Establishment of Methodological Traditions, chapter 2

Text Exploration

In this text, the authors describe the historic development of six different qualitative research and analysis methodologies.

James Flanagan developed the Critical Incident Technique in response to trying to make sense of thin responses on questionnaires. His work was in the context of Air Force piloting, where the content could not be understood through simple written or spoken answers to general questions. Instead, Flanagan asked his participants to describe anomalous or extreme situations in detail, which he then called “critical incidents.”

Flanagan “stressed the importance of critical incidents that contain ‘extreme behavior’”—to be critical, an incident “must occur in a situation where the purpose and effects of a human activity are clear.” The goal of the method, for Flanagan, was ultimately to solve practical problems; he recognized that the method was largely something most people do in their lives anyways (to observe things of significance more than things that are banal are regular).

The authors then describe Amadeo Giorgi’s work in developing Phenomenological Psychology, a way of viewing and analyzing the world that focuses on “unprejudiced description” of first-person experiences. His work grew out of frustration with the use of traditional experimental methods for investigating “human problems.” These forms of problems require a more through description of the underlying phenomena being studied, and Giorgi’s work was largely rejected by journals that would not publish descriptive studies. The authors describe that Giorgi’s contribution was in introducing qualitative research methods, in a broad sense.

Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss are credited next with the development of Grounded Theory, as a “systematic, inductive, iterative, and comparative method of data analysis for the purpose of sociological theory construction.” Working during a period of time that largely marginalized theory, Glaser and Strauss emphasized the rigor of their work in order to separate it from more basic discussion of ideas.

Grounded Theory emphasized coding as “inductive and open-ended rather than preconceived and deductive,” and described that meaning can be discovered in data through this form of rich analysis. Views taken by these pragmatists (and symbolic interactionists) recognize events as emergent and language and interpretation as consequential.

The authors discuss how “naming” emerged as a core part of Grounded Theory, as “naming marks boundaries and suggests one’s relationship to what is named.” Naming and knowing are inextricably connected.

Next, the authors introduce Discourse Analysis, as formulated by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell. Like earlier approaches, this form of analysis was developed as a rejection of the “near-exclusive use of experimental designs and questionnaires.” Discourse Analysis focused on the performative nature of language, considering how people say things, how they produce what they say, what they are intending to achieve, and what they achieve.

Potter and Wetherell identified several qualities of the methodology, including the idea that the things participants say “are approached in their own right and not as a secondary route to things ‘beyond’ the text like attitudes, events, or cognitive processes.” Content from an interview is not considered as representative of subject matter; it is the subject matter.

The development of Narrative Psychology is credited to Jerome Bruner, Ted Sarbin, and Don Polinghorne. This perspective assumed that people have a need and predisposition to use narrative to organize their experiences. Bruner distinguished between a narrative mode of knowing from a paradigmatic way of knowing; paradigmatic knowing focuses on classification, while narrative knowing is about description. Bruner describes that “it is our narrative gift that gives us the power to make sense oof things when they don’t.”

Polinghorne argued that narrative is used in real-time, continually, by everyone, as “we are in the middle of the plots of our lives” with no clear understanding of how the performance ends. These narratives are reconstructed over and over; narrative considers that knowledge is constructed rather than discovered.

Last, the authors discuss Intuitive Inquiry, developed by Rosemarie Anderson. This is a view that interpretation is self-reflective, iterative, and continual. Intuitive Inquiry recognizes insight as a way to deepen interpretation and understanding, and the method tries to prompt these forms of insights during research.