A Qualitative Research Renaissance

Abstract

This article reflects on the state of sociological research craft and the importance of SRO as a publication space that has fostered research innovation and invention for 30 years. Drawing on the author’s own experience of publishing in the journal since 2002, the author develops an argument for the vitality of sociological craft today that operates both within and beyond the text. Despite the austere atmosphere in UK Higher Education, it argues that we are experiencing a contemporary renaissance in qualitative research.

For 30 years, Sociological Research Online has acted as an incubator for sociological creativity and research craft. My own publication journey with SRO began in 2002 with an eccentric piece on the subcultural significance of the Sex Pistols’ silver jubilee and punk rock (Back, 2002b). The journal’s openness to rapid-response articles drew me to it, as academic publishing seemed slow and often out of step with contemporary social issues as they unfolded. In the same year, this was quickly followed up with another article on New Labour’s policy on multiculturalism (see Back et al., 2002). SRO has also been a place to intervene on the issues and challenges affecting sociological scholarship, whether it be the challenge of completing a PhD or the wider pressures of scholarly life (Back, 2002a, 2008).

The journal has been open to attempts to decolonise the discipline and to challenging the colour of its imagination (Back, 2009a; Back and Tate, 2015). Perhaps, most importantly for the argument I want to develop here, it offered researchers a space to tell and show society beyond words and use a much wider range of representational modes. This is something that Dawn Lyon and I embraced in our article that documented the everyday life of a London street markets through using colour photographs and sound samples alongside written ethnographic descriptions (Lyon and Back, 2012).

I want to use the 30th anniversary of the journal to argue for the potential and opportunities to tell and show society within the qualitative tradition of social research today. I will focus on three related themes: cultivating attentiveness, new opportunities for telling and showing research, and finally, an argument for viewing scholarship as a craft. I will argue that, taken together, there are unprecedented opportunities to do our work in augmented ways, which amounts to a renaissance in qualitative research.

So, to my first point, and the suggestion that sociological research is about paying careful attention.

An attentive vocation

In 2015 I was invited to participate in BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed episode on studying everyday life. ¹ It’s my favourite radio show and Laurie Taylor – the show’s host and sociologist in his own right – has a special talent for bringing the best out of his guests. Not that the conversations are easy or without challenge, because Laurie also has an equal flair for the deceptively simple question. That is, a question that seems straightforward on first hearing, but then the more you think about it, the more elusive an adequate answer becomes. Laurie asked me: ‘given that everyday life is all around us why don’t more sociologists study it?’ Mmm . . .

I want to start here because I think my answer chimes with the reflective tone of this 30th Anniversary Special Issue of SRO. One reason why sociologists are hesitant to train their minds on the everyday or quotidian trivialities is that we run the risk of being made fun of. ‘You are writing an article about Christmas lights or the social behaviour in café or caffs? That’s like being paid for sunbathing!’ I have a sneaking suspicion that some of you have been subject to similar indignities. But as anthropologist Clifford Geertz once commented, one of the ‘psychological fringe benefits’ of social research is that it teaches us what it feels like to ‘be thought of as a fool . . . and how to endure it’ (Geertz, 2000: 30). Maybe we shy away from the banal to avoid the accusation of seeming trivial or commonplace.

Strangely, it is the humdrum nature of our subject matter that makes it so difficult to study. The second reason everyday life is not explored more is that it is incredibly hard to do so. Social scientists depend on the spectacular aspects of society and its problems to justify the significance of our mission. Focusing on ‘bad news’ gives us a sense of purpose and importance, somehow. George Perec, the eccentric bard of the infra-ordinary, sums this up so well when he writes: ‘railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more they exist’ (Perec, 1997: 209).

Perec had an extraordinary life. A Polish Jew, his father was killed fighting the Nazis, and his mother was taken and murdered in Auschwitz. The spectacular, murderous power of the fascist machine orphaned him. His uncle and aunt took the place of his parents and raised him. I wonder in a way if his ear for, what he referred to as ‘banal facts, passed over in silence’, provided an anchor for him through those dark times (Perec, 1997: 174).

