U1D1-68 -compare and contrast the characteristics of quantitative and qualitative research, addressing the philosophical assumptions of both. Based on your review of the assigned readings, identify and describe what you believe to be meaningful about the

MQP Rumination #1

Anecdote as Epithet

In celebration of the fourth edition of this book (the first was in 1980), I am indulging in 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.

An anecdote is nothing more than a short story about something. But anecdote has become an epithet. “That’s just anecdotal” is a common way of dismissing qualitative data. For example, an article on science attacking qualitative case studies insisted, “The plural of anecdote is not evidence” (Benson, 2013, p. 11).

Sometimes. Cherry-picked anecdotes to supposedly “prove” a predetermined position come across as what they are: argumentative advocacy, not evidence. But the systematic, intentional, and careful recording of purposefully sampled anecdotes (stories) can become evidence when rigorously captured and thoughtfully analyzed. Suppose you’re doing fieldwork and ask eight knowledgeable people about an event

you’ve heard about. They give you 15 anecdotes. Look for patterns across the anecdotes. When in doubt about the veracity of a particular anecdote, check it out with others. That’s qualitative inquiry using anecdotes as data. But even single anecdotes can be informative. Consider this example.

Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, has the job of tracking down and verifying the original source of widely used quotations. He traced the quote “The plural of anecdote is not evidence” to Raymond Wolfinger, political scientist, University of California, Berkeley, and e-mailed him for confirmation. Wolfinger responded with an anecdote:

I said “The plural of anecdote IS data” sometime in the 1969–70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student’s dismissal of a simple factual statement—by another student or me—as a mere anecdote. The quotation was my rejoinder. Since then I have missed few opportunities to quote myself. The only appearance in print that I can remember is Nelson Polsby’s (1984) accurate quotation and attribution in an article in Political Science and Politics.

Shapiro goes on to note, “What is interesting about this saying is that it seems to have morphed into its opposite ‘Data is not the plural of anecdote.’”

Etymology

The word anecdote originally meant “secret or private stories,” from the French anecdote, derived from the Greek anekdota, “things unpublished” or “not given out.” The word entered our language to denote stories that weren’t given out to the public, meaning the hidden accounts that didn’t make the authorized biography, the formal minutes of the meeting, or the official version of events. Diaries are a classic source of anecdotal material. Fadiman (2000) traces the etymology and history of, and the changing connotations associated with, the word anecdote, including the contemporary scholarly enterprise of collecting and publishing entertaining, insightful, inspirational, and titillating anecdotes. Having studied anecdotes, he takes on the question of their value.

Men of high philosophic mind have valued the anecdote less for its capacity to divert, more for its power to reveal character. This value was first classically formulated by Plutarch, quoted by Boswell: “Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men’s virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles.”

From anecdotes, thought Prosper Merirnee, one “can distinguish a true picture of the customs and characters of any given period.” Nietzsche was confident that “three anecdotes may suffice to paint a picture of a man.” Isaac D’Israeli, whose Dissertation on Anecdotes affords a perfect reflection of his time’s anecdotal preferences, thought anecdotes accurate indices to character: “Opinions are fallible, but not examples.” Says Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Ballads, bons mots, and anecdotes give us better insights into the depths of past centuries than grave and voluminous chronicles.” His contemporary William Ellery Channing agreed: “One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.” (p. xxiii)

Dubious? Consider what this single anecdote reveals about a person, a people, and a colonial empire. It is told by English author J. R. Ackerley from his travels in India sometime around 1930.

Talking of snakes, Mrs. Montgomery told me that once she nearly trod upon a krait—one of the most venomous snakes in India. “I was going back in the evening to my bungalow, preceded by a servant who was carrying a lamp. Suddenly he stopped and said, ‘Krait, Mem-sahib!’—but I was far too ill to notice what he was saying, and went straight on. Then the servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India—he touched me! He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back. Of course if he hadn’t done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn’t like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.”

Fadiman, as an anecdote collector and scholar, is careful not to overgeneralize from a single anecdote. He has commented that, like a statistic taken out of context, a single anecdote, unless measured against the whole record of a life, may be a damned lie. But he ruminates that a reasonable and diverse number of anecdotes drawn from different circumstances and phases of a life may give us “an imperfect yet authentic sense of character.” In the end, though, he comes to see anecdotes as data, though he doesn’t use that word. Anecdotes are naturally occurring, readily available, and insight-generating data. He concludes thus about the overall value of anecdotes:

If one were asked to name the kind of book that within one set of covers most adequately reflects the sheer multifariousness of human personality, it might well be a book of anecdotes. . . .

