U2D1-68 - Follow instructions below to answer the questions regarding Identifying Qualitative Inquire Themes in Research

CHAPTER

2 Strategic Themes in Qualitative Inquiry

Hunt foxes stealthily and wolves openly.

Adapt strategies appropriately to meet different challenges.

Strategic Wisdom Strategos is a Greek word meaning “the thinking and action of a general.” What it means to be strategic is epitomized by the greatest of Greek generals, Alexander. He conducted his first independent military operation in northern Macedonia at age 16. He became the ruler of Macedonia after his father, Philip, was assassinated in 336 BCE. Two years later, he embarked on an invasion of Persia and conquest of the known world. In the Battle of Arbela, he decisively defeated Darius III, king of kings of the Persian Empire, despite being outnumbered five to one (250,000 Persians against Alexander and fewer than 50,000 Greeks).

Alexander’s military conquests are legendary. What is less known and little appreciated is that his battlefield victories depended on in-depth knowledge of the psychology and culture of the ordinary people and military leaders in the opposing armies. He included in his military intelligence information about the beliefs, worldviews, motivations, and patterns of behavior of those he faced. Moreover, his conquests and subsequent rule were more economic and political in nature than military. He used what we would now understand to be psychological, sociological, and anthropological insights. He understood that lasting victory depended on the goodwill of and alliances with non-Greek peoples. He carefully studied the customs and conditions of the people he conquered and adapted his policies—politically, economically, and culturally—to promote good conditions in each locale, so that the people were reasonably well disposed toward his rule (Garcia, 1989).

In this approach, Alexander had to overcome the arrogance and ethnocentrism of his own training, his culture, and Greek philosophy. Historian C. A. Robinson Jr. (1949) explained that Alexander was brought up on Plato’s theory that all non-Greeks were barbarians, enemies of the Greeks by nature; and Aristotle taught that all barbarians (non-Greeks) were slaves by nature. But “Alexander had been able to test the smugness of the Greeks by actual contact with the barbarians, . . . and experience had apparently convinced him of the essential sameness of all people” (p. 136).

In addition to being a great general and an enlightened ruler, Alexander appears to have been an extraordinary ethnographer, a qualitative inquirer par excellence, using observations and firsthand experience to systematically study and understand the peoples he encountered and to challenge his own culture’s prejudices. Thinking strategically, enhancing your powers of observation, becoming an ever more astute interviewer—these are not just research methods but life skills and competencies for more deeply experiencing and understanding the world and for engaging effectively in it.

Chapter Preview: The Purpose and Nature of Strategic Principles

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

—Alvin Toffler (1928– ) Futurist

A well-conceived strategy, by providing overall direction, constitutes a framework for decision making and action. It permits seemingly isolated tasks and activities to fit together, integrating separate efforts toward a common purpose. Specific study design and methods decisions are best made within an overall strategic framework. The effectiveness and impacts of the strategic approach taken can then be evaluated for quality, credibility, and utility (Mintzberg, 2007; Patrizi & Patton, 2010).

Reviewing the great variety of approaches to strategic planning requires a Strategy Safari Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (Mintzberg, Lampel, & Ahlstrand, 2008). This chapter offers a strategy safari for qualitative inquiry. We’ll review 12 major strategic principles that, taken together, constitute a comprehensive and coherent strategic framework for qualitative inquiry, including fundamental assumptions and epistemological ideals. Exhibit 2.1 summarizes these strategic principles in three modules:

Module 5 Strategic design principles for qualitative inquiry Module 6 Strategic principles guiding data collection and fieldwork Module 7 Strategic principles for qualitative analysis and reporting findings

EXHIBIT 2.1 TWELVE CORE STRATEGIES OF QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

MODULE

5 Strategic Design Principles for Qualitative Inquiry

This module covers three design strategies: (1) naturalistic inquiry, (2) emergent design flexibility, and (3) purposeful sampling.

Naturalistic Inquiry

The best [doctors] seem to have a sixth sense about disease. They feel its presence, know it to be there, perceive its gravity before any intellectual process can define, catalog, and put it into words. Patients sense this about such a physician as well: that he is attentive, alert, ready; that he cares. No student of medicine should miss observing such an encounter. Of all the moments in medicine, this one is most filled with drama, with feeling, with history.

—Michael LaCombe Annals of Internal Medicine (1993)

(Quoted in Mukherjee, 2010, p. 128)

A health researcher observes a doctor visiting her patients in a hospital. An anthropologist studies initiation rites among the Gourma people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. A sociologist observes interactions among bowlers in their weekly league games. An evaluator participates fully in a leadership training program she is documenting. A naturalist studies bighorn sheep beneath Powell Plateau in the Grand Canyon. A policy analyst interviews people living in public housing in their homes. An agronomist observes farmers’ spring planting practices in rural Minnesota. What do these researchers have in common? They are in the field studying the real world as it unfolds.

SIDEBAR

NATURALISTIC INQUIRY

Naturalistic inquiry is based on the notion that context is essential for understanding human behavior, and acquiring knowledge of human experience outside of its natural context is not possible. Conducting research in participants’ natural environments is essential. Researchers must meet participants where they are, in the field, so that data collection occurs while people are engaging in their everyday practices. Research conducted in the field allows investigators to observe participants in action in an effort to obtain a more complete understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. During the process of engaging in naturalistic inquiry, the researcher becomes the instrument for collecting data. Human beings as data collecting instruments are necessary because only humans can gather and evaluate the meaning of complex interactions. Attending to these processes in the field is necessary because the complexity of human interaction is available only in the settings of everyday life, not in a controlled laboratory setting or through created instruments.

—Jillian A. Tullis Owen (2008, p. 547) “Naturalistic Inquiry”

Qualitative designs are naturalistic to the extent that the research takes place in real-world settings and the researcher does not attempt to affect, control, or manipulate what is unfolding naturally. Observations take place in real-world settings, and people are interviewed with open-ended questions in places and under conditions that are comfortable for and familiar to them.

Egon Guba (1978), in his classic treatise on naturalistic inquiry, identified two dimensions along which types of scientific inquiry can be described: (1) the extent to which the scientist manipulates some phenomenon in advance to study it and (2) the extent to which constraints are placed on outputs, that is, the extent to which predetermined categories or variables are used to describe the phenomenon under study. He then defined “naturalistic inquiry” as a “discovery-oriented” approach that minimizes investigator manipulation of the study setting and places no prior constraints on what the outcomes of the research will be. Naturalistic inquiry contrasts with controlled experimental designs and laboratory studies where the investigator controls study conditions by manipulating, changing, or holding constant external influences and where a very limited set of outcome variables are measured. Open-ended, conversation-like interviews as a form of naturalistic inquiry contrast with questionnaires that have predetermined response categories. It’s the difference between asking, “Tell me about your reactions to the program?” versus “How satisfied were you with the program?”

1. Very satisfied 2. Somewhat satisfied 3. Not at all satisfied

In the simplest form of controlled experimental inquiry, the researcher enters the program at two points in time, pretest and posttest, and compares the treatment group with some control group on a limited set of standardized measures. Such designs assume a single, identifiable, isolated, and measurable treatment. Moreover, such designs assume that, once introduced, the treatment remains relatively constant.

While there are some narrow, carefully controlled, and standardized treatments that fit this description, in practice, human interventions (programs) are often quite comprehensive, variable, and dynamic—changing as practitioners learn what does and does not work, developing new approaches, and realigning priorities. This, of course, creates difficulty for controlled experimental designs that need specifiable, standardized, unchanging treatments aimed at producing specifiable, predetermined outcomes. Controlled experimental evaluation designs require controlling program adaptation and improvement so as not to interfere with the rigor of the research design. One contribution of qualitative inquiry in experimental designs is to document the extent to which treatment implementation unfolds as planned and, if there are variations in treatment implementation, to help interpret the implications of intervention variations for the observed and measured outcomes.

Under real-world conditions, where programs are subject to change and redirection, naturalistic inquiry replaces the fixed-treatment/outcome emphasis of the controlled experiment with a dynamic, process orientation that documents actual operations and impacts over a period of time. The qualitative evaluator sets out to understand and document the day-to-day reality of participants in the program, making no attempt to manipulate, control, or eliminate situational variables or program developments but accepting the complexity of a changing program reality. The data of the evaluation include whatever emerges as important to understanding participants’ experiences.

© 2002 Michael Quinn Patton and Michael Cochran

However, the distinction is not as simple as being in the field versus being in the laboratory; rather, the degree to which a design is naturalistic falls along a continuum with completely open fieldwork on one end and completely controlled laboratory control on the other end, but with varying degrees of researcher control and manipulation between these endpoints. For example, the very presence of the researcher, asking questions or, as in the case of formative program evaluation, providing feedback, can be an intervention that reduces the “natural” unfolding of events. Unobtrusive observations can minimize data collection as an intervention, but opportunities for unobtrusive observation are limited, and covert observations raise ethical issues that we’ll address in Chapter 6.

Let me offer two examples to illustrate variations in the naturalistic inquiry design strategy. In evaluating a wilderness-based leadership training program, I participated fully in the 10-day wilderness experience, guided in my observations by nothing more than the sensitizing concept of “leadership.” The only “unnatural” elements of my participation were that (a) everyone knew I was taking notes to document what happened and (b) at the end of each day, I conducted open-ended, conversational interviews with the staff and participants. While this constitutes a relatively pure naturalistic inquiry strategy, my presence, note taking, and interviews must be presumed to have altered somewhat the way the program unfolded. I know, for example, that my debriefing interviews with staff in the evenings got them thinking about the things they were doing that led to some changes in how they conducted the training.

