Qualitative Inquiry current issue

"What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...": Twenty-Five Years of Qualitative and New Paradigm Research

Lincoln, Y. S. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

Tracking the history of qualitative research is to some extent a personal journey, reflective of the individual's own experience in the field. Many scholars participated in the ongoing dialogue around the shift from a solely positivist model of research to a multiple-models context. There still remain some philosophical and practical problems, around which the field will be in dialogue for some time to come. Those problems include the issue of rapport, especially in the face of an increasingly critical turn in the social sciences, and the stances adopted for mixed-methods models. Conversations around these and other issues have never been more urgent, in light of the National Research Council's press for a return to conventional scientific inquiry.

Overdetermined Behavior, Unforeseen Consequences

Wolcott, H. F. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

Drawing on his original study about the Sneaky Kid and exploring some of the motives involved, the author reviews how preferable it might be to think about, and sometimes actually employ, the phrase "overdetermined behavior," to remind each of us that the accounts we provide are always partial and incomplete. This is implied when behavior is described as overdetermined, serving reminder that we can never predict exactly what any one human, including even oneself, will do.

Gatecrashing the Oasis? A Joint Doctoral Dissertation Play

Gale, K., Speedy, J., Wyatt, J. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

This article explores the institutional and individual struggles surrounding the submission for examination of a jointly authored doctoral dissertation at a U.K. civic university. Two of the article’s authors (Gale and Wyatt) were the dissertation’s authors, and Speedy, the article’s third author, is their supervisor. Joint doctoral dissertations are rare and the dissertation was unique in this department’s history. The article is written as play script, which allows for different points of view to be offered and juxtaposed and for key issues to emerge and be explored. These issues include the institutional and individual impact of challenging what counts as original doctoral scholarship, the supervision relationship, and aspects of the experience of the completion of a doctorate. With a nod to the Deleuzian concept of the nomad, a significant theoretical component of the joint dissertation, the play works with the metaphor of nomadic journeying across desert terrain toward the "oasis" of membership of the academy as an image of the doctoral process. The play begins as the dissertation’s two authors hand in their dissertation for examination, and ends on graduation day, with its primary focus being the eleven weeks between submission and the viva voce examination.

Cleaning Up My (Father's) Mess: Narrative Containments of "Leaky" Masculinities

Lindemann, K. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

In the photograph, my father holds my tiny elbow in my large hands, teaching me to punch and training me in "manly" poses.We are years away from my father’s motorcycle accident. While the disabled body has been displayed in many recent films and television shows, the ways it is discursively constructed remain relatively unarticulated. It is a task is even more complex given the ways the disabled body is gendered, particularly with regard to its literal and figurative "leaks" resulting from the loss of bodily function. In this "messy" narrative, I draw on three years of fieldwork with male wheelchair rugby athletes and personal experience with disability in exploring the ways disabled persons narrate control of their bodies and, in essence, narrate a preferred masculinity. I also employ performative writing in interrogating my own "leaky" masculinity, reflexively examining the control I attempt to enact over both my relationships and my body.

Poking Around Poetically: Research, Poetry, and Trustworthiness

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

In this article, the authors examined the current use of poetry in qualitative research. The literature yielded the following purposes of poetry: poetic allusions, cultural poetry research, participants’ poetry as data, data poems, research experience poems or poems from the field, and autoethnographic poetry.The authors drew on the experiences from a research poetry group, a reflexive circular e-mail, and research poems they authored. The authors deconstructed the reflexive circular e-mail for future possibilities as a data collection method and explored the following tensions: representation of research, research poets’ training and experience, explanation or interpretation, and trustworthiness. The authors composed Poetic Interludes throughout the article as a way of poking around at, with, and through poetry.

Spirited Accidents: An Autoethnography of Possibility

Poulos, C. N. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

Kierkegaard says, "A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation . . ." This understanding of spirit-as-self-in-relation, leads, inevitably, to concerns for personal fulfillment, dialogue, community, and social justice in our world. To engage spirit in our ethnographic practice is to engage the self in relation—with the world, with others, with the very frames and possibilities of our being. The accidental ethnographer, open to the driving pulse of spirited searching, may stumble into openings never anticipated. Following these openings may lead to transcendent experiences that bring new relational possibilities into view.

The Challenge of Doing Corporatized Research Revisited: Contrivances and the Presentation of Self

Saetre, A. S. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:18 PST

Browning and Sørnes’ article, "The Challenge of Doing Corporatized Research: An Ethnography of ICT use," implies by its title that it explores the difficulties inherent in corporation-sponsored research, and also that it offers an ethnography of ICT (information and communication technologies) use in that same context. In fact, it does neither. By exposing a deliberate series of contrivances, this article shows how their effort is a deliberate attempt at impression management. The problems with their article are divided into three main categories: ethical issues, vying for credit, and relating to sponsors and using ICTs. This article concludes that the effort by Browning and Sørnes falls well short of the scrupulousness one expects from qualitative researchers.

Metropoems: Poetic Method and Ethnographic Experience

Marechal, G., Linstead, S. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:46:19 PST

Discussions of the use and significance of poetry as a research tool have raised the question of poetic technique and craftsmanship in ethnographic poetic outputs. In this article, the authors look explicitly at a contemporary poetic form, the "metropoem" originated by French Oulipian poet Jacques Jouet,¹ arguing that it presents a potentially valuable new tool for qualitative research for four reasons. First, the "metropoetic" form enables the taking of a position that neither turns inward toward the ethnographer’s self nor outward toward an empathic relation with the ethnographic other, but is focused in the moment, in place, and in motion—which resists the temptations of nostalgia and Romanticism that have attracted criticism of "research poetry." Second, it imposes a discipline that is derived from a specific activity, which embodies the rhythms, time, and space of that activity, distinguishing metropoems from poetry that recollects or represents. Third, it demands attention to technique, to poetry as a craft, which underscores calls made by recent critical work in this area. Finally, despite being practically, empirically, and metaphorically enformed by the mobility of contemporary urban social experience, it offers a method that can usefully be adapted to encapsulate other forms of social life.