A reasonably ample gathering of anecdotes, drawn from many times and climes, may reconcile us to our human nature by showing us that, for all its faults and stupidities, it can boast a diversity to which no other animal species can lay claim. (Fadiman, 2000, p. xxiv)

Anecdotal Evidence

In the course of discussing this rumination while doing fieldwork together, colleague Jamie Radner shared two anecdotes with me that illustrate and illuminate anecdotes as data and evidence. With his kind permission (and a caution that these are vivid memories but, being decades old, may be off in one or more detail), I share them here:

Decades ago I worked for Amnesty International (AI). At the heart of AI’s effectiveness was generating impartial, reliable, credible evidence about what was going on in all kinds of brutal places. Our biggest staff unit and biggest investment was therefore our research department, packed with smart, well-trained PhDs. A core research method was collecting stories from refugees. Definitely, anecdotes in both the old and current senses. These were then rigorously analyzed to assess where there was independent corroboration coming through, to push for inconsistencies, to discover patterns (ah, that word—brings back memories). Was the result good evidence? You bet. Good enough, I liked to think, to at least occasionally save lives. And this brings to mind . . .

Again, decades ago, a colleague working for the Peace Corps in Africa described a scene to me in a remote village in a brutally run country. There was a long line of villagers waiting at some makeshift station. He asked what was up and learned that they were waiting to talk, one by one, to a representative from AI. Everyone knew that such talk, in such a place, was very dangerous. So at a certain point he asked a villager he knew why so many people were running this risk. I’ll never forget the answer: “We trust Amnesty International.”

Anecdotes as Hypotheses

Scientific observations often begin as anecdotes, for example, Newton getting inspired by observing a falling apple, stimulating him to ponder what we now know as gravity, or so goes the legendary anecdote. Anecdotes yield hypotheses and questions. Was that anecdote an interesting but idiosyncratic story, or is it part of a pattern? Qualitative inquirers examine multiple anecdotes for patterns, insights, and meaning.

Nicholas G. Carr (2010), an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture, has labeled anti-anecdotalism as antiscience.

We live anecdotally, proceeding from birth to death through a series of incidents, but scientists can be quick to dismiss the value of anecdotes. “Anecdotal” has become something of a curse word, at least when applied to research and other explorations of the real. . . . The empirical, if it’s to provide anything like a full picture, needs to make room for both the statistical and the anecdotal.

The danger in scorning the anecdotal is that science gets too far removed from the actual experience of life, that it loses sight of the fact that mathematical averages and other such measures are always abstractions. (Carr, 2014)

Anti-Anti-Anecdotalism

So here’s how I now respond to the dismissive “It’s just an anecdote.”

It’s just an anecdote when told in isolation and heard by amateurs. But I’m a professional anecdote collector. If you know how to listen, systematically collect, and rigorously analyze anecdotes, the patterns revealed are windows into what’s going on in the world. It’s true that to the untrained ear, an anecdote is just a casual story, perhaps amusing, perhaps not. But to the professionally trained and attuned ear, an anecdote is scientific data —a note in a symphony of human experience. Of course, you have to know how to listen. (Smile knowingly.)

On the other hand, this entire rumination may be viewed as evidence that I have moved into an advanced stage of anecdotage. “In youth we sow our wild oats, in old age our tame anecdotes” (Fadiman, 2000, p. xiv).

And a final cautionary note: Don’t confuse anecdotes with anecdata: “information which is presented as if it is based on serious research but is in fact based on what someone thinks is true” (Davidson, 2014; Macmillan, 2014).

Rumination Exercise: Practice Analyzing Anecdotes

For Valentine’s Day, the editor of The New York Times Book Review collected anecdotes from writers in a variety of genres about books that have taught them about love. Read these anecdotes as data. What themes do you find across the stories? (“A Sentimental Education,” 2014).

Likewise, interviewing skills are essential for the observer because, during fieldwork, you will need and want to talk with people, whether formally or informally. Participant observers gather a great deal of information through informal, naturally occurring conversations. Understanding that interviewing and observation are mutually reinforcing qualitative techniques is a bridge to understanding the fundamentally people-oriented nature of qualitative inquiry.

