Temporality in Qualitative Inquiry

Theories, Methods and Practices

Bryan C. Clift, Julie Gore, Stefanie Gustafsson, Sheree Bekker, Ioannis Costas Batlle, Jenny Hatchard, Bryan C. Clift, Julie Gore, Stefanie Gustafsson, Sheree Bekker, Ioannis Costas Batlle, Jenny Hatchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000356687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Temporality in Qualitative Inquiry explores the relationship between time and qualitative research and unpacks some of the conceptual, methodological, practical, and pragmatic areas of qualitative inquiry related to time and temporality.

This book advances the understanding and re-evaluation of research practice by examining the passage of time, temporal feeling, and conceptualising of time/temporality in research practice with participants. It provides theoretical and practical insights into how to navigate the concepts of time and temporality in qualitative inquiry. With authors from across the globe and from an array of social sciences including cultural studies, education, health, management and business, psychology, sociology, and sport and exercise, the book explores theoretical, methodological, and practical discussions of time and temporality in order to unpack and elicit meaning and understanding.

The editors champion the call for the existence of slow and quick qualitative methodologies and methods. As such, this book is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in qualitative inquiry, and in disciplines such as education, health research, management, psychology, sociology, and communication studies.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003083504-3

1
THE EBBS AND FLOWS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Time, change, and the slow wheel of interpretation

Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke

Take time to set the scene

Within some qualitative traditions, time and temporality have been central in scholarly practice–some older, like narrative approaches (e.g., Bruner, 1987; Sarbin, 1986) or memory work (e.g., Haug, 1987), some younger, like qualitative longitudinal research (e.g., Holland, Thomson, & Henderson, 2006; Saldaña, 2003) or story completion (e.g., Clarke, Braun, Frith, & Moller, 2019). In others, time and temporality are virtually absent, or rather invisible or obscured; not urgently demanding analytic or conceptual attention. Although we have both conducted (versions of) longitudinal qualitative research (e.g., Burgoyne, Clarke, Reibstein, & Edmunds, 2006; Willcox, Moller, & Clarke, 2019), and used and taught qualitative methods with explicit temporal dimensions like memory work, diaries (e.g., Meth, 2017), and story completion, we come from those latter traditions. This shapes what we “see” (and do not see) and our “take” on time and change in this chapter. Importantly, our argument here also reflects the moment in time of thinking and writing. We aim to emphasise, extrapolating from a point Saldaña (2003) made when writing about longitudinal qualitative research, that time itself is not a neutral thing, a universal thing, and is indeed a changing thing.

In this chapter, which will meander by design, like the meandering practice of good qualitative research, we focus on two aspects of time in qualitative research: the relationship between time and change, and time as resource. Throughout, we assume a conceptualisation of qualitative research as research that is qualitative in both methods and values (see Braun & Clarke, 2013; Grant & Giddings, 2002), what Kidder and Fine (1987) dubbed Big Q qualitative. This contrasts with small q qualitative–qualitative research conceptualised merely as research tools and techniques, but served up on the table of (post)positivism (see Kidder & Fine, 1987).

First, we explore time and change in relation to the data we collect and engage with, analytically, and reflect on this in relation to some of our own research and training experiences. We argue for the importance of recognising qualitative research as a contextually situated practice, with temporality as one of those important contexts, and qualitative researchers as contextually and temporally situated practitioners. We then move into considering the resources and constraints of time in relation to qualitative research, particularly in relation to the analysis of qualitative data. We consider Ritzer’s (1993) “McDonaldization” thesis, as applied to qualitative researching (e.g., Brinkman, 2012; Bryman & Beardsworth, 2006), and notions of “methodolatry” (Chamberlain, 2000) and “proceduralism” (King & Brooks, 2017). We challenge the increasing emphasis on efficiency and proceduralism in some contexts by highlighting the importance of what we call the slow wheel of interpretation for qualitative researching.