He never finished his degree in history at the Sorbonne but worked as an archivist in a science laboratory up until just before the end of his life. He characterised his writing as part ‘sociological . . . looking at the ordinary and the everyday’ part autobiographical, part ludic or playful and part novelistic (Perec, 2009: 3–4). He had an extraordinary attentiveness to things. He manages to enchant the mundane by noticing details and their significance. I see the same quality in Erving Goffman (1956) or the brilliantly attentive, more recent work of Rachel Hurdley (2015) or Sophie Woodward (2015).

Perec wrote a little book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which I think is the best realisation of Clifford Geertz’s notion of thick description (Geertz, 1973). At the beginning of the book, Perec introduces Place Saint-Sulpice, the subject of his weekend study, and lists the existing public knowledge about it. Then comments: ‘My intention in the pages that follow was to describe the rest . . . that which has no importance: that which happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds’ (Perec, 2010: 3). What a brilliant invitation to the study of everyday life but equally what a difficult challenge. This is reminiscent of Jennifer Mason’s (2016) wonderful project on the weather in Hebden Bridge that states with tender confidence that ‘weather is woven into every aspect of social life’ (p. 2).

Perec doesn’t really provide many clues about how he does his work. How do we write something interesting when nothing seems to be happening? ‘I find my direction by following my nose’, he comments (Perec, 2009: 5). Andy Balmer’s and Alex Rhys-Taylor’s olfactory experiments reminded me of this comment. It is hard, very hard to practice imaginatively endotic sociology – spectacular social problems somehow seem to offer us better clues. It makes us think, though, about attentiveness as a vocation – a matter of training our senses and then sifting imaginatively what we find for significance, like panning for gold on the surface of life.

This sensibility assumes added significance in the era of international conflicts, when other forms of social data are unavailable or when the sensational story of violence dominates public attention. This point is made by sociologists and anthropologist Jeremy Morris using the example of the Russia-Ukraine war (Morris, 2022). Ethnographic description and testimony are valuable in conflict zones precisely because survey data are no longer available or feasible. It is very different to study everyday life in a war zone than in a quiet suburb, but the invitation to an endotic approach trains attention on the remarkable things that often go unremarked upon.

More than a ‘science of the interview’

For 50 years, the qualitative research imagination was held hostage by the tape recorder. Everett Hughes suggests that, as a result, sociology became the ‘science of the interview’ (Hughes, 1971). To do qualitative research meant to conduct interviews, transcribe them, and present the idiomatic voices of our participants in anonymous block quotations. I have written elsewhere about my own love affair with the tape recorder as both a research companion and a device. In the digital age, this has all changed: we are thinking, working, and inquiring in a very different informational environment.

This is relevant to this anniversary edition of SRO because we are encountering unprecedented opportunities to work differently, communicate, and circulate the fruits of our work in new ways, alongside established conventions. Indeed, some of our old conventions are being revived in this environment, from drawing to Polaroid photographs to field notes.

I want to review some ways we might think about how we think and talk about these opportunities, drawing on examples from contemporary qualitative research. Despite the constraints imposed on our research environment by institutional structures for measuring value in an increasingly commercialised university, we are on the cusp of a renaissance in qualitative research. In fact, it has already arrived in large part.

According to David Silverman, we have had an almost Pavlovian tendency to think of qualitative research as necessarily involving interviews (Silverman, 2013). These interviews, recorded on tape or as digital sound files, are then transcribed into text. In the old days, through foot switch-operated mechanical devices, or now through the magic of F5 or Otter.ai or other such forms of artificial intelligence.

So, here’s the thing I have noticed about that procedure and how we think of data as involving mechanical procedures.

Transcription is not description

The forms of vivid description we might want to convey cannot be captured by transcription. The transcription will not establish the social context in which important things are said. I would like to offer you this wonderful description, as provided by Marek Korczynski (2014) in his brilliant ethnography, Songs of the Factory. The book is about the ways in which music makes deadening factory work endurable in the context of McTell’s blind factory, where he did ethnography. He describes what he calls a ‘staying alive culture’ where the Bee Gees afford a momentary sensory refuge from the deadening feelings of factory work. Music allows for ‘surplus rhythmic movements’, momentary solidarity in ‘sing-alongs’ where cultural instigators (otherwise known as workmates) lead the workers in a moment where employees ‘take their senses back’.

