Qualitative Research Practice

Concise Paperback Edition

Clive Seale, David Silverman, Jaber F Gubrium, Giampietro Gobo, Clive Seale, David Silverman, Jaber F Gubrium, Giampietro Gobo

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781473903487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

?This book is jam-packed with a wide range of material related to qualitative research…. [T]his is a quality text and has much to offer the reader, especially the novice researcher? - Nurse Researcher

`This comprehensive collection of almost 40 chapters - each written by a leading expert in the field - is the essential reference for anyone undertaking or studying qualitative research. It covers a diversity of methods and a variety of perspectives and is a very practical and informative guide for newcomers and experienced researchers alike? - John Scott, University of Essex

`The best ways in which to understand the issues and processes informing qualitative research is to learn from the accounts of its leading practitioners. Here they come together in what is a distinctive and wide-ranging collection that will appeal to postgraduates and social researchers in general? - Tim May, University of Salford

`This excellent guide engages in a dialogue with a wide range of expert qualitative researchers, each of whom considers their own practice in an illuminating and challenging way. Overall, the book constitutes an authoritative survey of current methods of qualitative research data collection and analysis? - Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey

This concise paperback edition of the best selling handbook, Qualitative Research Practice, is particularly aimed at the student reader. The chapters are written by leading, internationally distinguished qualitative researchers who recount and reflect on their own research experiences as well as others, past and present, from whom they have learned. It demonstrates the benefits of using particular methods from the viewpoint of real-life experience. This is also a good philosophy for students to adopt in planing research work: to begin from a practical conception of the research process and to treat a book like this as an opportunity to learn a valuable craft.

From the outside, good research seems to be produced through practitioners learning and following standard theoretical, empirical and procedural formats. But from the inside we learn that qualitative research (like other forms of scientific endeavour) is also a biographical engagement, rendering its scholarly and practical contributions in its own terms. Standards take on practical meaning as the distinct activities of qualitative research resonate throughout the enterprise, complicating its accountability to itself and to others. In an authoritative yet accessible manner, Qualitative Research Practice reveals the special features of this engagement, teaching us that qualitative research is as much a craft and practice as it is a way of knowing.

Presenting a comprehensive examination of contemporary and traditional varieties of qualitative research practice, Qualitative Research Practice will be an invaluable resource for advanced students and researchers in any discipline. It is an essential and definitive guide to the major forms of qualitative methods in use today, written by leaders in the relevant fields of research practice.

Part 1

ENCOUNTERING METHOD

How are qualitative methods to be taught? Are there standard techniques with given advantages and disadvantages that can be learned by rote? Or is qualitative research a kind of craft skill that can only be learned by doing it?

Which ever alternative we choose, we tend to end up in an intellectual dead end. Rote learning is hardly appetizing – even if it is tending to become the default learning method in modern higher education ‘factories’. By contrast, craft training seems to imply a one-to-one apprenticeship with a skilled practitioner. While this is appealing, it is hardly a reasonable prospect for mass education.

Part 1 of this book offers a way out of this impasse. Using their own research experience as a model, the authors provide a kind of distance-learning version of craft training. In this sense, encountering method documents a researcher’s own experience with using a particular method. And that experience offers you, the reader, an opportunity for your own encounter with method – an encounter that will be enriched as you yourself apply these ideas to the demands and contingencies of your own research studies.

There remains an important qualification to be made. As these chapters show, while methods are important, we must never allow them to rise above their station. Methods are only research techniques. They acquire substantial meaning only in the context of broader decisions involving how we define our research problem, our database, our methods of data analysis and our relationships to those we are studying. These are all methodological matters and choosing a method is only one among them.

Even methodology itself is but a part of a set of much wider issues. Say you have designed a research study using interviews. How are you going to treat your data? Will you view them as containing a set of ‘facts’ about, say, people’s attitudes or experiences? Or will you treat interviewees’ utterances as contingent and locally constructed (i.e. with the interviewer) ‘versions’ of reality? (see Silverman, 2001:87).

As this example makes clear, analytic choices are embedded in even the most apparently mundane methodological matters. This is because analytic models provide an overall framework for how we look at reality. Even if we would rather do without them, they creep in behind our backs as it were.

