The Quality of Qualitative Research

Clive Seale

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780761955986, 9780761955979
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This textbook is designed to help students and practicing researchers to improve the quality of their research. Practical examples and exercises demonstrate how to evaluate qualitative research, how to plan and collect good quality data, how to do thoughtful analysis, and how to write and report on qualitative research.

"Apart from its inherent readability, I found three other attractive features about the book: First is the use of exemplars based on case studies from qualitative studies, including Whyte?s Street Corner Society; second, is the quotes from key methodological texts reflecting on a range of qualitative research traditions; and third, is the use of philosophical argument and reference in the book which provided an added depth to the debate, often lacking in more practically oriented books. These deliberations take readers to a higher plane, whilst still allowing the novice to philosophy to gain an insight into theory." —Forum for Qualitative Research

"Seale steers a dispassionate course - both pragmatic and thoughtful - through the sometimes stormy waters of qualitative analysis. Anyone wanting an up-to-date picture of qualitative analysis will benefit from this book. It is truly a quality contribution to the field." —Nigel Fielding, University of Surrey

"Clearly and engagingly written, this book covers crucially important issues such as the generalisability of findings, the grounding of theory and the validity and reliability of research reports. With frequent summaries of key points, criteria for evaluating research reports and discussions exercises, this is an extremely useful text for students and professionals alike." —Derek Layder, University of Leicester

"This is a brilliant, carefully crafted, even-handed, comprehensive analysis of the multiple ways in which quality is assessed in contemporary qualitative inquiry. Clive Seale provides a balanced, subtly nuanced treatment of this key problem." —Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Chanpaign

"The coverage is impressive and the depth of scholarship impeccable. Both students and seasoned investigators will find the author?s pragmatic approach refreshing and helpful. It will appeal to the naturalistic researcher as well as to empirically-oriented scholars smitten by postmodern questions. I would definitely recommend it to my students. A splendid leading text for classroom adoption." —Jaber F Gubrium, University of Florida

"Clive Seale has performed an important service for social science researchers by finding a sane middle ground between the twin fanaticisms of radical interpretivism and quantiative scientism. His book is practical, telling people who want to get research done how to do that in an effective and reasonable way. His explanations are clear and concise, his examples well chosen, and the practices he recommends are doable. You can learn a lot about how to approach research from this book." — Howard S Becker, University of California, Santa Barbara

"For the undergraduate, or postgraduate looking for a comfortable drive through an increasingly unmanageable literature, this book provides an outstanding introduction." —Qualitative Research

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Part I

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

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1

Why Quality Matters

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CONTENTS

Denzin’s alternative

Conclusion

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I am going to start with an example because I believe that it helps to show why quality matters in qualitative research. It also shows one type of threat to quality, as well as allowing me to indicate how this might be overcome.

Announcing that qualitative research has now entered a ‘fifth moment’ in its development, two influential commentators on qualitative research, Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1994), propose that the field is now characterized by responses to a ‘double crisis’. Qualitative researchers, they say, face a ‘representational crisis’, since research texts can no longer be assumed capable of capturing lived experience in the way once thought possible. A second crisis, of ‘legitimation’, arises from this: the old criteria for evaluating the adequacy of researchers’ accounts no longer hold. Words like ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ are markers of an earlier, now largely discredited (or at least no longer fashionable) ‘moment’ in the short history of qualitative social research.

The contemporary sensibilities of the ‘fifth moment’ were expressed in raw form in a book review written some years earlier by Denzin (1988a), in which he delivered judgement on a work emanating from the ‘modernist phase’ or ‘second moment’ of qualitative research: Anselm Strauss’s (1987) book, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Denzin reflects:

