Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes PDF

ROUTLEDGE SERI ES ON INTE RP RE TIV E ME THODS INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH DESIGN Concepts and Processes Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH DESIGN Research design is fundamental to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. In many social science disciplines, however, scholars working in an interpretive–qualitative tradition get little guidance on this aspect of research from the positivist-centered training they receive. This book is an authoritative examination of the concepts and processes underlying the design of an interpretive research project. Such an approach to design starts with the recognition that researchers are inevitably embedded in the intersubjective social processes of the worlds they study. In focusing on researchers’ theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methods choices in designing research projects, Schwartz-Shea and Yanow set the stage for other volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. They also engage some very practical issues, such as ethics reviews and the structure of research proposals. This concise guide explores where research questions come from, criteria for evaluating research designs, how interpretive researchers engage with “world-making,” context, systematicity and flexibility, reflexivity and positionality, and such contemporary issues as data archiving and the researcher’s body in the field. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea is Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. Dvora Yanow is Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and in the Communication Sciences Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, at Wageningen University. Together they are co-editors of Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, and they created and run the “Methods Café” at both the American and Western Political Science Associations’ annual meetings. Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods Edited by: Dvora Yanow, University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, University of Utah The Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods comprises a collection of slim volumes, each devoted to different issues in interpretive methodology and its associated methods. The topics covered will establish the methodological grounding for interpretive approaches in ways that distinguish interpretive methods from quantitative and qualitative methods in the positivist tradition. The series as a whole engages three types of concerns: (1) methodological issues, looking at key concepts and processes; (2) approaches and methods, looking at how interpretive methodologies are manifested in different forms of research; and (3) disciplinary and subfield areas, demonstrating how interpretive methods figure in different fields across the social sciences. Approachable yet authoritative, the volumes are especially useful for graduate students looking for sources that lay out the reasoning and terminology of interpretive methodologies. Academic and independent researchers writing research plans for grant applications or sabbaticals can use these volumes to support the systematic procedural character and rigorous argumentation of interpretive research. Instructors teaching research methods courses will find the books valuable in providing an explanation of the differences between interpretive research methods and those of “traditional” positivist research. These may also be useful volumes for journal editors and reviewers of manuscripts who are not familiar with these differences. Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide Frederic Charles Schaffer Interpreting International Politics Cecelia Lynch Postcolonial Theory and Analysis in Political Studies Kevin Bruyneel Ethnography and Interpretation Timothy Pachirat Analyzing Social Narratives Shaul R. Shenhav International Advisory Board Mark Bevir Patrick Thaddeus Jackson University of California, Berkeley American University Pamela Brandwein Timothy Kaufman-Osborn University of Michigan Whitman College Kevin Bruyneel Bernhard Kittel Babson College Oldenburg University Douglas C. Dow Jan Kubik University of Texas, Dallas Rutgers University Vincent Dubois Beate Littig University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna Raymond Duvall Joseph Lowndes University of Minnesota University of Oregon Martha S. Feldman Timothy W. Luke University of California, Irvine Virginia Tech Lene Hansen Cecelia Lynch University of Copenhagen University of California, Irvine Victoria Hattam Navdeep Mathur New School India Institute of Management Emily Hauptmann Julie Novkov Western Michigan University State University of New York at Albany Markus Haverland Ido Oren Erasmus University, Rotterdam University of Florida David Howarth Ellen Pader University of Essex University of Massachusetts, Amherst Frederic Charles Schaffer Joe Soss University of Massachusetts, Amherst University of Wisconsin, Madison Edward Schatz Camilla Stivers University of Toronto Cleveland State University Ronald Schmidt, Sr. John Van Maanen California State University, Long Beach MIT James C. Scott Katherine Cramer Walsh Yale University University of Wisconsin, Madison Samer Shehata Lisa Wedeen Georgetown University University of Chicago Diane Singerman Jutta E. Weldes American University Bristol University INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH DESIGN Concepts and Processes Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine, 1955– Interpretive research design : concepts and processes / Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow. p. cm.