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A HISTORY OF QUALITATIVE INQUIRY IN SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH1

Frederick Erickson

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what their actions mean to them. It identifies meaning-relevant kinds of things in the world—kinds of people, kinds of actions, kinds of beliefs and interests— focusing on differences in forms of things that make a differ- ence for meaning. (From Latin, qualitas refers to a primary focus on the qualities, the features, of entities—to distinctions in kind—while the contrasting term quantitas refers to a pri- mary focus on differences in amount.) The qualitative researcher first asks, “What are the kinds of things (material and symbolic) to which people in this setting orient as they conduct everyday life?” The quantitative researcher first asks, “How many instances of a certain kind are there here?” In these terms, quantitative inquiry can be seen as always being preceded by foundational qualitative inquiry, and in social research, quantitative analysis goes haywire when it tries to shortcut the qualitative founda- tions of such research—it then ends up counting the wrong kinds of things in its attempts to answer the questions it is asking.

This chapter will consider major phases in the development of qualitative inquiry. Because of the scale of published studies using qualitative methods, the citations of literature present illus- trative examples of work in each successive phase of qualitative inquiry’s development rather than an exhaustive review of litera- ture in any particular phase. I have referred the reader at various points to additional literature reviews and historical accounts of qualitative methods, and at the outset, I want to acknowledge the comprehensive historical chapter by Arthur Vidich and Stanford Lyman (1994, pp. 23–59), which was published in the first edi- tion of this Handbook. Our discussion here takes a somewhat different perspective concerning the crisis in authority that has developed in qualitative inquiry over the last 30 years.

This chapter is organized both chronologically and themati- cally. It considers relationships evolving over time between five foundational “footings” for qualitative research: (1) disciplinary perspectives in social science, particularly in sociology and anthropology; (2) the participant-observational fieldworker as an observer/author; (3) the people who are observed during the fieldwork; (4) the rhetorical and substantive content of the qualitative research report as a text; and (5) the audiences to which such texts have been addressed. The character and legiti- macy of each of these “footings,” have been debated over the entire course of qualitative social inquiry’s development, and these debates have increased in intensity in the recent past.

2 I. OrIgIns Of QualItatIve research

In the ancient world, there were precursors to qualitative social inquiry. Herodotus, a Greek scholar writing in the 5th century B.c.e., had interests that were cross-cultural as well as historical. Writing in the 2nd century c.e., the Greek skeptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus conducted a cross-cultural survey of morality, showing that what was considered right in one society was con- sidered wrong in others. Both he and Herodotus worked from the accounts of travelers, which provided the primary basis for comparative knowledge about human lifeways until the late 19th century. Knowledge of nature also was reported descrip- tively, as in the physics of Aristotle and the medicine of Galen.

Descriptive reporting of everyday social practices flourished again in the Renaissance and Baroque eras in the publication of “how to do it books” such as Baldassar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and the writing of Thoinot Arbeau (Orchésographie) on courtly dancing, of Johann Comenius (Didactica Magna) on

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pedagogy, of Isaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) on fishing, and of John Playford (The Division Viol) on how to improvise in play- ing the viola da gamba. The treatises on dancing and music especially were descriptive accounts of very particular practices— step-by-step description at molecular grain size. Narrative descriptive reports were also written in broader terms, such as the accounts of the situation of Native Americans under early Spanish colonial rule in Latin America, written by Bartolomeo de las Casas in the 16th century, and the 17th-century reports French Jesuits submitted to superiors regarding their missionary work in North America (Relations). A tension between scope and specificity of description remains in contemporary qualitative inquiry and reporting.

Simultaneously with the 17th-century writing on everyday practices, the quantitative physics of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton was being established. As the Enlightenment devel- oped, quantitatively based inquiry became the standard for physical science. The search was for general laws that would apply uniformly throughout the physical world and for causal relations that would obtain universally. Could there be an equi- valent to this in the study of social life—a “social physics”—in which social processes were monitored by means of frequency tabulation and generalizations about social processes could be derived from the analysis of frequency data? In England, Wil- liam Petty’s Political Arithmetic was one such attempt, pub- lished in 1690. In France and Germany, the term statistics began to be used to refer to quantitative information collected for purposes of the state—information about finance, population, disease, and mortality. Some of the French Enlightenment phi- losophers of the 18th century saw the possibility that social pro- cesses could be mathematically modeled and that theories of the state and of political economy could be formulated and empir- ically verified in ways that would parallel physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

As time went on, a change of focus occurred in published narrative descriptive accounts of daily practices. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the activities of the leisured classes were described, while the lower classes were portrayed patronizingly at the edges of the action, as greedy, lascivious, and deceitful, albeit clever. (A late example can be found in the portrayal of the lusty, pragmatic countrymen and women in Picander’s libretto for J. S. Bach’s Peasant Cantata, written and performed in 1742.) By the end of the 18th century, the everyday lives of servants and rustics were being portrayed in a more sympa- thetic way. Pierre Beaumarchais’s play, The Marriage of Figaro, is an example. Written in 1778, it was initially banned in both Paris and Vienna on the grounds that by valorizing its servant characters and satirizing its aristocratic characters, it was dan- gerously subversive and incited insubordination. By the early 19th century, the Brothers Grimm were collecting the tales of German peasants, and documentation of folklore and folklife of commoners became a general practice.

By the mid-19th century, attempts were being made to define foundations for the systematic conduct of social inquiry. A fun- damental disagreement developed over what kind of a “science” the study of society should be. Should such inquiry be modeled after the physical sciences, as Enlightenment philosophers had hoped? That is what Auguste Comte (1822/2001) claimed as he developed a science of society he would come to call sociology; his contemporary, Adolphe Quetelet (1835/2010) advocated the use of statistics to accomplish a “social physics.” Early anthro- pologists with foundational interests in social and cultural evolution also aimed their inquiry toward generalization (e.g., Morgan, 1877; Tylor, 1871); they saw the comparative study of humans as aiming for general knowledge, in their case, an understanding of processes of change across time in physical and cultural ways of being human—of universal stages of development from barbarism to contemporary (European) civilization—comparative study that came to be called ethnol- ogy. Like Comte, they saw the purposes of social inquiry as the discovery of causal laws that applied to all cases, laws akin to those of physics and chemistry.

In contrast, the German social philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1883/1989) advocated an approach that differed from that of natural sciences (which he called Naturwissenschaften). He advocated conducting social inquiry as Geisteswissenschaften— literally “sciences of the spirit” and more freely translated as “human sciences” or, better, “human studies.” Such inquiry was common to both the humanities and what we would now call the social sciences. It focused on the particulars of mean- ing and action taken in everyday life. The purpose of inquiry in the human sciences was understanding (verstehen) rather than proof or prediction. Dilthey’s ideas influenced younger scholars—in particular Max Weber and Georg Simmel in soci- ology and early phenomenologists in philosophy such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. His ideas became even more influential in the mid-20th century “hermeneutical turn” taken by philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas and by anthropologists such as Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz.

The emergence of ethnography. In the last quarter of the 19th century, anthropologists began to use the term ethnography for descriptive accounts of the lifeways of particular local sets of people who lived in colonial situations around the world. These accounts, it was claimed, were more accurate and comprehen- sive than the reports of travelers and colonial administrators. In an attempt to improve the information quality and comprehen- siveness of description in traveler’s accounts, as well as to sup- port the fieldwork of scholars in the emerging field of anthropol- ogy, the British Society for the Advancement of Science pub- lished in 1874 a manual to guide data collection in observation and interviewing, titled Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travelers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands (available

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–45

at http://www.archive.org/details/notesandqueries00readgoog). The editorial committee for the 1874 edition of Notes and Que- ries included George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, Edward Tylor, and Francis Galton, the latter being one of the founders of modern statistics. The Notes and Queries manual continued to be reis- sued in further editions by the Royal Anthropological Society, with the sixth and last edition appearing in 1951.

