Qualitative Inquiry recent issues

"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.

Opening Doors: Poetic Representation of the Sport Experiences of Men With Severe Mental Health Difficulties

Carless, D., Douglas, K. — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:39 PST

We present here a series of poetic representations that stem from our research into the sport and exercise experiences of men with severe mental health difficulties. Relying exclusively on scientific or realist tales risks omitting or misrepresenting participants’ sometimes "messy" stories. By allowing space for these stories, which may not be considered "good stories" in terms of traditional narrative criteria of content, form, coherence, or plot, poetic approaches can contribute to a richer and more complex understanding of others’ lives. The first poem was written in response to our experiences of doing qualitative research in the context of a rehabilitation day center for people with severe mental health difficulties. We created the subsequent poems, using only the participants’ own words, as a way to further explore and represent their experiences of, and responses to, a golf activity group that was offered within the context the day center.

Zero Tolerance: A Stage Adaptation of an Investigative Report on School Safety

Goldstein, T., Wickett, J. — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:39 PST

In May 2007, 15-year-old Jordan Manners was shot and killed in the hallway of his Toronto school. In June 2007, the Toronto District School Board commissioned an investigation into school safety, which resulted in a report entitled The Road to Health: A Final Report on School Safety. In February 2008, in an attempt to provoke discussion about the investigative report among teacher candidates and teacher educators in Toronto, the author adapted The Road to Health into a performance script. The script, directed by MA student and theatre artist Jocelyn Wickett, was performed in September 2008, for 500 teacher candidates at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s annual Safe Schools Conference. The preparation of script involved the task of adapting a very large investigative report on school safety into a performance for the stage, in order to provide an example of how arts-based researchers or research-based artists can assist in the dissemination of important research and investigative reports.

Conflict, Theatrical Production, and Pedagogy: "It's Just a Play"

Denton, D., Ryder, S. — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:39 PST

Conflict generated in theatre productions in university theatre departments is unique to its context. Issues of role ambiguity; scarce resources; fear and response to the unknown or unfamiliar; and power relations, among others, influence both the generation and the management of conflict. Examining such conflict and the behaviors used to engage it, the authors consider what alternate "performances" might be available to handle conflict effectively and wholly. The authors wonder what fully communal performances and discourses of experience are possible? Using metaphor and concepts of the rhizomatic story, the authors examine conflict issues generated in actual student production contexts.

My Nine Lives as an Academic: Narratives of Identity Storied by a Platinum-Enhanced Brain

Charles, L. L. — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:39 PST

In this article, I describe my experiences 72 hours after I was told I had a life-threatening medical condition. My experience as an autoethnographer and my interest in embodied knowing put a unique spin on the narrative that developed in those three days. What I present here is an autoethnographic story of my experience, which culminated in a "miraculous" life-saving procedure that probably saved my life—but left me with multiple questions about what it means to live it. As I interacted with professional health providers, friends, and loved ones, I became vividly cognizant of the many character roles I play and narratives I participate in my life as an academic. In this essay, I present nine role-changing moments, illustrating how my various constructed personal and professional identities emerged and changed during my brief, clarifying, brush with death.

In His Time of Dying: Communication and Silence in Family Illness and Death

Knight, K. — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:39 PST

This is a personal narrative about the limits of communication in the context of illness and death. When I was twenty years old and a junior in college, my stepfather Jon was diagnosed with distally metastatic lung cancer and died four months later. This is a fragmented account of the emotional work I did and avoided doing during his illness and death, and the consequences of those reactions. In a sense, this is a story about scriptlessness in dealing with terminal illness. My hope is that my experiences, in their inadequacy, will resonate with families facing similar situations.

Fractured Femininities/Massacred Masculinities: A Poetic Installation

Leavy, P. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:54 PDT

The following series of poems, titled "Fractured Femininities/Massacred Masculinities" consists of six "tri-voiced poems" presented as an installation. The author uses the term tri-voiced poems to denote poems crafted from original data, existing literature, and autoethnographic researcher observations. With respect to original data, the poems are based, in part, on data collected during two interview studies. One study involves in-depth interviews with seven heterosexual college-age women regarding their body images and conceptions of femininity and masculinity. The other study consists of in-depth interviews with twenty-eight homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual college-age women regarding their body images and sexual-gender identities. A feminist social constructionist literature review and the author’s experiences and observations have also informed the poetic works. The poems are intended to be engaged with as an installation—connected pieces of a larger work in which themes and language are replicated across poems as windows through the elements in the series.

