Questioning Qualitative Inquiry

Critical Essays

Martyn Hammersley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412935159, 9781412935142
• eBook ISBN: 9781446244609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is qualitative research in crisis?

In Questioning Qualitative Inquiry Martyn Hammersley raises fundamental questions about the current state of qualitative social research. He examines some of the changes that have taken place within it over the past fifty years, suggesting that the move away from natural science as a model, and towards an appeal to literature and art, involves rejection of key principles that are essential to research of any kind.

Hammersley argues that, in important respects, qualitative inquiry has not lived up to the claims originally made on its behalf, and that more recent developments have worsened the situation. Insufficient attention has been given to the problems surrounding leading ideas like thick description, analytic induction, and constructionism. The argument is pursued through discussion of the work of influential writers - such as Clifford, Geertz, Denzin and Lincoln - and by detailed examination of concrete issues, like the value of interview data, the rationales for discourse and conversation analysis, the role of rhetoric in research reports, and the nature of assessment criteria.

At a time when qualitative inquiry is coming under renewed challenge in some quarters, the task of addressing the methodological problems it faces has become urgent. These essays on current developments and debates are essential reading for anyone interested in the future of qualitative research.

1

On the Failings of Qualitative Inquiry

My focus in this first chapter is on how qualitative research has developed over the past forty years. I examine what many of us claimed for it, and how far it has lived up to these claims. In effect, then, what is offered is an internal critique of qualitative research, one which assesses it according to the clarion calls sounded in the ‘paradigm wars’ of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It is important to remember that at that time there was a great deal more consensus about the nature of qualitative research, and why it was desirable, than there is today. While I write as someone who has worked in a particular country (the UK), a particular discipline (sociology), and for the most part in a particular substantive area (education) these were, to a considerable extent, in the vanguard of the shift towards qualitative method in the second half of the twentieth century (Atkinson et al. 1993). So I believe that the arguments I present here have wide relevance. Readers can, of course, judge this for themselves.

The emergence of qualitative research as a distinct approach to social science was often portrayed by its advocates as a ‘paradigm change’ or ‘scientific revolution’ of the kind that Thomas Kuhn had outlined in his historical and philosophical work on the development of natural science (Kuhn 1970). Kuhn described scientific revolutions as historical moments when it became widely recognised by researchers in the relevant field that a previously dominant paradigm had severe problems, and a new paradigm had appeared on the horizon that some believed to be superior. He argued that there was little likelihood that the disagreement between defenders of the old paradigm and advocates of the new one could be resolved through discussion. This was not just because there is never any logical or empirical means whereby the superiority of one paradigm over another can be demonstrated, but also because at the time of a scientific revolution insufficient intellectual resources are available even for effective reason-based persuasion. Instead, necessarily risky assessments have to be made; and, where a revolution succeeds, the outcome is partly determined by defenders of the old paradigm dying off and the emerging generation of researchers taking over. So, Kuhn argued that, during the throes of a scientific revolution, there can be reasonable disagreement among scientists in judgements about the potential of the new paradigm. Achieving a reason-based consensus is only possible once further work has been done within the framework of the new paradigm, so that its potential can be properly assessed. (Even then, agreement is not guaranteed – the superiority of one paradigm over another still cannot be demonstrated by either logic or empirical evidence.) What is involved in this process of assessment is discovering both whether the new paradigm resolves the anomalies that had emerged in the old one, and whether it opens up new fields of productive puzzles for normal science to pursue.

Kuhn’s work had a huge influence on qualitative researchers in the third quarter of the twentieth century, despite the fact that he explicitly excluded the social sciences from his account, viewing them as pre-paradigmatic at best. Moreover, his work was often misinterpreted.¹ For example, it was treated as showing that even the truth of a natural scientific theory is relative to the paradigm in which it was developed, so that it may be false from the point of view of a different paradigm. And it was taken to follow from this that the decision to adopt a particular paradigm is necessarily arbitrary: a matter of non-rational commitment, since what is and is not rational is always defined within a paradigm. Furthermore, the meaning of the term ‘paradigm’ was frequently extended by qualitative researchers to include political and ethical assumptions, not just theoretical and methodological ones.

While Kuhn’s perspective was not intended to apply to social science, and was often misrepresented, it is still worth looking back on forty years or so of qualitative research to consider how far it has succeeded in resolving the problems that it initially identified as intrinsic to ‘the quantitative paradigm’. As I have already indicated, Kuhn did not deny that paradigms could be evaluated, only that this could not be done in a presuppositionless way – especially not at the height of a scientific revolution. Others too have argued that, while it may not be possible to carry out a point-by-point comparison and assessment of competing paradigms, it is nevertheless feasible to make rational judgements about their relative potential. An influential example is Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of ‘three rival versions of moral inquiry’ (MacIntyre 1990). For MacIntyre, assessment can proceed by examining how well a paradigm succeeds in its own terms, and then by looking at how well it comprehends and resolves the problems that competing paradigms encounter.