At 6 ½ by 4 inches, the book could be carried to field settings in a large pocket, such as that of a bush jacket or suit coat. Rulers in both inches and centimeters are stamped on the edge of the cover to allow the observer to readily measure objects encoun- tered in the field. The volume contains a broad range of ques- tions and observation topics for what later became the distinct branches of physical anthropology and social/cultural anthro- pology: topics include anatomical and medical observations, clothing, navigation, food, religion, laws, and “contact with civi- lized races,” among others. The goal was an accurate collection of facts and a comprehensive description of the whole way of life of those who were being studied.

This encyclopedic approach to fieldwork and information collection characterized late 19th-century qualitative research, for example, the early fieldwork of Franz Boas on the north- west coast of North America and the two expeditions to the Torres Straits in Oceania led by Alfred Haddon. The second Haddon expedition involved fieldworkers who would teach the next generation of British anthropologists—for example, W. H. R. Rivers and C. G. Seligman, with whom A. R. Radcliffe Brown and B. Malinowski later studied. (For further discus- sion of the early history of field methods in anthropology, see Urrey, 1984, pp. 33–61.)

This kind of data collection and reporting in overseas set- tings was called ethnography, combining two Greek words: gra- phein, the verb for “to write,” and ethnoi, a plural noun for “the nations—the others.” For the ancient Greeks, the ethnoi were people who were not Greek—Thracians, Persians, Egyptians, and so on—contrasting with Ellenoi or Hellenes, as us versus them. The Greeks were more than a little xenophobic, so that ethnoi carries pejorative implications. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, ethnoi was the translation for the Hebrew term for “them”—goyim—which is not a compliment. Given its etymology and its initial use in the 19th century for descriptive accounts of non-Western people, the best definition for ethnography is “writing about other people.”

Perhaps the first monograph of the kind that would become modern realist ethnography was The Philadelphia Negro, by W. E. B. DuBois (1899). His study of a particular African American census tract combined demographic data, area maps, recent community history, surveys of local institutions and commu- nity groups, and some descriptive accounts of the conduct of daily life in the neighborhood. His purpose was to make visible the lives—and the orderliness in those lives—of people who had been heretofore invisible and voiceless in the discourses of

middle class white society and academia. A similar purpose and descriptive approach, combining demography and health statis- tics with narrative accounts, was taken in the reports of working class life in East London by Charles Booth (1891), whose col- laborators included Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Even more emphasis on narrative description was found in How the Other Half Lives, an account of the everyday life of immigrants on the lower East Side of New York City, written by the journalist Jacob Riis (1890) and illustrated with photographs. All of these authors—and especially Booth and DuBois—aimed for factual accuracy and holistic scope. Moreover, these authors were social reformers—Booth and the Webbs within the Fabian Socialist movement in England, Riis as a founder of “muckraking” jour- nalism and popular sociology, and DuBois as an academic sociologist who turned increasingly to activism, becoming a leader of the early 20th-century African American civil rights movement. Beyond description for its own sake, their purpose was to advocate for and to inform social change.

None of these early practitioners claimed to be describing everyday life from the points of view of those who lived it. They were outsider observers. DuBois, although an African American, grew up in a small New England town, not Philadelphia, and he had a Harvard education. Booth and the Webbs were upper middle class, and so was Riis. They intended to provide accurate descriptions of “facts” about behavior, presented as self-evidently accurate and “objective,” but not about their functional signifi- cance in use, or as Clifford Geertz (1973) said, what distin- guishes an eye blink from a wink (p. 6). To use terms that developed later in linguistics and metaphorically applied to ethnography, their descriptions were etic rather than emic in content and epistemological status.

Adding point of view. Portraying social action (as wink) rather than behavior (as eye blink)—that is, describing the conduct of everyday life in ways that make contact with the subjective ori- entations and meaning perspectives of those whose conduct is being reported—is the fundamental shift in interpretive (her- meneutical) stance within ethnography that Bronislaw Malinowski claimed to have accomplished a generation later. In his groundbreaking monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski, 1922), he said that ethnographic descrip- tion should not only be holistic and factually accurate, but should aim “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, his vision of his world” (p. 25).

During World War I, Malinowski, a Pole who had studied anthropology in England, was interned by British colonial authorities during his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia because they were concerned that, as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he might be a spy. He was not allowed to return home until the war had ended. Malinowski later made a virtue of necessity and claimed that his 4 years of enforced fieldwork and knowledge of the local language enabled

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him to write a report that encompassed the system of everyday life in its entirety and accurately represented nuances of local meaning in its daily conduct. After Malinowski, this became a hallmark of ethnography in anthropology—reporting that included the meaning perspectives of those whose daily actions were being described.

Interpretively oriented (i.e., hermeneutic) realist ethnogra- phy presumed that local meaning is causal in social life and that local meaning varies fundamentally (albeit sometimes subtly) from one local setting to another. One way this manifested in anthropology was through cultural relativism—a position that Franz Boas had taken before Malinowski. By the late 1920s, anthropologists were presuming that because human societies were very different culturally, careful ethnographic case study documentation was necessary before valid ethnological com- parison could take place—the previous armchair speculations of scholars like Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan were seen as having been premature.

What is implied in the overall emphasis on the distinctive dif- ferences in local meaning from one setting to another is a pre- sumption that stands in sharp contrast to a basic presumption in natural science. There one assumes a fundamental uniformity of nature in the physical universe. For example, one can assume that a unit measurement of heat, or of force, or a particular chemical element is the same entity in Mexico City and Tokyo as it is in London—and also on the face of the sun and in a far distant galaxy. The presumption of uniformity of natural elements and processes permitted the statement of general laws of nature in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, and to a lesser extent in biol- ogy. In contrast, a human science focus on locally constructed meaning and its variability in construction presumes, in effect, a fundamental nonuniformity of nature in social life. That assump- tion was anathema to those who were searching for a social phys- ics. But qualitative social inquiry is not aiming to be a social physics. Or is it? Within anthropology, sociology, and educational research, researchers disagreed about this, even as they did eth- nographic case studies in traditional and modern societies.

A basic, mainstream approach was developing in qualitative social inquiry. We can see that approach as resting on five foun- dational grounds or footings: the disciplinary enterprise of social science, the social scientific observer, those who are observed, the research report as a text, and the research audi- ence to which that text is addressed. Each of these five was considered as an entity whose nature was simple and whose legitimacy was self-evident. In current qualitative inquiry, the nature and the legitimacy of each of those footings have been called into question.

First, the enterprise of social science. By the late 19th century, sociology and anthropology were developing as new disciplines, beginning to achieve acceptance within universities. Physical sciences had made great progress since the 17th century, and social scientists were hoping for similar success.

Next, the social scientist as observer. His (and these were men) professional warrant for paying research attention to other humans was the social scientific enterprise in which he was engaged—that engagement gave him the right to watch other people and question them. It was assumed that he would and should be systematic and disinterestedly open-minded in the exercise of research attention. The process of looking closely and carefully at another human was seen as being no more ethically or epistemologically problematic than looking closely and carefully at a rock or a bird. Collecting specimens of human activity was justifiable because it would lead to new knowledge about social life. (Unlike the field biologist the social scientist was not justified to kill those he studied or to capture them for later observation in a zoological museum—although some non-Western people were exhibited at world expositions and the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber had housed a Native Ameri- can, Ishi, at the anthropological museum of the University of California, Berkeley, making him available for observation and interview there—but artifact collecting and the writing of field- notes were the functional equivalent of the specimen collection and analysis methods of biologists and geologists.) Moreover, research attention in social inquiry was a one-way matter—just as the field biologist dissected an animal specimen and not the other way around, it was the researcher’s watching and asking that counted in social inquiry, not the attending to and ques- tioning of the researcher by the people whose daily lives were being studied.