The second example comes from the fieldwork of Beverly Strassmann among the Dogon people in the village of Sangui in the Sahel, about 120 miles south of Timbuktu in Mali, West Africa (Gladwell, 2000). Her study focused on the Dogon tradition of having menstruating women stay in small, segregated adobe huts at the edge of the village. She observed the comings and goings of these women and obtained urine samples from them to be sure they were menstruating. The women slept in the isolation huts, but during the day, they went about their normal activities. For 736 consecutive nights, Strassmann kept track of all the women who used the huts. This allowed her to collect statistics on the frequency and length of menstruation among the Dogon women, but with a completely naturalistic inquiry strategy, illustrating how both quantitative and qualitative data can be collected within a naturalistic design strategy.

Emergent Design Flexibility

There’s the inquiry idea you begin with, the newborn idea. Then the inquiry design emerges and evolves as you think about it and discuss it with others. At some point, for some sooner, for others later, the inquiry design reaches the formal proposal stage. Then you start data collection and the fieldwork unfolds and new opportunities emerge and you pursue those opportunities, so the design further evolves. That becomes the actual design you have implemented by the time you cease data collection. Then as you immerse yourself in analysis, review the data you’ve collected and how you

collected it, the design you actually implemented will become clearer. Only retrospectively will you finally know what your design was. Prospective designs articulate possibilities. Retrospective descriptions of what actually occurred constitute the actual design. All of which means carefully documenting the design process throughout the inquiry journey.

—From Halcolm’s Methodology as Journey

In the 10-day wilderness leadership training program I evaluated, the 20 participants unexpectedly split into two subgroups on the first day. I had to make an in-the-field, on-the-spot decision about which group to join and how to get interviews with the others at a later time. The original design had planned for follow-up questionnaires to be sent to the 20 participants six months after the training experience, but as the program drew to a close, the participants rebelled against the idea of surveys as being too shallow to be meaningful and insisted on open-ended interviews, in which they could tell their stories and reflect on their experiences.

Naturalistic inquiry designs cannot usually be completely specified in advance of fieldwork. While the design will specify an initial focus, plans for observations, and initial guiding interview questions, the naturalistic and inductive nature of the inquiry makes it both impossible and inappropriate to specify operational variables, state testable hypotheses, or finalize either instrumentation or sampling schemes. A naturalistic design unfolds or emerges as the fieldwork unfolds.

The call for an emergent design by naturalists is not simply an effort on their part to get around the “hard thinking” that is supposed to precede an inquiry; the desire to permit events to unfold is not merely a way of rationalizing what is at bottom “sloppy inquiry.” The design specifications of the conventional paradigm [in which details of the design are rigidly determined in advance of data collection and carefully adhered to] form a procrustean bed of such a nature as to make it impossible for the naturalist to lie in it—not only uncomfortably, but at all. (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 225)

Design flexibility stems from the open-ended nature of naturalistic inquiry as well as pragmatic considerations. Being open and pragmatic requires a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty as well as trust in the ultimate value of what inductive analysis will yield. Such tolerance, openness, and trust create special problems for dissertation committees and funders of evaluation or research. How will they know what will result from the inquiry if the design is only partially specified? The answer is that they won’t know with any certainty. All they can do is look at the results of similar qualitative inquiries, inspect the reasonableness of the overall strategies in the proposed design, and consider the capacity of the researcher to fruitfully undertake the proposed study.

As with other strategic themes of qualitative inquiry, the extent to which the design is specified in advance is a matter of degree. Doctoral students doing qualitative dissertations will usually be expected to present fairly detailed fieldwork proposals and interview schedules so that the approving doctoral committee and institutional review board can guide the student and be sure that the proposed work will lead to satisfying degree requirements. Many funders will fund only detailed proposals. As an ideal, however, the qualitative researcher needs considerable flexibility and openness. The fieldwork approach of anthropologist Brackette F. Williams represents the ideal of emergence in naturalistic inquiry. She has focused on issues of cultural identity and social relationships. Her work has included in-depth study of ritual and symbolism in the construction of national identity in Guyana (1991) and the ways in which race and class function in the national consciousness of the United States. In 1997, she received a five-year MacArthur fellowship (popularly called a “Genius Award”), which allowed her to pursue a truly emergent, naturalistic design in her fieldwork on the phenomenon of killing in America. I had the opportunity to interview her about her work and, with her permission, am including several excerpts from that interview throughout this chapter to illustrate the actual scholarly implementation of some of the strategic ideals of qualitative inquiry. Here, she describes the necessity of an open-ended approach to her fieldwork because her topic is broad and she needs to follow wherever the phenomenon takes her:

I’m tracking something—killing—that’s moving very rapidly in the culture. Every time I talk to someone, there’s another set of data, another thing to look at. Anything that happens in America can be relevant, and that’s the

exhausting part of it. It never shuts off. You listen to the radio. You watch television. You pass a billboard with an advertisement on it. There’s no such thing as something irrelevant when you’re studying something like this or maybe just studying the society that you’re in. You don’t always know exactly how it’s going to be relevant, but somehow it just strikes you and you say to yourself: I should document the date when I saw this and where it was and what was said because it’s data.

I don’t follow every possible lead people give me. But generally, it is a matter in some sense of opportunity sampling, of serendipity, whatever you want to call it. I key into things that turn out to be very important six months later.

I did a lot of impromptu interviewing in the first year in places like airports to formulate a protocol of questions and issues to pursue. It was general sampling to get a sense of what I wanted to know. At other times, it’s just to get a general opinion from John Q. Public about a question that I’ve gotten all kinds of official responses to, but I want to know what people in general think. In an airport, I may get an opportunity to talk to 5 or 10 people. If I have several stops, I may get 15 or 20 by the time I come home.

I fashion the research as I want to fashion it based on what I think this week as opposed to what I thought last week. I don’t follow some proposal. I don’t have in mind that this has to be a book that’s going to have to come out a certain way. I’m following where the data take me, where my questions take me.

Few qualitative studies are as fully emergent and open-ended as the fieldwork of Williams. Her work exemplifies the ideal of emergent design flexibility.

SIDEBAR

EMERGENT METHODS

Emergent design flexibility not only includes openness, responsiveness, and adaptability within a particular study, but also emergent methods more generally are at the cutting edge of how we inquire into and make some sense of complexity.

Emergent methods arise as a means of accessing answers to complex research questions and revealing subjugated knowledge. These research techniques are particularly useful for discovering knowledge that lies hidden, that is, difficult to tap into because it has not been part of the dominant culture or discourse.

—Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patrcia Leavy (2008, p. v) Handbook of Emergent Methods

Emergent research methods are the logical conclusion to paradigm shifts, major developments in theory, and new conceptions of knowledge and the knowledge-building process. As researchers continue to explore new ways of thinking about and framing knowledge construction, so, too, do they develop new ways of building knowledge, accessing data, and generating theory. In this sense, new methods and methodologies are theory driven and question driven. Emergent methods often arise in order to answer research questions that traditional methods may not adequately address. Evolving theoretical paradigms in the disciplines have opened up the possibilities of the development of innovative methods to get at new theoretical perspectives.

—Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patrcia Leavy (2006a, p. xi) Emergent Methods in Social Research

Purposeful Sampling

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

—Herbert Simon (1971, pp. 40–41) Nobel laureate in economics

Since you can’t study everything and everyone, focus on something important and someone from whom you can learn a great deal about that matter of importance. Choose wisely, with purpose. Time is fleeting. Pay attention.

—Halcolm

In 1940, eminent sociologist Kingsley Davis published what was to become a classic case study, the story of Anna, a baby kept in nearly total isolation from the time of her birth until she was discovered at age six. She had been deprived of human contact, had acquired no language skills, and had received only enough care to keep her barely alive. This single case, horrifying as was the abuse and neglect, offered a natural experiment to study socialization effects and the relative contributions of nature and nurture to human development. In 1947, Davis published an update on Anna and a comparison case of socialization isolation, the story of Isabelle. These two cases offered considerable insight into the question of how long a human being could remain isolated before “the capacity for full cultural acquisition” was permanently damaged (Davis, 1940, 1947). The cases of Anna and Isabelle are examples of purposeful case sampling (also called purposive case selection).

Perhaps in nothing is the difference between quantitative and qualitative designs better illuminated than in the different strategies, logics, and purposes that distinguish statistical probability sampling from qualitative purposeful sampling. Qualitative inquiry typically focuses on relatively small samples, even single cases (n = 1) like Anna or Isabelle, selected purposefully to permit inquiry into and understanding of a phenomenon in depth. Quantitative methods typically aim for larger samples selected randomly, to generalize with confidence from the sample to the population that it represents. Not only are the techniques for sample selection different, but also the very logic of each approach is distinct because the purpose of each strategy is different. Mixed methods can incorporate both quantitative and qualitative sampling strategies when sufficient time and resources are available to do both.

SIDEBAR

WISE ADVICE ON CASE SELECTION

If you are going to do a case study, you are likely to devote a significant portion of your time to it. What is to be avoided is committing much of your time and resources and then finding that the case study will not work out. Therefore, in using the case study method, your goal should be to select your case study carefully. Try to spot unrealistic or uninformative case studies as early as possible.

More ambitiously, try to select a significant or “special” case or cases for your case study. The more significant your case, the more likely your case study will contribute to the research literature or to improvements in practice (or to the completion of a doctoral dissertation). Conversely, devoting your efforts to a fairly “mundane” case study may not even produce an acceptable study (or dissertation). If you do not have access to a special case, the recommended approach is to consider any candidate for your case study with great care and forethought, even if the process takes more time than you would have anticipated.

Set your goals high. You may only have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute to case study research. Also, consult actively with your peers and colleagues about your selection. Choose the most significant case possible. Your success might result in an exemplary study (or dissertation). Your study might present new theoretical or practical themes. It also might capture . . . a case of lasting relevance—if not value—decades later.