I want to describe how this was staged on my favourite BBC radio programme mentioned earlier. Marek’s description conveys the usefulness of description brilliantly. What is going on outside of language in gesture, rhythm, and sound? He describes the moment in the factory when the music stops:

At around four o’clock there was a sudden silence: the radio stopped for about a minute . . . There was an empty space, and people were strange, almost as if some of their clothes had been taken off. And then the radio came back on. What came on was rather beautiful; it was ‘Walk on By’, sung by Dionne Warwick, which has a gorgeous subtle introduction. From the silence came this subtle wonderfully arranged song, and for about thirty seconds I could see at least six people quietly either moving their lips or gently moving their bodies with the music while they kept on working. (Korczynski, 2014: 99)

In the radio rending of this example on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed’s rendering included both an actor reading this passage mixed with Dionne Warwick’s music. The re-staging was evocative and portrayed this factory scene filtered through a sociological imagining of its significance. It suggests some possibilities for combining drama and data in the service of social analysis and communication, which I also want to revisit later.

Transcription is not portraiture

Another of the tape recorder’s ghosts is that our confidence in capturing words often makes us reluctant to draw a social portrait of who has uttered them. The problem is that reading those transcriptions can often seem like disembodied quotations. We need to have a feel for the people who say things as much as what is said.

This is a complex business because we necessarily must pick up the burden of representation and navigate the boundary between eavesdropping, violating surveillance, and discerning human likeness. Or, to put it another way, between what Bourdieu would call portrayal and betrayal (see Back, 2009). As Bourdieu points out, this is particularly acute in the context of colonial settings, or we might also say, a securitised environment of racialised cities like Manchester, Birmingham, or London.

Let me offer another scene from Emma Jackson’s excellent study of young homelessness in London (Jackson, 2015). This is another tape recorder story, but of a different kind. Here, a young homeless man said in passing that he’s used to being recorded during police interviews and that they have ‘bigger tape recorders’. What Emma does so skilfully is make us think of the implications of our methods in the techniques of surveillance and power, the ‘demanded accounts’ required of the young, displaced people, in our cities.

Karen O’Reilly (2019) has emphasised that the use of interview ‘block quotations’ alone can result in descriptions that lack richness, context, and personality. The common misapprehension is that transcription and the voice will somehow convey the essence of the expressed meaning. However, the participant's personality needs to be evoked in the writing and in the description of the speaker’s social portrait. The tendency to stack disembodied quotes like scoops of ice-cream on a cone often does little to explicate the significance of what they contain. This is driven in part by the predominance of computer-assisted thematic coding software like NVivo that enables the collation of chunks of interview extracts. This leads to another associated problem.

Automation is not interpretation – or what NVivo or ChatGPT won’t do for you!

I admire the capacity of programmes like NVivo or MAX QDA to help us see our data as a whole, to prepare and assist our analysis, and think about the themes that might be in that data. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just input our transcribed word-based data into a piece of software, and interpretations of it could be somehow outputted?

Brian Alleyne has written about the potential to develop NVivo or Writer’s Café for analysing narrative networks (Alleyne, 2015). Even a self-professed geek like Brian concedes that automation cannot make judgements for us: imagination cannot ultimately be computer-generated. I think we should always be suspicious of the impulse that there is a technical fix for an interpretative problem or analytical judgement. There is no technological fix or artificial intelligence (AI) fix for authoring a PhD, research paper or journal article.

I am not suggesting for a moment that interviews are no longer important ways to do research, but sociology today is no longer a ‘science of the interview’. There are other opportunities for an augmented qualitative research practice. This would allow and facilitate greater openness in representational space, where the voices and understandings of participants can appear alongside the ethnographer’s interpretations. This supplements interview data as only one among many other opportunities within the qualitative tradition.

It also includes data generated on the move too where we get up on our feet as well as sit down and talk. Maggie O’Neill’s work on the everyday landscapes of migrants that are mapped on foot and in motion provides a good example where rich documents are produce by participants who are alongside the researcher (O’Neill and Perivolaris, 2014).

