Situational Analysis in Practice

Mapping Relationalities Across Disciplines

Adele E. Clarke, Rachel Washburn, Carrie Friese, Adele E. Clarke, Rachel Washburn, Carrie Friese

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000540123
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Recherche et méthodologie en psychologie

Situational Analysis (SA) uses analytic maps of the situation, processes and relations identified using approaches pioneered in Grounded Theory. Creator of the method, award-winning sociologist Adele E. Clarke, with Rachel Washburn and Carrie Friese, show how the method can be, and has been, used in a variety of critical qualitative studies.

The entirely new second edition of this book offers several chapters on the method and new introductory material from the editors about developments in using SA in qualitative inquiry. Part I introduces readers to the method of SA, discussing recent developments in the field. Part II offers five new chapters about various facets of the SA method, including a history of Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis, SA as critical pragmatist interactionism, using SA in managing a mixed-methods project, and SA mapping in the social policy classroom and in clinical counseling as innovatively collaborative analysis. Part III offers six new exemplary research articles drawn from energy research and international relations, public health research methods, disabled access to public transportation, participation in conservation in a biosphere reserve, and PTSD and the military. Authors' reflections on their experiences in using the method are also included.

These carefully selected new readings vividly demonstrate how widely this method has travelled, successfully meeting the needs of diverse researchers seeking an innovative relational approach to critically analyzing a wide array of data. Situational Analysis in Practice will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students practicing the SA method across the social sciences, including sociology and healthcare among other disciplines, as well as research scholars interested in qualitative inquiry.

PART I Introducing Situational Analysis

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

DOI: 10.4324/9781003035923-2

Welcome to the second edition of Situational Analysis in Practice, an all-new reader of articles on the qualitative method of Situational Analysis used in interpretive research. The first edition (Clarke, Friese & Washburn 2015) was inspired by a session, invited by Norman Denzin, of innovative papers that focused on using this method. This session was presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Urbana, Illinois in 2013. Those reflective papers, along with the original research publications based on Situational Analysis of their authors, became the core of the first edition. Its title was derived from Strauss and Corbin’s (1997) Grounded Theory in Practice.

Since the first edition, the method of Situational Analysis (SA) has come into its own both transnationally and, like grounded theory, across an exceptionally wide range of disciplines and specialties (see Appendix B). Happily these developments are vividly apparent in the new articles selected for inclusion in this second co-edited edition.

Part I introduces readers to the method of SA and discusses several recent developments in it. Part II offers five new chapters about various facets of the SA method, including innovative applications in the classroom and in counseling. Part III offers six new exemplars of research that used SA. A wide range of research projects is presented both in terms of discipline and geopolitical areas. We also include here these authors’ reflections on their experiences with using the method. These exemplars were selected to demonstrate excellent use of the various maps in a single, journal-length publication. Based on the first edition, we believe that such articles are especially useful for those early in their careers and/or new to SA or qualitative inquiry more broadly. We were thrilled to find such outstanding new exemplars for this volume and hope they will be very useful to you.

1 INTRODUCING SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

Adele E. Clarke, Rachel Washburn and Carrie Friese

DOI: 10.4324/9781003035923-3

In this chapter, we first introduce Situational Analysis (hereafter SA)¹ as a method used in the analysis of qualitative data in interpretive projects. Next, we offer a brief overview of its theoretical and methodological foundations, and then we turn to a description of the four main kinds of Situational Analysis maps involved in doing an SA research project: situational, relational, social worlds/arenas, and positional maps. Additional sections take up the issues, what is the situation in situational analysis, the definition and use of abduction in SA, and some distinctive affordances of SA as a method.

SA was developed early this century by Adele Clarke (2003, 2005) as an extension of the Grounded Theory (GT) research tradition. Clarke had been a student of Anselm Strauss (1916‒1996), a co-developer with Barney Glaser of GT (Glaser & Strauss 1967). She had used and taught GT since 1980, and gradually developed critiques of it that led her to generate a new approach to interpretive analysis—SA.

By the turn of this century, there were three major GT approaches in use: Glaserian GT (e.g., Glaser 1992, 1998, 2016) with positivist/realist assumptions; Straussian GT (e.g., Strauss 1987; Strauss & Corbin 1990, 1998; Corbin & Strauss 2008, 2015) with pragmatist/interactionist assumptions; and Constructivist GT (e.g., Charmaz 2000, 2006, 2014; Bryant 2017; Bryant & Charmaz 2007, 2018) with pragmatist/interactionist and constructivist assumptions and emphases on both researcher reflexivity and social justice.²

Sometimes seen as the fourth major GT approach, Situational GT, SA also stands on its own and differs. While drawing on both Straussian and constructivist modes of GT in its development, SA makes very different fundamental assumptions about the focus of research. In GT, the primary focus is on human action—on the processes of what is happening socially. In sharp contrast, in SA primary focus is on the situation being studied, on all the elements in that situation both human and nonhuman, and on the varied relations among those elements. This new focus is foundational to SA.

SA analysis is done through making four very different kinds of maps (all discussed and illustrated below), and writing memos about the analyses provoked by making, amending and studying them. Each map analyzes the situation being studied from a different angle of vision. Together, the maps and accompanying memos (all redone many times across the trajectory of the project) can yield a powerful and insightful analyses of that situation.