—Robert K. Yin (2004, pp. 3–4) The Case Study Anthology

Unusual clinical cases in medicine and psychology, instructive precisely because they are unusual, offer many examples of purposeful sampling. Neurologist Oliver Sacks presents a number of such cases in his widely read and influential books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and Hallucination (2012), the very titles of which suggest the uniqueness of the cases and issues examined. While one cannot generalize from single cases or very small samples, one can learn from them—and learn a great deal—often opening up new territory for further research, as was the case with Piaget’s detailed and insightful observations of his own two children. Andrew Solomon (2012) has studied a great diversity of families with children he describes as living “far from the tree,” that is, outliers in the sense that they are substantially different from their parents: children manifesting autism, schizophrenia, Down syndrome, dwarfism, deafness, or transgender identity, and prodigies, among others. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers (2008), reports on people with unusual, outside-the-mainstream advantages and success stories, like Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest men.

The logic and power of statistical probability sampling derives from its purpose: generalization. The logic and power of qualitative purposeful sampling derives from the emphasis on in-depth understanding of specific cases: information-rich cases. Information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the research; thus the term purposeful sampling. For example, if the purpose of an evaluation is to increase the effectiveness of a program in reaching lower–socioeconomic status groups, one may learn a great deal by focusing in depth on understanding the needs, interests, and incentives of a small number of carefully selected poor families. Chapter 5 will present a variety of strategies for purposefully selecting information-rich cases.

It is important to add that not all qualitative studies involve small samples. Lenore Manderson (2011) based her inquiry into the effects of amputations and other surgical intrusions that permanently change the body on interviews with 100 people. Exhibit 2.2 presents how she framed her inquiry. Solomon’s (2012) study of children living “far from the tree” (exceptional and special-needs children) is based on interviews with more than 300 families over 10 years.

EXHIBIT 2.2 From Able-Bodied to Disabled

Some reading this book have no doubt experienced the loss of a limb, the removal of a cancerous organ, or other surgical procedure or life event that left them disabled. If that has been your experience, you would have been a candidate for inclusion in Lenore Manderson’s (2011) study of “surgery, bodily boundaries, and the social self.” Most readers are likely to have escaped such an experience, at least so far, and so to understand what it is like would benefit from hearing how those who have gone from being able-bodied to “disabled” have coped. Here is how Manderson framed her inquiry:

The primary empirical data of Surface Tensions are narratives of illness, injury, surgery and recovery, elicited in interviews conducted often on more than one occasion with some one hundred remarkable men and women. . . . I explore how people make sense of who they are when the surface of the body is profoundly changed. I ask what occurs when a person experiences a dramatically physical, often very obvious loss, as in the case of the loss of a limb or its functionality. When a woman’s sense of being female is so invested in her sexed body, how does she reconstruct “being feminine” after mastectomy, when surfaces dense with gendered meaning are excised? And how, at the same time, does she make sense of the disease when the challenge to her

health is internal and cannot be monitored precisely, even though contemporary technologies extend the clinical gaze to the body’s interior? What difference does it make to the self when surfaces are reconstructed and the inner workings of the body are brought to the surface—when elimination must be managed with colostomy bags, for example? And what of the self, when the surface is stable but the inner mechanics of the body change—when, as with a kidney transplant, the body becomes host to an organ vital to survival and once part of someone else? Can the self be whole or undamaged when the body . . . has undergone so much change? The interviews on which I draw in this book illustrate how this disorganization is understood and managed by those directly affected.

—Lenore Manderson (2011, p. 44)

MODULE

6 Strategic Principles Guiding Data Collection and Fieldwork

This module covers 4 more of the 12 core strategies of qualitative inquiry, with a focus on data collection and fieldwork strategies: (4) qualitative data, (5) personal experience and engagement, (6) empathic neutrality and mindfulness, and (7) the dynamic systems perspective.

Qualitative Data

Human interconnections consist of molecules we call stories. —Halcolm

Qualitative data consist of quotations, observations, excerpts from documents, and entries from social media. The first chapter provided several examples of qualitative data. Deciding whether to use naturalistic inquiry or an experimental approach is a design issue. This is different from deciding what kind of data to collect (qualitative, quantitative, or some combination), although design and data alternatives are clearly related. Qualitative data can be collected in experimental designs where participants have been randomly divided into treatment and control groups. Likewise, some quantitative data may be collected in naturalistic inquiry approaches. Nevertheless, controlled experimental designs predominantly aim for statistical analyses of quantitative data, while qualitative data are the primary focus in naturalistic inquiry. This relationship between design and measurement will be explored at greater length in Chapter 5.

Qualitative data describe. They take us, as readers, into the time and place of the observation so that we know what it was like to have been there. Thick description with contextual details captures and communicates someone else’s experience of the world in his or her own words. Qualitative data tell a story. In the excerpt below, from my interview with Brackette Williams, she tells the story of checking out a childhood memory. This story gives us insight into the nature of her naturalistic inquiry and open-ended interviewing, shows how a critical incident can be a purposeful sample, and, in the story itself, offers something of the flavor of qualitative data.

I was down in Texas interviewing last March, thinking about my research and interviewing people, and there was a childhood memory that I had of an electrocution of a man that was the son of a woman who lived across the field from us. Now a rumor about this had always been in the back of my mind. Whenever I’d hear about a death penalty case over the years, I would think about this man having been electrocuted. I thought he was electrocuted because he raped this white woman. So I’m sitting in my cousin’s kitchen after I had done some of these interviews and another woman, an older woman who was a relative of hers, came in and the conversation goes around. I happen to mention this memory of mine. I asked, “Is that just something that I concocted out of having read a book or something, but it never happened?” She answered, “Oh, no, it happened. You only have one part of the story wrong. He didn’t rape her. He looked at her.”

You know, you read about these things in history books, and then all of a sudden, it’s like a part of a world that you existed in. These things happened around you and yet somehow there was so much of a distance, you couldn’t touch it. I knew about this man all my life, but in all the reading and all the history books, I couldn’t touch that. Doing this project the way I’m doing it allows me to touch things that otherwise I would never touch.

Direct Personal Experience and Engagement: Going Into the Field

Objects in a mirror may appear closer than they are. —Warning on passenger-side car mirrors

People in the field may appear more distant than they are. Or closer. Or both at the same time. In every case these appearances are not what’s important. Get closer. And closer. And closer. To get beyond appearances.

—From Halcolm’s Fieldwork Advice

SIDEBAR

STORIES AS QUALITATIVE DATA

Richard Krueger, University of Minnesota, pioneered using focus groups for program evaluation, created the Focus Group Kit (1997), and coauthored the most widely used practical guide to focus groups (Krueger & Casey, 2008). In recent years, he has been writing about and conducting workshops on stories as central to qualitative inquiry: collecting, analyzing, and presenting stories. Here’s why he thinks stories are the core of qualitative inquiry:

I believe in the power of stories. I have spent much of my career listening to people tell their stories in focus groups and individual interviews. People’s stories have made me laugh, made me cry, made me angry, and kept me awake at night. Quantitative data have never once led me to shed a tear or spend a sleepless night. Numbers may appeal to my head, but they don’t grab my heart. I believe that if you want people to do something with your evaluation findings, you have to grab their attention, and one way to do that is through stories.

Stories can help evaluators get their audience’s attention, communicate emotions, illustrate key points or themes, and make findings memorable. . . . Stories give researchers new ways to understand people and situations and tools for communicating these understandings to others.

They help us understand. Stories provide insights that can’t be found through quantitative data. A story helps us understand motivation, values, emotions, interests, and factors that influence behavior. Stories can give us clues about why an event might occur or how something happens.

Stories help us interpret quantitative data. Stories can also be used to amplify and communicate quantitative data. For example, a monitoring system might detect a change in outcomes, but what prompted the change usually can’t be found in these data systems. Stories from clients and staff can help us understand factors that change lives and influence people.

They help share what we learned. Stories help communicate evaluation findings. Evidence suggests that people have an easier time remembering a story than recalling numerical data. The story is sticky, but numbers quickly fade away. Evaluation data are hard to remember. The story provides a framework that helps the reader or listener remember salient facts.

Stories help communicate emotions. Statistical and survey data tend to dwell on the cold hard facts: Stories are different. They show us the challenges people face, how people feel, and how they respond to situations. Stories tug at our hearts and affect our outlook. Evaluators tend to be apprehensive about emotional messages for valid reasons. Emotional messages can ignore important facts, be fabrications, or overlook empirical data. But instead of avoiding these emotional messages, [qualitative data combines] the emotional aspect of stories with empirical data to address the concerns of both the heart and the head.

—Richard A. Krueger (2010, pp. 404–405)

Using Stories in Evaluation StoryCorps is a resource for stories: http://storycorps.org/listen/

The quotation from Williams that closed the last section exemplifies the personal nature of qualitative fieldwork. Getting close to her subject matter, including using her own experiences, from both childhood and her day-to-day adult life, illustrates the all-encompassing and ultimately personal nature of in-depth qualitative inquiry. Traditionally, social scientists have been warned to stay distant from those they studied in order to maintain “objectivity.” But that kind of detachment can limit your openness to and understanding of the very nature of what you are studying, especially where meaning making and emotion are part of the phenomenon. Look closely at what Williams says about the effects of immersing herself personally in her fieldwork, even while visiting relatives: “Doing this project the way I’m doing it allows me to touch things that otherwise I would never touch.”

Fieldwork is the central activity of qualitative inquiry. Going into the field means having direct personal contact with the people under study in their own environments—getting close to the people and situations being studied to personally understand the realities and minutiae of daily life, for example, life as experienced by participants in a welfare-to-work program. The inquirer gets close to the people under study through physical proximity for a period of time as well as through development of closeness in the social sense of shared experience, empathy, and confidentiality. That many quantitative methodologists fail to ground their findings in personal qualitative understanding poses what sociologist John Lofland (1971) has called a major contradiction between their public insistence on the adequacy of statistical portrayals of other humans and their personal, everyday dealings with and judgments about other human beings. His classic observation about how we all make sense of the world through direct personal experience, though a half-century old, still gets at the heart of the value of fieldwork.