Those who were observed as research objects (not as subjects but as objects) were thus considered as essentially passive par- ticipants in the research enterprise—patients rather than agents—there to be acted upon by observing and questioning, not there to affect the direction taken in the inquiry. Thus, in the division of labor within the process of qualitative social inquiry, a fundamental line of distinction and asymmetry was drawn between the observer and the observed, with control over the inquiry maximized for the observer and minimized for the observed.

That asymmetry extended to the process of producing the text of a research report, which was entirely the responsibility of the social scientist as author. Such reports were not written in collaboration with those whose lives were studied, nor were they accompanied by parallel reports produced by those who were studied (just as the finches of the Galapagos islands had not published a report of Darwin’s visit to them). In reports of the results of social inquiry by means of firsthand participant observation, the portrayal of everyday life of the people studied was done by the researcher.

The asymmetry in text production extended further to text consumption. The written report of social inquiry was addressed to an audience consisting of people other than those who had been studied—the community of the researcher’s fel- low social scientists (and perhaps, of policymakers who might

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–47

commission the research work). This audience had as its pri- mary interests the substantive significance of the research topic and the technical quality of the conduct of the study. The suc- cess of the report (and of the author’s status as a reporter) was a matter of judgment residing in the scholarly community. The research objects’ existential experience of being scrutinized during the researcher’s fieldwork and then described in the researcher’s report was not a primary consideration for the readers of the report, nor for its author. Indeed those who had been studied were not expected to read the research report, since many were not literate.

For a time, each of these five footings had the stability of canonical authority in the “normal science” practice of qualita- tive inquiry. That was a period that could be called a “golden age,” but with a twinge of irony in such a designation, given what we now know about the intense contestation that has developed recently concerning each of the footings.

2 II. a “gOlden age” Of realIst ethnOgraphy

From the mid 1920s to the early 1950s, the basic approach in qualitative inquiry was realist general ethnography—at the time it was just called ethnography. More recently, such work has been called realist because of its literary quality of “you are there” reporting, in which the narrator presents description as if it were plain fact, and general because it attempted a compre- hensive description of a whole way of life in the particular set- ting that was being described—a setting (such as a village or an island or, later, an urban neighborhood or workplace within a formal organization) that was seen as being distinctly bounded. Typically, the narrator wrote in third person and did not portray him- or herself as being present in the scenes of daily life that were described. A slightly distanced authorial voice was intended to convey an impression of even-handedness—conveying “the native’s point of view” without either overt advocacy of custom- ary practices or explicit critique of them. (For a discussion of the stance of detachment, see Vidich & Lyman, 1994, p. 23.) Usually, the social theory perspective underlying such work was some form of functionalism, and this led authors to focus less on conflict as a driving force in society and more on the comple- mentarity of various social institutions and processes within the local setting.

Ethnographic monographs in anthropology during this time followed the overall approach found in Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1922) Argonauts, where he said that an adequate ethnography should report three primary bodies of evidence:

1. The organisation of the tribe, and the anatomy of its culture must be recorded in firm, clear outline. The method of concrete, sta- tistical documentation is the means through which such an outline has to be given.

2. Within this frame the imponderabilia of actual life, and the type of behaviour must be filled in. They have to be collected through minute, detailed observations, in the form of some sort of ethnographic diary, made possible by close contact with native life.

3. A collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore, and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionem, as documents of native mentality. (p. 24)

What was studied was a certain village or region in which a named ethnic/linguistic group resided. The monograph usually began with an overall description of the physical setting (and often of subsistence activities). This was followed by a chapter on an annual cycle of life, one on a typical day, one on kinship and other aspects of “social organization,” one on child rearing, and then chapters on certain features of the setting that were distinctive to it. (Thus, for example, Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 monograph on a herding people, The Nuer, contains detailed description of the aesthetics of appreciation of color patterns in cowhide.) Narrative vignettes describing the actions of particu- lar people in an actual event were sometimes provided, or typi- cal actions were described more synoptically. These vignettes and quotes from informants were linked in the text by narrating commentary. Often maps, frequency tables, and analytic charts (including kinship diagrams) were included.

Notable examples in British and American anthropology during this period include volumes by students of Franz Boas, such as Margaret Mead’s (1928) semipopular account, Coming of Age in Samoa. Raymond Firth, a student of Malinowski, pro- duced We the Tikopia (1936/2004), E. E. Evans-Pritchard, a stu- dent of Malinowski’s contemporary, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (who himself had published a monograph The Andaman Islanders in the same year as Malinowski’s Argonauts, 1922) published The Nuer in 1940. David Holmberg (1950) published a study of the Siriono, titled Nomads of the Longbow. In addition to American work on indigenous peoples of the Western Hemi- sphere, there were monograph series published on British colo- nial areas—from Australia, studies of New Guinea, Micronesia, and Melanesia, and from England, studies of East Africa, West Africa, and South Africa.

In the United States, community studies in an anthropologi- cally ethnographic vein were encouraged by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the department of sociology of the University of Chicago. On the basis of hunches about geographic deter- minism in the founding and maintenance of distinct social areas within cities, various Chicago neighborhoods were treated as if they were bounded communities, for example, Louis Wirth’s (1928) study of the West Side Jewish ghetto and Harvey Warren Zorbaugh’s (1929) study of contiguous working- class Italian and upper class “mainstream American” neighbor- hoods on the near North Side. A tradition of community study

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followed in American sociology. Robert and Helen Lynd (1929, 1937) conducted a two-volume study of a small Midwestern city, Muncie, Indiana, which they called Middletown. The anthro- pologist W. Lloyd Warner studied Newburyport, Massachusetts (1941), the Italian neighborhood of Boston’s North End was described by William F. Whyte (1943/1955), and the anthro- pologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball studied a rural Irish village (1940).

The urban community studies efforts continued after World War II, with St Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s (1945) descrip- tion of the African American neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side and Herbert J. Gans’s report (1962) on an Italian American neighborhood in New York, among others. Gerald Suttles (1968) revisited the “social areas” orientation of Chicago School sociol- ogy in a study of interethnic relations in a multi-ethnic neigh- borhood on Chicago’s Near West Side, and Elijah Anderson (1992) described a multiracial West Philadelphia neighborhood in a somewhat similar vein. Some studies narrowed the scope of community studies from a whole neighborhood to a particular setting within it, as in the case of bars as sites for friendship networks among African American men in the reports (e.g., Liebow, 1967). Rural sociology in America during the 1930s had also produced ethnographic accounts. (For an extensive review and listing of American community studies, see the discussion in Vidich & Lyman, 1994.)

Institutional and workplace studies began to be done ethno- graphically, especially in the postwar era. Labor-management relations were studied by means of participant observation (e.g., Roy, 1959). Chris Argyris published descriptive accounts of daily work in a bank department (1954a, 1954b) and of the worklife of a business executive (1953). Ethnographic accounts of socialization into professions began to appear (e.g., Becker & Geer, 1961; Glaser & Strauss, 1965). Workplace accounts, as in community studies, began to focus more closely on immediate scenes of everyday social interaction, a trend that continued into the future (see, e.g., Vaught & Smith, 1980; Fine, 1990).

Journal-length reports of workplace studies (as well as accounts of overseas development interventions by applied anthropologists) appeared in the interdisciplinary journal Human Organization, which began publication under that title in 1948, sponsored by the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Ethnographic documentary film developed in the 1950s and 1960s as field recording of sound became easier, with more portable equipment—audiotape and the 16-mm camera. Boas had used silent film in the 1920s to document Kwakiutl life on the Northwest Coast of Canada, and Gregory Bateson and Mead used silent film in the late 1930s in their study of dance instruc- tion in Bali. Robert Flaherty produced semifictional, partially staged films of Canadian Inuit in the 1920s, notably Nanook of the North.