this book marks the end of an era. It signals a turning point in the history of qualitative research in American sociology. At the very moment that this work finds its place in the libraries of scholars and students, it is being challenged by a new body of work coming from the neighboring fields of anthropology and cultural studies. Post-Geertzian anthropologists (Marcus, Tyler, Clifford, Bruner, Turner, Pratt, Asad, Rosaldo, Crapanzano, Fischer, Rabinow) are now writing on the politics and poetics of ethnography. They are taking seriously the question ‘How do we write culture?’ They are proposing that postmodern ethnography can no longer follow the guidelines of positivist social science. Gone are words like theory, hypothesis, concept, indicator, coding scheme, sampling, validity, and reliability. In their place comes a new language: readerly texts, modes of discourse, cultural poetics, deconstruction, interpretation, domination, feminism, genre, grammatology, hermeneutics, inscription, master narrative, narrative structures, otherness, postmodernism, redemptive ethnography, semiotics, subversion, textuality, tropes. (1988a: 432)

Denzin argues that the modernist assumption of an empirical world that can be studied objectively by qualitative methods is no longer sustainable. He makes the apparently democratic point that scientific emphasis on theory generated by researchers gets in the way of paying close attention to the theories that people use in everyday life. He says that Strauss’s modernist demand to make generalizations across cases obstructs a detailed focus on the individual characteristics of particular cases. Denzin observes: ‘By making qualitative research “scientifically” respectable, researchers may be imposing schemes of interpretation on the social world that simply do not fit that world as it is constructed and lived by interacting individuals’ (1988a: 432). Instead, we live in a postmodern world of multiple selves and endless fragmentation of experience. This, Denzin claims, has profound consequences for the practice of social and cultural research.

We thus see in this review a clash of two ‘moments’. On the one hand is the older, scientific view of Strauss. On the other hand, Denzin proposes a postscientific vision of locally relevant, temporary accounts, perhaps collaboratively written by researchers and those whose lives have been researched. No single account should dominate others in this postmodern conception which, nevertheless, is itself a successor to earlier ‘moments’.

This divide, which I may have exaggerated a little, points to a central problem for qualitative social researchers that I hope this book will help to solve. Where competing conceptions exist about such basic matters as the nature of the social world and how we may know it, and these appear difficult, if not impossible, to resolve, how is the social researcher going to decide where he or she will stand? I argue in this book that researchers can use methodological debates constructively in their research practice without necessarily having to ‘solve’ paradigmatic disputes of the sort I have outlined.

So that you can see how this might be done, I will continue to use Denzin’s work as an example.

Denzin’s alternative

Denzin himself points the way towards this resolution of paradigms or ‘moments’ since, contrary to the impression I have given so far, he does not say that the modernist grounded theory methodology of Strauss is invalid, or to be dispensed with as being in some way wrong or misguided. Such a position would in fact itself be a modernist strategy, signalling that its author is proposing some improved grand narrative for social research. Denzin is careful not to fall into this trap, instead adopting the more liberal view that grounded theorizing is simply one choice among many that qualitative researchers can make: ‘it is now clear that qualitative researchers have choices. Twenty years ago they didn’t’ (1988a: 432).

It therefore seems incumbent on us to evaluate the quality of Denzin’s alternative, which we can do by examining one of his own studies (Denzin, 1994), done in the style of deconstructionism which, in his preamble to the study, he claims ‘may be employed as a postmodern research strategy for the interpretive study of contemporary society’ (1994: 182). The work involves an analysis of the meanings of a Stanley Lumet film (The Morning After), in which a Los Angeles actress awakes to find herself next to a murdered man. The film tells the story of her struggle to avoid being framed for the murder.

At one level, Denzin’s report reads like a somewhat elaborate film review, briefly giving us the plot of the film and then recording his personal response to it. Thus, he is clearly offended by some of the underlying political messages that he sees. At a certain point Alex (the actress) meets another character (Turner) and they speak as Turner drives:

Turner: (driving, looking over his shoulder) A spade in a caddy ran into somebody.

Alex: Spade in a caddy. Is that anybody like Jack in the Box?

Turner: I wish I had the caddy dealership in Watts. Spades, ah, they spend disproportionately on their transportation, also in dressing their young.

Alex: What are you, the Klan anthropologist?