—(Routledge series on interpretive methods) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Science—Methodology. 2. Experimental design. I. Yanow, Dvora. II. Title. Q175.S4144 2011 001.4'34—dc23 2011033462 ISBN: 978–0–415–87807–4 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–87808–1 (pbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–85490–7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO. DEDICATION This book is dedicated to Howard Becker, Bud Duvall, Murray Edelman, Richard Fenno, Clifford Geertz, Egon Guba, Yvonna Lincoln, Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne Rudolph, Jim Scott, to name but a few, and others in many fields who have walked these paths before us; to our colleagues and students who walk them with us now, leading us to new ways of seeing, knowing, and thinking about these matters; and to the leaders of those directorates within the US National Science Foundation which have begun to grapple with some of these issues, in the hope that they, along with their counterparts in other states’ funding organizations, will pave new paths in the near future. CONTENTS List of Illustrations xii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 A Sketch of the Book 9 1 Wherefore Research Designs? 15 Research Design: Why Is It Necessary? 18 An Outline of a Research Proposal, Including the Research Design 19 2 Ways of Knowing: Research Questions and Logics of Inquiry 24 Where Do Research Questions Come From? The Role of Prior Knowledge 25 Where Do Research Questions Come From? Abductive Ways of Knowing 26 Where Do Research Questions Come From? The Role of Theory and the “Literature Review” 34 Do Concepts “Emerge from the Field”? More on Theory and Theorizing 38 Where Do Research Questions Come From? Ontological and Epistemological Presuppositions in Interpretive Research 40 x Contents A Short Bibliography of Key Sources in Interpretive Social Science 44 3 Starting from Meaning: Contextuality and Its Implications 45 Contrasting Orientations toward Knowledge 46 Contextuality and the Character of Concepts and Causality 49 Concepts: Bottom-up In Situ Development 49 But What of Hypothesizing? Constitutive Causality 51 The Centrality of Context 53 4 The Rhythms of Interpretive Research I: Getting Going 54 Access: Choices of Settings, Actors, Events, Archives, and Materials 57 Power and Research Relationships 60 Researcher Roles: Six Degrees of Participation 63 Access, Researcher Roles, and Positionality 66 Access and Archives 68 Access versus Case Selection 69 Design Flexibility: Control and Requisite Researcher Skills 71 Control and Positivist Research Design 71 The Logics of Control and Interpretive Research 72 Interpretive Researcher Competence and Skill 74 5 The Rhythms of Interpretive Research II: Understanding and Generating Evidence 78 The Character of Evidence: (Co-)Generated Data and “Truth” 79 Forms of Evidence: Word-Data and Beyond 83 Mapping for Exposure and Intertextuality 84 Fieldnote Practices 89 6 Designing for Trustworthiness: Knowledge Claims and Evaluations of Interpretive Research 91 Understanding the Limitations of Positivist Standards for Interpretive Research: Validity, Reliability, and Replicability 92 Contents xi The Problems of “Bias” and “Researcher Presence”: “Objectivity” and Contrasting Methodological Responses 95 Researcher Sense-Making in an Abductive Logic of Inquiry: Reflexivity and Other Checks for Designing Trustworthy Research 99 Checking Researcher Sense-Making through Reflexivity 100 Checking Researcher Sense-Making during Data Generation and Analysis 104 Checking Researcher Sense-Making through “Member- Checking” 106 Doubt, Trustworthiness, and Explanatory Coherence 107 “Researcher Contamination” and “Bias” Revisited 109 Summing Up 112 7 Design in Context: From the Human Side of Research to Writing Research Manuscripts 115 The Body in the Field: Emotions, Sexuality, Wheelchairedness, and Other Human Realities 115 Interpretive Research and Human Subjects Protections Review 120 Data Archiving and Replicability 124 Writing Research Designs and Manuscripts 126 8 Speaking across Epistemic Communities 130 Designing for “Mixed Methods” Research 130 Crossing the Boundaries of Epistemic Communities: Proposal Review and Epistemic Communities’ Tacit Knowledge 135 Practicing Interpretive Research: Concluding Thoughts 138 Notes 140 References 157 Index 179 ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1.1 What is this? 15 2.1 Beginning “where the light is” and expanding the research in ever-widening circles 30 7.1 The hourglass shape of a traditional research manuscript as it relates to a research design. Sections I and II are common in content across research designs and manuscripts; below the dotted line, design contents are different, as indicated from the perspective of the design. Title page, table of contents, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography are not indicated. 