Doing Qualitative Research in Social Work

Ian Shaw, Sally Holland

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446252871, 9781446252826
• eBook ISBN: 9781473905030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing key developments and debates together in a single volume, this book provides an authoritative guide for students and practitioners embarking on qualitative research in social work and related fields. 

Frequently illustrated with contemporary and classic case examples from the authors' own empirical research and from international published work, and with self-directed learning tasks, the book provides insight into the difficulties and complexities of carrying out research, as well as sharing 'success' stories from the field. Shaw and Holland have long experience of writing for practitioners and students and in making complex concepts accessible and readable, making this an ideal text for those engaging in qualitative social work research at any level. 

Ian Shaw is a Professor of Social Work at the University of York and at the University of Aalborg.

Sally Holland is a Reader in Social Work at the School of Social Sciences in Cardiff University.

PART I

What is Distinctive about Qualitative Social Work Research?

ONE

Qualitative Research and the Social Work Context

We open the book by inviting you to consider an example of qualitative social work research. Extending from this, we consider two general questions during the chapter. First, what is entailed in a commitment to qualitative research? Second, how does social work frame and infuse the practice of qualitative research? In response to the first question we examine how qualitative research has developed an understanding of subjective meanings and also the routines of everyday life. We introduce three areas of debate within qualitative methods: whether qualitative methods should be seen as a paradigm position; the relationship between numbers and qualities; and the kinds of knowledge claims that may be made from different methods. The social work character of qualitative research comes under scrutiny throughout this opening section of the book. In this chapter we take up the significance of social work contexts.

Through their personal memory people give meaning to what has happened to them. When people are involved in traumatic events, they are faced with questions regarding their identity and relation with others and the world. On the one hand, they have the need to recollect and process those memories; on the other hand, they feel a need to distance themselves and forget or detach from the pain and threat involved in such memories.

Seeking to understand these issues, several different researchers – men and women – interviewed twenty couples who had been involved in domestic violence. Guy Enosh and Eli Buchbinder say that

In the process of remembering, the interviewee might recall a sensitive event in detail, reliving it to the fullest and re-experiencing the feelings felt during the event. At other times, interviewees might narrate events at various levels of distance, taking the position of an outsider or of an observer witnessing the experience … To describe this range of ways of reconstructing experience, from full reliving of the experience to its disowning, we use the terms ‘knowledge’, ‘focus of awareness’ and ‘alienation’. (Enosh and Buchbinder, 2005: 14)

There is little knowledge regarding the processes by which such memories are constructed. They suggest an understanding of ‘approaching and distancing’ (remembering and forgetting) around the axes of emotional involvement and linguistic abstraction. Analysis of the data yielded four broad categories:

• ‘Knowledge’, defined as direct remembering and reliving, with complete details of the event.

• ‘Awareness of mental processes’, including awareness of emotions and of cognitive processes.

• ‘Awareness of identity’, including awareness of values and the construction of personal characteristics of each partner and of the couple as a unit.

• ‘Alienation’, characterised by a refusal to observe, reflect or remember.

Enosh and Buchbinder’s article exemplifies much of what is characteristic of qualitative research. For example, we suggest in Chapter Three that more than 70 percent of qualitative social work research relies on some form of interview as its primary method of collecting data. The authors of this article were aware of one possible limitation of that approach and so modify it by focusing their attention on the reconstruction of narrative memory as a means of remedying the inconsistency of methods that rely on self-report in domestic violence.

More unusually, they carried out joint interviews with couples. In the later chapter on ‘Asking Questions’ we show that there is considerable diversity in forms of interviewing, and some important recent developments of the method. In the ‘Telling Stories’ chapter we give considerable space to narrative methods.