In everyday life, statistical sociologists, like everyone else, assume that they do not know or understand very well people they do not see or associate with very much. They assume that knowing and understanding other people require that one see them reasonably often and in a variety of situations relative to a variety of issues. Moreover, statistical sociologists, like other people, assume that in order to know or understand others one is well advised to give some conscious attention to that effort in face-to-face contacts. They assume, too, that the internal world of sociology—or any other social world—is not understandable unless one has been part of it in a face-to-face fashion for quite a period of time. How utterly paradoxical, then, for these same persons to turn around and make, by implication, precisely the opposite claim about people they have never encountered face-to-face—those people appearing as numbers in their tables and as correlations in their matrices! (p. 3)

Qualitative inquiry means going into the field—into the real world of programs, organizations, neighborhoods, street corners—and getting close enough to the people and circumstances there to capture what is happening. This makes possible description and understanding of both externally observable behaviors and internal states (worldview, opinions, values, attitudes, and symbolic constructs). The qualitative emphasis on striving for depth of understanding, in context, includes capturing inner perspectives.“The inner perspective assumes that understanding can only be achieved by actively participating in the life of the observed and gaining insight by means of introspection” (Bruyn, 1963, p. 226).

Actively participating in the life of the observed means going where the action is, getting one’s hands dirty, participating where possible in actual program activities, and getting to know program staff and participants on a personal level—in other words, getting personally engaged so as to use all of one’s senses and capacities, including the capacity to experience emotion no less than cognition. Such engagement stands in sharp contrast to the professional comportment of some in the field, for example, supposedly objective evaluators, who purposely project an image of being cool, calm, external, and detached. Such detachment is presumed to reduce bias. However, qualitative methodologists question the necessity and utility of distance and detachment, asserting that without empathy and sympathetic introspection derived from personal encounters the observer cannot fully understand human behavior. Understanding comes from trying to put oneself in the other person’s shoes, from trying to discern how others think, act, and feel.

SIDEBAR

VERSTEHEN: MEANINGFUL UNDERSTANDING

An American Indian prayer warns, “Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.” The issue in fieldwork is avoiding judgment so as to be open to deep and meaningful understanding of another.

Verstehen involves the capacity to see things from another’s perspective. The nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber pioneered this approach. Verstehen refers to understanding the meaning of action from the actor’s point of view, metaphorically entering into the shoes of the other. Adopting this research stance requires respecting a person interviewed or observed as a fellow human being rather than as an abstract object of study. It also implies that unlike objects in the natural world, human actors are not simply the product of the pulls and pushes of external forces. Individuals are seen to create the world by organizing their own understanding of it and by giving it meaning. To do research on people without taking into account the meanings they attribute to their actions or environment is to treat them like objects.

The verstehen perspective emphasizes that human beings can and must be understood in a manner different from other objects of study, because we create purposes and experience emotions. We make plans, construct cultures, and hold values that affect our behavior. Our feelings and behaviors are influenced by consciousness, deliberation, and the capacity to think about the future. As human beings, we each live in a world that has special meaning to us, and because we give our behavior meaning, our human actions can and must be studied interpersonally. In this regard, behavioral and social sciences need methods different from those used in agricultural experimentation and physical sciences because human beings are different from plants and nuclear particles. You can’t interview a stalk of corn or an electron. The verstehen tradition stresses understanding that focuses on the meaning-making capacity of humans, the contextual importance of social interactions, an empathetic understanding based on interpersonal experience, and attention to the connections between mental states and behavior. Interpretation of what we observe flows from empathetic introspection and reflection based on direct observation of and interaction with people.

Verstehen thus entails a kind of empathic identification with the actor. It is an act of psychological reenactment —getting inside the head of an actor to understand what he or she is up to in terms of motives, beliefs, desires, thoughts, and so on. (Schwandt, 2000, p. 192)

In an enduringly relevant classic study, educational evaluator Edna Shapiro (1973) studied young children in classrooms in the National Follow Through Program using both quantitative and qualitative methods. It was her closeness to the children in those classrooms that allowed her to see that something was happening that was not captured by standardized tests. She could see differences in children, observe their responses to diverse situations, and capture the varying meanings they attached to common events. She could feel their tension in the testing situation and their spontaneity in the more natural classroom setting. Had she worked solely with data collected by others or only at a distance, she would never have discovered the crucial differences in the classroom settings she studied—differences that actually allowed her to evaluate the innovative program in a meaningful and relevant way. Where standardized tests showed no differences between classrooms using different approaches, her direct observations documented important and significant program impacts.

It is important to note that the admonition to engage directly and personally in fieldwork is in no way meant to deny the usefulness of quantitative methods. Rather, it means that statistical portrayals must always be interpreted and given human meaning. I once interviewed an evaluator of federal health programs, who expressed frustration at trying to make sense out of statistical data from more than 80 projects after site visit

funds had been cut out of the evaluation: “There’s no way to evaluate something that’s just data. You know, you have to go look.”

Going into the field and having personal contact with program participants is not the only legitimate way to understand human behavior. For certain questions and for situations involving large groups, distance is inevitable, perhaps even helpful, but to get at deeper meanings and preserve context, face-to-face interaction is both necessary and desirable. This returns us to a recurrent theme of this book: matching research methods to the purpose of a study, the questions being asked, and the resources available.

In thinking about the issue of closeness to the people and situations being studied, it is useful to remember that many major contributions to our understanding of the world have come from scientists’ personal experiences. One finds many instances where closeness to sources of data made key insights possible— Piaget’s closeness to his children, Freud’s proximity to and empathy with his patients, Darwin’s closeness to nature, and even Newton’s intimate encounter with an apple. In short, closeness does not make bias and loss of perspective inevitable; and distance is no guarantee of objectivity.

Empathic Neutrality and Mindfulness

The idea of acquiring an “inside” understanding—the actors’ definitions of the situation—is a powerful central concept for understanding the purpose of qualitative inquiry.

—Thomas A. Schwandt (2000, p. 102)

Since naturalistic inquiry involves fieldwork that puts one in close contact with people and their problems, what is to be the researcher’s cognitive and emotional stance toward those people and problems? No universal prescription can capture the range of possibilities, for the answer will depend on the situation, the nature of the inquiry, and the perspective of the researcher. But, thinking strategically, I offer the phrase “empathic neutrality” as a point of departure. It offers a middle ground between becoming too involved, which can cloud judgment, and remaining too distant, which can reduce understanding. What is empathic neutrality? In essence, it is understanding a person’s situation and perspective without judging the person—and communicating that understanding with authenticity to build rapport, trust, and openness.

Let’s examine each idea separately and then the combination, emphatic neutrality. We’ll start with neutrality.

Neutrality

Methodologists and philosophers of science debate what the researcher’s stance should be vis-à-vis the people being studied. Critics of qualitative inquiry have charged that the approach is too subjective, in large part because the researcher is the instrument of both data collection and data interpretation, and because a qualitative strategy includes having personal contact with and getting close to the people and situation under study. From the perspective of advocates of a supposedly value-free social science, subjectivity is the very antithesis of scientific inquiry.

Objectivity has been considered the strength of the scientific method. The primary methods for achieving objectivity in science have been conducting blind experiments and quantification. “Objective tests” gather data through instruments that, in principle, are not dependent on human skill, perception, or even presence. Yet it is clear that tests and questionnaires are designed by human beings and, therefore, are subject to the intrusion of the researcher’s biases by the very questions asked. Unconscious bias in the skillful manipulation of statistics to prove a hypothesis in which the researcher believes is hardly absent from hypothetical- deductive inquiry.

Part of the difficulty in thinking about the fieldwork stance of the qualitative inquirer is that the terms objectivity and subjectivity have become so loaded with negative connotations and subject to acrimonious debate that neither of the terms any longer provides useful guidance. These terms have been politicized beyond utility. To claim the mantle of objectivity in the postmodern age is to expose oneself as embarrassingly naive. The ideals of absolute objectivity and value-free science are impossible to attain in practice and of questionable desirability in the first place since they ignore the intrinsically social nature and human purposes of research. On the other hand, subjectivity has such negative connotations in the public mind that to admit being subjective may undermine one’s credibility with audiences unfamiliar with philosophy of science debates. In short, the terms objectivity and subjectivity have become ideological ammunition in the methodological paradigms debate. My pragmatic solution is to avoid using either word and to stay out of futile debates about subjectivity versus objectivity. Qualitative research in recent years has moved toward preferring terms such as trustworthiness and authenticity. Evaluators aim for balance, fairness, and neutrality (Patton, 2012a). Chapter 9 will discuss these terms and the stances they imply at greater length. At this point, I simply want to note the strategic nature of the issue of inquirer stance and add empathic neutrality to the emerging lexicon that attempts to supersede the hot-button term objective and the epithet subjective.

Any research strategy ultimately needs credibility to be useful. No credible research advocates distortion of data to serve the researcher’s vested interests and prejudices. Both qualitative/naturalistic inquiry and quantitative/experimental inquiry seek honest, meaningful, credible, and empirically supported findings. Any credible research strategy requires that the investigator adopt a stance of openness, being careful to fully document methods of inquiry and their implications for resultant findings. This simply means that the investigator does not set out to prove a particular perspective or manipulate the data to arrive at predisposed propositions. The neutral investigator enters the research arena with no axe to grind, no theory to prove (to test but not to prove), and no predetermined results to support. Rather, the investigator’s commitment is to understand the world as it unfolds, be true to complexities and multiple perspectives as they emerge, and be balanced in reporting both confirming and disconfirming evidence with regard to any conclusions offered.

Neutrality is not an easily attainable stance, so all credible research strategies include techniques for helping the investigator become aware of and deal with selective perception, personal biases, and theoretical predispositions. Qualitative inquiry, because the human being is the instrument of data collection, requires that the investigator carefully reflect on, deal with, and report potential sources of bias and error. Systematic data collection procedures, rigorous training, multiple data sources, triangulation, external reviews, and other techniques to be discussed in this book are aimed at producing high-quality qualitative data that are credible, trustworthy, authentic, balanced about the phenomenon under study, and fair to the people studied.