Sociologist John Lofland posited four people-oriented mandates in collecting qualitative data. First, the qualitative methodologist must get close enough to the people and situation being studied to personally understand in depth the details of what goes on. Second, the qualitative methodologist must aim at capturing what actually takes place and what people actually say: the perceived facts. Third, qualitative data must include a great deal of pure description of people, activities, interactions, and settings. Fourth, qualitative data must include direct quotations from people, both what they speak and what they write down.

The commitment to get close, to be factual, descriptive and quotive, constitutes a significant commitment to represent the participants in their own terms. This does not mean that one becomes an apologist for them, but rather

that one faithfully depicts what goes on in their lives and what life is like for them, in such a way that one’s audience is at least partially able to project themselves into the point of view of the people depicted. They can “take the role of the other” because the reporter has given them a living sense of day-to-day talk, day-to-day activities, day-to-day concerns and problems. . . .

A major methodological consequence of these commitments is that the qualitative study of people in situ is a process of discovery. It is of necessity a process of learning what is happening. Since a major part of what is happening is provided by people in their own terms, one must find out about those terms rather than impose upon them a preconceived or outsider’s scheme of what they are about. It is the observer’s task to find out what is fundamental or central to the people or world under observation. (Lofland, 1971, p. 4)

Personal Engagement in Qualitative Inquiry In qualitative inquiry, the person conducting interviews and engaging in field observations is the instrument

of the inquiry. The inquirer’s skills, experience, perspective, and background matter. The personal nature of qualitative inquiry will be a recurring theme of this book. Qualitative inquiry provides a point of intersection between the personal and the professional. Exhibit 1.8 offers a concrete example of inquiry into that personal/professional intersection while contrasting cognitive styles and inviting you to assess your own cognitive style and personal/professional qualitative inquiry intersection.

SIDEBAR

MAPPING EXPERIENCES: Our Own as Well as Those of Others

Qualitative inquiry offers opportunities not only to learn about the experiences of others but also to examine the experiences that you, the inquirer, bring to the inquiry, experiences that will, to some extent, affect what is studied and help shape, for better or worse, what is discovered. Qualitative inquiry includes examining and understanding how who we are can shape what we see, hear, know, and learn during fieldwork and subsequent analysis. In that sense, qualitative inquiry can be thought of as mapping experiences, our own as well as those of others.

Imagine a map . . . drawn from your memory instead of from the atlas. It is made of strong places stitched together by the vivid threads of transforming journeys. It contains all the things you learned from the land and shows where you learned them. . . .

Think of this map as a living thing, not a chart but a tissue of stories that grows half-consciously with each experience. It tells where and who you are with respect to the earth, and in times of stress or disorientation it gives you the bearings you need in order to move on. We all carry such maps within us as sentient and reflective beings, and we depend upon them unthinkingly, as we do upon language or thought. . . . And it is part of wisdom, to consider this ecological aspect of our identity. (Tallmadge, 1997, p. 14)

EXHIBIT 1.8 Cognitive Inquiry Styles: PowerPoint Versus Story

PowerPoint constitutes a powerful and widely used presentation tool, but embedded within it may be a way of thinking that reduces knowledge to bullet points. Edward R. Tufte (2006), professor emeritus of political science, computer science, statistics, and graphic design at Yale, argues that the “cognitive style” of PowerPoint weakens verbal and spatial reasoning. His view is emphatic: PowerPoint Is Evil. Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely (Tufte, 2003). Victims of poor PowerPoint presentations refer to being caught in “PowerPoint hell.” Angela R. Garber (2001), a communications expert, is credited with the phrase “death by PowerPoint.” Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has warned of PowerPoint poisoning.

PowerPoint is an effective presentation tool when expertly used. That is not in question. What undergirds these vociferous critiques of PowerPoint is the exalted position it has been thrust into as a symbol of bullet-point simplicity. The tool has been cloaked in a mantle that caricatures simple-mindedness. What does this have to do with qualitative inquiry? Just this: Qualitative inquiry and reporting resist bullet-point simplicity in favor of contextualized complexity and offer an alternative to the Information Age trend of reducing knowledge to numbers, bullet points, tweets, and text messages.

