Qualitative Inquiry

Indigenous scholars have debated the impact that researchers and the act of researching have on Native and Indigenous people and communities. Although literature on this subject has grown, little has been written explicitly laying out the doing of research with these communities. The authors seek to articulate their doing by drawing upon the essential research principles and standards set by scholars. The authors seek to examine their work as education researchers in three different international contexts—Kenya, Cambodia, and “Indian country” in the United States—highlighting research practice shaped by context, relationship, and discourse emergent in their investigations of schooling, language revitalization, and scientific knowledge access. The authors reflect, analyze, and summarize their actions of decolonizing research that were present or particularly challenging cross-culturally, in each context. Examples of common action in the projects include relinquishing control, reenvisioning knowledge, cultivating relationships, and purposeful representation of communities. Finally, the authors connect their actions to the principles and standards set by scholars and discuss lessons learned.

This autoethnographic piece explores the relationships between the author’s personal stories and her capacities as a qualitative researcher. Relying on poststructural inquiry, the author thinks her stories through each other and the works of Deleuze, Butler, and Caputo in order to examine how these fabulas disallow her to meet the other face to face.

Gadamer claims that the horizons of the listener and the narrator merge and create a new understanding of the narrative’s meaning. This study examines encounters between researcher and informant in which these horizons do not merge, encounters—usually ignored in the literature—in which the researcher senses that the informant’s statements raise questions, cause confusion, or are perceived as perhaps unacceptable. It analyzes these moments and their implications regarding the research process and findings. We claim that not all statements are accepted. Researchers sift through questionable data, disregarding it at times. This may cause a “converse error,” leading researchers to ignore information perceived as doubtful that in fact could be valuable and contribute innovative understandings and knowledge.

Access to information (ATI) and freedom of information (FOI) mechanisms are now relevant features of governments in many liberal democracies today. Citizens, organizations, and permanent residents in several countries across the globe can request unpublished information from federal, provincial, state, county, and municipal government agencies. However, most qualitative researchers appear to be unfamiliar with ATI/FOI or write it off as an approach used by journalists rather than as a way to systematically produce qualitative and longitudinal data about government practices. In this article, the authors discuss the use of ATI/FOI requests as a means of data production. The authors show how the use of ATI/FOI requests intersects with issues such as reflexivity, the Hawthorne effect, interviewing, and discourse analysis. The study objective is to foster a multidisciplinary discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of ATI/FOI requests as a data production tool.

It is sometimes a difficult journey receiving ethics approval for research involving vulnerable populations, research involving our own children, or innovative research methodologies such as autoethnography. This autoethnographical account is a story about one student who wanted to write a PhD dissertation in a very different way and also the story of her co-supervisors who supported the student in using autoethnography as a creative way to share her “secrets of mothering” and who also supported her through an ethics-approval process that was both challenging and rewarding. This article reflects on a personal journey through the ethics-approval process at a Canadian university integrating components of the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS), that guides university ethics committees across Canada, and asks the questions: What is the purpose of research and how can research ethics boards support research and stories that are difficult to tell and difficult to hear? It is an inquiry into secrets and difficult knowledge, and how reluctant we are to talk about difficult topics such as developmental disabilities, sexual abuse, divorce, accidents, and illness.

This article will be enacted through a performative script that incorporates the dual narratives of the journey of whirling and trembling dervishes by montaging images from Peter Brooks’ movie Meetings With Remarkable Men. Denzin and Lincoln’s notion of the montage is experimented as an editing technique where a series of images and texts are edited into a sequence to condense a narrative. Whirling and trembling dervishes are devotional performers and inquirers of the Islamic sect of Sufism. Their performative inquiries are centered on the idea of an organic unity of groundlessness, nothingness, and love. However, the performances of whirling and trembling dervishes differ from each other—while the former offers a type of nonrestrictive but conventional order of inquiry, the latter constitutes a formless chaos, an ongoing performance, both deconstructive and creative. Two educative narratives called menkıbe in Islamic inquiry will be edited into a sequence to demonstrate the distinction between the tariqas (paths, performances) of whirling and trembling dervishes. At the end of the article, implications of the performances of whirling and trembling dervishes on social science inquiry will be discussed.

In contrast to many other social sciences, criminology has largely resisted the notion that qualitative inquiry has autoethnographic dimensions and remained quiet on the subject of the emotional investment required of ethnographic fieldworkers studying stigmatized and/or vulnerable “others” in settings where differential indices of power, authority, vulnerability, and despair are felt more keenly than most. Emotion appears in criminology in discussions about public sentiments, populist punitiveness, and the emotional motivations behind offending but rarely features as a lens through which one might better understand the process of doing research. This article examines the state of the field, discusses the work of a small minority of ethnographers who acknowledge the emotional content of prison studies, and tells the story of a personal research encounter that changed the author’s methodological and theoretical orientation. It argues that a more frank acknowledgment of the convergence of subject-object roles does not necessarily threaten the validity of social science, or at least, “it is a threat with a corresponding gain.”

This article recounts the authors’ experiences at the Authentic Voices of America summer camp for severely disabled youths who are learning to become more proficient at using computerized communication devices to speak. The five-day camp was founded by Jon Feucht, who also uses a device and continues to serve as its director. In the summer of 2011, Feucht invited sociologist Ron Berger to attend the camp as part of a collaborative research project about Feucht’s life story. This article is written in Berger’s voice, but includes excerpts from Feucht’s “Straight Talks” that he gave at the camp as well as his views about living with a severe disability. By way of conclusion, insights from critical disability studies and crip theory are also considered.

The Journal Project is a qualitative research study of self at the crossroads—a female, middle-aged academic, posttenure, postmenopausal—at sea in her profession and not entirely able to inhabit her own skin. My solution to this dilemma was to study an 18-month period of my personal journals written from June 2006 to March 2008, the period after I received tenure from my university. I used standard qualitative research methods of document analysis to study the 303 entries. The materials were organized and analyzed within NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software. Throughout the process of standard social science analysis, I was also employing arts-based approaches (fiber arts in particular) to deepen and extend my understanding of the findings. The outcome of this work was an exhibit of the fiber works at a qualitative research conference in which I was able to blend the findings derived from a social science analysis within an arts-based presentation. In this piece, I describe the genesis of the Journal Project and document my love affair with fiber arts. The heart of the piece is a description of the exhibit, with attention to the ways that the making of art AND the description of that making extend the possibilities of interpretation for qualitative researchers. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this experiment with arts-based research for my own practice as a qualitative researcher and, by extension, for others.

The process to knowing entails perpetual curiosity as well as wearied surrender in which one’s understandings transform. This philosophy describes the approach that our team took to research, interpret and exhibit patients’ narratives of open-heart surgery in “The 7,024th Patient” project – an arts-informed, narrative study that resulted in an installation that is 1,739 square feet in area and over 9 feet in height. With the intention to physically and emotionally engage viewers, patients’ stories were aesthetically translated into an installation of poetry and photography that was configured as a winding, labryinth-like path. In this article, we recount the journey of creating “The 7,024th Patient” exhibition illustrating the employment of the arts as a tool in research for acquiring understanding. In order to vividly highlight our journey, poetic excerpts and photographic images from the installation are embedded.