The new ethnographic documentaries were shot in natural- istic field situations, using for the most part hand-held cameras

and microphones in order to move with the action. John Marshall’s film, The Hunters, featured Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa; Napoleon Chagnon’s “The Ax Fight” and Tim Asch’s “The Feast” were filmed in the Amazon River Delta in Brazil, among the Yanomamo. John Adair and Sol Worth gave 16 mm hand- held cameras to Navaho informants in a project that tried to identify differences in ways of seeing between the Navaho and Western European cinematographers. They produced film foot- age and a monograph on the project titled, “Through Navaho Eyes” (Worth & Adair, 1972). John Collier Jr. shot extensive silent film footage showing Native American school classrooms in Alaska. He also published a book on the use of still photographs for ethnographic documentation (Collier, 1967)—a practice that Mead had pioneered a generation earlier (see Byers, 1966, 1968). The Society for Visual Anthropology, a network of ethno- graphic filmmakers and scholars of documentary film semiot- ics, was founded in 1984.

U.S. sociologists made institutionally focused documentary films during the same time period, notably the films produced in the 1960s and 1970s by Frederick Wiseman. These interpre- tive film essays, through the editing of footage of naturally occurring events, bridge fiction and more literal documentary depiction. They include “Titicut Follies” (1967), a portrayal of a mental hospital; “High School” (1968); “Hospital” (1970); and “Essene” (1972), a portrayal of conflict and community in a monastery (for further discussion, see Barnouw, 1993; Benson & Anderson 2002; deBrigard, 1995; Heider, 1982; Ruby, 2000).

2 III. crIses In ethnOgraphIc authOrIty

A gathering storm. Even in the postwar heyday of realist ethnog- raphy, some cracks in its footings were beginning to appear. In American anthropology, a bitter controversy developed over accuracy and validity of competing ethnographic descriptions of a village on the outskirts of Mexico City, Tepoztlán. Robert Redfield (1930) at the University of Chicago had published an account of everyday life in Tepoztlán; in keeping with a func- tionalist perspective in social theory, he characterized the com- munity as harmonious and internally consistent, a place where people led predictable, happy lives. Beginning fieldwork in the same village 17 years after Redfield and viewing everyday life in the community through a lens of Marxist conflict theory, Oscar Lewis (1951) saw life in Tepoztlán as fraught with tension and individual villagers as tending toward continual anger, jealousy, and anxiety; in his monograph, he harshly criticized Redfield’s portrayal. Two fieldworkers had gone to the “same” place and collected very different evidence. Which one was right?

Concern was developing over texts that reported the general ethnography of a whole community—those reports seemed increasingly to be hazy in terms of evidence: Description flowed a mile wide but an inch deep. One way to address this limitation

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–49

was to narrow the scope of research description and to focus on a particular setting within a larger community or institution. Another way was to become more careful in handling evidence. Within American anthropology, specialized “hyphenated” sub- fields of sociocultural study developed, such as cognitive anthropology, economic anthropology, anthropology of law, ethnography of communication, and interactional sociolinguis- tics. Studies in those subfields were often published as tightly focused journal-length articles in which evidence was pre- sented deliberately and specifically. Careful elicitation tech- niques and increasing use of audio and audiovisual recording were used in attempts to get “better data.” An interdisciplinary field called sociolinguistics developed across the disciplines of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology.

In sociology first and then increasingly in anthropology, methods texts were published—becoming more explicit about methods of participant observation as another route to “better data.” Notable examples are McCall and Simmons (1969), Glaser and Strauss (1967), Denzin (1970), Pelto and Pelto (1970), Hammersley and Atkinson (1983), Ellen (1984), and Sanjek (1990).

Autobiographical accounts of fieldwork also began to be published. The second edition of Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943/1955) and subsequent editions contained an extensive appendix in which Whyte described, in first person, his field experience. Hortense Powdermaker (1966) described her field experience in White and Black Southern U.S. rural communities in the 1930s. Even earlier, Laura Bohannon had published a fictionalized memoir of fieldwork, writing a quasi-novel under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen (1954) because frank revelations of ambivalence, ethical dilemmas, the intense emo- tionality of fieldwork, and tendencies toward self-deception were not considered proper topics of “academic” discourse at the time. Rosalie Wax (1971) candidly recalled the difficulties of her fieldwork as a White woman in Japanese internment camps during World War II. These accounts showed that actual field- work was not so consistently guided by detached, means-ends rationality as ethnographic monographs had sometimes sug- gested. In 1967, Malinowski’s Trobriand Island field diary was published posthumously. Over the next 15 years, the diary came to occupy a central place in what became a firestorm of criti- cism of realist general ethnography.

After World War II, the accuracy of ethnography began to draw challenges from the “natives” whose lives were portrayed in them. Thirty years after Malinowski left the Trobriands, Father Baldwin, a Roman Catholic missionary who succeeded him there, reported in a master’s thesis how the “natives” had reacted to the text of Argonauts. Baldwin had lived on the island of Boyowa longer than Malinowski had done and learned the local language more thoroughly. To check the validity of Malinowski’s portrayal of the “native’s point of view,” Father Baldwin translated large portions of Argonauts and read those

texts with the Boyowans he knew, some of whom remembered Malinowski’s presence among them:

He seems to have left nothing unexplained and his explanations are enlightening, even to the people who live there. It is curious, then, that this exhaustive research, and patient, wise, and honest explanation, should leave a sense of incompleteness. But it does. I feel that his material is still not properly digested, that Malinowski would be regarded in some ways naive by the people he was studying . . .

I was surprised at the number of times informants helping me with checking Malinowski would bridle. Usually when a passage has been gone over more than once, they would say it was not like that. They did not quarrel with facts or explanations, but with the coloring as it were. The sense expressed was not the sense they had of themselves or of things Boyowan. (Baldwin, n.d., pp. 17–18, as cited in Young, 1979, pp. 15–16)

Vine deLoria, a Native American, was more harsh in his criticism of American anthropologists, in a book evocatively titled Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). He characterized Amer- indian studies done by American anthropologists as ethnocen- tric and implicitly colonialist. Sociological community studies also drew negative reactions from the “natives.” Some small- town residents in rural New York were deeply offended by the monograph titled, Small Town in Mass Society (Vidich & Bensman, 1958; see Vidich’s discussion of this reaction in Vid- ich & Bensman, 2000, and in Young, 1996). They castigated the authors for inaccuracy, for taking sides in local disputes, and for violating the confidentiality of individuals (e.g., there being only one mayor, his anonymity was compromised even though his name was not used; this later became a classic example of ethical difficulties in the conduct of qualitative research and its reporting.) The rise of Black nationalism in African American communities in the late 1960s (and the reaction of African American scholars to the “blame the vic- tim” tone of studies about inner-city families such as that of Moynihan, 1965) gave further impetus to the contention that only “insiders” could study fellow insiders in ways that would be unbiased and accurate.

This directly contradicted the traditional view that an out- sider researcher, with enough time to develop close acquain- tance, could accurately observe and interpret meaning, without being limited by the insider’s tendency to overlook phenomena so familiar they were taken for granted and had become invisi- ble. As the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1949) put it in a vivid metaphor: “It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water” (p. 11).

This was not only a matter of inaccurate conclusions—it also had to do with the power relations that obtained in the conduct of “participant observation” itself. Various feminist authors, in a distinct yet related critique of standard anthro- pology and sociology, pointed out that fieldworkers should

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attend to their own mentality/subjectivity as a perceiving subject trying to make sense of others’ lives, especially when power relations between the observer and the observed were asymmetric. An early instantiation of these perspectives was Jean Briggs’s (1970) study of her conflicting relationships with an Inuit (Canadian Eskimo) nuclear family with whom she lived during fieldwork. Titled Never in Anger, her monograph reported in first person and placed her self and her reactions to her “informants” centrally in the narrative picture her monograph presented.