The livelihood of evaluators and researchers depends on their integrity and credibility. Independence and neutrality, then, are serious issues.

Empathy

Regarding the pain of others requires more than just a pair of eyes. It necessitates an act of the imagination: a willingness to think or feel oneself into the interior of another’s experience.

—Leslie Jamison (2014) The Empathy Exams

Neutrality does not mean detachment. It is on this point that qualitative inquiry makes a special contribution. Qualitative inquiry depends on, uses, and enhances the researcher’s direct experiences in the world and insights about those experiences. This includes learning through empathy. So, having discussed the neutrality part in the phrase “emphatic neutrality,” let’s now turn to a closer look at empathy.

Humanistic psychologist Clark Moustakas has described the nonjudgmental empathic stance as “being-in” another’s world—immersing oneself in another’s world by listening deeply and attentively so as to enter into

the other person’s experience and perception.

I do not select, interpret, advise, or direct. . . . Being-In the world of the other is a way of going wide open, entering in as if for the first time, hearing just what is, leaving out my own thoughts, feelings, theories, biases. . . . I enter with the intention of understanding and accepting perceptions and not presenting my own view or reactions. . . . I only want to encourage and support the other person’s expression, what and how it is, how it came to be, and where it is going. (Moustakas, 1995, pp. 82–83)

Empathy develops from interpersonal interaction with the people interviewed and observed during fieldwork. Empathy involves being able to take and understand the stance, position, feelings, experiences, and worldview of others. Put metaphorically, empathy is “like being able to imagine a life for a spider, a maker’s life, or just some aliveness in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets so you take it outside in two paper cups instead of stepping on it” (Dunn, 2000, p. 62). Empathy combines cognitive understanding with affective connection, and in that sense it differs from sympathy, which is primarily emotional.

Nor can the capacity for empathy be assumed. University of Michigan studies of incoming students show that “today’s students score about 40 percent lower in measures of empathy than students did 30 years ago” (Brooks, 2014, p. A25). Empathy may need to be cultivated, and nurturing empathy begins with valuing it.

Empathy as an inquiry stance is rooted in the phenomenological doctrine of verstehen, discussed earlier in a sidebar (p. 56), which undergirds much of qualitative inquiry. Verstehen means understanding at a deep level, grounded in the unique human capacity to make sense of the world, which has profound implications for how we can study our fellow human beings. The verstehen doctrine presumes that since human beings have a unique type of consciousness, as distinct from other forms of life, the study of human beings will be different from the study of other forms of life and nonhuman phenomena. In this regard, the capacity for empathy is one of the major assets available for human inquiry into human affairs. Verstehen is primarily cognitive understanding of another; empathy is emotional understanding, feeling what it’s like for another.

A qualitative strategy of inquiry proposes an active, involved role for the social scientist. This increases the opportunity to generate insight, which deepens social knowledge. Insight emerges from being close to, even sometimes on the inside of, the phenomena being studied. This is quite a different scientific process from that envisioned by the classical, experimental approach to science, but it is still an empirical, that is, data-based, scientific perspective. The qualitative perspective

in no way suggests that the researcher lacks the ability to be scientific while collecting the data. On the contrary, it merely specifies that it is crucial for validity—and, consequently, for reliability—to try to picture the empirical social world as it actually exists to those under investigation, rather than as the researcher imagines it to be. (Filstead, 1970, p. 4)

This is the reason for the importance of qualitative approaches such as participant observation, in-depth interviewing, detailed description, and case studies.

Empathetic Neutrality

Having discussed empathy and neutrality separately, let’s turn our attention back to the phrase that combines these ideas. On first encountering the phrase empathetic neutrality, it may appear to be an oxymoron, combining contradictory ideas. While empathy describes a stance toward the people we encounter in fieldwork, calling on us to communicate interest, caring, and understanding, neutrality suggests a stance toward their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, a stance of being nonjudgmental. Neutrality can actually facilitate rapport and help build a relationship that supports empathy by disciplining the researcher to be open to the other person and nonjudgmental in that openness. Rapport and empathy, however, must not be taken for granted, as Radhika Parameswaran (2001) found in doing fieldwork among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction.

Despite their eventual willingness to share their fears and complaints about gendered social pressures, I still wonder whether these young women would have been more open about their sexuality with a Westerner who might be seen as less likely to judge them based on cultural expectations of women’s behavior in Indian society. The well-known

word rapport, which is often used to signify acceptance and warm relationships between informants and researchers, was thus something I could not take for granted despite being an insider; all I could claim was an imperfect rapport. (p. 69)

Evaluation presents special challenges for rapport and neutrality as well. After fieldwork, an evaluator may be called on to render judgments about a program as part of data interpretation and formulating recommendations, but during fieldwork, the focus should be on rigorously observing and interviewing to understand the people and situation being studied. This nuanced relationship between neutrality and empathy will be discussed further in both data collection and analysis chapters.

Empathic Neutrality Grounded in Mindfulness

Mindfulness is wise attention. Mindlessness is lazy inattention. We have the capacity for and experience of both. Each is part of the human condition and human potential. Which one prevails in a given moment or over time is, paradoxically, a matter of mindfulness. Practice choosing wisely.

—From Halcolm’s Mindfulness Meditations

Mindfulness involves being focused in the moment, being attentive to what’s going on, without distraction, and maintaining attentiveness on a moment-to-moment basis. Mindfulness is best known as a core discipline of Zen Buddhism (Hanh, 1999), but the practice has application well beyond the meditative life of monks. In qualitative inquiry, when interviewing, mindfulness means that you are completely focused on the interaction with the person or people being interviewed. Likewise, in observation, your mind becomes immersed in the setting, the situation, and what is happening so that you can be present to and see what is unfolding. Mindfulness is presence, which creates the opening to empathy, and is intrinsically nonjudgmental. To achieve empathic neutrality in qualitative inquiry, then, requires mindfulness. You can’t hear what you’re not taking in. You can’t observe what you’re not seeing.

A Dynamic, Developmental Perspective

There is nothing permanent except change. —Heraclitus

Philosopher, Ancient Greece

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. —Ecclesiastes 3:1

A questionnaire is like a photograph. A qualitative study is like a documentary film. Both offer images. The photograph captures and freezes a moment in time, like recording a respondent’s answer to a survey question at a moment in time. The film offers a fluid sense of development, movement, and change.

Qualitative evaluators, for example, conceive of programs as dynamic and developing, with “treatments” changing in subtle but important ways as staff learn what does and doesn’t work, as clients move in and out, and as conditions of delivery are altered in response to changing conditions in the program’s environment. This kind of adaptive approach to tracking program dynamics and participant outcomes is called developmental evaluation (Patton, 2011). The purpose is documenting and understanding dynamic program processes and their effects on participants so as to provide information for ongoing program development. In

contrast, an experimental design for an evaluation typically conceives of the program as a fixed thing, like a measured amount of fertilizer applied to a crop—a treatment, an intervention—which has predetermined, measurable outcomes. Inconsistency in the treatment, instability in the intervention, changes in the program, variability in program processes, and diversity in participants’ experiences undermine the logic of an experimental design because these developments—all natural, even inevitable, in real-world programs—call into question what the “treatment” or experiment actually is.

Naturalistic inquiry assumes the ever-changing world posited by the observation in the ancient Chinese proverb that one never steps into the same river twice. Change is a natural, expected, and inevitable part of human experience, and documenting change is a natural, expected, and intrinsic part of fieldwork. Rather than trying to control, limit, or direct change, naturalistic inquirers expect change, anticipate the likelihood of the unanticipated, and are prepared to go with the flow of change. One gets this sense of pursuing change in the comment by Williams cited earlier: “I’m tracking something—killing—that’s moving very rapidly in the culture.” Part of her inquiry task is to track cultural changes the way an epidemiologist tracks a disease. As a result, reading a good qualitative case study gives the sense of reading a good story. It has a beginning, middle, and ending—though not necessarily an end.

MQP Rumination # 2

Confusing Empathy With Bias

I am offering one personal rumination per chapter. These are issues that have persistently engaged, sometimes annoyed, occasionally haunted, and often amused me over more than 40 years of research and evaluation practice. Here’s where I state my case on the issue and make my peace.

Researchers and evaluators are admonished to stay rational and independent. Don’t get emotional. Feelings are the enemy of rationality and objectivity. Emotions and feelings lead to caring—and caring is a primary source of bias. Stay distant and unfeeling. Caring emerges from connecting to people, an empathic sense of interdependence rather than independence. So avoid connection and caring, eschew empathy, maintain rationality and independence, and you can avoid bias, the greatest of scientific failings.

I hear this view expounded regularly when qualitative findings are attacked for being biased because the researcher or evaluator got close to the people studied and

took on the responsibility of communicating their point of view. Early in my career, I was admonished in a public forum by a distinguished university professor who disagreed with the qualitative findings on an innovative education program:

Your results can’t be trusted because you went native. You obviously spent lots of time with them. You totally bought into what those people told you. You’ve lost all objectivity. You call it empathy. True scientists call it bias.

At that time, I had no ready response. Today, I do, and I will share it at the end of this rumination.

As I’ve experienced versions of this confusion between empathy and bias over the years, I get the sense that the vociferousness of the attack, and it is often quite vehement, stems from a deep-seated fear of emotions and human connection by those dismissing qualitative data.

So What About the Role of Emotions in Scientific Inquiry?

Brian Knutson is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University. Knutson (2014) makes the case that scientific inquiry should incorporate emotions as a source of data and insight into the nature of the human experience.

The absence of emotion pervades modern scientific models of the mind. In the most popular mental metaphors of social science, mind as reflex (from behaviorism) explicitly omits emotion and mind as computer (from cognitivism) all but ignores it. Even when emotion appears in later theories, it is usually as an afterthought—an epiphenomenal reaction to some event that has already passed. But over the past decade, the rising field of affective science has revealed that emotions can precede and motivate thought and behavior.

