Qualitative Research

Case studies have a valuable place in health research, including the increasingly popular illness narrative. In a thrice-told tale, I analyze and compare the performance of identities in two illness narratives, men with multiple sclerosis whom I interviewed in the 1980s. I include myself as a figure in the construction of the narratives, as audience for their performance, and I reinterpret them drawing on contemporary concepts of gender, disability, and performativity. Initially inspired theoretically by Goffman, the re-analysis locates the men in social structural contexts, drawing on Bourdieu’s work on class and the body’s relationship to social space.

Qualitative and quantitative research approaches reflect different ‘world views’ and raise different questions for inquiry. In this article, we map several prominent features of the landscape of qualitative research by presenting a range of research exemplars in the fields of medicine and health care that focus on process, that is, on ‘What’s going on?’. We include studies of: clinical encounters between patients and health care providers; patients’ lived experiences in their social and cultural settings; institutional changes in training and practice; and public health care policy. Our approach is intended to show that there are many ways to do qualitative research, with exemplars chosen so as to be relevant to the specific questions asked and to the stance of the researcher. The diversity of topics, approaches and methods represented may help practitioners, educators, and researchers specify, clarify, elaborate and refine their domains of concern, and guide them in choosing appropriate and context-sensitive methods for their own inquiries.

The purpose of this article is to outline ways in which qualitative research has a contribution to make to research on outcomes in health, social work and education. The main questions are contextualized through a general consideration of the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, especially in relation to evaluative research. In the main part of the article, I draw some conclusions regarding the contribution that qualitative methodology can make to outcomes research. I illustrate how qualitative research can contribute indispensably to outcomes research in four ways: design solutions; sensitivity to the micro-processes of practice and programmes; applications of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology; and qualitative data analysis.

Researching black parents has thrown into sharper relief the issue of the usefulness of research and that of objectivity versus subjectivity. These debates are hardly new but in research regarding participatory democracy it would be incorrect and indeed impossible to ignore them. Drawing on research with black parents, mainly mothers, and their views on their children’s schooling, this article begins to engage with the issues of data ownership and dissemination, together with the role of the white researcher and concerns of trust and risk in the research process. From the perspective of critical social research it is argued that in researching social justice issues and participation engaging the actors in a dialogic relationship with the researcher is essential, together with having some ownership over the data.

This article aims to augment collective understandings of the ethical complexities of qualitative research, and to encourage more attention to the actual practices of interviewing than has usually been paid in discussions in this area. Drawing on interview transcripts, we offer an analysis of the ways vulnerability may be produced for research participants by the intersection of interview factors (an interview strategy, the interviewer’s presence, a line of questioning) with particular discursive and political surrounds. This conceptualization of the conditions of interviewee vulnerability prompts a revisioning of the power that researchers bring to, and exercise in, interviews. In reflecting on interactions with research participants we describe our efforts to use our power wittingly and responsibly.

Of deaths in the US, an increasing proportion occur within hospital intensive care units amidst miraculous medical technology. A positivist ethos dominates, despite the severe philosophic criticisms levelled at its axiomatic foundations. As patients are transformed into ‘cases’, they lose social identity, and their dying becomes a medical defeat, rather than a natural and social process. Families encounter sedated intubated specimens rather than social persons from whom they wish ceremonially to depart. In response to these problems, there are ongoing efforts at transformation and remediation. Viewing biomedicine in relationship to phronesis, this article explores the dilemmas.