Turner: You can learn a lot about a person by the car they drive. (Denzin, 1994: 194)

Denzin comments: ‘In this dialogue, the text criticizes Turner’s racism through the two phrases “Jack in the Box,” and “Klan anthropologist,” thereby neutralizing the unpresentable through an appropriate moral stance. But the effacement of blacks stands’ (1994: 194) and later, after exegesis of messages about homosexuality contained in the film, he observes that ‘the film . . . asserts that gays and “spies” who, if not evil, are persons about whom jokes can be told’ (1994: 195). Denzin, then, is unhappy about the dependence on stereotypes that can be seen in the superficially anti-racist and pro-gay messages contained in the dialogue and characterization, saying that: ‘The above analysis reveals how the deconstructionist method may be utilized in the reading of a contemporary cultural text’ (1994: 195).

Yet his ‘findings’ (to use a word from the modernist era) are more ambitious than this. He also wishes to read the film as conveying what it is like to live in the conditions of postmodernity. For this reading, he relies heavily on the ideas of Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. In particular, he draws on Baudrillard’s (1988) depiction of America as the location of a media-dominated culture, in which the real has become ‘hyperreal’, where human beings are judged by ‘their ability to match up to media representations’ (Denzin, 1994: 188). Additionally, people’s identity is decentred and fragmented according to whatever context they inhabit at a particular moment. Alex, the key figure in The Morning After, is thus analysed by Denzin as conveying ‘a decentred character’ who drifts in and out of relationships and widely varying social settings so that she ‘is constituted in these relationships’ and yet ‘has no center’ (1994: 192). The film’s location in Los Angeles is also significant, as Denzin understands this city to be ‘the quintessential postmodern American city’ (1994: 184).

Denzin ends his analysis with a vision of the more general effects that can be achieved by the application of deconstructive method, which he now locates as falling within cultural studies rather than sociology, his previously preferred disciplinary identity: ‘Cultural studies . . . is a project informed by the politics of liberation and freedom, by a post-Marxism with no guarantees . . . texts [such as The Morning After are] ideological efforts to find a common ground in a postmodern world that has neither a fixed center nor a coherent understanding of this thing called human’ (1994: 197). He thus is mixing two postscientific tendencies within social theory, those of postmodernism and critical theory. Presumably reluctant fully to embrace the relativist tendencies within postmodernism, he wants to rescue the quest for deconstructive readings of everything by asserting a moral position on heterosexism and racism, positions that he clearly regards as foundational and unassailable.

At one level, it can be argued that evaluating this as a report of qualitative social research is inappropriate. It is a different sort of project, not setting itself up as an authoritative, defensible interpretation of a cultural artifact, but simply presenting one person’s response, from which readers are free to vary if they wish. Yet this would be to avoid some important issues. Denzin, as we saw in his review of Strauss’s book, clearly feels that his approach can be seen as an alternative strategy for doing qualitative research; at one level, at least, a successor ‘science’ to Strauss’s modernist conception. His reading also contains numerous markers of his desire to persuade readers of the truth value of his deconstructive reading. This is seen most obviously in his assumption of the correctness of the particular moral positions that he adopts. This is not an innocent, liberal-minded, personal response to a film that we can take or leave as the mood suits us, but a claim on our hearts and minds.

It is therefore an interesting exercise to apply the canons of grounded theorizing, the modernist methodology outlined by Strauss (1987), to Denzin’s text, as if it were a more conventional research report rather than the exotic new animal that Denzin himself announces. First, we may ask how well grounded are Denzin’s concepts in his data? Secondly, have his theories emerged from data, or are they preconceived and forced on the data? Thirdly, has he actively searched, through theoretical sampling perhaps, for negative instances in order to develop his theory by a method of constant comparison? (These terms are explained and illustrated further in Chapter 7 of this book.) If we can answer these questions, we may go some way towards learning what is valuable in Denzin’s choice, while retaining a sense of what is valuable in Strauss’s alternative. In this way we can learn from both, without having to resolve the matters that divide the two ‘moments’ that they represent.

