Qualitative Inquiry

What means qualitative inquiry in the public sphere? What are public spheres for qualitative inquiry? First, to transgress the disciplinary boundaries of qualitative inquiry. Second, to identify research problems of societal relevance and target groups affected. Third, to make our results accessible for public audiences—how we write about our research and where we publish our findings. Fourth, to face changing political discourses with our research. Public sociology and ethnography are discussed for their relevance for qualitative inquiry in the public sphere. An overview of the contributions and the way this idea is treated in them are given.

Critical qualitative research is at a troubled juncture. Web 2.0 has stimulated an appetite for Big Data across the policy community that maps to quantitative research, less to qualitative work. Evidence-based policy places qualitative research at the bottom of the scientific credibility scale. A lurch to the hard Right in the political world marginalizes critical research and sets back the indigenous and alienated, with whom many qualitative researchers most naturally ally. Qualitative research has a long tradition of impact in the policy world. Current trends are set against that tradition to take stock of where we are now.

Qualitative inquiry is well positioned to aid in public education on crucial social problems. Implementing a dual perspective engages not only quantitative approaches, but centers the critical role of qualitative inquiry in uncovering a multilayered analysis of the diversity and range of lived experience that can also contribute a rich perspective onto the wider quantitatively driven macro inquiry public landscape. The case studies presented provide strategies for harnessing missed opportunities for dialogue between the macro and micro level, demonstrating the importance of applying hybrid methodological and methods perspectives onto social issues that contain both words and numbers.

This article addresses how constructivist grounded theorists grapple with conducting their research and use the method for social justice research and critical inquiry in the public sphere. To explicate how using this method ensues, I sought reflections from four researchers explaining why they adopted the method and how they used it. I also reviewed more than 40 constructivist grounded theory studies concerning research in the public sphere to illuminate the authors’ methodological strategies and decisions. These researchers’ reflexive stance toward their preconceptions, positions, and research actions supports exploring critical questions and fosters using grounded theory strategies to answering them.

This article focuses on public policies and programs as a major component of the “public sphere,” and argues that qualitative inquiry can make uniquely valuable contributions to their development and evaluation. These contributions include understanding (a) how people interpret and respond to such policies, (b) contextual variability and its effects on the implementation and consequences of these policies, and (c) the processes through which policies achieve their results. The movement for “evidence-based” policy and practice has largely ignored these issues, but they are critical for developing policies that actually achieve their goals and avoid unintended and damaging consequences.

Qualitative inquiry in the public sphere is discussed with a study concerning intercultural palliative care. For the case of Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany, language problems in care are analyzed as an issue of organizational ethics. Interviews with this target group originally addressing barriers of access to professional care are reanalyzed for the roles of language, limited language skills, and the lack of professional translation in care. The focus is on ethical implications for organizing services and the health care system planned for organizational justice for all groups in a diversifying society. Findings are discussed with Burawoy’s concept of a public sociology.

From many disciplines come the calls for academic researchers and specialists to seek a greater participation in the public sphere. In a mass mediated age, these calls imply a greater participation with mass media sources and operatives. Many of us have had considerable experience with mass media, and the problems and limitations of these relationships are described. More effective strategies for making a public impact are described. These involve making passionate commitments of local organizations and groups, and working with them over many decades, to progressively develop trusting interpersonal relationships with their members, and increasing levels of trust and responsibility.

Telling about our qualitative inquiry in public spheres has a whole new meaning in a neoliberal-derived research marketplace. It is also about being seen and heard in that competitive marketplace to accrue the market currency that different types of public telling differentially provide. This can result in an “overadaptive” telling of a qualitative inquiry that itself has been overadapted to meet other agendas. Three snapshots of different types of public telling provide the vehicles for our discussion: about impact to funders, about relevance at our workplace, and to journalists so they can publicly retell that research.

The public discourse on the integration of refugees into the German society and the labor market in Germany in particular is polarized. How does the transition of refugees to work can be made possible and how does it currently take place? There is little evidence, how refugees can be successfully placed on the labor market. Exemplary qualitative case studies are presented that address processes and mechanisms which facilitate or hinder effective transitions. In a tense social and political climate, the interplay between employment integration, recognition options, and the social participation of refugees as essential factors of sustainability should be considered.

This article describes an ongoing series of public arts–based experiments that build critical curiosity and develop data literacy via self-reflexive public interventions. Examined through the lens of remix methodology the Museum of Random Memory exemplifies a form of collective–reflexive meta-analysis whereby interdisciplinary researchers generate immediate social change and build better questions for future public engagement. The experiments help people critically analyze their own social lives and well being in cultural environments of growing datafication and automated (artificial intelligence [AI]-driven) decision-making. Reflexivity, bricolage, and critical pedagogy are emphasized as approaches for responding to changing needs in the public sphere that also build more robust interdisciplinary academic teams.

Here, I outline a performative approach to the politicized public sphere specifically drawing on Moises Kaufman’s Laramie Project,¹ Saldaña’s call for a critical ethnotheatre that engages key moments in a culture’s history, and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.