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Passage I

Qualitative research methods are often mischaracterized by advocates, users, and critics alike because toooften the reflexive, iterative, and flexible methods are misunderstood as 'just making do.' There is a goodpragmatic tradition of "making do," from Dewey to the present, that describes the necessities as well asvirtues of using what situations provide in their immediacy as the grounds of social action. While qualitativeresearch certainly shares some of this pragmatic bricolage, good research, qualitative as well asquantitative, is designed as well as improvised. One of the merits of qualitative research is its particularopenness to serendipitous invention; one of its failures, however, has been an unwillingness, or inability, onthe 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 theseclaimed that because the researcher was doing a qualitative study, the kinds of data and forms of collectioncould not be specified in advance. I was always a bit embarrassed by this, feeling let down by my side. Itsometimes seemed as if our teaching of qualitative research was creating a mystical religion, a set of ourown unexamined fetishes just at the moment we set about to identify others' taken for grantedassumptions and social meanings. In this vein, some years ago I heard a colleague advise a student goingout 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, orsecond, or how to begin. What would constitute telling me all you see and hear. Importantly, the studenthad read a lot of sociology, and knew a lot about signs and signifiers, latent as well as manifest patterns insocial relations. She knew that competent social actors are not blank slates. She felt incompetent but notentirely 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 theresearch), because that would mean that we would have -- by that naming -- necessarily circumscribedwhat we would do. Having supposedly controlled a priori what we would do, we would be unable to dosomething else along the way, as the situations and insights invited. We would have lost the distinctivevirtues of qualitative research. Somehow, in this mysticism about qualitative methods, research designsseemed to be understood as enforceable contracts or sets of machine instructions; any deviation from thedesign was understood to be either impossible, a failure, or a mistake. Qualitative research was celebratedfor its flexibility, the temporal coincidence of collection and analysis and thus prior design was, bydefinition, a threat to qualitative research.

Of course, I have overstated the issue but we were asked to provide fodder for discussion. And, to someextent, this overstatement puts the issue in a bold form. Why should qualitative research be any less welldesigned (or specified) than quantitative research? When I think about the steps in different methods, itoccurs to me that most of what gets put into a research design, let us say for a survey project orquantitative 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 notrely on statistical analyses and therefore do not need to produce probability samples and standardizedcollection instruments at the same temporal pace and placement in the research process. As a consequenceof temporal pace and sequencing, qualitative projects (2) will be able to adjust the forms of data, modesand cites of collection in response to the ongoing processes of analysis and interpretation. This is certainlyso. 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 otherforms of research proceed, whether quantitative sociology or chemistry or biology. That is, all researchdevelops (is in the making and rethinking) throughout the stages of design, collection, and analysis. Almostall research produces much that was unanticipated and therefore had to be responded to with adjustmentsalong the way. The central difference lies in the explicit weight of recognition of and preparation for thisprocess of adjustment in most qualitative projects. Nothing precludes a preliminary design that sets theresearcher 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 willnot 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 documentsof various sorts. Thus, the mode of analysis rather than the type of data more appropriately describes workas 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 rationalprocesses 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 tryingto produce a similar account. What makes science morally, and rationally, compelling is that it is a publicenterprise. I am not referring to the funding or organizational supports. Rather, science is distinguished bythe claim to produce shared understanding/knowledge through modes that can be rationally andcollectively 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.