127 Tables 1.1 An ideal-typical outline of a proposal for funding, IRB or doctoral committee approval of a research project 20 6.1 Contrasting approaches to research and its design 113 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many of the ideas contained herein were worked out in teaching contexts, whether in classroom settings or in conversations with our respective students and colleagues. We thank all of them in their several settings: the Political Science Department at the University of Utah; the 2006–2009 “Meaning and Meth- ods” course in the Culture, Organization, and Management Department at VU University, Amsterdam, and the Netherlands Institute of Government “General Methodology” course, co-taught with Markus Haverland; the 2009 National Sci- ence Foundation Workshop on Interpretive Methodologies in Political Science; and methods courses, workshops, and seminars of various sorts at Vienna’s Insti- tute for Advanced Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Institute for Health Policy and Management’s Healthcare Governance Group, Charles University- Prague’s Center for Social and Economic Strategies, and the Methods Cafés at the Western and American Political Science Association meetings. In particular, we are grateful for the extraordinary collegiality of members of our extended interpretive research community—Robert Adcock, Lee Ann Fujii, Patrick Jack- son, Xymena Kurowska, Cecelia Lynch, Ido Oren, Tim Pachirat, Fred Schaffer, Ed Schatz, Joe Soss, Merlijn van Hulst, and Dorian Warren—who have never stinted on advice and critical input. What we have learned from our ongoing conversations with them is reflected in the pages of this book, even as the usual and customary caveats concerning ultimate responsibility apply. We also thank Eric Blanchard, Matthew Burbank, and Jennifer Yim for comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript; Lee Ann Fujii, in particular, for bringing her strict eye for formal writing to a line by line reading of much of the previous draft; and Akiko Kurata for last-minute graphic design help. The conversations initiated through the vehicle of detailed comments received from our four reviewers have helped us shape the book into its present form, challenging us to better articulate our xiv Acknowledgments reasoning and views. In addition, Dvora Yanow would like to thank the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Political Science Department, at the University of Amsterdam, and especially Mark Rutgers, John Grin, and Frances Gouda, for creating a hospitable setting in which to write this book. It is not only colleagues who enable research and writing. Given that we speak in Chapter 4 of the relational character of research and the support field research often requires, we want also to acknowledge the trans-collegial relation- ships whose emotional and other support enabled the writing of this book: Dave Gelici, at the Coffee Connection in Amsterdam, and the friendly baristas at Salt Lake Roasting Company and The Coffee Garden, both in Salt Lake City, where each of us has spent many hours thinking through the issues discussed here; Juraj Fabus at Health City, Amsterdam, and the many yoga instructors who brought that discipline to the US, who helped each of us keep body and soul together in ways that enabled long hours glued to the desk chair; and Tim Shea, who has been unstinting in his support over many years. INTRODUCTION [Such research is characterized by an] intensive focus on the empirical world; on seeing and understanding behavior in its particular and situated forms. Data that do not stay close to the events, actions, or texts being studied are always sus- pect. There is a hostility to generalizations at any level that are not connected to description, to immersion in substantive matter.... The preference for descriptive material and observation made us suspicious of... material torn from the context of their creation. Action was too situated, too contextual to be understood at the high levels of much macroanalysis. Meanings were often not assuredly under- standable without an experience with those we were describing. —Joseph R. Gusfield (1995, xii) How does one begin to design an empirical research project? Many scholars across the social sciences, socio-cultural anthropology perhaps excepted, would reply with the steps associated with “the scientific method”: articulate your hypotheses, define your concepts, operationalize these in the form of variables, establish the relationships among the latter, and then plan to test them in your research set- ting, checking for validity, reliability, and generalizability. This is the formula for research design found in most methods textbooks. And yet this way of proceeding does not describe very well a whole segment of scientific research: that conducted under the heading of interpretive