The notion that the researcher always sees from within (and is also blinded by) the power relationships between her and those she studies was pointedly explicated in Dorothy Smith’s 1974 essay “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology.” That idea continues to evolve in feminist criti- cism (see, e.g., Harding, 1991; Lather, 1991) that advocates reflexivity regarding the personal standpoints, the positional- ity, through which the fieldworker perceives—gendered, classed, age-graded, and raced/ethnicized ways of seeing and feeling in the world, especially as these are in part mutually constructed in the interaction that takes place between the observer and observed.

George Marcus and James Clifford (1986; Clifford, 1988) extended this line of criticism in the mid 1980s, a period when Malinowski became a prime target for those who considered conventional “participant observation” to be deeply flawed. With the publication of his Diary, Malinowski had become an easy target. The diary had unmasked power relationships that his ethnographic reporting had disguised. Thus, Malinowski’s por- trayal of the “native’s point of view” in Argonauts may have had to do with the power relationships of his fieldwork. He does not mention this in his discussion of his fieldwork method; rather, he portrays himself simply as a detective, a Sherlock Holmes searching avidly for clues concerning native customs and char- acter (Malinowski, 1922, p. 51):

It is difficult to convey the feelings of intense interest and suspense with which an ethnographer enters for the first time the district that is to be the future scene of his field work. Certain salient fea- tures characteristic of the place had once riveted attention and filled him with hopes or apprehensions. The appearance of the natives, their manner, their types of behavior, may augur well or ill for the possibilities of rapid and easy research. One is on the look- out for the symptoms of deeper sociological facts. One suspects many hidden and mysterious ethnographic phenomena behind the commonplace aspect of things. Perhaps that queer looking, intelligent native is a renowned sorcerer. Perhaps between those two groups of men there exists some important rivalry or vendetta, which may throw much light on the customs and character of the people if one can only lay a hand upon it.

From the diary (Malinowski, 1967), a very different voice sounds—boredom, frustration, hostility, lust.

December 14, 1917: “When I look at women I think of their breasts and figure in terms of ERM [an Australian woman who he later married].” (pp. 151–152)

December 17, 1917: “I was fed up with the niggers and with my work.” (p. 154)

December 18, 1917: “I thought about my present attitude toward ethnographic work and the natives, my dislike of them, my longing for civilization.” (p. 154)

What went without mention was the asymmetry in power relationships between Malinowski and those he studied. He was the primary initiator of actions toward those around him. Years later, working with the same informants, Father Baldwin (n.d.) reported:

It was a surprise to me to find that Malinowski was mostly remem- bered by the natives as a champion ass at asking damn fool ques- tions, like “You bury the seed tuber root end or sprout end down? . . . They said of him that he made of his profession a sacred cow. You had to defer though you did not see why. (p. 41, as cited in Young, 1979, p. 15)

In contrast, Malinowski’s tone in the original monograph suggests a certain smugness and lack of self-awareness: “In fact, as they knew that I would thrust my nose into everything, even where a well-mannered native would not dream of intruding, they finished by regarding me as part and parcel of their life, unnecessary evil or nuisance, mitigated by donations of tobacco” (Malinowski, 1922, p. 8).

Admittedly, the alienation Malinowski revealed in the diary was not unique to him. As Young (1979) puts it,

It is only fair to point out that the chronic sense of alienation which permeates the diary is a common psychic experience of anthro- pologists in the field, and it is intensified by homesickness, nostal- gia, loneliness, and sexual frustration, all of which Malinowski suffered in full measure. (p. 13)

That is humanly true, but it does not square with the popular image of the scientist—rather, it puts the professional social scientist on the same plane as the practical social actor, the “man in the street.” Furthermore, it makes one distrust the dispassionate tenor of what Rosaldo (1989, p. 60) called “distanced normalizing description” in ethnographic research reporting.

Malinowski—and the overall credibility of ethnographic research reporting—was further undermined by similar criti- cism of Margaret Mead. Her first published study, titled Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1928), had considered the experience of adolescence from the culturally relativist perspective of her teacher, Boas. Interviewing young Samoan girls and women, Mead concluded that their adolescent years were not emotionally turbulent and that, unlike American teenagers, they were able to engage in sexual experimentation without guilt. Her book attracted a wide popular audience and, together with subsequent

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–51

popular writing, established Mead’s reputation in the United States as a public intellectual. Derek Freeman (1983), an Austra- lian anthropologist, waited until after Mead’s death to publish a scathing critique of Mead’s research in Samoa. He claimed that Mead had been naive in believing what her informants told her; that they had exaggerated their stories in the direction she had signaled that she wanted to hear. Subsequent consideration sug- gests that Mead’s interpretation was correct overall (see, e.g., Shankman, 1996), but the highly authoritative style of Mead’s text (and the lack of systematic presentation of evidence to sup- port the claims she was making) left her vulnerable to the accu- sation that she had got her findings wrong.

Were all ethnographers self-deceived—or worse, were many of them “just making things up?” The Redfield-Lewis controversy—two vastly different descriptions of the same group—raised an even deeper question: Do the perspective, politics, and ideology of the observer so powerfully influence what he or she notices and reflects on that it overdetermines the conclusions drawn? Realist general ethnography was experiencing heavy weather indeed.

One line of response to these doubts was the “better evi- dence” movement already discussed. Somewhat earlier, another stream of work had developed that led to participatory action research or collaborative action research. In this approach, out- side researchers worked with members of a setting to effect change that was presumed to be of benefit there—for example, improvements in public health, agricultural production, the formation of cooperatives for marketing, and the organization of work in factories. Research efforts accompanied attempts at instituting change, as in the study of local community health practices and beliefs within a project aimed to prevent cholera and dysentery by providing clean water. The social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1946) was one of the pioneers of these attempts, focusing especially on labor-management relations in England. The attempts in England spread through trade union channels into Scandinavia (see Emery & Thorsrud, 1969). Another pio- neer was Whyte, working in industrial settings in the United States (see Whyte, Greenwood, & Lazes, 1989).

Also in the period immediately before and after World War II, anthropologists were undertaking change-oriented research overseas, and the Society for Applied Anthropology was founded in 1948. During the 1960s and 1970s, applied anthropologists and linguists worked in action projects in the United States and England in ethnic and racial minority communities (e.g., Gumperz, Roberts, & Jupp, 1979; Schensul & Schensul, 1992).

One line of justification for applied research harked back to the “better evidence” movement: Through a researcher’s “involvement in the action” (Schensul, 1974), the accuracy and validity of evidence collection and analysis are tested in condi- tions of natural experimentation.

Another justification for applied research had to do with the explicit adoption of value positions by action researchers and

their community partners. This is similar to the “critical” posi- tion in social research that especially took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, and as action research progressed, it combined increas- ingly with the various critical approaches discussed in the pre- vious section (for elaboration, see Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005).

This aspect of action research led away from the stance of cultural relativism itself—from even the appearance of value neutrality—toward value affirmation. In research efforts to effect social change, explicit value commitments had to be adopted if the work was to make change in specific directions. This was called critical ethnography, related to the “critical theory” perspective articulated by the Frankfurt School. The- odor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had developed a critique, based in neo-Marxist social analysis, of both capitalism and fascism. The point was to criticize whatever material or cultural influences might lead people to take actions or support actions that resulted in limiting their own life chances—that is, their collusion in their own oppression. In Marxist terms one could say that critical theory made visible social processes that worked against the class interests of those being dominated— for example U.S. white workers supporting an oligarchy that oppressed both them and Black workers. Culturally relativist ethnography had not called domination by that name, nor had it named suffering as an object of attention and of description. Critical ethnography claimed to do just that, and in so doing, the ethnographer stepped out of a defended position of value neutrality to one of vulnerability, shifting from distanced rela- tions with informants to relations of solidarity. This was to engage in social inquiry as ethnography “that breaks your heart” (Behar, 1996).