Academics in time and context

Before we discuss these two dimensions of time and qualitative research, it seems appropriate to locate ourselves in time, and briefly reflect on the time pressures within which academics increasingly operate. Time means quite different things to us now than it did when we started our PhD journeys in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University in the autumn of 1997,¹ both conducting broadly discursive and critical qualitative research. Then, our particular focus with time was finishing our PhDs before three years of scholarship funding (Virginia) or the four-year completion period emphasised by UK research councils (Victoria) ran out. This might be a familiar feeling to readers doing PhDs who are lucky enough to have funding. For Virginia, with a brutalisingof-herself working schedule, she managed it, submitting on the last day her funding covered. Similarly, Victoria, keen to be a “four-year completer”–something which seemed to signal some kind of PhD “success”–managed, despite illness and undergoing major surgery, to submit within the four-year limit.

We are not suggesting that such schedules were ideal, and since then, our positions around the possibility of “bending time to our will” have changed, reflecting different life circumstances, including chronic disease/disability, among other things. Whilst we can–obviously–make some choices in relation to our research that facilitate “timely completion” of our projects, we hope one of the key “takeaways” from this chapter is that qualitative researchers should interrupt the idea that “timely completion” is the be-all and end-all of qualitative researching. Although “completing” is an important goal and aspiration, an overly strong focus on “the end-point” can undermine quality. In saying this, we recognise that almost all qualitative researchers are operating in conditions of expectation and pressure that work directly against much of what we are going to discuss. Whilst we might promote practices stemming from what is “ideal,” we cannot all make choices to practise in those ways. Despite the popular myth that if you only believe in yourself, your dream, your qualitative project enough, anything is possible, not everything is possible. We are all constrained in various ways, both obvious and obscured. We are all subject to the vicissitudes of life, although social privilege can provide a buffer that socially marginalised groups cannot access. Within the ebbs and flows of life as a qualitative researcher, there is much to be gained in reflecting and thinking: for being “informed” and “knowing” practitioners and for understanding what we are giving up in the compromises we inevitably make in any project.

Time and change

An aspect of time emphasised by nursing researcher Sandelowski (1999) is the location of our data collection in time. As qualitative researchers, we often emphasise the value of context, but many of us (ourselves included) do not orient enough to the moments in time of our data collection. We therefore offer seven moments in time from our own training and research experiences where this became salient for us (two are discussed under one heading).

Analysing data dislocated from time

The first moment was during our PhDs in a research methods course. This course was predominantly focused on the discursive and conversation analytic “language practice” approaches developed and favoured by many Loughborough social science academics.² In a session on membership categorisation analysis (see Housley & Fitzgerald, 2017), our group of exclusively white academics and students were discussing data from a conversation recorded in California in the 1960s or 1970s. The moment that remains salient came when we considered a segment of the talk where the racial background (African-American) of someone being discussed was noted in a brief aside (using the N word). Much interpretation went on. How could we make sense of the speaker making race salient through this word, in this sequence of talk? What could it tell us about race talk, prejudice, and so on? Victoria remembers asking about more recent “reclamation” of the term by some African-Americans (e.g. in rap and hip-hop culture), emphasising context in interpretation. Virginia does not remember this. From her memory, no one paused to question whether the racial context in California, two to three decades before the then late 1990s UK context, was an important factor in how we can and should interpret the data. Memory is fallible, as we know. But Virginia does recall a post-group rant with Victoria and others, questioning the validity of the analysis of data displaced in time and space. The treatment of the data divorced from its temporal context connects with what social scientists Mauthner and Gárdos (2015) have noted as the problematic nature of “treating data independently of their ontological contexts of production” (p. 164) or not recognising “data” as “reflexively constituted through historically- and culturally-specific practices” (p. 164). Temporality constitutes one of the contexts of production for qualitative data; one that became largely obscured in this teaching session. Data are not “just data,” they potentially become and mean something different, as the temporal context of our engagement shifts (Sandelowski, 2011).

The second and fourth quite different experiences also happened during our PhDs; the third happened more recently.

