Turtles All the Way Down? — On a Quest for Quality in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between the personal and the scientific in qualitative research discourse as an aspect of the quest for quality. While there is of necessity a personal dimension in any type of social science research, in qualitative research the personal takes a prominent place in that the researcher's subjectivity is explicitly used within the research context and appropriated by the methodological discourse. The purpose of methodological discourse is to safeguard the quality of research: Guidelines are developed, innovations are discussed, and traditions and conventions maintained. Methodological discourse can also be the arena where a community of scientists asserts itself through discussing its members' practices. It is here where personal authority and scientific convention meet in the battle for research quality. The case study used here reflects a particular event in a qualitative methodological discourse which was a crisis of sorts. An attempt is made to analyse the process which revealed the prevalent rules and the question is raised whether the quest for recognizability, which is the basis of methodological discourse operating within a community of scientists, has the potential to function as a threat to the quest for quality, so undermining its very purpose. A plea is made for a multi-layered reflective discourse where not only individual work will be scrutinized, but the discourse will scrutinize itself with the help of individual events.

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