Emerging physiological, behavioral, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that emotions are proactive as well as reactive. Emotional signals from the brain now yield predictions about choice and mental health symptoms, and may soon guide scientists to specific circuits that confer more precise control over thought and behavior. Thus, the price of continuing to ignore emotion’s centrality to mental function could be substantial. By assuming the mind is like a bundle of reflexes, a computer program, or even a self-interested rational actor, we may miss out on significant opportunities to predict and control behavior—both in individuals and groups.

Literally and figuratively, we should stop relegating emotion to the periphery, and move emotion to the center —where it belongs.

An Anecdote About Empathy and Bias

MQP Rumination # 1 (Chapter 1, pp. 31–33) concerned undervaluing anecdotes as a form of potentially useful data. So let me share an anecdote that illustrates the importance of human empathy as a source of understanding and making sense of the world. It is an anecdote about the nature of bias told by Tom Griffiths, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

It’s easy to discover the biases that have been built into speech recognition software. I once left my office for a meeting, locking the door behind me, and came back to find a stranger had broken in and typed a series of poetic sentences into my computer. Who was this person, and what did the message mean? After a few spooky, puzzling minutes, I realized that I had left my speech recognition software running, and the sentences were the guesses it had produced about what the rustling of the trees outside my window meant. But the fact that they were fairly intelligible English sentences reflected the biases of the software, which didn’t even consider the possibility that it was listening to the wind rather than a person. (Griffiths, 2014)

Cultivating Empathic Skills and Appreciating the Appropriate Use of Bias

Computers, at least so far, lack the capacity for empathy—or even bias. Biased human beings import bias into software. The distinguished philosopher of science and evaluation research pioneer Michael Scriven concluded his volume on Hard-Won Lessons in Program Evaluation (1993) with astute observations about both empathy and bias. First, empathy:

The most difficult problems with program evaluation are not methodological or political but psychological. . . . What is lacking is the ability to see the point of view of those on the receiving end of the evaluation [intended beneficiaries of the program]—the lack of empathic skills [italics added]—and that is just as important a failing. (p. 87)

Scriven (1993) also commented on the common fallacy of defining bias as a lack of belief in or concern about something:

Preference and commitment do not entail bias.

It is crucial to begin with a clear idea of the difference between bias in the sense of prejudice, which means a tendency to error, and bias in the . . . sense of preference, support, endorsement, acceptance, or favoring of one side of an issue. Only the first of these senses is derogatory, and in the legal context the term bias is restricted to the first sense. From none of the synonyms for the second sense can one infer prejudice, because the preference, support, and so on may be justified. It is insulting, and never tolerated in a court of law where these matters are of the essence, to treat someone who has preferences as if they are thereby biased (and hence not a fair witness). It is especially absurd in the science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) area to act as if belief in [something] shows bias. Bias must be shown, either by demonstrating a pattern of error or by demonstrating the presence of an attitude that definitely and regularly produces error. . . .

People with knowledge about an area are typically people with views about it; the way to avoid panels of ignoramuses or compulsive fence sitters is to go for a balance of views, not an absence of views. (pp. 79–80)

Emotion and Reason

When I was in graduate school, we were constantly warned that emotion was the enemy of reason. Now, based on the latest research on how we as humans make decisions, brain research, and cognitive science, we know that emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason (Brooks, 2011; Patton, 2013). “Emotive traits” like “empathetic sensitivity” are not barriers to scientific inquiry about the human experience; rather, the capacity for empathy enhances, enriches, and deepens human understanding (Brooks, 2011, 2014).

Beyond Defensiveness

Nowadays, in the face of attacks on my qualitative findings as biased because I got close enough to people to feel empathetic, I assume the stance of an old man feigning calm and a statesman-like attitude, rather than displaying the passion and defensiveness of youth, and I say,

I’m sorry you feel that way. Oops! I didn’t mean to use the verb feel. But it must be a terrible thing to be so afraid of feelings and human connections. How much of human experience you miss by staying so doggedly and dogmatically in your head. But I certainly understand why you can’t relate to and don’t understand my findings. You detect bias. I detect empathic atrophy. Such a tragic loss. My condolences.

MODULE

7 Strategic Principles for Qualitative Analysis and ReportingFindings

This module covers the final five core strategies for qualitative inquiry focused on qualitative analysis strategies: (8) unique case orientation, (9) inductive analysis and creative synthesis, (10) holistic perspective, (11) context sensitivity, and (12) voice, perspective, and reflexivity.

Unique Case Orientation

If we wish to know about a man, we ask “what is his story—his real, inmost story?”—for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique.

—Oliver Sacks (1985, p. vii) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Six windows on respect” is how Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (2000, p. 13) described the six detailed case studies in her book Respect. The cases, each a full chapter, offer different perspectives on the meaning and experience of respect in modern society. We enter the worlds of a nurse-midwife, a pediatrician, a teacher, an artist, a law school professor, and a pastoral therapist/AIDS activist. Before drawing themes and contrasts from this small, purposeful sample and before naming the six perspectives they represent, Lawrence- Lightfoot had the task of constructing the unique cases to tell these distinct stories. Her first task, then, was to undertake the “art and science of portraiture” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). From these separate portraits, she fashions a metaphoric stained-glass mosaic that depicts and illumines respect.

SIDEBAR

STUDYING EXITS

The diversity, meaning, and impacts of people separating from each other

For two years I sought out and listened to people tell their big and memorable stories of leaving. As we talked together, some were in the midst of composing their exits, anticipating and planning their departures, anxious and excited about moving on. Others had exited long ago and used our dialogues as an opportunity for reflection—revisiting the ancient narratives that had changed the course of their lives, discovering new ways of interpreting and making sense of their journeys. Some interviewees told tales of forced exits; others spoke about designing and executing their planned departures. Still others found it hard to determine whether the impetus for their exits came from within—a decision motivated by them, within their jurisdiction and control— or whether their leave-takings were a response to subtle pressuring from friends and families, covert warnings from bosses, or influenced by the social prescriptions, norms, and rhythms deemed appropriate by our institutional cultures.

In all our conversations I followed the lead of my interviewees as they decided where to begin their stories, chose the central arc of their exit narratives, and rehearsed the major transformational moments of their departures. I listened carefully to the talk and the silences, the text and the subtexts of their narrations. I was attentive to those revelations that surprised them, to those discoveries that disoriented them, to the places where they feared to tread. I pushed for the details of long-buried memories. I stopped my probing when I felt myself crossing the boundaries of resistance and vulnerability. We took breaks, went for walks, and drank lots of water to hydrate us through what one storyteller called “the desert of my despair.” For many—in fact, most—these were emotional encounters, filled with weeping and laughter, breakthroughs and breakdowns, curiosity and discovery.

—Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (2012) Harvard University

EXIT: The Endings That Set Us Free

I undertook a study of a national fellowship award program that had had more than 600 recipients over a 20-year period. A survey had been done to get the fellows’ opinions about select issues, but the staff wanted more depth, richness, and detail to really understand the patterns of fellowship use and impact. With a team of researchers, we conducted 40 in-depth, face-to-face interviews and wrote case studies. Through inductive analysis, we subsequently identified distinct enabling processes and impacts and created a framework that depicted the relationships between status at the time of the award, enabling processes, and impacts. But the heart of the study was always the 40 case studies. To read only the framework analysis without reading the case studies would be to lose much of the richness, depth, meaning, and contribution of qualitative data. That is what is meant by the unique case orientation of qualitative inquiry.

Case studies are particularly valuable in program evaluation when the program is individualized, so the evaluation needs to be attentive to and capture individual differences among participants, diverse experiences of the program, or unique variations from one program setting to another. A case can be a person, an event, a program, an organization, a time period, a critical incident, or a community. Regardless of the unit of analysis, a qualitative case study seeks to describe that unit in depth and detail, holistically, and in context.

Inductive Analysis and Creative Synthesis

In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. This is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887) (Quoted by Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet)

Benjamin Whorf’s development of the famous “Whorf hypothesis”—that language shapes our experience of the environment and that words shape perceptions and actions, a kind of linguistic relativity theory (Schultz, 1991)—provides an instructive example of inductive analysis. Whorf was an insurance investigator assigned to look into explosions in warehouses. He discovered that truck drivers were entering “empty” warehouses smoking cigarettes and cigars. The warehouses, it turned out, often contained invisible but highly flammable gases. He interviewed the truck drivers and found that they associated the word empty with “harmless” and acted accordingly. From these specific observations and findings, he inductively formulated his influential theory about language and perception, which has informed a half-century of communications scholarship (Lee, 1996).

Qualitative inquiry is particularly oriented toward exploration, discovery, and inductive logic. Inductive analysis begins with specific observations and builds toward general patterns. Categories or dimensions of

analysis emerge from open-ended observations as the inquirer comes to understand patterns that exist in the phenomenon being investigated.

Inductive analysis contrasts with the hypothetical-deductive approach of experimental designs, which requires the specification of main variables and the statement of specific research hypotheses before data collection begins. A specification of research hypotheses based on an explicit theoretical framework means that general constructs provide the framework for understanding specific observations or cases. The investigator must then decide in advance what variables are important and what relationships among those variables can be expected.

The strategy of induction allows meaningful dimensions to emerge from the patterns found in the cases under study, without presupposing in advance what those important dimensions will be. The qualitative analyst seeks to understand the multiple interrelationships among the dimensions that emerge from the data, without making prior assumptions or specifying hypotheses about the linear or correlative relationships among the narrowly defined, operationalized variables. For example, an inductive approach to program evaluation means that understanding the nature of the intervention emerges from direct observations of program activities and interviews with participants. In general, theories about what is happening in a setting are grounded in and emerge from direct field experience rather than being imposed a priori, as is the case in formal hypothesis and theory testing.

