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David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research

Video Title: David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research Originally Published: 2017 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: London, United Kingdom ISBN: 9781473992771

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473992771

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473992771

[SAGE video experts] [David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research]

DAVID SILVERMAN: Hi, My name is David Silverman. I'm the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at

Goldsmiths College, University of London. I also have a couple of visiting professorships in Australia,

where I visit every northern winter. I'm the author of a couple of bestselling textbooks on qualitative

research, doing qualitative research, which

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: is essentially a guide to writing up a piece of research, and

interpreting qualitative data, which is about different ways of analyzing qualitative data. I've also

written a short book. In fact, it's called A Very Short Book, which is more a polemic about my ideas

about qualitative

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: research, which are rather different from some other people as you'll

see in a minute. Apart from writing textbooks these days, I also run workshops for graduate students

and faculty at a number of European and Australian universities. [Introduction: Minority and Majority

View] Qualitative research, as I will show you,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: contains many competing perspectives. I'll talk about a majority

perspective and a minority perspective. Now, which perspective you choose is ultimately up to you in

terms of the kind of topics you want to study and how you want to study them. But you owe it to your

audience, as I'll argue, to show why you've chosen the particular perspective

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: that you have, and what things you're gaining by it, but also what

things you're losing by it. Many years ago, the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, talked about

different sciences, some of which, he said, had paradigms, or agreed ways of looking at the world,

and others, which didn't have any such agreement.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And he called these pre-paradigmatic. Now in many respects,

qualitative research fits into this second box of Kuhn's. It's pre-paradigmatic. There is no agreed

perspective in qualitative research. What I want to try and show you now is there is a majority view

and a minority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: In fact, the majority view is a large majority if you look at articles that

are published in journals. The majority of articles, the vast majority of articles, that are published in

journals involve open-ended interviews, which are analyzed often using an approach called grounded

theory, which uses something called thematic analysis, which I'll mention in a minute.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Only a tiny minority of published research in the qualitative area

actually looks at what people are doing in real life situations rather than asking them questions.

And that's the minority view, which I'll expand on in a minute. And I'll explain why I believe it has

advantages compared to the majority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: [The Majority View & Thematic Analysis] So let me talk a bit about

this majority view, which is in a majority, as I've said already, because if you look at published research

in qualitative research, around about 90% of research follows this position. What features does the

majority view have?

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: The first is the assumption that qualitative research is about

something that people call lived experience. By that they seem to mean something about the need to

understand what is inside people's heads to understand how they see situations.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the most commonly way used to access this lived experience

is by means of open-ended interviews. And so in the majority view, you contrast quantitative

research, which typically uses pre-prepared survey questions, with open-ended interviews, where the

interviewer

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: may only have a general question and then encourages the

interviewee to speak more usually by using things like, mm hmm, which usually generates more talk,

the aim being, without too much structure, to get inside people's heads and see how they see things.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: It's one thing to gather data. There's also the issue of how you

analyze that data and the majority view has an overall version of what is the most effective way of

analyzing what people say. And it's called thematic analysis. And thematic analysis, as the name

suggests,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: involves looking at interviewees' responses and picking out certain

themes, which are often coded-- and there are often software methods to do this-- and then relate

it. So the argument is, you can get a systematic understanding of what people are thinking by this

thematic analysis.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: [The Appeal of the Majority View] Why should so much qualitative

research follow this majority view? Well in one sense, I think because it fits a popular conception of

what qualitative research is all about. You think of qualitative research very often,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: and you think of somebody of an interviewer with a clipboard who's

going through questions, which they're asking somebody else, or maybe-- an approach that I haven't

mentioned so far-- a focus group, where you gather a group of people together and give them some

stimulus and encourage them to talk about that stimulus.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the second reason for this appeal of the majority view, it

establishes a very neat division of labor. We say-- the majority people say-- quantitative research,

which we don't do, is studying people's behavior. What we offer instead is an in-depth analysis

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: of people's experience. So quantitative research is about studies

of behavior, sometimes in laboratories, sometimes by other means. Qualitative research is about

people's lived experience, often understood through interviews or focus groups. [What are the

limitations of the majority view?]

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What I want to show you is that ultimately, at least in my view, the

majority view of qualitative research derives not from social science, but from the everyday world in

which we live. That ultimately, its appeal is to our common sense assumptions about what society

looks like.

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Let me try and demonstrate that to you in a number of ways.

Firstly, think about the issue of experience, which is so dear to the majority view. Now put that word

"experience" in inverted commas or scare marks. And think about whose topic is "experience."

