Qualitative Inquiry

Coding and data are conceptual twins. This article focuses on the latter concept in particular and opens with a dilemma: We can either follow the root meaning of “data” and say that they are the “givens” that we “collect” and code. In this case, however, data turn out to be mythological, for they are always produced, constructed, or “taken” as the pragmatists said. Or we can say, like some qualitative researchers, that “everything is data,” which rests on a more sophisticated philosophical position but which easily renders the concept empty. The article describes a way out of this dilemma by presenting a way to think about (and teach) qualitative analysis that is neither data-driven (induction) nor hypothesis-driven (deduction) but driven by astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one’s understanding (abduction). Materials are “taken” and produced to describe or resolve a mystery, which, to me, is “analysis after coding.”

This essay examines the limits of allegedly atheoretical approaches to qualitative research that rely on the coding of qualitative data. The authors focus specifically on the challenge of analyzing socially produced silences. The use of coding techniques for analyzing data is found to be inadequate for documenting the social erasure of a middle school student who does not conform to local gender norms. The article argues that the interpretation of socially produced silences requires the use of theories that explain the source and effects of these silences. This utility is illustrated through the application of feminist and queer poststructuralist theory to the analysis of the experience of the aforementioned student.

This article is an experiment in diffractive analysis. In a diffractive analysis, research problems, concepts, emotions, transcripts, memories, and images all affect each other and interfere with each other in an emergent process of coming to know something differently. The substantive topic that is worked with to open up this experiment in thought is reading anger in early childhood intra-actions.

In this article, I use Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction as a methodological practice of reading “insights through one another” in response to the editors’ call for examples of analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry. A diffractive reading of data through multiple theoretical insights moves qualitative analysis away from habitual normative readings toward a diffractive reading that spreads thought in unpredictable patterns producing different knowledge. In response to the editors’ pedagogical approach for the issue, the article focuses on an example from previously collected interview data and how a diffractive analysis produces questions and knowledge that are only possible in analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry.

This article explains how the author used Deleuze and Guattari’s concept assemblage to analyze data from an interview study about the reading practices of 10 academics. Instead of coding interview transcripts, the researcher used writing and reading as methods of inquiry and analysis to explore how reading can become a force that enables complex relationships with texts.

In this article, the authors take up the question of what they do when they do analysis in post-qualitative research contexts. Working as a/r/tographers who see their artist/researcher/teacher practices as simultaneous and non-hierarchical, they use theory, writing, and collaging to think beyond work produced by “positivist, scientific storytellers.” Art-making within inquiry becomes a rigorous articulation process through which sense (rather than meaning) is tentatively fabricated. The article includes a three-part assemblage that conveys how the authors articulate thought through pieced fragments of data in ongoing movements of hoarding, mustering, and folding, the aim of which is not to conclude with answers but to pause, gather energy, and invite comments until questions spur them on again.

This article puts to work a Deleuzio-Guattarian methodology of cartography using data from a pilot study of young schoolgirls’ “school-related” ill-health and well-being. Doing a cartography means setting up a “map” of various kinds of data produced by a multiplicity of desiring agents in various power-producing fields such as medicine, psychology, popular science, media, as well as narrative data from young girls and the two researchers themselves. Together, these data make up a wider machinic assemblage of Public Health in Sweden. As researchers, we understand ourselves as co-productive of this machinic assemblage that, in turn, is productive of a multiplicity of different Bodies without Organs (BwOs) that young schoolgirls fabricate for themselves. The analysis will show the specific types of BwOs that are fabricated, how they are fabricated, the modes of desire that come to pass on them, and thus what kinds of subjectivities of schoolgirls might be produced.

The aim of this article is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical and political relationalities that circulate in, through, and outside empirical research. We explore research processes as “intra-acting” drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “assemblages,” “intensities,” “territorialization,” and “lines of flight” to analyze research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s notions of data “hot spots” that “glow,” we explore methodological processes of working with “affective intensities.” In particular, we draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category “slut” works as an affective intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage—from the co-creation of “data” in the field to the “data” analysis and beyond.

