Read the passage and answer the questions.
Passage I

Qualitative research methods are often mischaracterized by advocates, users, and critics alike because too often the reflexive, iterative, and flexible methods are misunderstood as 'just making do.' There is a good pragmatic tradition of "making do," from Dewey to the present, that describes the necessities as well as virtues of using what situations provide in their immediacy as the grounds of social action. While qualitative research certainly shares some of this pragmatic bricolage, good research, qualitative as well as quantitative, is designed as well as improvised. One of the merits of qualitative research is its particular openness to serendipitous invention; one of its failures, however, has been an unwillingness, or inability, on the part of its practitioners, until recently, to specify how that openness to 'what situations make available' can be both systematic and creative.

Over the years, I have probably reviewed hundreds of research proposals; too large a number of these claimed that because the researcher was doing a qualitative study, the kinds of data and forms of collection could not be specified in advance. I was always a bit embarrassed by this, feeling let down by my side. It sometimes seemed as if our teaching of qualitative research was creating a mystical religion, a set of our own unexamined fetishes just at the moment we set about to identify others' taken for granted assumptions and social meanings. In this vein, some years ago I heard a colleague advise a student going out to do field work for the first time "to be like a blank slate," "just tell me everything you see and hear,write it all down." The student was completely baffled and clearly at a loss about what to do, to do first, or second, or how to begin. What would constitute telling me all you see and hear. Importantly, the student had read a lot of sociology, and knew a lot about signs and signifiers, latent as well as manifest patterns in social relations. She knew that competent social actors are not blank slates. She felt incompetent but not entirely blank. She had a project, after all.

It seemed from the proposals I read and the conversations I observed that we, qualitative sociologists, believed that we could not specify what we were going to do (i.e. lay out a design and plan of the research), because that would mean that we would have -- by that naming -- necessarily circumscribed what we would do. Having supposedly controlled a priori what we would do, we would be unable to do something else along the way, as the situations and insights invited. We would have lost the distinctive virtues of qualitative research. Somehow, in this mysticism about qualitative methods, research designs seemed to be understood as enforceable contracts or sets of machine instructions; any deviation from the design was understood to be either impossible, a failure, or a mistake. Qualitative research was celebrated for its flexibility, the temporal coincidence of collection and analysis and thus prior design was, by definition, a threat to qualitative research.

Of course, I have overstated the issue but we were asked to provide fodder for discussion. And, to some extent, this overstatement puts the issue in a bold form. Why should qualitative research be any less well designed (or specified) than quantitative research? When I think about the steps in different methods, it occurs to me that most of what gets put into a research design, let us say for a survey project or quantitative research, could also be put in the design for an ethnography or a project of in-depth-interviewing and narrative analysis. The major differences lie in the fact that qualitative projects (1) will not rely on statistical analyses and therefore do not need to produce probability samples and standardized collection instruments at the same temporal pace and placement in the research process. As a consequence of temporal pace and sequencing, qualitative projects (2) will be able to adjust the forms of data, modes and cites of collection in response to the ongoing processes of analysis and interpretation. This is certainly so. I suspect, however, that the resistance to detailed research qualitative research designs derives less,however, from emphasis on these key differences than from an overly idealized or reified view of how other forms of research proceed, whether quantitative sociology or chemistry or biology. That is, all research develops (is in the making and rethinking) throughout the stages of design, collection, and analysis. Almost all research produces much that was unanticipated and therefore had to be responded to with adjustments along the way. The central difference lies in the explicit weight of recognition of and preparation for this process of adjustment in most qualitative projects. Nothing precludes a preliminary design that sets the researcher on a path that is understood as a first approximation of the work process.

I should say before going much further that there are varieties of qualitative research and my remarks will not appropriately characterize all. For the moment, I am referring primarily to ethnographic fieldwork (i.e.research study looking at the social interaction of users in a given environment), participant observation,in-depth open ended interviewing, and other work involving interpretative qualitative analysis of documents of various sorts. Thus, the mode of analysis rather than the type of data more appropriately describes work as qualitative. (The content of documents and interviews can be analysed quantitatively or qualitatively. Observations can be systematically structured and quantified but much observation is not, nor would beproductive.)

The goal of research is to produce results that can be falsifiable and in some way affirmable by rational processes of actors other than the author. Most important is that the researcher provide an account of how the conclusions were reached, why the reader should believe the claims and how one might go about trying to produce a similar account. What makes science morally, and rationally, compelling is that it is a public enterprise. I am not referring to the funding or organizational supports. Rather, science is distinguished by the claim to produce shared understanding/knowledge through modes that can be rationally and collectively apprehended. In short, we have an obligation not to "hide the ball." To the extent that we do"hide the ball," we transform our science into rhetorical performance.