The adoption of an explicit value position created a fixed fulcrum from which analytic leverage could be exerted in dis- tinguishing between which everyday practices led to increase or decrease in life chances (see Bredo & Feinberg 1982). As the critical ethnography movement developed, the focus shifted somewhat from careful explication of the value yardsticks used to judge habitual practices to claims about domination and oppression as if the inequity involved was self-evident. There was a push back from the earlier generation of scholars, who accused critical ethnographers of letting their values so drive their fieldwork that they were able to see only what they expected to see, ignoring disconfirming evidence.

As critical ethnographers identified more and more kinds of inequity, it became apparent that social criticism itself was relative depending on which dimension of superordination/ subordination was the locus for analysis. If it was economic relations, then processes of class-based oppression appeared most salient; if gender relations, then patriarchal processes of domination; if postcolonial relations, the survivals of “colo- nized” status; if sexual identification, then heterosexual domi- nation. And if race became the primary fulcrum for critical social analysis—race, as distinct from, yet as linked to class,

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gender, colonization, or sexuality—then racial privilege and disprivilege occupied the foreground of attention, with other dimensions of inequity less prominent. Arguments over whose oppression was more heinous or more fundamental— “oppresseder than thou”—took on a sectarian character.

There was also a new relativity in the considerations of the seats of power itself, its manifestations in various aspects or domains, and the ways in which existing patterns of life (includ- ing patterns of domination) are reproduced within and across successive generations. Marxism had explained social order as a forcefield of countervailing tensions that were the result of macro-social economic forces. Structural functionalism in anthropology and sociology had explained social order as the result of socialization of individuals, who followed systems of cultural rules. Structuralism in anthropology and linguistics had identified cultural rule systems, which appeared to operate according to inner logics that could be identified and specified by the social scientist. All these approaches treated macro-social structures as determining factors that constrained local social actors. Poststructuralist critiques of this top-down determin- ism developed. One line of critique stressed the opportunistic character of the everyday practices of local social actors, who as agents made choices of conduct within sets constrained by social processes (i.e. “structures”) operating at the macro-social level (for example, Bourdieu’s 1977 critique of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism). Another line of critique (Foucault, 1977) showed how power could be exercised over local social actors without physical coercion through the knowledge systems that were maintained discursively and through surveillance by secular “helping” professions—the modern successors of pre-modern religion—whose ideologically ratified purpose was to benefit the clients they “served” by controlling them—medicine, psy- chiatry, education, and modern prisons. Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse as embodied in the conventional common sense of institutions is akin to Gramsci’s (1988) notion of “cul- tural hegemony”—again, an ideological means by which con- trol can be exercised nonviolently through commonsense ratio- nalization justifying the exercise of such power. Power and social structure are thus seen to be strongly influential pro- cesses, even though the influence is partial, indirect, and contested—local actors are considered to be agents, not simply passive rule followers, yet they are agents who must swim in rivers that have strong currents.

At the same time, historians began to look away from the accounts of the past that were produced by the powerful (rich, literate, Caucasian, male, or any combination of those traits) and began to focus more centrally on the daily life practices of people whose subaltern “unwritten” lives could fly, as it were, below the radar of history. (This was a challenge to the accounts of orthodox historians who stuck to the conventional primary source materials.) An additional line of criticism of the author- itativeness of texts, which was once taken for granted, came

from postmodern scholars (e.g., Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze) who questioned the entire Enlightenment project of authorita- tive academic discourse concerning human activity, whether this discourse manifested in the arts, in history, or in social science. With roots in the early modernism of the Enlighten- ment, all these discourses attempted to construct “master nar- ratives” whose credibility would be robust because they were based on reason and evidence. For the postmodernists, the rhetorical strategies that scholarly authors used to persuade readers of their text’s accuracy and truthfulness could be unmasked through a textual analysis called deconstruction. Critical ethnography had challenged the authority of realist narrative accounts that left out explicit mention of processes of conflict and struggles over power; the postmodern line of criti- cism challenged the fundamental authoritativeness of texts per se. Moreover, lines of demarcation between qualitative social inquiry and scholarship in the humanities were dissolving. Approaches from literary criticism—outside the boundaries of mainstream social science—were used both in the interpretist (hermeneutic) orientation in ethnography and in the critical scrutiny of scholarly texts by means of deconstruction.

One of the ways to demystify the text of a qualitative research report is to include the author (and the author’s “standpoint” perspectives) as an explicit presence in the fieldwork. The author becomes a character in the story being told—perhaps a primary one—and much or all of the text is written in first-person narra- tion using past tense rather than the earlier ethnographic con- vention of present-tense narration, which to critics of realist ethnography seemed to connote timelessness—weightless social action in a gravitationless world outside history and apart from struggle. This autobiographical reporting approach came to be called autoethnography. Early examples of the approach have already been mentioned: the fiction of Bohannon (Bowen, 1954) and the first confessional ethnographic monograph by Jean Briggs (1970). Later examples of autoethnographic reporting include Rabinow (1977) and Kondo (1990)—see also the recent comprehensive discussion in Bochner and Ellis (2002).

Another approach toward alteration in the text of reports came from attempts to heighten the dramatic force of those texts, making full use of the rhetorics of performance to pro- duce vivid kinds of narration, for example, breaking through from prose into poetry or adopting the means of “street the- ater,” in which scripted or improvised dramatic performances were presented. Ethnographers have sometimes been invidi- ously called failed novelists and poets because their mono- graphs typically did not make for compelling reading. By anal- ogy with performance art, the new performance ethnography sought to employ more audience-engaging means of represen- tation (see Conquergood, 1989, 2000; Denzin, 2003; Madison & Hamera, 2006.) Examples of arts-based representation approaches are also found in the recent work of Richardson (2004, 2007; see also the discussion in Richardson, 1999).

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–53

Classic and more innovative approaches to qualitative inquiry were extensively reviewed in the three successive hand- books on qualitative research methods edited by Denzin and Lincoln (1994, 2000, 2005).

Bent Flyvbjerg (2001), a member of the urban planning fac- ulty at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, made an important statement in the edgily titled Making social science matter: How social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. The book argued for the use of case study to address matters of value, power, and local detail, as these are pertinent to policy decision making. What policymakers need in making decisions is not general knowledge, says Flyvbjerg, but rather the specific cir- cumstances of the local situation. He uses as an example the planning of auto parking and pedestrian mall arrangements in the city of Aalborg. To achieve the best traffic solution for Aalborg, one cannot make a composite of what was done in Limerick, Bruges, Genoa, Tokyo, and Minneapolis. To know what is good for Aalborg involves detailed understanding of Aalborg itself. Such understanding comes from a kind of knowl- edge that Flyvbjerg calls phronesis, action-oriented knowledge of a local social ecosystem.

