences.

With respect to the conceptual history of qualitative research, although the term itself is a relatively recent one, the notion of it originates in the ideas of our philosophical predecessors who put in place the early philosophical building blocks. Brinkmann et al. (2014) take note of the Enlightenment thinkers who distinguished between the qualities (‘qualia’) and the quantities (‘quanta’) of things. For instance, they call attention to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who argued as early as 1810 that there is a difference in the study of colours according to Newtonian optics and how colours are experienced through the human senses. In Goethe’s view, the latter, embodied experience was just as significant as the physics of colour perception, and his Theory of Colours is described by Brinkmann et al. as an early qualitative phenomenological study. Other philosophical giants, including Descartes, Locke, and Hume, saw the need to distinguish between primary qualities, those that are independent of observers, and secondary ones, which are observer-dependent. This early separation between ‘appearances’ and the ‘intrinsic properties’ of objects is, in contemporary terms, formulated as the problem of objectivism versus subjectivism, and will occupy us later in the book.

We can go beyond Brinkmann et al. and probe even deeper into our historical past. The ancient philosophers pondered many of the fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge with which we still grapple today. For example, the proponents of scepticism, such as the Greeks Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrho, contested the ‘givens’ of perception and radically undermined the views of the empirically oriented philosophers. Likewise, the philosophical ideas put forth by the proponents of relativism, including Protagoras, and later Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, and many others, played a major role in shaping the discourse between the doctrines of realism and anti-realism. And therefore, as commented by Laudan, ‘struggles between realist and relativist perspectives span the entire history of epistemology’ (1997: 139). When we adopt a longitudinal approach to qualitative research, we realize that it is in many ways a continuation of the older debates – albeit fuelled by contemporary concerns, novel theoretical perspectives, and innovative methods.

The second, internal history of qualitative research focuses our attention on the dedicated qualitative thinkers from inside the field. Here, Brinkmann et al. (2014: 20) outline what they call the ‘three philosophical foundations of qualitative research’: the German tradition of Verstehen, with figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002); the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938); and the North American traditions of pragmatism, Chicago sociology, Erving Goffman’s (1922–1982) dramaturgical approach, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. These traditions, of course, come with an elaborate list of intellectuals – each making a contribution to what have become rather heterogeneous and at times radically different schools of thought. Later in this book we will see that there is not just one phenomenology but rather a variety of strands of phenomenological thought, that there is not just one symbolic interactionism but rather many approaches within this tradition (Herman and Reynolds (1994) noted that there were up to 15 varieties), and that there is no one univocal hermeneutics, idealism, or constructionism.

The third, marginalizing history of qualitative research is a reminder that qualitative researchers have been subjected to hostile attitudes by scientifically oriented, or what are frequently called positivistically inclined, academics for whom qualitative research does not meet the criteria of scientific inquiry. In this regard, what is refreshing in the work of Brinkmann et al. (2014) is their acknowledgement of positivism as being too quickly dismissed and typecast as the enemy of qualitative inquiry. Pointing out that not all positivists are opposed to qualitative research, the authors comment that ‘when qualitative researchers distance themselves from positivism, they most often construct a straw man [sic] and rarely, if ever, go back and read what early positivists such as Comte, Schlick, or Carnap in fact had to say about research and human experience’ (2014: 31). This is a key point. We will follow this critical line of thought throughout this book, with Chapter 2 focusing in on the doctrine of positivism and other varieties of empiricism and addressing some of the misconceptions surrounding these.

In the fourth, repressed history of qualitative research, Brinkmann et al. provide an analysis of the discipline of psychology as a way of demonstrating that the qualitative tradition has been ‘forgotten by the official journals and handbooks of psychology to an extent that makes it resemble repression’ (2014: 32). The authors argue that the qualitative character of such research as Piaget’s work with children, Gestalt psychologists’ investigations into perception, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, and Bartlett’s work on remembering is often omitted and ‘almost always neglected and repressed’ (2014: 32). This leads them to the realization that, in charting various disciplinary developments, qualitative research has not always been noted as having played a significant role, or even any role at all – a wholly unjustified view.

The fifth, social history of qualitative research underscores the necessity to take into account the social, cultural, economic, and historical contexts within which qualitative research takes place. This approach is an invitation to consider not only cultural and social movements, which undoubtedly created new opportunities for scholars to think and express themselves differently (particularly in the 1960s and 1970s), but also soft forms of power. Brinkmann et al. caution against the naïve conception of qualitative inquiry simply as ‘progressive’ or ‘emancipatory’, and explain that qualitative market research, for example, has become a powerful tool in the manipulation of consumers’ desires and behaviour. This is a critical reminder that qualitative research is now firmly embedded in our social life and is applied for different purposes and agendas, including those that are economic and political.