Culture here would be written within, but also beyond, words. Texts are collaged alongside pages that also serve as screens, including moving images, still photography, drawings, soundscapes, and music. There are just so many examples today, including Suzanne Hall’s imaginative fieldwork maps that plot the threads of globalised networks on a single south London street (Hall, 2012). Fieldwork drawings here are not just a representational device but also a mode of discovery and analysis. Rachel Hurdley, who writes brilliantly about design and office spaces and the things people bring to work to make them habitable, using sketching to discover to look closely and outline the shape of significance (Hurdley, 2015).

Sociologically attentive film practice is another alternative to creative qualitative data that is not merely confined to what is spoken and recorded. The film made by Jennifer Mason (2016) and visual anthropologist Lorenzo Ferrarini on living with the weather evokes a sensuous understanding of the physical and cultural environment. Mason’s work on social atmospheres, I think, is so much in the spirit of Perec, while achieving something beyond it.

Another possibility is a research practice that would enable residents to become observers of their own lives, generating a mode of commentary on their own lives in their own voices. A more sociable sociology might prompt us to consider the distinctiveness of the researcher’s role. It also raises questions about how participants’ involvement is financially rewarded and how authorship is attributed. Curated digitally, this gallery of commentary might be linked across common questions or coded themes.

We also have the potential now to curate those voices online, assembling and then reassembling them logarithmically through the variegated dimensions of their relatedness and example of this is the Question Bridge: Black Males, an innovative video installation created by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair. The four collaborators travelled the United States, recording video interviews with 150 Black men living in 12 American cities and towns (https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/en-GB/exhibitions/question_bridge). What is interesting about this experiment is that these voices are constantly being re-curated so that we hear them differently, with different lives alongside each other.

This makes us perhaps think again about how we communicate or show and tell our research. Researchers such as Yasmin Gunaratnam have developed methods for live re-staging research data in collaboration with actors. There is something about these empirical enactments that is so much more than the reading aloud of block quotations. These live dramatisations literally bring the voices within the data to life, giving the research subjects a greater sense of personification.

Others have used ethnographic comics, ‘Zines’ or graphic ethnography to do similar things. Anja Schwanhausser’s (2016) book Sensing the City is an example. Working with artist Nele Bronner, the authors collaborated to produce a methodological comic strip that raised important dilemmas and questions beyond the time of the text. What is so interesting about these graphic illustrations is that they make us think about the relationship between research writing and time.

In 2022, SRO launched its inaugural Beyond Text Special section as a place to foster innovative formats which foreground the possibilities I am describing (Lomax et al., 2022). To me this work exemplifies the best aspects of sociology with other modes including animation, creative and fine art, film, photographs, and zines produced not only by academic researchers but also this can take very different forms of ways telling and showing society from collaborative ‘Zine’ making (Lamond et al., 2024) to participatory documentary forms (Palladino, 2024) and digital storytelling in which participants in our projects can represent themselves (Ward et al., 2024).

To summarise, the qualities I find appealing include an attentiveness to endotic life, sociable methods of ongoing dialogue, mobile forms of research encounter, working with other crafts of showing and telling (drawing, film, moving image, sound), and producing sensuous and atmospheric modes of live data dramatisation. My interest in these possibilities began here at Sociological Research Online more than a decade ago, with my friend Dawn Lyon and our attempt to represent the everyday life of a London street market more vividly.

Sociology as craftwork

C Wright Mills (1959) in The Sociological Imagination suggested that social research is a craft. This anniversary edition of SRO presents a good opportunity to reflect on the most suitable metaphor to describe the work we do. About 10 years ago, a feminist colleague commented that she felt that craft is a masculinist metaphor for sociology. I canvassed opinion via email from within the online sociological research community,

Carol Smart – co-editor of a beautiful book called The Craft of Knowledge (Smart et al., 2014) – sent a reply that helped me think more carefully:

I think craft has strong feminine meanings. OK I know many crafts are/were male preserves but so were many associated with women e.g. sewing, knitting, cooking. My reading is that men abandoned the association with craft as more kudos and income was linked to professionalisation (eg medics versus midwives). Women were denied access to professions, and so their association with ‘mere’ craft led to a diminution of the status of craft. Craft has been seen as rather humble and undervalued – hence feminine (or working class). (Carol Smart, personal correspondence, 21 July 2014)

What is interesting about craft is that it emphasises the idea that knowledge is about doing and making things with words, but not only with words. We are no longer hostage to the tape recorder – how could we be when people are generating accounts of themselves and their lives at an unprecedented frequency and quantity: the melding of lives on-screen and off-screen.