Qualitative inquiry in educational research. The authority of realist ethnography was beginning to be challenged at the very time when qualitative research approaches developed in certain fields of human services delivery, especially in education. By the 1950s, a subfield of anthropology of education was forming (Spindler 1955, 1963). Henry (1963) published chapter-length accounts of elementary school classrooms that were highly critical of the practices used to encourage competition among students. The first book-length reports, modeled after the writ- ing of ethnologists and anthropologists, were Smith and Geoffrey’s (1968) The Complexities of an Urban Classroom, and Jackson’s (1968) Life in Classrooms. Also in 1968, the Council on Anthropology and Education was founded within the American Anthropological Association. Its newsletter developed into a journal in 1973, the Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and for a time, this was the primary journal outlet for qualitative studies in education in the United States. Spindler became the editor of a series of overseas ethnographic studies of educa- tional settings, published from the 1960s to the late 1980s by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

In England, qualitative inquiry was pioneered by educational evaluation researchers with an orientation from sociology and action research. At CARE, Laurence Stenhouse formed a genera- tion of evaluators who studied schools and classrooms by means of participant observation and who wrote narrative research reports (see, for example, in chronological order, Walker & Adelman, 1975; Adelman, 1981; Kushner, Brisk, & MacDonald, 1982; Kushner, 1991; Torrance, 1995). Various soci- ologists also engaged in qualitative educational research. In 1977, Willis published Learning to Labour. See also Delamont

(1984, 1989, 1992) and Walkerdine (1998). Following in the tradition of Henry and Spindler in the United States and the “new sociology of education” in England, many of these studies focused on aspects of the “hidden curriculum” of social rela- tions and values socialization in classrooms.

Because of the “objectivist” postpositivist tenor of main- stream educational research, this early work in education anticipated to some extent the criticisms of ethnographic authority that developed in anthropology in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In defense, the early qualitative researchers in edu- cation took pains to present explicit evidence; indeed, some of them had come out of the ‘better data” and “hyphenated sub- fields” movements in anthropology or the ethnomethodological critique of mainstream work in sociology.

In the United States, qualitative approaches began to be adopted within research on subject matter instruction— initially in literacy studies (Heath, 1983) and social studies. Some of this work derived from the ethnography of communication/ sociolinguistics work begun in the 1960s. As portable video equipment became available, classroom participant observation research was augmented by audiovisual recording (Erickson & Shultz, 1977/1997; McDermott, Gospodinoff, & Aron, 1978; Mehan, 1978). A literature on classroom discourse analysis developed, involving transcriptions of recordings of speech (see Cazden, 2001). Initially focused on literacy instruction, after the mid 1980s, this approach was increasingly used in studies of “teaching for understanding” in mathematics and science that were funded by the National Science Foundation in the United States, and that tendency has increased up to the present time.

Methods texts began to appear, explaining to postpositivist audiences of educational researchers how qualitative research could be rigorous and systematic: Guba (1978), Bogdan and Biklen (1982), and Guba and Lincoln (1985); see also Schensul, LeCompte, and Schensul (1999). Erickson’s (1986) essay on interpretive qualitative research on teaching appeared in a hand- book sponsored by the American Educational Research Associa- tion, and that discussion came to be widely cited in educational research. Preceded by a meeting in 1978 at which Mead was the keynote speaker, shortly before her death, and established as an annual meeting 2 years later, the Ethnography in Education con- ference at the University of Pennsylvania soon became the larg- est gathering of qualitative educational researchers in the world, surpassed in scale only recently by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Also in the 1980s, a movement of practitioner research in education developed in the United States, principally as teachers began to write narrative accounts of their classroom practice (see Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). This was related to participatory action research (see the discussion in Erickson, 2006).

By the early 1990s, qualitative research on subject areas in both the humanities and in science/mathematics had become commonplace, where 20 years earlier it had been very rare.

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Video documentation was especially useful in the study of “hands on” instruction in science and in the use of manipula- bles in teaching mathematics instruction (see Goldman, Barron, Pea, & Derry, 2007). Increasingly, the subject matter studies— especially those supported by NSF funds—focused on the “manifest curriculum” rather uncritically. This tendency was counterbalanced by the adoption of “critical ethnography” by some educational researchers (e.g., Fine, 1991; Kincheloe, 1993; Lather, 1991; McLaren, 1986).

In a number of ways qualitative inquiry in education antici- pated and later ran in parallel with the shifts taking place within recent qualitative work in anthropology and sociology. From the outset of qualitative inquiry in education, its research subjects—school teachers, administrators, parents—were liter- ate, fully able to read the research reports that were written about them, and capable of talking back to researchers using the researchers’ own terms. The “gaze” of educational researchers— its potential for distorted perception and its status as an exercise of power over those observed—had been identified as problem- atic in qualitative educational inquiry before critics such as Clifford and Marcus (1986) had published on those matters. Also action research and practitioner research—involving “insiders” in studying and reflecting on their own customary practices—had been done by educational researchers before such approaches were attempted by scholars from social science disciplines.

Today there is a bifurcation in qualitative educational studies—with subject matter-oriented studies on the one hand and critical or postmodern studies on the other. In effect, this results in a split between attention to issues of manifest cur- riculum and hidden curriculum. Ironically, as the authority of realist ethnography was increasingly challenged within sociol- ogy and anthropology, “realist” work in applied research in education, medicine, nursing, and business came to be the most valued.

2 Iv. the current scene

At this writing, there appear to be seven major streams of qualitative inquiry: a continuation of realist ethnographic case study, a continuation of “critical” ethnography, a continuation of collaborative action research, “indigenous” studies done by “insiders” (including practitioner research in education), auto- ethnography, performance ethnography, and further efforts along postmodern lines, including literary and other arts-based approaches.

The differences go beyond technique to basic assumptions. A question arises: Is it more useful to consider these as differing “paradigms,” as Guba and Lincoln have done among many oth- ers (e.g., Guba 1990), or as a more mundane phenomenon? As Hammersley (2008) has put it, “differences among qualitative

researchers are embedded in diverse forms of situated practices that incorporate characteristic ways of thinking and feeling about the research process” (p. 167). Whatever terms one uses to characterize this divergence, it is apparent that major differ- ences in purposes, value positions, and ontological and episte- mological assumptions obtain.

At the outset of this chapter, I mentioned five foundational “footings” for qualitative inquiry, each of which has been con- tested across the course of the development of such inquiry: (1) disciplinary perspectives in social science, (2) the partici- pant-observational fieldworker as an observer/author, (3) the people who are observed during the fieldwork, (4) the rhetorical and substantive content of the research report, and (5) the audi- ences to which such reports have been addressed.

As the social sciences began to develop along lines of natu- ral science models, its social theory orientations (social evolu- tion, then functionalism combined with cultural relativism) were seen to justify data collection and analysis as a “value- neutral” enterprise. That stance was challenged by conflict- oriented social theory, with the research enterprise redefined as social criticism. Today the possibility of valid social critique is itself questioned by postmodern skepticism about the authoritativeness of scholarly inquiry in general, and core organizing notions taken from arts and humanities disciplines inform much new qualitative research. Sociology and anthro- pology are no longer the foundational “homes” for social and cultural studies.

Formerly, an “expert knowledge” model of the social scientist was seen as justifying long-term firsthand observation and interviewing—”fieldwork”—that was conducted autono- mously by a researcher, who operated in ways akin to those of a field biologist. Today the adequacy and legitimacy of that researcher stance has been seriously challenged, with many researchers allying themselves as advocates (collaborators/joint authors/editors) with the people who are studied, or working with researchers coming from the ranks of the “studied.” Thus, the roles of “researcher” and “researched” have been blended in recent work.

The research report was formerly considered to be an accu- rate, realistic, and comprehensive portrayal of the lifeways of those who were studied, with an underlying rhetoric of persua- sion as to the realism of the account. Today qualitative research reports are often considered to be partial—renderings done from within the standpoints of the life experience of the researcher. The “validity” of these accounts can be compared to that of novels and poetry—a pointing toward “truths” that are not literal; fiction may be employed as a means of illuminating interpretive points in a report.

Initially, the audiences of such reports were the author’s scholarly peers—fellow social scientists, and rarely those who were studied. Today those who are studied are expected to read the report—and they may also participate in writing it.

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–55

Moreover, in action research and other kinds of advocacy research, research may also address popular audiences.