To illustrate the contrast, which itself is oversimplified and intentionally provocative, let’s compare two inquiry frameworks using the life of Dr. Will Wilson (a pseudonym), who teaches qualitative methods. For this thought experiment, the left-hand column below is his life story in 20 bullets. In the right-hand column are the qualitative inquiry questions that would form the basis for a deep, rich, thick, complex, and contextualized story. The contrasting frameworks constitute not only different cognitive styles but also different ways of engaging the world, different forms of understanding, different commitments of time and attention, and different tolerances for ambiguity and complexity. These differences are partly a matter of taste, but taste flows from habit, experience, and behavioral reinforcement as much as, and even more so than, any inherent predilection. This exercise invites you to assess your current taste preferences and habits of mind while aspiring to whet your appetite for the deep engagement that is the essence of qualitative inquiry.

The Story of Dr. Will Wilson

Research Question: What Experiences Have Informed Your Engagement With and Approach to Qualitative Inquiry?

Interrelationship Between the Two Columns

This exercise was positioned as a contrast between two competing cognitive frameworks: bullet-point simplicity versus in-depth qualitative complexity. But looked at from a different angle, the 20 bullet-point facts can be treated as an outline for creating the interview questions that guide the in-depth qualitative inquiry. The bullet points are the bare-bones skeleton of Dr. Wilson’s life. The qualitative inquiry puts flesh, visage, expression, and personhood on that skeleton. Each informs the other. They are complementary, interconnected cognitive frameworks, a metaphor for integrated mixed methods.

MODULE

4 The Fruit of Qualitative Methods

Wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it. Variations in technique, climate, grape, soil, and culture ensure that wine is, to the ordinary drinker, the most unpredictable of drinks, and to the connoisseur the most intricately informative, responding to its origins like a game of chess to its opening move.

—Roger Scruton (2009) I Drink Therefore I Am:

A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine

You may have noticed that the phrase “the fruit of qualitative methods” appears often throughout this chapter. Subsequent chapters in this book discuss how to collect, analyze, and use qualitative data, but this opening chapter has aimed at giving you a taste of the fruit of qualitative methods. As noted at the beginning, this chapter has been a bit like a qualitative wine tasting, if you will: a chance to cultivate taste as much as judge what is to your liking. It is important to know what qualitative data yield and what findings look like so that you will know what you are seeking to produce when you undertake your own qualitative inquiry. It will also be important to consider criteria for judging the quality of qualitative data. Wines come to market distinguished by type (e.g., red, white, rose, and sparkling), serving a variety of purposes (e.g., fine dining, celebrations, as accompaniment to particular foods, for cooking, for medicinal purposes), and varying in quality, though judges of quality differ in their judgments. Likewise, qualitative studies vary by type, purpose, data-gathering processes, analytical techniques, reporting formats, and quality. These variations are the territory we’ll cover in subsequent chapters. Before doing so, here’s a brief review of this initial foray into the qualitative vineyard.

Chapter Summary and Conclusion Module 1 How Qualitative Inquiry Contributes to Our Understanding of the World Module 2 What Makes Qualitative Data Qualitative Module 3 Making Methods Decisions Module 4 The Fruit of Qualitative Methods: Chapter Summary and Conclusion

Chapter Review

The fruit of qualitative inquiry emerges from the three kinds of qualitative data:

1. Interpersonal interviews: They ask open-ended questions and probe for in-depth responses about people’s experiences, perceptions, opinions, feelings, and knowledge; interview data consist of verbatim quotations with sufficient context to be interpretable. Exhibit 1.1 offers examples of open-ended interview questions.

2. Fieldwork observations: They describe activities, behaviors, actions, conversations, interpersonal interactions, organizational or community processes, or any other aspect of observable human experience; data consist of field notes—rich, detailed descriptions, including the context within which the observations

were made. Exhibit 1.7 presents an example of an observation of a session in an early-childhood parent education program.

3. Documentation: This includes any kind of written material from organizational, clinical, or program records; social media postings of all kinds; memoranda and correspondence; official publications and reports; personal diaries, letters, artistic works, photographs, and memorabilia; and written responses to open-ended surveys. The qualitative data consist of excerpts from documents captured in a way that records and preserves context.

This chapter compared and contrasted these qualitative kinds of data with quantitative data and gave examples of mixed methods that integrate qualitative and quantitative methods and findings. (See Exhibit 1.4, p. 15 for details.)

In Module 1, we examined five examples of the qualitative inquiry contributions summarized in Exhibit 1.2 (p. 13):

1. Capturing stories to understand people’s perspectives and experiences 2. Elucidating how systems function and their consequences for people’s lives 3. Understanding context: how and why it matters 4. Identifying unanticipated consequences 5. Making case comparisons to discover important patterns and themes across cases.