EXHIBIT 2.3 A Classic Mixed-Methods Inquiry Sequence

In practice, these approaches are often combined in mixed-methods designs. Some inquiry questions may be determined deductively, while others are left sufficiently open to permit inductive analysis based on participants’ responses. While the quantitative/experimental approach is largely hypothetical-deductive and the qualitative/naturalistic approach is largely inductive, a mixed-methods study can include elements of both strategies. Indeed, over a period of inquiry, an investigation may flow from inductive approaches, to find out what the important questions and variables are (exploratory work), to deductive hypothesis-testing or outcome measurement, aimed at confirming and/or generalizing exploratory findings, and then back again to inductive analysis to look for rival hypotheses and unanticipated or unmeasured factors. This mixed-methods sequence is depicted graphically in Exhibit 2.3.

Anthropologist Russell Bernard has described how the interaction of inductive and deductive strategies unfolds in fieldwork:

When I started working with the Ñähñu Indians of central Mexico, for example, I wondered why so many parents wanted their children not to learn how to read and write Ñähñu in school. As I became aware of the issue, I started asking everyone I talked to about it. With each new interview, pieces of the puzzle fell into place. This was a really, really inductive approach. After a while, I came to understand the problem: It’s a long, sad story, repeated across the world by indigenous people who have learned to devalue their own cultures and reject their own languages in the hope that this will help their children do better economically. After that, I started right off by asking people about my hunches—for example, about the economic penalty of speaking Spanish in Mexico with an identifiable Indian accent. In other words, I switched to a really, really deductive approach.

It’s messy, but this paradigm for building knowledge—the continual combination of inductive and deductive research—is used by scholars across the humanities and the sciences alike and has proved itself, over thousands of years. If we know anything about how and why stars explode or about how HIV is transmitted or about why women lower their fertility when they enter the labor market, it’s because of this combination of effort. Human experience —the way real people experience real events—is endlessly interesting because it is endlessly unique, and so, in a way, the study of human experience is always exploratory and is best done inductively. (Bernard, 2013, p. 12)

Just as writers report different creative processes, so too qualitative analysts have different ways of working. While software programs now exist to facilitate working with large amounts of narrative data, and while substantial guidance can be offered about the steps and processes of content analysis, making sense of multiple interview transcripts and pages of field notes cannot be reduced to a formula or even a standard series of steps. There is no equivalent of a statistical significance test or factor score to tell the analyst when results are important or what quotations fit together under the same theme. Finding a way to creatively synthesize and present findings is one of the challenges of qualitative analysis, a challenge that will be explored at length in Part III of this book. For the moment, I can offer a flavor of that challenge with another excerpt from my interview with Williams. Here, she describes part of her own unique analytic process.

My current project follows up work that I have always done, which is to study categories and classifications and their implications. Right now, as I said, the focus of my work is on killing and the desire to kill and the categories people create in relation to killing. Part of it right now focuses on the death penalty, but mainly on killing. My fascination is with the links between category distinctions, commitments, and the desire to kill for those commitments. That’s what I study.

I track categories, like “serial killers” or “death row inmates.” The business of constantly transforming people into acts and acts into people is part of the way loyalties, commitments, and hatreds are generated. So I’m a classifier. I study classification—theories of classification. A lot of categories have to do with very abstract things; others have to do with very concrete things like skin color. But ultimately, the classification of a kill is what I’m focusing on now. I’ve been asking myself lately, for the chapter I’ve been working on, Is there a fundamental difference, for example, in the way we classify to kill? Consider the percentage of people classified as death worthy—the way we classify to justify the death penalty.

As I write, moving back and forth between my tapes and my interviews, I don’t feel that I have to follow some fixed outline or that I have to code things to come out a certain way. Sometimes I listen to a tape and I start to think that I should rewrite this part of this chapter. I had completely forgotten about this tape. It was done in early ’98 or late ’97 and maybe I hadn’t listened to it or looked at the transcript for a while, and I’ve just finished a chapter or section

of a chapter. I pull that tape off the shelf. I listen to it. I go back to the transcript and I start writing again. I start revising in ways that it seems to me that tape demands.

As Williams describes her analysis and writing process, she offers insight into what it means when qualitative researchers say they are “working to be true to the data” or that their analytical process is “data driven.” She says, “I start revising in ways that it seems to me that tape demands.” It is common to hear qualitative analysts say that, as they write their conclusions, they keep going back to the cases, rereading the field notes and listening again to the interviews. Inductive analysis is built on a solid foundation of specific, concrete, and detailed observations, quotations, documents, and cases. As thematic structures and overarching constructs emerge during analysis, the qualitative analyst keeps returning to fieldwork observations, interview transcripts, social media entries, and relevant documents, working from the bottom up, staying grounded in the foundation of case write-ups, and thereby examining emergent themes and constructs in light of what they illuminate about the case descriptions on which they are based. That is inductive analysis.

Holistic Perspective

The child’s life is an integral, a total one. He passes quickly and readily from one topic to another, as from one spot to another, but is not conscious of transition or break. There is no conscious isolation, hardly conscious distinction. The things that occupy him are held together by the unity of the personal and social interests which his life carries along. . . . [His] universe is fluid and fluent; its contents dissolve and reform with amazing rapidity. But after all, it is the child’s own world. It has the unity and completeness of his own life.

—John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

The Child and the Curriculum (1956, pp. 5–6)

Holography is a method of photography in which the wave field of light scattered by an object is captured as an interference pattern. When the photographic record—the hologram—is illuminated by a laser, a three- dimensional image appears. Any piece of a hologram will reconstruct the entire image. This has become a metaphor for thinking in new ways about the relationships between parts and wholes. The interdependence of flora, fauna, and the physical environment in ecological systems offers another metaphor for what it means to think and analyze holistically. Or consider this holistic wisdom from the great Greek physician Hippocrates (460–377 BCE): “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”

Researchers and evaluators analyzing qualitative data strive to understand a person, organization, community, phenomenon, or program as a whole. This means that a description and interpretation of a person’s social environment or an organization’s external context is essential for an overall understanding of what has been observed during fieldwork or said in an interview. This holistic approach assumes that the whole is understood as a complex system that is greater than the sum of its parts. The analyst searches for the totality or unifying nature of particular settings—the gestalt. Psychotherapist Fritz Perls (1973) used the term gestalt to evoke a holistic perspective in psychology. He used the example of three sticks that are just three sticks until one places them together to form a triangle; then, they are much more than the three separate sticks combined; they form a new whole.

A gestalt may be a tangible thing, such as a triangle, or it may be a situation. A happening such as a meeting of two people, their conversation, and their leave-taking would constitute a completed situation. If there were an interruption in the middle of the conversation, it would be an incomplete gestalt. (Brown, 1996, p. 36)

The strategy of seeking gestalt units and holistic understandings in qualitative analysis contrasts with the logic and procedures of studies conducted in the analytical tradition of “Let’s take it apart and see how it works.” The quantitative/experimental approach, for example, requires operationalization of independent and dependent variables with a focus on their statistical covariance. In program evaluation, this means that outcomes must be identified and measured as specific variables. Treatments and programs must also be conceptualized as discrete, independent variables. The characteristics of program participants must be measured by standardized, quantified dimensions. Sometimes, the variables of interest are derived from program goals, for example, student achievement test scores, recidivism statistics for a group of juvenile delinquents, and sobriety rates for participants in chemical dependency treatment programs. At other times, the variables measured are indicators of a larger construct. For example, community well-being may be measured by such rates for delinquency, infant mortality, divorce, unemployment, suicide, and poverty. These variables are statistically manipulated or added together in some linear fashion to test hypotheses and draw inferences about the relationships among separate indicators or the statistical significance of the differences between measured levels of the variables for different groups. The essential logic of this approach is as follows: (a) key program outcomes and processes can be represented by separate independent variables, (b) these variables can be quantified, and (c) the relationships among these variables are best portrayed statistically.

SIDEBAR

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY AS A HOLISTIC PROCESS

A holistic approach views research as a process rather than an event. In this regard, adopting a holistic approach means the researcher views all research approaches, from topic selection to final representation, as interrelated. This differs from an event-oriented approach, which views choices as a set of sequential steps. . . . In addition, it is not just the resulting information or research findings that we learn; the process itself becomes a part of the learning experience. In this regard and others, qualitative approaches to social inquiry foster personal satisfaction and growth.

—Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patrcia Leavy (2011, pp. 7–8) The Practice of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed.

The primary critique of this logic by qualitative/naturalistic evaluators is that such an approach (a) oversimplifies the complexities of real-world programs and participants’ experiences, (b) misses major factors of importance that are not easily quantified, and (c) fails to portray a sense of the program and its impacts as a “whole.” To support holistic analysis, the qualitative inquirer gathers data on multiple aspects of the setting under study to assemble a comprehensive and complete picture of the social dynamic of the particular situation or program. This means that, at the time of data collection, each case, event, or setting under study, though treated as a unique entity, with its own particular meaning and its own constellation of relationships emerging from and related to the context within which it occurs, is also thought of as a window into the whole. Thus, capturing and documenting history, interconnections, and system relationships is part of fieldwork.

The advantages of using quantitative variables and indicators are parsimony, precision, and ease of analysis. Where key elements can be quantified with validity, reliability, and credibility and where necessary statistical assumptions can be met (e.g., linearity, normality, and independence of measurement), then statistical portrayals can be quite powerful and succinct. The advantages of qualitative portrayals of holistic settings and impacts are that greater attention can be given to nuance, setting, interdependencies, complexities, idiosyncrasies, and context.

Holism is partly about how you see. Breaking a thing down into its constituent parts is one way to understand something—but not the only way. In fact, that can be [a] terribly limiting approach. Instead of narrowing your

focus, why not expand it instead? By zooming out and bringing more into the frame, an observer can perceive phenomena that only appear in the whole, not in the parts. (This approach has been called expansionism in contrast to reductionism.) . . .