This article has in its flesh the question of what I, as a qualitative researcher, do, other than code, when I do something I think is “analysis.” In 1850, Horne catalogs the ingredients of a huge decomposing dust-heap in Marylebone. It is described as comprising of original heterogeneous contents from all the dustbins of the London locality, as having grandeur and permanence and capable of sustaining life. Resembling the ethnographers’ scrutiny as she distils, condenses, and categorizes data, these contents are searched and sorted in accordance with their ongoing potential, the debris is organized to ensure the appropriation of (re)useable decomposing materials, “the dead cats are compromised . . . dealers come . . . they give sixpence for a white cat, fourpence for . . . a black one . . . the bones are . . . sold to the soap-boiler.” Integral to this process of decomposition is the mound’s uncanny life as a recipient of the dead and procurer of new life, as movement sparks from the heterogeneous matter of lifeless carcasses, disintegrated bone fragments, breeze, cinders, and dust. Given this backdrop of decomposition and becoming amid a plethora of life and death, movement and dispersion, this article opens up serendipitous encounters between an ethnographer and some data, whereby analysis is understood as a body encountering another body, or an idea another idea, and it happens that sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. In this encounter, the organic and the inorganic become folded into the other, allowing each to be dragged and dispersed among its own and each other’s mundane detail.

What possibilities for thinking and expression lie suspended between what we say is a “something” or a “someone” and the forces, multiplicities, intensities, and uncanny relations that effect and constitute its naming—its sedimentation as such? How do we engage in analysis practices that help hold open identitarian thought’s press so that we might learn from the embodied register of previously un-thought forces and creative rhythms; the material-discursive passageways of a life becoming a life? In this essay, the author introduces somatographic analysis as a practice of deeply attuning and attending via poesis, or creativity, to material-discursive data and the subjective emergences they enact. Following a description of somatographic analyses’ practical features and aims, a Working-Class Academic Zombie as figuration gets assembled. This figuration functions as both an illustration of somatographic analysis practices irrupting in the fold of inquiry and an alternative material–theoretical tool marking the limits of classificatory systems for understanding first-generation college students and their paths to becoming women academics.

This article discusses the role of refusal in the analysis and communication of qualitative data, that is, the role of refusal in the work of making claims. Refusal is not just a no, but a generative stance, situated in a critical understanding of settler colonialism and its regimes of representation. Refusals are needed to counter narratives and images arising (becoming-claims) in social science research that diminish personhood or sovereignty, or rehumiliate when circulated. Refusal, in this article, refers to a stance or an approach to analyzing data within a matrix of commitments, histories, allegiances, and resonances that inform what can be known within settler colonial research frames, and what must be kept out of reach.

This article troubles the seductive nature of coding based on its potential to fulfill the desires for systematicity, procedure, and clarity. I attempt to explicitly narrate what it is I think I do when I “analyze” data in my empirical work. Building on the notion of promiscuous feminist research, I delineate more explicitly how promiscuity became the hallmark of my inquiry while conducting research at a high-achieving, high-poverty urban school. I also discuss how materiality is entwined with theoretical thinking and explore how a promiscuous deployment of Foucaultian discourse analysis and Critical Race Theory (CRT) helped me to see how race works in schools in a more complicated way than if I had used one or the other framework loyally or prescriptively.

Thick description is often invoked by qualitative researchers as a form of representation after analysis such as coding has been completed. I argue that thick description can be more productively considered as an aesthetic encounter guiding the research process from beginning to end. Drawing on the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I demonstrate that thick description is more than an analytical consideration of context but is rather an articulation of how we see and understand. According to Gadamer, there is an aesthetic quality to our experiencing that is never completely rendered visible in our accounts. This is because we do not draw on context to make sense of the evidence presented; we see and understand in contexts—physical, historical, cultural, linguistic, moral, experiential, affective—that we venture in, as Clifford Geertz put it, as we conjure our interpretations of what is going on. It is only by allowing ourselves to be guided by the entity of study and critically questioning the complexity of our contextualized responses that we can gain a better grasp of this complex architecture that is analysis.