social science, a term increasingly being used in some disciplines or fields of inquiry to refer to qualitative social science in the Chicago School tradition. This is research that, similar to 1920s–1960s anthropol- ogy and sociology field research conducted at the University of Chicago, focuses on specific, situated meanings and meaning-making practices of actors in a given context, as described in the epigraph by Joseph Gusfield, reflecting on his own 2 Introduction experiences and role there, then (see also Calhoun 2007: 26–33). It is to address this missing conversation that we have written this book. Given the increasingly inter- and cross-disciplinary research and publishing practices within the social sciences, what it means to do interpretive empirical research needs articulation and development such that scholars from various epis- temic communities can appreciate the full extent of its practices and, in particular, their methodological underpinnings. This volume lays out the grounding for the design of research projects that build on interpretive methodological presupposi- tions, with such scholars, among them newer researchers, as our imagined readers. Notable within this group are those reviewing interpretive research, whether for thesis, dissertation or ethics committee assessments (such as Institutional Review Boards, IRBs, in the US), funding or publication reviews, or promotion and tenuring evaluations. Research design is about making choices and articulating a rationale for the choices one has made. As a term, “design” evokes expectations of a carefully formulated plan. Many elements are common across research designs, whatever ontological and epistemological presuppositions inform the specific work. But these seemingly common elements can mask significant differences in approaches to research. We engage here both those elements that are shared and those that are clearly distinctive to interpretive research designs. If this distinctiveness is not understood, an interpretive research design may be judged by those unfamiliar with its premises to be weak, sloppy or underdeveloped, rather than adequate, well-developed or even “strong.” In attending to and articulating the differences between design forms, it becomes crucial at times to explore other terms for design concepts that are well known, but which inadequately express ideas that are central to interpretive research processes. Other vocabularies make these differ- ences clear, and they articulate the design concepts’ underlying ideas in ways that more closely fit interpretive presuppositions. Engaging alternate terms can help both interpretive researchers and reviewers of various sorts from other epistemic communities understand the philosophical grounding of interpretive research and its design requirements. In writing this book, then, we had three broad readerships in mind. One of these is graduate students, who in particular need information about interpretive concepts and processes so that they can do empirical research that genuinely allows for an interpretive approach without having their confidence undermined at this stage of the game by uninformed critiques. These include, for instance, comments that suggest that interpretive research does not stand on its own, being useful only as a preliminary stage to generate information that can serve as the basis for a quantitative study; or criticisms that inquire about the variables used in the study, misunderstanding the purposes of interpretive research, which is not variables- based. The treatment of interpretive research design presented here counters prevailing misinformation about the methodological grounding for “qualitative” methods (even among research methods textbook authors) and the widespread Introduction 3 ignorance of interpretive methods. The volume discusses interpretive method- ologies’ and methods’ distinctive concepts and processes and the reasoning that underlies them in ways that enable students to think and talk about the particulars of the interpretive research designs they are developing or conducting. In several places, discussions of interpretive approaches are situated adjacent to discussions of positivist approaches to the same topic, especially when methodological concepts from the latter are widespread and commonly used. Through that contrast, we hope to make clear the claims and processes of both approaches. Second, we are writing for more experienced researchers—academics, policy analysts, independent scholars, and consultants—who apply for funding, for research-related release time, and/or for other resources to conduct such research (e.g., entrée/access to field settings). They will find here a way to talk about interpretive methodologies and methods that can be useful in those applications. Such research-speak is needed in order to explain the rationale behind the more flexible, open-ended approach to research design that is common in this sort of empirical research, manifest, for example, in the lack of formalized hypotheses and random sampling. More flexible approaches and the absence of hypotheses, variables, and sampling are commonplaces in social