This is a story of decentering and jockeying for position as qualitative inquiry has evolved over the last 120 years. Today there is an uneven pattern of adoption and rejection of the newer approaches in qualitative inquiry. In applied fields, such as edu- cation, medicine, and business, “realist” ethnography has gained wide acceptance, while more recently developed approaches have sometimes been adopted (especially in education) and sometimes met with skepticism or with outright rejection. In anthropology, heroic “lone ethnographer” fieldwork and report- ing, after the self-valorizing model of Malinowski, has generally gone out of fashion. In sociology, the detached stance of profes- sional researcher has also been seriously questioned, together with the realist mode of research reporting.

Yet there has also been push back. In education, for example, while realist ethnography was officially accepted as legitimately scientific in an influential report issued by the National Research Council (Shavelson & Towne, 2002), postmodern approaches were singled out for harsh criticism. The report also took the position that science is a seamless enterprise, with social scien- tific inquiry being continuous in its fundamental aims and procedures with that of natural science. This position was rein- forced by a statement by the primary professional society of researchers in education, the American Educational Research Association. Quoting from the AERA website:

The following definition of scientifically based research (SBR) was developed by an expert working group convened by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) . . . AERA provided this definition in response to congressional staff requests for an SBR definition that was grounded in scientific standards and principles. The request derived from an interest in averting the inconsisten- cies and at times narrowness of other SBR definitions used in legislation in recent years.

Alternate Definition of Scientifically Based Research (SBR) Supported by AERA Council, July 11, 2008

The term “principles of scientific research” means the use of rigorous, systematic, and objective methodologies to obtain reliable and valid knowledge. Specifically, such research requires

development of a logical, evidence-based chain of reasoning;

methods appropriate to the questions posed;

observational or experimental designs and instruments that provide reliable and generalizable findings;

data and analysis adequate to support findings;

explication of procedures and results clearly and in detail, including specification of the population to which the find- ings can be generalized;

adherence to professional norms of peer review;

dissemination of findings to contribute to scientific knowl- edge; and

access to data for reanalysis, replication, and the opportunity to build on findings.

The statements by the NRC panel and the AERA Council claimed to provide a more broadly ecumenical definition of scien- tific research than that which some members of the U.S. Congress and their staffs were trying to insist on in developing criteria of eligibility for federal funding. Some legislators proposed that fund- ing should be restricted to experimental designs with random assignment of subjects to treatment or control conditions. However, AERA’s adoption of the “seamless” view of science means that many of the recent approaches to qualitative inquiry are declared beyond the boundaries of legitimate research. Moreover, the statements by the NRC and by AERA show no awareness of an intellectual history of social and cultural research in which, across many generations of scholars, serious doubts have been raised as to the possibility that inquiry in the human sciences should be, or could be, conducted in ways that were continuous with the natural sciences.

Geertz warned against the “broad umbrella” conception of science in his favorable review of Flyvbjerg’s (2001) book, Making Social Science Matter:

Using the term “science” to cover everything from string theory to psychoanalysis is not a happy idea because doing so elides the dif- ficult fact that the ways in which we try to understand and deal with the physical world and those in which we try to understand and deal with the social one are not altogether the same. The meth- ods of research, the aims of inquiry, and the standards of judgment all differ, and nothing but confusion, scorn, and accusation— relativism! Platonism! reductionism! verbalism!—results from failing to see this. (Geertz, 2001, p. 53)

In addition to external critique from the advocates of social inquiry as “hard science,” there is also a conservative reaction from within the community of qualitative researchers. One such statement appears in a recent collection of essays by Martin Hammersley (2008):

I have argued that this postmodern approach is founded on some false assumptions that undermine the distinctive nature of social research . . . one consequence of this has been a legitimization of speculative theorizing; another has been a celebration of obscurity, and associated denunciations of clarity . . . [this] leads toward an abdication of the responsibility for clear and careful argument aimed at discovering what truths qualitative inquiry is capable of providing. (p. 144)

We must work to overcome, or at least to reduce, methodological pluralism. It is not that all research can or should be done in the same standardised way. Rather, my point is that any approach to methodological thinking needs to engage with the same general issues. (p. 181)

56–2–PART I LOCATING THE FIELD

This postmodernist image of qualitative inquiry is not only ill- conceived but . . . its prominence at the present time, not least in arguments against what it dismisses as methodological conserva- tism, is potentially very damaging—not just to qualitative research but to social science more generally. (p. 11)

The postmodern range within the current spectrum of qualitative inquiry approaches was also criticized in a recent presidential address at the Midwest Sociological Society’s annual meeting in 2006 (Adler & Adler, 2008). Reviewing past and current practices, Adler and Adler contrasted mainstream, realist interpretive ethnography and its literary tropes of verisi- militude with the postmodern approaches: “With its focus on the exploration of new forms, it [i.e., postmodern ethnography] offers great possibilities for continuing innovation. There is increasing unlikeliness, however, that it will ever be legitimized beyond its own rather narrow orbit” (p. 29).

In a response to these and other critics, Denzin (2009) wrote a rejoinder in the form of an imaginary play in which various characters—some of whom are scholars, living or dead, some of whom are fictional—engage in dispute on either side of this argument. Many of the lines the characters “speak” come from published work by the various scholars, and the form of the rejoinder as a performance text—a blending of scholarly quota- tion with novelistic creation of new utterances—mocks the high seriousness of the critics.

Mark Twain is said to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself—at best it sometimes rhymes.” If he was correct, then the proponents of postpositivist social science are in serious trouble. Such inquiry, grounded in what is assumed to be a seamless whole of science, aims to discover general laws of social process that are akin to the laws of physics, that is, an enterprise firmly grounded in prose and in literal meanings of things. It will con- tinue to be controverted by the stubborn poetics of everyday social life—its rhyming, the nonliteral, labile meanings inherent in social action, the unexpected twists and turns that belie pre- diction and control. It may well be that social science will at last give up on its perennially failing attempts to assume that history actually repeats itself and therefore can be studied as if it did. One might think that contemporary qualitative social inquiry would be better equipped than such a prosaic social physics to take account of the poetics of social and cultural processes, and yet qualitative social inquiry expends considerable energy on internecine dispute, with “classical” and “anticlassical” approaches vying for dominance. It seems too soon to know whether this situation is more an opportunity than a liability.

Let me conclude in first person. It seems to me that the full- blown realist ethnographic monograph, with its omniscient narrator speaking to the reader with an apparent neutrality as if from nowhere and nowhen, is no longer a genre of reporting that can responsibly be practiced, given the duration and force of the critique that has been leveled against it. Some adaptation, some deviation from the classic form seems warranted. It also

seems to me that there should be a viable place within qualita- tive inquiry between harsh critique and self-satisfied nostalgia— and that this need not involve what Hammersley (2008) has called overcoming methodological pluralism. But it does require adopting a certain degree of humility as we consider what any of our work is capable of accomplishing.

It is only 86 years since Malinowski set foot in the Trobriand Islands. I want to say that Malinowski’s overall aim for ethnog- raphy was a noble one, especially as amended in the words that follow: “to grasp the points of view of those who are studied and of those who are studying, their relations to life, their visions of their worlds.” I think it is fair to say that we have learned over the past 60 years how hard it is to achieve such an aim partially, even to move in the direction of that aim. We know now that this is far more difficult than Malinowski and his contemporaries had anticipated. Yet it could still orient our continuing reach.

2 nOte

1. Some discussion here is adapted from my own previous writing on these topics, drawing especially on Erickson 1986 and 2006. Because the literature on qualitative research methods is huge, the reader is also referred to Vidich and Lyman (1994) for an extensive review of classic realist ethnography in American sociology and anthropology; to Urrey (1994) for an extensive review of field research methods, primarily in British social anthropology; and to Heider (1982) for an extensive review of ethnographic film.

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