First, it is clear that Denzin does not use theoretical concepts without showing the reader the phenomena to which they refer. To take just one concept, that of the decentred self, it is clear that Alex’s life exhibits this condition, and Denzin’s text describes several illustrative passages from the film to show this. On the second question, however, Denzin’s analysis is powerfully driven by a pre-existing set of theories, rather than emerging from an original reading of ‘data’. He has chosen this film to illustrate the truth of certain ideas derived from Baudrillard. He might have chosen some other film to do this, but the theoretical messages about our supposed postmodern condition would have been the same. The text is, in this sense, highly overtheorized, in the manner of the ‘theoretical capitalist(s)’ that Glaser and Strauss (1967: 10), in their original account of grounded theorizing, had wanted to overthrow. We might feel that their postmodern equivalents appear now to be renewing their ascendancy over qualitative research.

On the last question I also find Denzin’s report lacking. A fallibilistic approach, which I advocate in this book as desirable in qualitative research, is not well served by presenting a personal interpretation and then simply saying that people are free to disagree if they so wish. It requires a much more active and labour-intensive approach towards genuinely self-critical research, so that something of originality and value is created, with which, of course, people are then always free to disagree, but may be less inclined to do so because of the strength of the author’s case. Take, for example, Denzin’s belief that in a postmodern world our lives and fragmented, changing identities are overdetermined by media representations. Clearly, this belief is something that he has taken from Baudrillard. Rather than regarding this as given, Denzin might have generated a rather different form of research project investigating people’s relationships with media representations, through interviewing or observational methods. This might have led him to some novel insights about the applicability of concepts like hyperreality, grounded in data about people’s experience.

Take, too, his view that this particular film contains subtly racist and heterosexist messages. At present, we are given Denzin’s own reaction as evidence that this is the effect of particular passages of dialogue, and we are shown the dialogue itself in order to persuade us to go along with Denzin’s interpretation. How much more interesting and revealing it might be to seek to understand the responses of ordinary cinema goers to these passages in the film. At the same time, Denzin’s deconstructive method is a useful preliminary exercise in imagining the sort of questions one might ask of such cinema goers, and in formulating the more general research questions that might inform such a project, which would itself be a very different type of exercise from the review that Denzin presents.

Conclusion

We should not, of course, take this too far. It can be argued that Denzin is engaged in a different project from that of Glaser and Strauss, one of social or cultural commentary rather than social research perhaps, somewhat distanced from the need to develop ideas through a genuinely fallibilistic approach to the interaction of ideas and data. It should not, then, be judged in terms of how well he does what his predecessors did.

One could take the view that it is simply a matter of preference as to which ‘moment’ one adopts, or which approach one takes. However, this seems a characteristically postmodernist way of dealing with the issue, avoiding concerns about the purpose of social research. It also seems questionable to promote Denzin-style analysis as necessarily morally or politically superior to its modernist predecessors (see Chapter 2). If we reject preference or moral superiority as adequate reasons for adopting ‘fifth moment’ analysis, we are left with the view that such work may be a useful source of ideas, but cannot be proposed as a wholly adequate successor to more scientific conceptions of social research.

At the same time, an unproblematic return to modernist assumptions seems impossible. The widespread appeal of alternative conceptions of research is based on some fundamental dissatisfactions with the scientific world view. This book takes this tension as its starting point.

Quality does matter in qualitative research, but I agree with Denzin that the modernist headings of ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ are no longer adequate to encapsulate the range of issues that a concern for quality must raise. Instead, we need to accept that ‘quality’ is a somewhat elusive phenomenon that cannot be pre-specified by methodological rules. This in fact is the ‘threat’ to quality that I referred to at the start of this chapter: the idea that research must be carried out under the burden of fulfilling some philosophical or methodological scheme. Practising social researchers can learn to do good work from a variety of examples, done within different ‘moments’, without needing to resolve methodological disputes before beginning their work. At the same time, the quality of qualitative research is enhanced if researchers engage with philosophical and methodological debate, so that the pursuit of quality becomes a ‘fertile obsession’ (Lather, 1993) as methodological awareness devel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• PART I GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
• PART II RESEARCH PRACTICE
• Appendices
• References
• Index