Scenes in the Life of a Woman

Pearson, A. R. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:54 PDT

Mother Liar

Lahman, M. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:54 PDT

Trying On--Being In--Becoming: Four Women's Journey(s) in Feminist Poststructural Theory

Kalmbach Phillips, D., Harris, G., Legard Larson, M., higgins, k. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:55 PDT

The article discusses the narrative of four women in academia spanning a ten-year relational journey. As a performance collaborative autoethnography, it explores and presents theories of subjectivity and transitional space. Through journals, e-mails, and dialogue, the authors are trying on, being in, and becoming feminist poststructural thinkers/inquirers/teacher educators. The authors further explore the following: How has theory changed their subjectivity, lived experiences and relationships, and moved them from comfortable spaces of knowing to uncomfortable places of becoming? In a series of poetry and performance narratives, the authors chart their own linked journey(s) in pursuing these questions. As autoethnographers, the authors grapple with meanings and moments of loss, desire, guilt, and love as a practice of hypomnemata. This study represents a reflective mining of such treasures, capturing moments of rereading and meditation, and a pause, even if an illusionary one, in our intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and embodied journey(s). This work illustrates how the self looks in transitional space: in motion, contemporaneous, simultaneously in the making, and in relation to others. The authors continue this practice as a pedagogy for being and living out the fictions of their lives.

The Drama Is Always Right in Front of You: Sociodrama for the Development of Social Insight and Action

Carter, P. D. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:55 PDT

This article is a story in three acts. Act I is the initial article submitted to Qualitative Inquiry describing an unscripted sociodrama that occurred in a weekly psychodrama group two days after September 11, 2001 (initial submission titled, 9/11 in New Zealand: A point of leverage). Act II presents the reviewer’s response to the submission in which he invites more discussion of the participants and content of the drama, as well as an attempt at stating the salient aspect or moral of the story. The author’s response begins in Act II and concludes in Act III. The author acts on the psychodramatic principles of the meaning always being immediately in right in front of one’s nose and that everything is connected. In taking space to value his own immediate response to the reviewer and trusting that it would be connected with the theme of the drama, the author does come, after a period of reflection and writing, to identify a theme that is both in the process of crafting this article and in the sociodrama: keeping going with each other. The production process of writing has been enthused by the life of the theme and has also helped to cultivate it. The writing has been a reciprocal cocreation between the author and the reviewer and so is authentic in living its message. Act III concludes with a twist that reveals the real moral of the story.

The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context for the Production of Social Life and Personal Narratives

Tanggaard, L. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:55 PDT

The aim of the present article is to consider the research interview as a dialogical context for the production of social life and personal narratives. It is emphasized that interviews are inevitable, dialogical social events based on repertoires of socially and culturally embedded and constantly changing words and discourses. Rather than viewing the interview as a setting for unfolding an inner and subjective lifestory uninfluenced by the interview setting, it is suggested that the interview is better described as a setting in which dissenting opinion, diverse discourses, and personal narratives are produced through the social, dialogical context of the interview. In this sense, one major objective of qualitative research interviewing is to identify general discursive repertoires in speaking within particular social settings and to fuel public dialogue about research themes beyond the specific interview setting.

Discourse Tracing as Qualitative Practice

LeGreco, M., Tracy, S. J. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:44:55 PDT

This article introduces a qualitative research method called discourse tracing. Discourse tracing draws from contributions made by ethnographers, discourse critics, case study scholars, and process tracers. The approach offers new insights and an attendant language about how we engage in research designed specifically for the critical-interpretive and applied analysis of discourse. More specifically, discourse tracing analyzes the formation, interpretation, and appropriation of discursive practices across micro, meso, and macro levels. In doing so, the method provides a language for studying social processes, including the facilitation of change and the institution of new routines. The article describes the current theoretical and political landscape of qualitative methods and how discourse tracing can provide a particularly helpful methodological tool at this time. Then, drawing from a qualitative study on of school lunch policy, the authors explain how to practice discourse tracing in a step-by-step manner.

What We Tell Our Daughters and Ourselves About Hysterectomy

Davis, A. M. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

On December 18, 2006, I became one of hundreds of thousands of women who undergo hysterectomies annually in the United States—the highest number of any industrialized nation—second only to C-sections as the most commonly performed surgery. Studies have found that at least 90% of these costly procedures are deemed unnecessary, performed for other than lifesaving purposes, i.e. sterilization. As a form of gender violence, all women have been victimized by hysterectomy. Not surprisingly however, African-American women have historically, disproportionately been targets of sterilization by hysterectomy, oftentimes state sponsored and funded, despite still unknown longterm physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual consequences beyond the permanent elimination of the means for propagating the species, leading some to charge racial genocide. This autoethnographic text, produced during my recovery, represents an attempt to rupture silences that hide the historic and contemporary abuse of Black women’s reproductive autonomy. Simultaneously, this intervention seeks restore to Black women the sanctity of their bodies.