So the chapters below also document how our authors themselves came to grips with issues of both method and theory. And because the delight (and difficulty) of qualitative research is that there any many, competing analytic models, you can see for yourself what follows when researchers make their (fateful) choices.

In his chapter on qualitative or ‘in-depth’ interviewing, Tim Rapley take us to the processes by which interviews accomplish their social facts. From recruitment and the formulation of an initial list of questions, to the interaction between interview participants and analysis, Rapley illustrates from his own material the eminently practical contours of the interview enterprise.

Joanna Bornat’s chapter on oral history also draws on the interview method. Here, however, the aim is to illustrate and understand historical purposes. Bornat’s account of her rich and varied career allows us to see how oral history extends beyond the personal, to include the documentation of community experience.

Gabriele Rosenthal’s chapter on biographical method and biographical research traces its origins to early twentieth century American pragmatist concerns with the ‘actor’s perspective’. This theme comes forth and resonates throughout the chapter, from suggestions for organizing the biographical interview to a detailed case analysis of one interview subject’s life history.

Macnaghten and Myers’ chapter is on focus groups. It discusses an aspect that is often neglected: the tension between the moderator and the analyst. The moderator plans and conducts the groups; the analyst draws conclusions from them. There are often tensions between these perspectives, and these tensions affect such practical decisions as the detail of the topic guide, the use of various kinds of visual or verbal prompts, the structure of the sessions or series of sessions, the amount and form of intervention by the moderator, the degree of detail in the transcripts, and the use of the transcript in the analysis. The authors do not try to resolve these tensions, but present them as a dialogue between two perspectives (and the two authors).

Ian Dey’s chapter discusses conventional topics in grounded theory methodology, including theoretical sampling, coding strategies and categorization. But it is also a chapter that is innovative and practical in taking the grounded theory analysis of the author’s study of trade union activism in unpredictable new directions.

REFERENCE

Silverman, D. (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Methods (2nd ed.), London: Sage.

1

Interviews

Tim Rapley

I was originally asked to write a chapter on something called ‘in-depth interviews’. Now, I knew by that specific term that the editors wanted me to tell a story about something understandable as an ‘interview’ – a story that describes how two people, often relative strangers, sit down and talk about a specific topic. One of those strangers – an interviewer – introduces the specific topic, then asks a question, the other speaker – an interviewee – gives something hearable as an answer to that specific question, the interviewer listens to the answer and then asks another question … and so the pattern repeats itself until at some point the interviewer says ‘Thank you, that was really helpful/interesting/useful’ and then they part company. So far so good – I know what it means to talk about ‘interviews’.

Then I came to the term ‘in-depth’ and I was very aware that they don’t want me to talk about interviews that only require ‘yes-no-maybe’ types of answers. But then I got stuck. I knew they wanted a description of a style of interviewing that encourages interviewees to produce ‘thick descriptions’ – where interviewees are specifically encouraged, by questions and other verbal and non-verbal methods, to produce elaborated and detailed answers. A doubt emerged; what specifically makes an in-depth interview an ‘in-depth interview’ compared to the academic literature that names such interviews as: active, biographical, collaborative, conversational, depth, dialogical, focused, guided, informal, life-history, non-directed, open-ended, oral-history, reflexive, semi-structured, etc.? So I decided to write the chapter on qualitative interviews, as this term seems to be a useful gloss for the disparate descriptions of the practices of this version of interviewing.

Now, some people may be thinking that I am being pedantic. Others may see those paragraphs above as ‘setting the scene’ for the argument that follows. My commentary is trying to highlight two things. Firstly that, as Silverman (1993: 19) notes, we are currently part of an ‘“interview society” in which interviews seem central to making sense of our lives’. The interview – seen in various forms of news interviews, talk shows and documentaries, alongside research interviews – pervades and produces our contemporary cultural experiences and knowledges of authentic personal, private selves. The face-to-face interview is presented as enabling a ‘special insight’ into subjectivity, voice and lived experience (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997). Importantly, we all just know ‘at a glance’ what it takes to be an interviewer or an interviewee.

