What Counts as Qualitative Research? Some Cautionary Comments

 
PIIS013216250006160-9-1
DOI10.31857/S013216250006160-9
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Occupation: Prof. Emeritus, Department of Sociology; London and a Visiting Prof., Management Department
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths’ College
King’s College
Business School, UTS
Address: Australia, Sydney
Journal nameSotsiologicheskie issledovaniya
EditionIssue 8
Pages44-51
Abstract

Many PhD students begin as unconscious Naturalists or Emotionalists using interview studies to report people’s «experience» of an unquestioned social «problem». An analysis of articles in one journal shows that this naïve use of interview data has become the common currency of qualitative research. In a critique of one such article, I show how interview studies may simply reproduce interviewees’ own accounts, glossed over by a few social science categories. By «mining» interviews for apposite extracts, such researchers lose sight of how sequence is consequential for what we say and do. Much more needs to be done if qualitative research is not to be just a set of techniques but an analytic project, different from journalism.

Keywordsqualitative research, interviews, data analysis, social theory
Received08.08.2019
Publication date12.08.2019
Number of characters26213
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