What is Qualitative Research? – Moral, Ethical, Political
Unfurling Rigor: On Continuity and Change in Qualitative Inquiry
Arthur P. Bochner
Bochner, A.P. (2018) ‘Unfurling Rigor: On Continuity and Change in Qualitative Inquiry’, Qualitative Inquiry, Vol 24 (6), pp. 359 – 368. doi: 10.1177/1077800417727766journals.sagepub.com/home/qix (Accessed: 18th November 2021)
- Richard Rorty – The whole idea of ‘being scientific’ or of choosing between methods is confused (1982, p.195)
p.359
- Reality
The confusion arises when we think of what we’re doing as producing knowledge that represent ‘reality’. When we make these kinds of knowledge claims, we have to worry about the extent to which our descriptions and explanations are accurate and thus ‘true’. This makes us accountable for our objectivity as observers, the appropriateness of our data, and the validity of our inferences, in short the rigor of our methodology (Atkinson & Delamont, 2006; Hammersley, 1995, 2008; Krefting, 1991)
p.359
- ‘Trustworthiness of our descriptions’, embedded in language (Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Morse 2015)
p.359
- Objects are not ‘more objectively’ described in any vocabulary than in any other. (Rorty, 1982, p.203)
p.359
- Narrative Turn
He (Rorty) believed that ‘the narrative turn’ made it possible to exploit Dewey’s conception of ‘the moral importance of the social sciences – their role in widening and deepening our sense of a community and the possibilities open to this community (Rorty, 1982, pp. 203-204)
p.359
- Qualities/Thoughts/Beliefs you have if you distrust language:
Hold reservations about whether truth can ever be made completely transparent
How difficult you find it to artfully arrange depictions of the mysteries and complications of being alive in stories that can help people cope better, fell less alone, and achieve the social justice they deserve (Bochner and Ellis, 2016)
Empirical enquiry – practical and dialogic – its truths are partial, situated, relational and incomplete.
Your work seeks conversation, encounter, and the fullness of an emotional and subjective life shared with others.
You want to empower your audience, not control them and to wrestle with ambiguities and contradictions not resolve or exhaust them.
p.360
- Science
‘A kind of deep scientificity found in narrative work’ (Freeman, 2016, p.361) that gives flesh and form to the better possible worlds we are seeking to make through our research. We need to bend and blend and blur the genre of science until it is more widely recognized that science is something we made, something that can be unmade and remade, in Rorty’s terms ‘Not One Right Description’ only an expanding repertoire of alternative descriptions.’
p.361
- Mind-set:
Where once we saw subjects, now we see participants and co-collaborators;
where once we sought to predict and control, now we seek to learn to talk with, to empower, to transform, and to empathize;
where once we were concerned with the accuracy of our descriptions, now we ask how useful they are and what we can do with them;
where once we thought research ethics meant debriefing before leaving, now we see ethics as a relational obligation to stay awhile, return, and give something back;
where once we conceived of our readers as passive receivers of our knowledge, now we construe them as active co-constructors of meaning;
where once we focused on what they can learn about themselves from us, now we also stress what we can learn about ourselves from them;
where once we thought the right thing to do was to ensure that we composed texts that were scientific, detached, and valid, now we want to make our research performances artful, urgent, and believable;
where once we worried about how we would be judged as scientists (by other scientists), now we concern ourselves with whether our work will be applicable and meaningful—and for whom;
where once we considered it sufficient to show that our voice as researchers had authority, now we insist that the voices of the people we study be put on an equal plane to our own;
where once we thought we were exclusively talking about them, now we sense that we are talking about ourselves as well;
where once we elevated ourselves to the position of confident theorists in pursuit of rigorously produced knowledge, now we more humbly understand ourselves as vulnerable storytellers with moral imagination in pursuit of social justice;
p.363
where once we saw ourselves as apart from, now we see ourselves as part of those people we study; and
where once we were preoccupied with scientific rigor, now we feel liberated to use our poetic imagination and literary license.
p.364