In other words, a whole (or system) is both construed and discovered. So when people say that they want to be holistic, they usually mean that they aspire to expand their range of vision. They want to include more parts and, in that way, perceive a whole that is larger than what they could see before. . . . [Yet] no whole that an observer has construed and discovered can ever be considered complete. And for that reason, holism is necessarily an ongoing aspiration. It implies a disciplined commitment to continue questioning. It is endless pursuit of a broader and richer understanding. It is a radically open approach. (Coursen, 2014, p. 1)

Qualitative sociologist Irwin Deutscher (1970) commented that, despite the totality of our personal experiences as living, working human beings, social scientists have tended to focus their research on parts to the virtual exclusion of wholes:

We knew that human behavior was rarely if ever directly influenced or explained by an isolated variable; we knew that it was impossible to assume that any set of such variables was additive (with or without weighting); we knew that the complex mathematics of the interaction among any set of variables . . . was incomprehensible to us. In effect, although we knew they did not exist, we defined them into being. (p. 33)

While many would view this intense critique of variable analysis as too extreme, the reaction of many program staff to scientific research is like the reaction of Copernicus to the astronomers of his day: “With them,” he observed,

©2002 Michael Quinn Patton and Michael Cochran

it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be monster rather than man. (Kuhn, 1970, p. 83)

How many program staffs have complained of the evaluation research monster?

It is no simple task to undertake holistic analysis. The challenge is “to seek the essence of the life of the observed, to sum up, to find a central unifying principle” (Bruyn, 1966, p. 316). Again, Shapiro’s work (1973) in evaluating innovative follow-through classrooms is instructive. She found that standardized test results could not be interpreted without understanding the larger cultural and institutional context in which the individual child is situated. Taking context seriously, the topic of the next section, is an important element of holistic analysis.

I opened Chapter 1 with an illuminative example of holistic understanding that is worth repeating here. A Portuguese colleague told of driving in a remote area of his country when he came upon a sizable herd of sheep being driven along the road by a shepherd. Seeing that he would be delayed until the sheep could be turned off the road, he got out of the car and struck up a conversation with the shepherd.

“How many sheep do you have?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” responded the young man.

Surprised at this answer, the traveler asked, “How do you keep track of the flock if you don’t know how many sheep there are? How would you know if one was missing?”

The shepherd seemed puzzled by the question. Then, he explained, “I don’t need to count them. I know each one and I know the whole flock. I would know if the flock was not whole.”

This epitomizes holism. “I would know the flock as a whole.” Qualitative inquiry focused on a classroom of students strives to know the class as a whole. Qualitative inquiry into a family’s life seeks to understand the family class as a whole. Qualitative inquiry about a community aims to represent the community as a whole.

Context Sensitivity

The Latin word contextus means “to join together” or “to weave together.” —Dahler-Larsen and Schwandt (2012, p. 75)

Context envelops and completes the whole. Without attention to and inclusion of context, qualitative findings are like a fine painting without a frame. To understand context, let’s move now from sheep to elephants.

One of the classic tales used to illustrate the relationship between parts and wholes is the story of the nine blind people and the elephant. Each person touches only one part of the elephant and therefore knows only that part. The person touching the ears thinks an elephant is like a large, thin fan. The person touching the tail thinks the elephant is like a rope. The person touching the trunk thinks of a snake. The legs feel like tree trunks, the elephant’s side like a tall wall. And so it goes. The holistic point is that one must put all of these perspectives together to get a full picture of what an elephant actually looks like.

But such a picture will still be limited, even distorted, if the only place you ever see an elephant is in the zoo or at the circus. To understand the elephant—how it developed, how it uses its trunk, why it is so large— you must see it in the African savannah or an Asian jungle. In short, you must see it in context as part of an ecological system in relation to other flora and fauna, in its natural environment.

When we say to someone, “You’ve taken my comment out of context,” we are saying, “You have distorted what I said,” changed its meaning by omitting critical context.

In Victor Hugo’s great classic, Les Misérables, we first encounter Jean Valjean as a hardened criminal and common thief; then, we learn that he was originally sentenced to five years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister’s starving family. That adds context for his “crime” and changes our understanding. The battle over standardized sentencing guidelines in the criminal justice system is partly a debate about how much to allow judges sway in taking into account context and individual circumstances in pronouncing sentences.

Naturalistic inquiry not only describes context in reporting findings but also highlights and deciphers context when interpreting findings. Social psychology experiments under laboratory conditions strip the observed actions from context. But that is the point of such laboratory experiments—to generate findings that are context-free. The scientific ideal of generalizing across time and space is the ideal of identifying principles that do not depend on context. In contrast, qualitative inquiry elevates context as critical to understanding. Portraitist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1997) explains why she finds context “crucial to the documentation of human experience and organizational culture”:

By context, I mean the setting—physical, geographic, temporal, historical cultural, aesthetic—within which action takes place. Context becomes the framework, the reference point, the map, the ecological sphere; it is used to place

people and action in time and space and as a resource for understanding what they say and do. The context is rich in clues for interpreting the experience of the actors in the setting. We have no idea how to decipher or decode an action, a gesture, a conversation, or an exclamation unless we see it embedded in context. (p. 41)

Context also affects how an inquiry is conducted. As president of the American Evaluation Association in 2009, Debra Rog made “Context and Evaluation” the theme of the annual conference. In doing so, she sought to move attention to context “from background to foreground” by focusing on “how best to match designs and methods to particular program and policy contexts to produce the most useful and actionable evidence” (Rog, 2012, p. 26).

Context-sensitive evaluation eschews a methods-first orientation and suggests that a context-first approach for evaluation is more appropriate. The perspective is that the evaluator needs an understanding of which approaches to evaluation are most appropriate for particular contexts. Much like the question we strive to answer in our evaluations, “What works best for whom under what conditions?” context-sensitive evaluation practice asks “What evaluation approach provides the highest quality and most actionable evidence in which contexts?” The answer to this question requires balancing, at a minimum, attention to context, stakeholder needs, and rigor. Accomplishing this balance likely entails understanding the many context issues that affect an evaluation and its evaluand, actively involving the range of stakeholders in the process, and drawing on a portfolio of methodological and analytic strategies to accommodate the context issues and needs in the most rigorous way possible. (pp. 26–27)

While Rog was focusing on selecting evaluation methods to fit program and policy contexts, moving from a methods-first orientation to a context-first approach applies to any kind of inquiry. What kinds of methods are most appropriate for what kinds of questions? That issue is the core of this chapter as we examine the 12 strategic dimensions that characterize and distinguish qualitative inquiry. What is the purpose of the inquiry? Who will be assessing the rigor of the inquiry, using what standards and criteria, to judge the credibility of the findings? How will qualitative inquiry be received in the context in which the study will be conducted? Exhibit 2.4, adapted and expanded from Rog (2012, p. 28), depicts the interrelated arenas of context that come into play in determining the appropriateness of a particular inquiry approach.

Reflexivity: Perspective and Voice

γνῶθι σεαυτóν (“Know thyself” in Greek) —Inscription in ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi

Let me acknowledge immediately that the term reflexivity reeks of academic jargon. In everyday conversation, we don’t say, “I’m in a reflexive mood today. I’ve set aside time to engage in some serious reflexivity.” Such an assertion would likely evoke a profoundly unimpressed and skeptical “Whatever.” So why not just use the word reflection? Reflexivity encompasses reflection—indeed, mandates reflection—but it means to take the reflective process deeper and make it more systematic than is usually implied by the term reflection. It may sound pretentious and can elicit negative feedback for sounding academic and highfalutin, but the purpose is not pomposity. The term reflexivity is meant to direct us to a particular kind of reflection grounded in the in- depth, experiential, and interpersonal nature of qualitative inquiry.

In science generally, a reflexive relationship is bidirectionally interactive and interdependent. Cause and effect are circular, interconnected, and mutually influencing. I affect you, and you affect me. The interviewer affects the interviewee, and the interviewee affects the interviewer. Fieldworkers enter a place in which they observe what is going on, they describe what they see and hear, they interact with people in the situation being studied, and these interactions have effects, both on those studied and on the observers. But how do we know what those effects are? How do we figure out how who we are affects what we see, how we see what we see, and how others respond to our being there, observing, asking questions, and taking notes?

SIDEBAR

REFLEXIVITY

Reflexivity is self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher. Indeed reflexivity is critical to the conduct of fieldwork; it induces self-discovery and can lead to insights and new hypotheses about the research questions. A more reflexive and flexible approach to fieldwork allows the researcher to be more open to any challenges to their theoretical position that fieldwork almost inevitably raises.

—Kim V. L. England (1994) Professional geographer

The term reflexivity has entered the qualitative lexicon as a way of emphasizing the importance of deep introspection, political consciousness, cultural awareness, and ownership of one’s perspective. Reflexivity calls on us to think about how we think and inquire into our thinking patterns even as we apply thinking to making sense of the patterns we observe around us. Reflexivity involves “interpretation of interpretation and the launching of a critical self-exploration of one’s own interpretations . . . , a consideration of the perceptual, cognitive, theoretical, linguistic, (inter)textual, political and cultural circumstances that form the backdrop to —as well as impregnate—the interpretations” (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009, p. 9). Being reflexive involves self-questioning and self-understanding, for “all understanding is self-understanding” (Schwandt, 1997a, p. xvi). To be reflexive, then, is to undertake an ongoing examination of what I know and how I know it, “to have an ongoing conversation about experience while simultaneously living in the moment” (Hertz, 1997, p. viii). Reflexivity reminds the qualitative inquirer to be attentive to and conscious of the cultural, political, social, linguistic, and economic origins of one’s own perspective and voice as well as the perspective and voices of those one interviews and those to whom one reports.

Reflexivity turns mindfulness inward. Earlier, I discussed mindfulness as a pathway to empathic neutrality. Here, reflexive mindfulness is the pathway to self-awareness. To excel in qualitative inquiry requires keen and astute self-awareness. It turns out that people who excel in all kinds of activities share the quality of being self-aware and using that awareness to adapt to whatever presents itself in the course of taking action (Sweeney & Gosfield, 2013). Exhibit 2.5, on the next page, depicts the mindfulness of reflexive triangulation.