METHODOLOGIES For a “statistics” of qualitative research

METHODOLOGIES For a “statistics” of qualitative research

The humanities have long relied on systematic and efficient methods of analysis, even if these are not normally referred to as “methodologies.” Logic within philosophy, grammatical analysis in philology and more recently linguistics, textual criticism of historical sources—all these procedures are the hallmarks of science. The humanities seek—and find—facts.

However, there are also important limitations to the scope and explicitness of the empirical approaches to be derived from the humanities. The strengths and weaknesses become especially clear in literary criticism, which has been an important influence on qualitative research about mass media.

On the one hand, the literary notion of exegesis, or “reading,” normally implies a cognitive operation of analysis-cum-interpretation, in which no firm line can be drawn between the analysis of “data” and the subsequent discussion of aggregated “findings.” The primary tool of research is the interpretive capacity of the scholar. The meaning of each constitutive element of a text is established with reference to its con-text—the rest of the text as a whole. The wider significance of the text may then be established by considering also the social context of historical and psychoanalytical factors, which offer cues to understanding specific literary periods, authors, readerships, or discursive themes. Yet, particularly in studies that draw on phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions (see the overview in Eagleton, 1983: Ch. 2; a major text of the tradition is Gadamer, 1975), while the act of interpretation may be thought of as a phenomenological reduction extracting a textual essence, the steps of the reduction frequently are not made explicit. As a result, the analysis normally cannot meaningfully become the object of intersubjective (dis- )agreement in a scientific community or public forum. Rather, the

32 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

validity of an interpretation depends on a more universal confidence in the scholar’s expertise and sensitivity, his/her legitimacy and authority, or perhaps an appreciation of the interpretation as original and stimulating.

On the other hand, literary studies start from the fundamental insight that language, as employed also in cultural and everyday practices, is not transparent, but requires detailed analytical attention in order to

be interpreted. Reading qualitative studies through the eyes of a humanist, one is sometimes struck by the inattention to the actual language that informants use. The social-scientific analysis of, say, an interview respondent’s conceptual structures or worldviews, while being supported with illustrative quotations, often is not based on any textual analysis. Consequently, it remains unclear how the respondent’s everyday discourse was transformed into the researcher’s analytical discourse. If the humanities, notably modern linguistics, have one lesson to contribute to interdisciplinary qualitative studies, it is this: mind the language!

Because language is a constitutive element of most qualitative studies, one may build a typology of qualitative methodologies around their characteristic uses of language (Jensen, 1989). Table 1.1 thus notes both productive and receptive uses of language in qualitative research. First, language is normally the main object of analysis, whether in the form of basic linguistic analysis of interview transcripts (and any other type of language data) or further textual criticism of historical sources and literary works. Second, language is a primary tool of data-gathering in interview and observational studies.

Table 1.1 The roles of language in qualitative methodologies

In qualitative Interviewing (a form of interpersonal communication) language is both the tool and the object of analysis. Communicating through language, the interviewer and respondent(s) negotiate an understanding of the subject matter in question, which subsequently,

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in the form of tapes and transcripts, becomes the object of linguistic analysis and textual interpretation. In the case of observation studies, where interviewing normally is an integrated element of research, this use of language is primarily a tool for gathering further information, whereas the interview discourse mostly is not documented through transcripts or analysed in its linguistic detail. (This is in spite of the fact that field notes and other accounts of observation represent a discourse which lends itself to categories of linguistic analysis; see van Maanen, 1988.) Textual criticism, finally, as practiced by disciplines from history to literary criticism, is applied to written source materials as objects of analysis. Whereas written accounts may not be seen as tools of data-gathering as such, any existing textual sources will be used routinely for cross-reference with other types of evidence. The language of textual sources, then, from legislation and business memoranda to newspapers, offers cues to how, for example, political and cultural rights have been conceived in different social and historical settings.

The focus on language suggests the interesting possibility of arriving at a systematic methodology or “statistics” of qualitative research with reference to the various levels of linguistic discourse. Admittedly, linguistics is itself a specialized discipline; this is one further argument for the field to undertake more genuinely interdisciplinary group projects. Nevertheless, linguistics does offer a number of analytical procedures which can be applied by scholars across the field. The most important level of linguistic analysis in this context is pragmatics, which studies the uses of language in social context (Crystal and Davy, 1969; Halliday, 1978; Leech, 1983). The study of language, which traditionally, as in classical philology, had been preoccupied with form, over the last two decades has turned to the social uses of language in everyday life.