An obvious feature of the article is how the authors are endeavouring to understand things that we may think of as largely ‘internal’ – memories and how people sort and manage them. In a way that is strikingly different from, for example, a questionnaire or a measurement scale, the understanding of behaviour is mediated through a primary emphasis on what things mean to people, and also on how that meaning emerges from the research process – in this case by talking to two people simultaneously. Meaning is, we might say, ‘co-constructed’. They talk in the article about how this influenced the analysis of the data. They searched for themes in the data, but did so in a way that inserted those themes back into their context, rather than treating them as abstract ‘variables’. We unpack methods of analysing qualitative data towards the end of the book.

They are not writing any qualitative study, but one that is about social work. This comes over in different ways. For example, domestic violence is centrally, though not exclusively, a social work concern. In Chapter Two we analyse the range of research problems that characterise qualitative social work research. Interviewing couples where at least one of them has been violent towards the other is a sensitive topic. In the next chapter we ask whether social work research is especially sensitive, and what we mean when we talk about doing ‘sensitive’ research. Finally, although they emphasise how to understand memory, there is an undercurrent of concern about applications of their work. We talk during this book about how the explicitness of the applied agenda of social work research varies considerably from one study to another.

The article poses a further issue. Interviewing couples about domestic violence may be regarded as ethically complex and even controversial. Qualitative research poses ethical and political problems. We take these up in Chapter Six, and elsewhere in discussions of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘standpoints’.

To enable us to get inside the book we treat this chapter as setting out how to approach qualitative research in social work. We do this by considering two broad questions. First, what is entailed in a commitment to qualitative research? Second, how, in general terms, does ‘social work’ frame and infuse the practice of qualitative research?

Qualitative research

We have taken for granted so far that we can refer to qualitative research without undue ambiguity. However, any attempt to list the shared characteristics of qualitative research will fall short of universal agreement, and some think the effort itself is misguided. We say more about these challenges of diversity and delusion in a few paragraphs’ time. Nonetheless, most qualitative researchers would appeal to and identify with the majority of the following descriptors.

• It involves immersion in situations of everyday life. ‘These situations are typically “banal” or normal ones, reflective of the everyday life of individuals, groups, societies and organizations’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 6). It involves ‘looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms’, so that ‘understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity’ (Geertz, 1973: 14).

• The researcher’s role is to gain an overview of the whole of the culture and context under study.

• Holism is pursued through inquiry into the particular. This contrasts with methods where ‘[t]he uniqueness of the particular is considered “noise” in the search for general tendencies and main effects’ (Eisner, 1988: 139). Grand realities of Power, Faith, Prestige, Love, etc. are confronted ‘in contexts obscure enough… to take the capital letters off’ (Geertz, 1973: 21). Qualitative research studies ‘make the case palpable’ (Eisner, 1991: 39).

• The whole and the particular are held in tension. ‘Small facts speak to large issues’ (Geertz, 1973: 23), and ‘in the particular is located a general theme’ (Eisner, 1991: 39). Patrick Kavanagh, the Irish poet, wrote ‘parochialism is universal. It deals with the fundamentals’.

All great civilisations are based on parochialism. To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of woody meadows, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.

Robert Macfarlane, from whose essay we have taken this quotation,¹ says that for Kavanagh, ‘the parish was not the perimeter, but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen’.

• ‘The researcher attempts to capture data on the perceptions of local actors “from the inside”, through a process of deep attentiveness, of empathic understanding (verstehen), and of suspending or “bracketing” preconceptions about the topics under discussion’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 6). Stanley Witkin talks in this context about the need for us to have ‘a theory of noticing’, and to look for rich points (Witkin, 2000a).

• This stance is sometimes referred to as one of ‘ethnomethodological indifference’ (after Garfinkel). However, ‘bracketing’ preconceptions, even if it is possible, need not preclude taking a normative position – ‘you do not have to be neutral to try to be objective’ (Wolcott, 1990: 145). ‘Appreciation does not necessarily mean liking something… Appreciation … means an awareness and an understanding of what one has experienced. Such an awareness provides the basis for judgement’ (Eisner, 1988: 142). Indeed, qualitative approaches ‘can effectively give voice to the normally silenced and can poignantly illuminate what is typically masked’ (Greene, 1994: 541).

