Abstract
The term “qualitative” is best considered a disciplinary convenience, not a careful index of research practice. Viewed closely and historically, qualitative research is a shifting, expanding collection of techniques and logics of inquiry, though for curricular reasons we often define that collection by techniques. An effort to discern a single, shared definition of “qualitative” distracts us from the more central questions: What are qualitative researchers trying to achieve, and how do we know if they are doing that well? Qualitative research aims to access meanings that orient actors. Researchers have several historically evolving, mutually reinforcing standards to guide our efforts to access and conceptualize actors’ meanings. These standards currently are interpretive validity, groundedness, and theoretical imagination. When we switch from asking what is qualitative to inquiring after the aims and standards of interpretive research, we find that communities of inquiry continue cultivating logics and observation techniques, and re-visioning standards for deploying them as we investigate meaningful action.
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Notes
This applies even to projects that start with strong theoretical commitments; they aim to use puzzles or anomalies that the researcher discovers, in order to thicken or improve rather than verify theory.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to students in my qualitative methodology seminars for trying out these ideas with me and helping me improve them. The inevitable shortcomings are my doing. Thanks, too, to Richard Swedberg and the Editor for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Lichterman, P. “Qualitative Research” Is a Moving Target. Qual Sociol 44, 583–590 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09499-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09499-8