Secondly, the sheer range of terms available to encompass the various formats of qualitative interviews begins to outline the trans-disciplinary ‘industrial complex’ of academic work on interviewing. Interviewing is currently the central resource through which contemporary social science engages with issues that concern it (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997). Since the emergence of the classical social survey interview, the interview has been deconstructed and theorized and consequently re-emerged in various guises. Symbolic interactionism sought to ‘open’ the talk so as to obtain more ‘textured’ and ‘authentic’ accounts. Feminist accounts sought to ‘unmask’ and then ‘de-centre’ the power balance. Alongside this work emerged an interest in the interview itself as a topic of research (notably Cicourel, 1964) and, following the linguistic turn, the gaze fell to the interviewee’s shifting and complex discursive, identity and narrative work.¹

As my discussion above begins to highlight, qualitative interviewing is, in some senses, both ‘simple and self-evident’ (Gubrium and Holstein, 2002: 3). It draws on the everyday practices of asking and answering questions and the everyday identities of questioner/answerer and interviewer/interviewee. And I argue below that, contra most of the current literature on ‘how to’ interview, interviewers don’t need massive amounts of detailed technical (and moral) instruction on how to conduct qualitative interviews. This how-to-interview literature, with its concerns with the production of ‘neutral and facilitative’ or ‘rapport building’ questions and gestures, is the outcome of specific theoretical concerns about the analytic status of interview data. I argue that interview talk, and hence the ‘interview data’ that emerges from this, is the product of the local interaction of the speakers. As Gubrium and Holstein note, interviewers ‘cannot very well taint knowledge if that knowledge is not conceived as existing in some pure form apart from the circumstances of its production’ (2002: 15). Following from this, interviewers don’t need to worry excessively about whether their questions and gestures are ‘too leading’ or ‘not empathetic enough’; they should just get on with interacting with that specific person.

Interviews are, by their very nature, social encounters where speakers collaborate in producing retrospective (and prospective) accounts or versions of their past (or future) actions, experiences, feelings and thoughts. As Fontana notes, ‘given the irremediably collaborative and constructed nature of the interview, a postmodern sentiment would behove us to pay more attention to the hows, that is, to try to understand the biographical, contextual, historical, and institutional elements that are brought to the interview and used by both parties’ [author’s emphasis] (2002: 166). When it comes to analysing interviews, I argue that you should analyse what actually happened – how your interaction produced that trajectory of talk, how specific versions of reality are co-constructed, how specific identities, discourses and narratives are produced.

Prior to offering a textured picture of the range of practices and the processes involved in doing qualitative interviewing, I want to present a very brief outline of debates over the analytic status of interview data.

INTERVIEWING AND THE ‘REAL’

Seale (1998), in his overview of qualitative interviewing, identifies the two major traditions on which the analysis of interviews has centred: interview data as a resource and interview data as a topic. I am aware that such a divide glosses over the myriad of approaches that these terms encapsulates, but, put simply, the story goes something like this:

• Interview-data-as-resource: the interview data collected is seen as (more or less) reflecting the interviewees’ reality outside the interview.
• Interview-data-as-topic: the interview data collected is seen as (more or less) reflecting a reality jointly constructed by the interviewee and interviewer.

The data-as-resource approach has undergone considerable critique from those working in constructionist traditions.² Much of this critique stems from highlighting that interviews are inherently interactional events, that both speakers mutually monitor each other’s talk (and gestures), that the talk is locally and collaboratively produced. The critique also centres on the idea that data-as-resource researchers often incorrectly assume that interview-talk is only about the official topic of the interview. The talk in an interview may be as much about the person producing themselves as an ‘adequate interviewee’, as a ‘specific type of person in relation to this specific topic’. In this sense, interview data may be more a reflection of the social encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee than it is about the actual topic itself. As Dingwall notes, ‘[t]he interview is an artefact, a joint accomplishment of interviewer and respondent. As such, its relationship to a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Inside Qualitative Research (paperback edition)
• Part 1 ENCOUNTERING METHOD
• Part 2 ANALYTIC FRAMEWORKS
• Part 3 FIELD RELATIONS
• Part 4 CONTEXT AND METHOD
• Part 5 QUALITY AND CREDIBILITY
• Part 6 AUDIENCES,APPLICATIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
• Index