Growing Up: A Journey Toward Theoretical Understanding

Dillow, C. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

This article describes a struggle and a journey. It shows a struggle between the need to be scholarly and the desire to be evocative; it travels carefully along a path toward less certainty. The article discusses how the author, as a doctoral student, was aware of the need to address her innate resistance to use theory and how she struggled to assimilate this into her research project and text. The author says the journey toward this understanding was akin to a growth spurt—sometimes painful and always surprising. Here, the author uses a narrative style to explore approaches to theory, knowledge, and representation and to show this struggle in the context of her research into lived experience. The author records the way how she constructed her own theoretical framework and show the dawning realization that decisions about approach and method are indeed theoretically informed and supported. Finally, the article discusses how the author faced her theories about theories and discovered that the journey is important and that certainty is an elusive destination.

Art Installation as Method: "Fragements" of Theory and Tape

Mandlis, L. R. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

This article discusses the use of art mediums as methods to enhance the theoretical and political intentions of an academic work. More specifically, it traces the author’s moving from one artistic method to another, in order to show how the engagement with the theory that is afforded by each is different. Taking performance ethnography as a methodology, the author argues that two different artistic mediums (performance text and art installation) function as significant tools of method that inform his research on various forms of transphobic violence. The author discusses the ways in which the author’s experience as a transsexed (transsexual) researcher and artist informed the move into this methodology, and the ways in which the chosen method of art installation allows the work to perform and be performative more effectively than the original paper-based performance text method.

the scholar dances

Prendergast, M. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

This poem was written in response to the speech given by Donald Blumenfeld-Jones in his role as Vice-President of Division B [Curriculum Studies] at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association meeting in April of 2006. Like many creative acts, it has required a long gestation and I have revisited it from time to time over the past 2 years. Creative researchers may struggle as do some artists with the process of letting-go; it is time to let this poem go and to wish that it communicates some small part of the powerfully visceral, intellectual and emotional response I had to Donald’s dance and speech that day. As a fragment of arts-based inquiry, I intend for it to reveal the sometimes hidden intersections between the scholarly and personal, often found in the overlapping landscapes of experience and memory (which also happens to be the landscape of poetry).

Literature as Qualitative Inquiry: The Novelist as Researcher

Brinkmann, S. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

In recent years, there has been a literary turn in parts of the social sciences. Attention has been given to social science writings as literature. In this article, the author approaches the issue from the opposite direction by engaging with literature as qualitative social inquiry. He does so through a reading of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq’s style represents a form of "lyrical sociology," depicting human experience in a consumer society. The author argues that we can learn as much from Houellebecq about contemporary human lives, experiences, and sufferings as we can from traditional forms of empirical qualitative research. He concludes with a more general proposal of how to think about fact and fiction in social science writings.

"Coming of Age in Methodology": Two Collaborative Inquiries With Shinnecock and Maya Peoples

Caracciolo, D., Staikidis, K. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

In this article the authors tell the story of their separate but related journeys toward "coming of age in methodology," journeys that brought them, as non-indigenous women, into relationships with indigenous peoples, who challenged them to unlearn their taken-for-granted notions about research. The first study highlights the pervasive silencing of indigenous perspectives within K-12 schools and teacher preparation programs on Long Island, New York. The second study focuses on the mentoring model in two Maya artists’ studios as a dialogic process that is guided by Maya artists, and which fosters discoveries that help to transform art education curricula. Through rich conversations leading to alliances with the indigenous peoples they have met in these studies, the authors hope to examine their own biases and create avenues for indigenous perspectives to inform and transform educational and research practices.

Infusing Participants' Voices Into Grounded Theory Research: A Poetic Anthology

Kennedy, B. L. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:04 PDT

This article augments the author’s grounded theory study of student and teacher interactions in alternative education classrooms by presenting poetic transcription as a way to portray the essences and experiences of the participants. The author builds on the experimental writing traditions of other researchers to embrace her own experiences as a classroom teacher in crafting the poems out of the participants’ words. In so doing, the author actively interacts with the texts to co-construct new meaning that elucidates research findings. Utilizing her position between the worlds of research and practice, the author crafts the poems to convey personalities, victories, and complexities involved in these classrooms. This application of the methodology of poetic transcription allows for a deeper understanding of students’ and teachers’ experiences in these schools.