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Once we think about it that way, we think about how so many of us

are involved in the social media. And what is the social media concerned with other than narrating our

experience to ourselves and to other people? Then think about television coverage of news events

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: and the way in which, so often, that's organized around interviews

with people who were involved, sometimes, to my mind, to a distressing extent. So for instance, no

scene of a disaster, it seems to be the case, is complete without interviews with bereaved families

talking about their experience.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: But then something curious happens if you think systematically

about it-- and I've studied this rather morbid subject myself-- people roughly say the same thing. It

turns out this is almost a social fact, because it's so recurrent. That everybody who dies in a tragic

circumstances is nearly always a hero or heroine. That's how we talk about bereavement.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Callously, I might say, it would be interesting in a news interview

if somebody who was bereaved had said, oh, that's great, because now I can let out their room.

That would be newsworthy. But instead we get this endless repetition of people telling these stories

of heroes and heroines. So the whole topic, it seems to me, of "experience," in inverted commas,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: can be seen to be part of our world, not part of social science. It

doesn't mean to say social science can't study experience, but not trying to get inside people's heads

and asking what they really feel, but rather studying the ways in which this term "experience" is

actually used in the media and by ourselves in the social media.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Now the second reason, and it's a related reason, why I think the

majority view has a common sense origins is that we live in something that I called, in a paper with

Paul Atkinson, an interview society. We see truth somehow in the world in which we live as residing

within the interview, hence all these TV news programs, which largely consists

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: of interviews with people. So it's hardly surprising that qualitative

researchers should buy in to a version of doing qualitative research by means of the interview, since

it's central to the world in which we live. Now we come on to some more technical issues, which I

believe are further faults in the majority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: I've talked about how in the majority view, thematic analysis is used,

picking out themes within what people say in interviews. Now the question I would want to ask such

researchers is, how easy is it to pick out themes in what people say? Do you really need social

science skills

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: in order to be able to do that? Or isn't this a common sense activity?

And part of what is happening in this business of finding themes when we analyze interviews or focus

groups, is that a large part of what goes on in the interview or focus group gets lost. If you look at

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research papers based on these kinds of data,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: you often find that the interviewer's question isn't there. You just get

the interviewees response. So ultimately what I would say in my critique of the majority view is that

it derives from something about the world in which we live, what I call the interview society. And its

pursuit of experience arises

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: not from a position within social science, but arises from that world

in which we live. [How does the minority view differ?] Above all, it differs because IT believes that

rather than studying primarily what is inside people's heads, we should study what people actually

do.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: A great American qualitative researcher of the 1970s, called Harvey

Sacks, once took this to an extreme level. When he was teaching his students in an introductory

class, he said, I gather a lot of you are interested in understanding people's experience.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What I would say to you is this. If you're interested in getting inside

people's heads, what I suggest to you is that you give up social science. Go into medicine, and

become a brain surgeon. So the minority view primarily argues that the first place we should go to in

any qualitative research study is what can be called naturalistic data, data that

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: would be out there even if we weren't asking questions or forming

focus groups. [What are the strengths of the minority view?] Jonathan Potter, a great discourse

analysist, has argued for what he calls the Dead Social Scientist Test.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What does he mean by that? He means that we should prefer data

that would still be available even if we, as a researcher, got run over on our way to the office that

morning. Now if we got run over on the way to the office that morning, we couldn't do an interview, or

we couldn't hold a focus group.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: But the world, the social world, would still continue. So Potter's way

of summarizing this appeal of naturalistic data is to apply the Dead Social Scientist Test to any kind

of data you're thinking of gathering, and see if it passes it. Of course, gathering rich data, as I believe

naturalistic data is, is not the be all and end all.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What ultimately matters in all research is whether you have rigorous,

systematic ways of analyzing that data. Data never speak for themselves. The minority view has, as

such, a systematic way of analyzing data. The first thing it demands is rather than cutting off

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: an instance of behavior or talk from other instances of behavior and

talk, that we see how it fits into a particular sequence of actions or talk. And sequences are all around

us in the world in which we live. This is not something peculiar to qualitative research.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: So for instance, just to take an example, I think you would all

understand if somebody asked you, what are you doing on Saturday evening? That if you say, nothing

much, what's going to happen next is you're going to get an invitation. And so that's a very skillful

question, what are you doing at Saturday evening, because it's a pre-invitation.

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And both the potential giver of the invitation and the recipient of it

can head off the invitation, and the embarrassing features of turning down an invitation, by answering

the question, what are you doing on Saturday evening, by saying, oh, I'm busy washing my hair or

whatever. And so and invitation that's going to be turned down never has to be offered.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Now this is showing you how sequences are part of the world

in which we live. So it's very curious in the majority view, particularly when they just do thematic

analysis, they're leaving out the sequences which are central to the social world in which we live.