Participants beyond data collection: positive transformation and change

Loughborough was a small student town, so we inevitably bumped into participants in the pub. Awkward, but not too much. When this happened to Virginia, the (somewhat inebriated) student told her that taking part in one of her focus groups–for research on “women’s experiences around their genitalia” (e.g. Braun & Kitzinger, 2001; Braun & Wilkinson, 2003)–had been eye-opening and transformative for them. It had changed things. Virginia basked in a warm glow of “happy participant” success. She also held on to this moment because it connected to a claim about focus groups–then not yet the ubiquitous method that they have become–that participating in a focus group discussion can be akin to a “consciousness-raising” session (Wilkinson, 1998, 1999). For readers not steeped in feminist history, consciousness-raising groups were popular in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the US. They aimed to bring women’s understanding about an experience or issue, a source of oppression, to “consciousness”–or to a feminist and sociostructural analysis (see Shreve, 1989). The personal as political. Focus groups had been identified as a feminist method for various reasons, including for the potential for collective conversation to lead to change, be that individually or collectively.

Victoria had a similar experience more recently (our third incident)–with a participant at the end of a focus group exploring young adult’s understandings of bisexuality commenting enthusiastically about how much they had learned from the discussion. Their understanding had been transformed through participating in the research. This obviously problematises the notion of participant-as-informant and doing qualitative research, and focus groups specifically, to capture pre-existing (and fixed) understandings rather than contextually and temporally situated sense-making. In light of this participant’s comment, a better conceptualisation of the research question is “exploring sense-making” rather than “exploring understandings.” The latter framing potentially implies something pre-existing the focus group, the former captures something that unfolds during, and in the context of, the focus group.

Trajectories from research can bring harm

The fourth incident happened when Victoria bumped into a focus group participant in Loughborough’s only gay bar. On seeing Victoria, the participant exclaimed “I knew it!” The focus group, with Loughborough undergraduates, had focused on the meaning of family, including questions about lesbian and gay parenting (the topic of Victoria’s PhD; see Clarke, 2001, 2005). The participant had come out as “gay” in the group, slowly (dropping lots of hints) and tentatively, but Victoria had not (although for those “in the know” her appearance was readable as lesbian). Victoria and the participant chatted. The participant mentioned that another participant in the focus group had broken the confidentiality agreement and outed them to the rest of their student-year cohort–with, they felt, religiously motivated homophobic intent. Aside from the ethical breaches, this conversation provided insight into the ways in which the consequences of participating in research can continue to unfold for participants long after we have packed up our recording equipment, thanked them and left the “field.” We leave, and perhaps imagine our participants fixed in time, but they are not. The aftermath of participating in research might be minimal, or significant, or even transformative for participants, in good or bad ways.

The conversation also provided a new context for reading and interpreting the focus group transcript, but not one Victoria had legitimate access to as “data.” This created a dilemma for reporting the analysis of this focus group. Victoria could not unknow what she now knew, but she could not report it. This highlights that even a method like focus groups, acclaimed as more “naturalistic” than other methods (e.g. interviews), as they to some extent resemble communication practices in everyday life (Wilkinson, 1999), still only capture a moment in time. Furthermore, this moment in time is displaced from the vicissitudes of participants’ everyday lives and framed within the context of the study and data collection.

Attempting to explore transformation through focus group research

As feminist researchers, with interests in health and wellbeing, the possibility of positive, transformative change is important, even if we do not do work that is directly about change. Virginia came back to her inebriated participant’s comment when she designed a project examining discourses of sexual health and risk in Āotearoa/New Zealand; this project provides our fifth example. With a focus on heterosex, and a context in which sexual health statistics were appallingly bad, she incorporated an element of “change” in the design. Virginia invited those interested to participate in a second focus group, many months after the first. She collected data from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: of time and qualitative research
• 1 The ebbs and flows of qualitative research: time, change, and the slow wheel of interpretation
• 2 Investigating waiting: interdisciplinary thoughts on researching elongated temporalities in healthcare settings
• 3 Timelines and transitions: understanding transgender and non-binary people’s participation in everyday sport and physical exercise through a temporal lens
• 4 What would a rhythmanalysis of a qualitative researcher’s life look like?
• 5 Time as a conceptual-methodical device: putting time to work in gendered sporting moments, memories, and “experience”
• 6 Rhythmanalysis as a method to account for time in qualitative research
• 7 Visualising pasts, futures, and the present: how can creative research methods enable reflection, reflexivity, and imagination?
• 8 Radically slow? Reflections on time, temporality, and pace in engaged scholarship
• 9 Trust and relationships in qualitative research: a critical reflection on how we can value time
• 10 The use of rapid qualitative research in time-sensitive contexts: challenges and opportunities
• Index