The last type of history of qualitative research is the technological one. It makes allowance for the kinds of devices researchers utilize to gather, manage, and make sense of qualitative data. From digital voice recorders to the latest software programs, many contemporary researchers rely on a wide array of technological innovations (Brinkmann et al., 2014). It is increasingly common for scholars to work with electronic data, blogs, mind maps, transcription programs, and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) such as NVivo. Moreover, technology has been widely embraced and amalgamated into relatively novel approaches and methods, such as visual methodologies (e.g., Hughes, 2012; Rogers, 2013; Rose, 2012). Of course, as Brinkmann et al. point out, there are a number of issues related to the use of technology. Its critics are concerned that the use of software programs to manage and analyze qualitative data may lead to a certain type of analysis being favoured over others. Nonetheless, the twenty-first century qualitative researcher can be not only a bricoleur (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) but also a techno-savvy problem solver who understands that technology is useful and necessary in a digital era. And if we consider that we ‘think through, with, and alongside media’ (Hayles, 2012: 1), then much of the future research in humanities and qualitative social science is likely to rely on and incorporate the use of technology. However, there are philosophical implications researchers ought to consider when adopting numerical approaches to qualitative data, some of which are discussed in Chapter 8.

In addition to the types of histories noted above, an account of the developments in qualitative research can be also organized around a focus on specific geographical areas. Flick (2009), for example, explains that in Germany, advances on the front of qualitative research were marked by methodological consolidation and a focus on procedural questions, whereas across the Atlantic, qualitative researchers were more concerned about the issues of representation and the politics and practice of interpretation. He remarks that particularly towards the end of the 1970s, German qualitative researchers reduced their reliance on the translations of American works (what he calls the ‘import of American developments’) and began to develop original research focusing on the application and analysis of interviews. By the 1980s, Schütze’s (1977) narrative interview and Oevermann et al.’s (1979) objective hermeneutics had become pivotal in the development of an original approach to qualitative research in Germany. The ‘historical moments’ delineated by Denzin and Lincon (1994) stand as rather unique and specific to the North American context.

The ‘historical moments’ of qualitative research in North America

Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1994) worked diligently to map several ‘historical moments’ in qualitative research. These have become a popular way of chronologically marking specific ideas and concerns over the past decades. As noted in the previous section, the moments correspond to developments within the qualitative communities in North America, and have been outlined as follows: ‘the traditional (1900–1950); the modernist or golden age (1950–1970); blurred genres (1970–1986); the crisis of representation (1986–1990); the postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990–1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000); the methodologically contested present (2000–2004); and the future (2005–), which is now’ (Denzin, 2010b: 13). In the view of Denzin and Lincoln, qualitative research has reached the eighth moment, which ‘asks that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization, freedom, and community’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011a). We shall not describe each moment here, for this has now become the habit of nearly every text on qualitative research, but we will address some of the concerns and misconceptions surrounding these moments.

The act of conceptually dividing qualitative research into different periods or ‘moments’, and framing these in terms of ‘progress’, has been questioned – particularly by scholars within the field of ethnography (Atkinson et al., 1999, 2003; Atkinson et al., 2007; Delamont et al., 2000). Atkinson et al. argue that it is misleading to assume that the early ethnographic figures saw their work as ‘positivist’, stating that they are not convinced that ‘the kind of intellectual history repeatedly sketched by Denzin and Lincoln is wholly adequate’ (2003: 21). Furthermore, they posit that Denzin and Lincoln’s chronological view ‘does a disservice to earlier generations of ethnographers’ (2003: 197), and that ‘it is far from clear that there ever were such monolithically positivist and modernist phases’ (2003: 26). In their opinion, it would be incorrect to assume that all ethnography in past generations ‘was conducted under the auspices of a positivistic and totalizing gaze as it is to imply that we are all postmodern now’ (2003: 27). Atkinson et al. make an important point about the impossibility of capturing the developme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Qualitative Inquiry and Philosophy
• One Introduction: Situating Metaphysics and Epistemology in Qualitative Research
• PART II Key Epistemological and Metaphysical Problems
• Two In Search of Truths: Empiricism Versus Rationalism
• Three Scepticism, Idea-ism, and Idealism
• Four German Idealism, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics
• Five Realism, its Varieties and Contenders
• PART III Intangible Realities
• Six Social Ontology
• Seven Quantum Reality: Contemporary Views of the Things-in-Themselves
• PART IV Philosophy in Qualitative Research
• Eight Conclusions: On Academic Creativity and Philosophical and Methodological Freedom
• Glossary
• References
• Index