That's why I was arguing that if you're analyzing interviews,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: that you have to look at how what the interviewee is saying is

shaped by what the interviewer has said and doing, even mm-hmm and another continuers. But you

also have to look at the way what the interviewer is saying is shaped by what the interviewee has

said. And you can't pick out a theme without looking at sequences.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the final feature I want to talk about of this brief summary of the

minority view is that it attempts to do rigorous analysis of these sequences in a very specific way.

Firstly, it looks at one or two examples of data you've gathered from a particular setting, say this

private doctor consultation.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And it tries to generate hypotheses about what's going on in these

sequences in these one or two examples. This is what I call intensive analysis. As a result of this

intensive analysis, you generate hypotheses, which still need to be tested.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the way in which you do that is to work with a large body of your

data. Maybe if you've got 20 consultations rather than one or two, you look at all 20 and transcribe

them. And what you're doing in this extensive analysis is trying to find deviant cases, not to prove that

your hypothesis is right,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: but on the contrary, trying to find examples that don't fit your

hypothesis, so that you can refine it, or abandon it, or develop new hypotheses. And having

discovered these deviant cases, you go back to what I've called intensive analysis, in this case, of

these deviant cases. Until you've reached a situation where

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: you can generalize in a way that covers 100% of the variance of

your data. In this respect, qualitative research is stronger methodologically than quantitative research.

Because in quantitative research, in my dim understanding of statistical method, you're often talking

about, and satisfied with, 95% of the variation of your data.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: The beauty of qualitative research with well-transcribed and well-

analyzed, systematically analyzed data, is that you can talk about all the variation in your data and

come up with a generalization that works across all your data. So that's what I see as the strengths

of what I call the minority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: [Minority View and Quantitative Research] Let me give you a brief

example of how qualitative people and quantitative people can work together. Some years ago, I

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was asked to speak to a demography department at London University. And one of the things that

concerned me was that they were quantitative people,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: and they wouldn't like qualitative work. But I actually talked through

what qualitative research could do with their data. And they started to see how it could be relevant to

the kinds of things they were interested in. Demographers work with official statistics very often, like

mortality statistics.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And I gave them the example of a qualitative researcher called

Lindsay Prior, who had actually studied how these official statistics actually get collated and noted

down in a computer. He watched what civil servants actually did in their offices when they were in

certain receipt of death certificates and showed how they picked out particular features

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: on those death certificates to enter into their computers. And their

procedures weren't at all in common. Some picked out the first cause of death on the death certificate.

Others picked out the second. Sometimes a combination of both. So what this ultimately meant was

that what appeared in the official statistics was, in some sense, a social construction.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Now, because the demographers were not dopes, they realized that

official statistics were not perfect. But they couldn't access the ways in which these features that I

described actually happened. The only way they could study behavior, because they were quant.

people, was in a laboratory with all the problems that laboratory studies have. Lindsay Prior's work

gave them real insight

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: into the way in which qualitative research could be compatible with

their own work and add to their own work. The strength of qualitative research that Prior showed is the

way in which it can access social phenomena unavailable to quantitative researchers. [Conclusion]

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What you've heard in this talk is more or less a polemic about the

right way and the wrong way to do qualitative research. And you may be thinking, well, this is not what

I've heard from my professor. It's not what I've found in my textbooks. What point is there in listening

to someone

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: who's very much in a minority? What I want to do at the end of this

talk right now is to suggest that, actually, there are implications of what I've been saying, even if you

choose to use an approach quite different from mine. Firstly, no method or approach is inherently

wrong.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Any approach has advantages and disadvantages. And secondly,

even if you've gathered what I see as good quality data, you're only a little way along in the path to

doing good research. Ultimately, everything depends on how effective is your analysis of your data.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: So if I had to choose between a well-analyzed interview study and a

poorly-analyzed observational or document study, I would choose the well-analyzed interview study.

So this talk has been about systematic analysis as much as the kind of data you're working with. The

important thing is to be aware of the choices that

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: face you and not assume that you can only go down one particular

path. So often I read research sections of methodology papers where people say, the approach

chosen was this, and put everything in the passive voice

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: as if they weren't making choices. What I'm always looking for in

methodology sections is writers being aware of the logic of their choice and what they're gaining and

what they're losing by that choice. And that's quite rare. So if you can do that, you're doing well. And

the final point I wanted to make is think about how you formulate your research topic.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Because when you're formulating a research topic, you can make

choices which you're not aware of. For instance, if you say, what I want to study are the experience

of managers in dealing with their workforce, you're already formulating your topic in a way which

presupposes that you're going to use interviews or focus

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: groups to gather your data and rules out naturalistic data. So in

formulating a topic, think about what implications arise in setting up your topic in that particular way.

And maybe try and put off formulating your research topic until you've got some sense of the field

that you're going to study.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Hold off formulating your research topic as long as you can, or as

long as your university department will allow you, until you're more familiar with what you're studying.

So good luck in your research, but be aware of the importance of choice. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research