or cultural anthropology, where interpretive methodologies have received their fullest expression in the conduct of research. When used in disciplines in which other methodological approaches are dominant, these commonplaces often are treated as outliers, and even as signs of poorly designed research. As a result, the research proposal, as well as subsequent manuscripts, is often found wanting. Yet these characteristics of interpretive research designs are neither haphazard nor sloppy, but systematic (i.e., “rigorous”) in their own right, as we explain in Chapters 1–6 of the book. Third, those teaching research methods courses will find the book useful, for the same reasons, for curricular purposes. Most treatments of research design across the social sciences (social-cultural anthropology excepted) take a variables- based, hypothesis-testing, (quasi-)experimental approach to the topic that is quite different from the word-based, abductive, field and archival research approach common to interpretive empirical work. Most methods textbooks, even when presenting and discussing qualitative methods, lack a full understanding of the ways in which many kinds of qualitative research design, let alone interpretive ones, are different from “traditional” research designs—the latter influenced by the forms and logic of inquiry dominant in economics, psychology, and other fields that follow “positivist”-inflected methodological argumentation (which is not to say that those fields do not have their own forms of interpretive research; see, e.g., McCloskey 1985 in economics, Giorgi et al. 1983 or Wertz 2005 in psychology).1 Our approach is informed by a science studies or sociology of knowledge perspective that sees scientific work as a practice—and one that seeks to per- suade others of the “goodness” of its findings. As such, we are asking ourselves, constantly, about the political (or power) dimensions of what scientists do, 4 Introduction including social scientists. Although this statement is strongly reminiscent of Foucault’s engagement with the intersections of knowledge and power (1984), we are influenced more by ethnographic analyses of various kinds of natural and physical scientific practices (see, e.g., Latour 1987, Latour and Woolgar 1988, M. Lynch and Woolgar 1990, Traweek 1992) and by the utility of bringing such a perspective to bear on the practices of social scientists (see, e.g., Brandwein 2000, 2006, Büger and Gadinger 2007, Woolgar et al. 2009, Yanow 2005). Some points of clarification concerning concepts that run through this vol- ume are in order. First, the discussion rests on a distinction between methodology and methods. Methodology commonly refers to the presuppositions concerning ontology—the reality status of the “thing” being studied—and epistemology—its “know-ability”—which inform a set of methods. It might be thought of, in a way, as applied philosophy. If methodology refers to a logic of inquiry, the con- duct of the inquiry itself might be thought of in terms of the particular tools—the methods—with and through which the research design and its logic are carried out or enacted. So, in this sense, interviewing might be seen as a tool—a method; and it is one that can be informed by different, and often conflicting, methodo- logical presuppositions. A researcher can interview based on the belief that she is going to be able to establish “what really happened” in a setting. This reflects a realist–objectivist methodology that rests on three things: faith in the existence of an objective social world that is external to the researcher; knowledge of that world which can be achieved through observation from a point outside it; and the belief that this knowledge can yield an understanding of what the researcher holds to be the truth of that external world, an understanding that mirrors that world. Or a researcher can interview based on the belief that there are multiple perceived and/or experi- enced social “realities” concerning what happened, rather than a singular “truth.” In this view, the researcher would assume that event narratives are likely to vary depending on the perspective (political, cultural, experiential, etc.) of the persons being interviewed. This approach reflects a constructivist–interpretivist method- ology that rests on a belief in the existence of (potentially) multiple, intersubjectively constructed “truths” about social, political, cultural, and other human events; and on the belief that these understandings can only be accessed, or co-generated, through interactions between researcher and researched as they seek to interpret those events and make those interpretations legible to each other.2 Attending to their methodological underpinnings makes it less reasonable to think of any method as an item in a “tool box,” a metaphor commonly found in textbooks that do not distinguish between methods and methodologies (if they discuss methodology or philosophy of science issues at all). Underlying the tools metaphor is an assumption of neutrality among methods: the researcher is meth- odologically—philosophically—agnostic as to whether she picks up an open- ended interview or