Throughout the chapter, I’ve provided examples of qualitative findings, such as teachers’ reactions to the Kalamazoo accountability system and research on women’s ways of knowing (Exhibit 1.5, p. 16).

Exhibit 1.6 (p. 21) provides a list of guiding questions and options for making methods decisions. To place our contemporary inquiries and methods into the broadest possible historical context, Exhibit 1.9, at the end of this chapter (pp. 41–43), lists the contributions of qualitative inquiry pioneers across the full panorama of disciplines and inquiry traditions going back to ancient Greece.

Form Follows Function, Design Follows Purpose

Beginning this book with examples of the fruit of qualitative inquiry follows the basic logic of design: Start with what you want to produce and achieve, the outcomes and results you seek, and then work backward to figure out what processes you must follow and what steps you must take to get where you want to be at the end. It turns out, however, that the planned path and the path actually taken can be quite different as you navigate uncharted parts of the terrain and overcome unexpected obstacles along the way. Start to finish is rarely, if ever, a simple, linear path. Be prepared for some major forks in the road, detours, emergent opportunities, disappointments, and thrills. For qualitative inquiry takes you into the world to experience and document the world, and the world, being multidimensional, multilayered, complex, dynamic, and enveloping, will take you to places both planned and unplanned. It’s an amazing journey because the world is an amazing place, offering much to discover, much to ponder, and much to understand. To help determine if you are ready, reflect on what you understand to be the fruit of qualitative inquiry. The ancient Sufi story, in graphic comic format, that ends this chapter (pp. 38–40) is aimed at stimulating that reflective process.

EXHIBIT 1.9 Qualitative Inquiry Pioneers

Below are examples of inquisitive minds who contributed to our knowledge of the world through direct observation, interviewing, document analysis, fieldwork, open-ended inquiry, systematic analysis, and careful reflection into and on the nature of things. No such list can be definitive, and any such list will be controversial. The purpose here is to place what we now understand to be—and label as—qualitative inquiry within the broadest possible historical context. As has been reiterated periodically by scholars throughout history, we surely stand on the shoulders of giants (Bernard of Chartres, 12th century; Sir Isaac Newton, 17th century). This is a purposeful sampling of those giants, the purpose being to demonstrate and remind that qualitative inquiry is deeply grounded in scientific inquiry across time, space, discipline, culture, and knowledge epoch.

APPLICATION EXERCISES

1. This chapter opened with the story of a Portuguese sheep herder. Identify and explain at least three things that story illustrates about the nature of qualitative inquiry.

2. The first contribution of qualitative inquiry discussed is illuminating meanings (pp. 3–6).Write a case study of an event, experience, or encounter that had meaning for you. First, simply describe what happened, what you experienced, and how the story unfolded in enough detail that a reader knows what occurred. Then, analyze the experience or event for meaning. Finally, reflect on your experience of meaning making. Comment on your experience of and thoughts about interpreting a case study (personal story) to extract meanings.

3. Early in the chapter, there is a section on how qualitative inquiry elucidates “how systems function and their consequences for people’s lives” (see p. 8). Identify a system that you have some knowledge about. Discuss and explain how a qualitative inquiry could help elucidate how that system functions and its system dynamics.

4. The chapter highlights a number of important qualitative studies that have contributed to our knowledge. (See especially the section on qualitative findings (pp. 15–17) as well as Exhibit 1.9, on qualitative inquiry pioneers (pp. 41–43). Find a major qualitative study in your own field of interest. Why did the study use qualitative methods? What was the importance of the contribution made to knowledge of the study you located?

5. My rumination on anecdotes included an application exercise, which, in case you neglected it earlier, I repeat here. For Valentine’s Day, The New York Times collected anecdotes from writers in a variety of genres about books that have taught them above love. Read these anecdotes as data. What themes do you find across the stories? Practice analysis (“A Sentimental Education,” 2014).

6. This chapter ends with an ancient Sufi story, “The Fruit of Qualitative Methods” (pp. 38–40), in which a scholar is seeking to experience and understand fruit. Earlier in the chapter, in the section “The Power of Qualitative Data,” the case example of what happened in Kalamazoo schools is presented. Qualitative analysis often involves looking across different stories for common themes and patterns. Identify and discuss at least two patterns or themes that are common in those two stories. This is a creative analysis exercise. There is no particular right answer. What connections can you make between those two quite different stories, the scholar seeking fruit and the Kalamazoo teachers reacting to the school district’s accountability system?