The rise in influence of qualitative inquiry, whereby it came to be seen by many as a separate and superior approach, certainly resulted in part from increasing recognition of the failures of various kinds of quantitative work. Whereas these failures were generally regarded by quantitative researchers themselves as technical problems – in other words, as manageable, if not resolvable – many advocates of qualitative inquiry came to see them as more fundamental in character, as pointing to basic flaws in the ideas behind quantitative method, these often being dismissed as ‘positivist’. In part what was being rejected here was the very image of science that Kuhn’s work had undermined. Moreover, in classic Kuhnian terms, there was a sizeable revolt on the part of a new generation, who saw qualitative research as based on fundamentally different assumptions from quantitative work; plus the defection of some more established scholars from that dominant paradigm.² In the process, the attitude of most quantitative researchers towards qualitative work, at least in public, came to be one of toleration and even appreciation. It is only quite recently that there have been signs of a change back to more severe assessments.

While I still believe that the criticisms qualitative researchers made of the conventional methodological wisdom of the 1950s were largely correct, and that some of the problems with quantitative work are intractable, here I want to focus on assessing the track record of qualitative work.³ I will suggest that there is much to criticise in the way that it has developed over the past few decades. In particular, there are respects in which it has not achieved what was promised. I am not denying the major contribution it has made to many substantive fields; though I think that this is rather less than is often claimed. My focus is solely on respects in which it has failed to live up to expectations or to meet the challenges it faced.

The failings of qualitative research can be divided into two categories. The first relates to criticisms that qualitative researchers made, and continue to make, of quantitative work, thereby claiming superiority. I will call these ‘offensive failings’. The second sort of defect concerns responses to criticisms that quantitative researchers have made of qualitative research. I will call these ‘defensive failings’.

Offensive failings

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were a number of grounds on which qualitative research was widely advocated.⁴ I will pick out just two main ones: first, the need to understand people’s perspectives if their actions are to be explained; and, secondly, recognition of the extent to which social life is a contingent, and even emergent, process – rather than involving the repetition of lawlike patterns. It was argued that, because of its reliance upon pre-structured data, quantitative research was not able to provide adequate understanding of people’s perspectives. Similarly, as a result of its focus on variable analysis, it ignored the processual character of human sociation. Qualitative research was put forward as better able to meet these requirements. Here I want to examine the extent to which it has done so.

Understanding

The first argument was that in order to be able to explain – in fact, even to describe – people’s behaviour it is necessary to understand how they view the world, and themselves. What the term ‘understanding’ meant here was for the researcher to learn to be able to see things in the same terms as participants, and thereby to recognise and document the internal rationality or logic of their perspectives. Quantitative research was criticised for either ignoring these perspectives completely, focusing on external behaviour, or eliciting attitudes by structured means, which were believed by qualitative critics to introduce serious distortions. These arose, they argued, from the preoccupation of quantitative researchers with measurement. This involved too many assumptions being built into the structure of the questionnaires or interview schedules employed, assumptions which were likely to reflect the cultural background of the researcher rather than the interpretative assumptions of the people being studied. In other words, much quantitative research was criticised for being framed in terms of conventional wisdom about the field being investigated, whereas (it was suggested) proper understanding requires that prior assumptions be suspended, in order to open them up to challenge.

The danger of misunderstanding had always been obvious in anthropological and other cross-cultural research, since there were many occasions when people’s behaviour was not immediately intelligible. However, it came to be argued that the risks of distortion operated even when Western researchers studied their own societies: because of the high level of cultural differentiation within them, and also because of the creative and contextually sensitive ways in which people make sense of the world. It was pointed out that much survey research tends to assume that the dimensions of attitudinal variation are already known, and that the task is to document the number of people who see things in each of the various anticipated ways, and to explain the distribution of attitudes discovered. More fundamentally, there was a tendency to assume the existence of a cognitive consensus: that the world appeared the same way to everyone, or should do so (see Wilson 1971). Qualitative researchers insisted that, by reducing perspectives to positions on an attitude scale, a great deal could be lost that might be significant if we want to understand people’s behaviour. They argued that what is required, instead, is the use of less-structured methods, such as informal and/or open-ended interviews, since these allow people to talk freely in ways that can reveal the distinctiveness and complexity of their perspectives. Only in this way, it was suggested, could genuine variation in orientation be understood.⁵

In the field of educational research, to take an area where qualitative work gained influence very quickly in the UK during the 1970s, this resulted in detailed, exploratory investigations of students’ perspectives, particularly in secondary schools. It was argued that quantitative research either tended to assume that all students went to school simply in order to be educated, in the sense of wanting to learn the official curriculum, or it treated any deviance from this as abnormal, as a form of pathology that had to be causally explained. By contrast, qualitative researchers stressed the importance of exploring students’ perspectives and actions without prejudging the parameters of these from the outset, or using evaluative categorisations. The aim was to seek to understand students in their own terms, treating what they said and did as rational in context, and as requiring explication. This was especially important, it was argued, in the case of those who were treated as recalcitrant or deviant by the school system. The task was to discover the rationality of these students’ responses to schooling.⁶ One general way of formulating this contrast – used at the time, and deriving from the sociology of deviance – was between a correctionalist and an appreciative stance (Matza 1969).