The idea of craftwork in general has been subject to interesting sociological treatment (Adamson, 2007; Sennett, 2008). Craftwork can be associated with alternatives or responses to industrial mechanisation and technological standardisation. Here, the sense of the craft retains its aura of special value because it is a handmade object, whether created by a single craft worker or a team of workers, and as a result, it carries the ‘mark of the maker’. In addition, this assumes an intellectual value in the face of the challenge posed by the bland uniformity of Artificial Intelligence. Cultivating the idea of sociological research as craft thinking means inviting the cultivation of a distinctive intellectual signature, whether it is a single author’s work or a group project.

Paul Atkinson, (2022) develops such a line of argument in his book Crafting Ethnography, when he writes:

Be they potters or ethnographers, makers and writers shape their materials into characteristic forms. There is something of the maker or author in each artefact or ethnographic text. Equally, each work bears the imprint of traditions and genealogies into which the creator has been socialized. There is nothing mechanical or mechanistic in the making, and it reflects personal and local canons. But works inscribe their makers’ identities and allegiances. (Atkinson, 2022: 145)

This foregrounds that knowledge is made over time, our data honed and sculpted like other ‘raw materials’ over time and takes on different shapes from journal articles and books to podcast, plays or even sociological poetry and fiction.

I will end by arguing that, to embrace the opportunities that lie before us, we need to be bold and to license experimentation of the kind being done in the space of Sociological Research Online, using the new modes and methods now available. We all know we are struggling within the institutions in the academy where metrics and audit culture are tied to the hierarchies of value and the incredible uncertainty within the sector both in the UK and around the world. During a financial crisis, the university sector is being stretched as the big players take more students to the detriment of the small, more bespoke colleges within the sector, where there have been widespread redundancies across half of the institutions in UK Higher Education. Even if your institution is one of the ‘winners’ in this torrid academic landscape, success is routinely followed quickly by an impending sense of falling and failing.

The crisis of the academy has not dealt a fatal blow to the research imagination. Creativity endures, and we are seeing a qualitative research renaissance that Sociological Research Online has helped support, offering opportunities for sociology to be more than merely a discipline of words. This possibility is why I published here from the early days of the journal, and it has also been a place where the issues of research craft, the politics of knowledge itself, have been helpfully debated. There is so much brilliant work being done that can be celebrated and read with a sense of wonder. This will sound weak, I am sure, but I think one way to survive the current academic conjuncture is to cultivate a kind of intellectual generosity.

There are now more opportunities than ever to circulate social research through social media, online magazines, and other publications. There can be some unpleasant dimensions, including the dark arts of academic impression management, but I still argue that the possibilities are abundant. It draws us into the conversation with non-specialists, schoolteachers, high school students, and sometimes people who are just plain curious (often in more ways than one). It isn’t always comfortable, but I think it is often vital.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I am an avid listener to Laurie Taylor’s BBC Radio 4 programme, Thinking Allowed, which has now been serving the discipline for 25 years, offering an international public platform for sociologists from around the globe. Laurie has cost me a fortune in buying books from a wide variety of fields that I wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of. Many of them I have mentioned already.

After listening to the programme, I often feel compelled to Google the featured researchers’ email addresses. I email them just to say how amazing their work is, or sometimes to beg a few .pdfs from esoteric journals not available in the University of Glasgow’s library. I think these authors recognise sincere appreciation that isn’t a ‘networking opportunity’. They almost always reply favourably, often with emails containing numerous attachments. It shows a small aspect of what I mean by a shared craft or living by the best values of scholarship.