Theoretical Foundations of Situational Analysis

The theoretical foundations of SA are also broader than those of constructivist GT which center on pragmatist interactionism. While SA also draws on that tradition, it adds special emphasis on Strauss’s (1978, 1982a, b) social worlds/arenas theory and mapping (discussed below). For the concept of the situation, SA relies on several scholars. A major contributor, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1938: 66), wrote that a “‘situation’ is not a single object or event … but … [It] binds all constituents into a whole [and] it is also unique.” Interactionist sociologist Norman Denzin saw “situating interpretation” as requisite in both The Research Act (1970, 1989, 2009) and Interpretive Interactionism (1989, 1997). And Donna Haraway’s (1991) famous feminist concept of embodied objectivity is called situated knowledges and recommends developing strong reflexivity. All matter in SA.

Michel Foucault (1979) was also theoretically inspiring of SA. He highly recommended going “beyond the knowing subject” of classic interview research to also include “discursive fields.” Because we are awash in multiple “seas” of discourse—including social media—SA deeply encourages analyzing extant discourse materials (narrative, visual & historical) found in the situation being studied as well as in-depth interviews and ethnographic field notes as data.³

As both a pragmatist philosophically and a science and technology studies (STS) scholar, it was also very important to Clarke that SA take the nonhuman elements in the situation explicitly into account. Pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934) and pragmatist interactionist sociologist Susan Leigh Star (1995) both raised concerns with the relational ecologies among animate and inanimate things in their writings. And STS has long been concerned with “nonhuman actors” as agentic—active in situations (e.g., Latour & Woolgar 1979). Moreover, attending to materialities in situations raises posthumanist issues—going beyond the idea that only humans “really” matter or “matter most” in a given situation. In SA, what matters most in a situation is an empirical research question—to be answered through doing research.

SA also draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of rhizome and assemblage, especially in designing Messy Situational Maps. In botany, rhizomes are subterranean horizontal networks with multiple nodes of potential that may give rise to new entities (e.g., irises, bamboo). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 21) noted: “[T]he rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed … always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits … It has neither beginning nor end.” Similarly, an assemblage brings together heterogeneous entities in dynamic, fluid relations; it can expand, contract and is an inherently unstable phenomenon.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage is an inspirational metaphor for theorizing in SA precisely because of the looseness of connections among heterogeneous entities and the instabilities of those connections. Doing research requires us to attempt to see things at one historical moment, while also acknowledging that things are always changing, that our analyses are conditional—and can only be conditional. They are by nature partial and temporally bounded. Coming to terms with this both theoretically and in practice is integral to becoming a qualitative researcher.

Last, SA’s theoretical foundations draw upon critical interactionism (e.g., Jacobsen 2019; Clarke & Star 2007). As Charmaz (2005: 508) reminds us, justice and injustice are “enacted processes.” Critical interactionism fundamentally assumes that interactionism is a conflict-based theory/methods package in which differences of perspectives, commitments, allegiances, and so on, actively shape social life individually and collectively. Conflict is not limited to social class but also includes race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality—any patterned means of marginalization or stratification. Collectivities are assumed to be characterized by inter- and intra-organizational contestations and conflicts over power—politics writ both small and large (e.g., Blumer 1958; Evergeti 2011). In SA, both the social worlds/arenas and positional maps attend to these kinds of conflicts.

Historically, interactionists have relentlessly pursued the analysis of power as dynamic and situated (e.g., Dennis & Martin 2005: 199–201). In a figure/ground gestalt switch, critical interactionism makes it the new focus. As Clarke was a women’s studies scholar for some years, SA was always already but not only a feminist approach (e.g., Clarke 2006, 2012b).⁴ Over recent decades, an array of critical approaches has been woven into interactionism, including anti-racisms, political economies, anti-imperialisms, queer, decolonizing, indigenous, and post-structural theorizing. Here we include for example Schwalbe’s (2008, 2014, 2015) social psychology of domination and Charmaz’s (2005, 2017a, b, 2021; Charmaz, Thornberg & Keane 2018) constructivist grounded theory (CGT), social justice orientation and her (2016) argument that stories of suffering have many layers and much to teach us. Both Charmaz’s and Clarke’s methods have been seen as appropriate to and are utilized in indigenous and decolonizing research (e.g., Bainbridge et al., 2019).⁵ In sum, we urge using a critical approach “in the belief that effective political understanding and action might still be possible” (Lather 2020: 768).

Methodological Foundations of Situational Analysis

The major methodological foundations of SA include the concept of theory-methods packages, social worlds/arenas theory, the situation as the unit of analysis, researcher reflexivity and analyzing complexities, including positionalities and differences. Each and all of these require gathering rich and diverse data. “Data allow us to learn from the stories of those left out and permits research participants to break silences. Data can help us look underneath and beyond our privileges, and alter our views” (Charmaz & Belgrave 2019: 743).⁶ We next address each of these issues in turn.

While the idea that theories and methods are interrelated has deep roots in pragmatist philosophy (Dewey 1939) and interactionist sociology (Blumer 1969), the concept of theory-methods packages was coined by Susan Leigh Star (1989). She describes theory and methods as “coconstitutive”: theories contain the epistemological roots of those methods that “fit” with their precepts, implying that other methods do not fit. That is, only certain methods are congruent with certain theoretical assumptions about the world and about how we can know.

Another major methodological foundation of SA is social worlds/arenas theory and mapping, developed by Anselm Strauss separately from his work on GT (Strauss 1978b, 1982, 1984). In their earlier GT book, Glaser and Strauss (1967) had developed the concept of “structural process” to capture how these usually separate and distinctive concepts in social science are actually related quite complexly. Both GT and Strauss and colleagues’ (Strauss 1978a; Strauss et al. 1964) concept of “negotiated orders” had focused on processual aspects. With social worlds/arenas theory and mapping, Strauss (1978b, 1982, 1984) turned his attention to elaborating more structural dynamics of social life, and largely continued in this vein for the rest of his career (e.g., Strauss 1991, 1993). Social worlds/arenas maps are integral to SA and definitions of world...