Of course, as it emerged within sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, qualitative research was not simply a reaction against quantitative method. It was also opposed to theoretical approaches that evaluated people’s perspectives as rational or irrational against the standard of some scientific body of knowledge or purportedly rational mode of thought.⁷ For this reason, use of the concept of ideology – whether by structural functionalists or by Marxists – was often rejected as simply explaining away whatever was difficult to understand from the researcher’s chosen theoretical perspective, or on the basis of her or his background assumptions. Also, qualitative researchers criticised the common dismissal of some forms of behaviour as ‘mindless’, such as ‘vandalism’ or ‘hooliganism’, and challenged explanations of the lifestyles of some groups, notably the poor, as the product of ‘cultural deprivation’ or a ‘culture of poverty’ (Cohen 1971; Keddie 1975). Such theoretical approaches were rejected as an obstacle to genuine understanding of the lives of the people being studied.

In summary, then, the difficulty of understanding other people’s points of view was emphasised by qualitative researchers, this difficulty being believed to arise both from the complexity of people’s perspectives, and from the barriers to understanding created by those differences in assumption and orientation that frequently exist between researchers and researched. Central here was a rejection of the idea that societies operate on the basis of a widespread consensus – about either values or facts – in favour of an openness to at least the possibility that there can be heterogeneous (or even ‘incommensurable’) perspectives within a single society, organisation, or local community. Following from this, what was recommended in methodological terms was an attitude that allowed researchers to learn the cultural perspectives of the people being studied, this requiring quite lengthy contact and a relatively unstructured approach to data collection, along with forms of analysis that minimised researchers’ prior assumptions and maximised their interpretative capacities.

Now, of course, a great deal of qualitative work has indeed sought to understand, or appreciate, perspectives and actions in this manner. And its contribution in this respect has undoubtedly been substantial in many fields. However, there are some respects, both methodological and theoretical, in which it has frequently failed to live up to this appreciative commitment.

One is that qualitative researchers have often been selective in seeking to understand the perspectives of the people they study. It is true that they have attempted to understand the views of people with whom they sympathised, for political or ethical reasons; and, laudably, these have often been those subordinated, devalued, discriminated against or oppressed by the wider society. However, qualitative researchers have been less ready to seek to understand, and to represent in their own terms, the perspectives of those they regard as playing a more central or dominant social role, and/or those with whom they have little sympathy. In this way, a radical methodological principle of early qualitative research – the commitment to understanding or appreciation – became compromised. In fact, what has resulted here is a process of distortion not unlike that which qualitative researchers complained about in quantitative work; in this case the attitudes of people ‘in power’, or those judged to support the status quo or to be politically incorrect, came to be treated as pathological.

This failing is exemplified by the common misinterpretation of Becker’s influential article ‘Whose side are we on?’ (Becker 1967). This has frequently been treated as a call for partisanship, yet it was actually a demand for full commitment to objectivity, in the specific sense of being prepared to question dominant views when these are false (Hammersley 2000:ch 3 and 2004a). Becker argued that researchers must suspend the hierarchy of credibility, in terms of which those at the top of power and status structures are assumed to know more and better than those at the bottom. However, what many qualitative researchers have done is to invert this credibility hierarchy. While they have sought to appreciate the perspectives and actions of many people at the bottom of the heap, they have generally adopted a correctionalist stance towards those judged to be in power or in a privileged position. In relation to them, the usual devices of ideological analysis have been deployed.⁸

Sometimes, a more sophisticated version of this politically discriminating approach has been adopted, with elements of the perspectives of the marginalised being treated differentially, depending upon whether these are deemed rational or irrational by the – usually implicit – evaluative criteria of the analyst. An exemplar here, still much cited, is Willis’s Learning to La...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Dentists, Dadaists or discourse analysts?
• 1 On the failings of qualitative inquiry
• 2 Capturing complexity? Examining a commonly used rationale for qualitative research
• 3 On thick description: interpreting Clifford Geertz
• 4 The critical case of analytic induction
• 5 Assessing the radical critique of interviews (with Roger Gomm)
• 6 Conversation analysis and discourse analysis: self-sufficient paradigms?
• 7 The Dadaist alternative: ‘postmodernist’ qualitative research
• 8 Is qualitative research just rhetoric?
• 9 The issue of quality in qualitative research
• Epilogue
• References
• Author index
• Subject index