• Respondent or member categories are kept to the foreground throughout the research. This is linked to a strong inductive tradition in qualitative research – a commitment to the imaginative production of new concepts, through the cultivation of openness on the part of the researcher. One of the most difficult challenges for the qualitative researcher is how to develop a convincing account of the relationship between the language, accounts and everyday science of those to whom she has spoken and her own analytic categories.

• When it comes to those analytic categories, qualitative research is characteristically interpretive. ‘A main task is to explicate the ways people in particular settings come to understand, account for, take action, and otherwise manage their day-to-day situations’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 7). For qualitative researchers, subjectivity is created by culture, and does not simply display it. This is partly what is meant when the word ‘constructivist’ is used.

• The researcher is essentially the main instrument in the study, rather than standardised data collection devices. It is here that the word ‘reflexive’ often occurs – referring to the central part played by the subjectivities of the researcher and of those being studied. Qualitative fieldwork is not straightforward. ‘The features that count in a setting do not wear their labels on their sleeve’ (Eisner, 1991: 33). The part played by the self in qualitative research also raises the special significance of questions of ethics in qualitative research, and renders the relationship between researcher and researched central to the activity.

• Finally, most analysis is done in words. This is true – perhaps even more so – with the advent of increasingly sophisticated software for analysing qualitative data. There are frequent references in this connection to ‘texts’. Judgement and persuasion by reason are deeply involved, and in qualitative research the facts never speak for themselves.

Is there a central organising idea behind this characterisation of qualitative research? Maybe not, and anyway the question is not very interesting. But we like, for example, Elliot Eisner’s comment that qualitative research slows down the perception and invites exploration, and releases us from the stupor of the familiar, thus contributing to a state of wide-awakeness (Eisner, 1991). He compares this to what happens when we look at a painting. If there is a core – a qualitative eye – it has been expressed in different ways. For Riessman, it is ‘Scepticism about universalising generalisations; respect for particularity and context; appreciation of reflexivity and standpoint; and the need for empirical evidence’ (Riessman, 1994: xv).

Qualitative research is not a unified tradition. The term qualitative ‘refers to a family of approaches with a very loose and extended kinship, even divorces’ (Riessman, 1994: xii). These differences of research practice stem from diverse theoretical positions. While there have been numerous cross-currents that muddy the waters of these differences, it is helpful to think of them as following two general lines.

Subjective meanings

The first of these different traditions starts with the subjective meanings that people attribute to their actions and environments, and follows through to the work of Norman Denzin on interpretive interactionism, much of the work on the sociology of knowledge and on subjective theories, and some of the influences from feminist research and postmodernism. Symbolic interactionism lies behind most approaches that stress studying subjective meanings and individual ascriptions of meaning. Symbolic interactionist research is founded on the premises that

• People act towards things on the basis of the meanings such things have for them.

• The meaning is derived from interactions one has with significant members of one’s social networks.

• Meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things encountered (Flick, 2006).

These processes form the starting point for empirical work. Is culture people’s beliefs or material artifacts (subjective or objective)? In Geertz’s much alluded to essay on thick description, he said ‘Once human behavior is seen as … symbolic action … the question as to whether culture is patterned action or a frame of mind or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense’ (Geertz, 1973: 10). For him the meaning of culture ‘is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other – they are things of this world. The thing to ask is what their import is … what is being said’ (ibid., p. 10).

This position developed out of American philosophical traditions of pragmatism, and the work of people in Chicago early in the twentieth century, and was given its fullest early statements in the writings of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. The reconstruction of such subjective viewpoints becomes the instrument for analysing social worlds. There h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• Part I What is Distinctive about Qualitative Social Work Research?
• Part II Doing Qualitative Social Work Research
• Part III The Purposes of Qualitative Social Work Research
• References Archives
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index