a survey instrument to use in her research. Yet no method is methodologically neutral: each one—modeling, ethnomethodology, modes Introduction 5 of interviewing, “styles” of participant observation—rests on the choices that researchers make when they enact their ontological and epistemological presup- positions. These are “pre-”suppositions less in time than in logic: they typically are part of researchers’ tacit knowledge (in Polanyi’s, 1966, sense), such that instead of being able to declare them at the outset of a research career, it is only when researchers reflect on research already conducted, and perhaps even published, that their knowledge of their own presuppositions becomes explicit (often when a colleague or reviewer points out the ontological and epistemological ground on which the research stands). This understanding leads us to focus, instead, on the language of methodological “approaches” and choices among them, rather than of tools, the second point. Referring to approaches emphasizes the inevitable intertwining of the many choices that a researcher makes in bringing research question, methodology, and methods together. These choices give expression to, or enact, the methodological approach—interpretive, positivist, critical realist, or some other—informing the work that a researcher carries out. Third, we draw a distinction not only between quantitative and qualitative research and their attendant designs, but among quantitative, qualitative, and inter- pretive research. The older, and still widely known and used, two-part taxonomy developed at a particular point in time to demarcate University of Chicago– style observational and interview-based research from the kind of quantitative and survey-based research developed at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. As survey research instruments, statistical science, and the com- puter hardware and software that could process ever greater quantities of data further developed, along with behavioralist theories, “quantitative” research ascended over “qualitative” research in many social science departments and/or disciplines.3 As a consequence, researchers using qualitative methods came under increasing pressure to adopt the evaluative criteria central to quantitative ones. Qualitative research continues to use one or more of three common data generat- ing methods: observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people (a.k.a. interviewing); and the close “reading” of research-relevant materials. But in many fields, it has grown to resemble less and less Chicago-School–style field research, drawing increasingly, instead, on analytic methods that enact positivist philosophical modes of scientific knowing (e.g., a realist ontology, the possibility of objective knowledge, generalizing universal laws). The bipartite “quantitative– qualitative” taxonomy of methods has, more and more, come implicitly to stand in as proxy for a distinction between positivist and interpretivist methodologies. In many fields, the dual taxonomy has increasingly lost that sense of methodo- logical difference, although in some, such as parts of sociology and educational studies, “qualitative” still carries its older meaning intact. In other fields, reflecting the “interpretive turn” that took place across the social sciences in the 1970s– 1990s (see, e.g., Geertz 1973, Rabinow and Sullivan 1979, 1985, Polkinghorne 1983, 1988, Hiley et al. 1991), Chicago-School–style qualitative methods resting on a phenomenological hermeneutics that privileges local, situated knowledge 6 Introduction and situated knowers has increasingly become known as “interpretive” research. This yields a three-part taxonomy of research approaches: quantitative–positivist methods drawing on realist–objectivist presuppositions, qualitative–positivist methods drawing on similar presuppositions, and qualitative–interpretive meth- ods drawing on constructivist–interpretivist presuppositions.4 Properly speaking, then, we should use those three compound adjectives when describing methods; but to make the language simpler, we will use quantitative, qualitative, and inter- pretive, instead. In some places, where qualitative and interpretive methods are similar in their approaches to a topic, we use them together. In others, in order to emphasize interpretive design’s distinctiveness, we contrast it with positivist design elements found in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In part because of this history, what gets included or counted as “interpretive empirical” research can be confusing. Does it include analyses interpreting theo- retical texts, such as those seeking to understand the implications of Weber’s writ- ings from a feminist perspective (Ferguson 1984),5 for example, or of some other writer whose work is considered canonical or otherwise central to a discipline? Clearly, analyzing documentary materials, whether historical or contemporary, draws on similar methods of text-treatment and thought. This was precisely Tay- lor’s (1971) argument: that in studying human actions, researchers render them as “text analogues” for purposes of analysis (see also Ricoeur 1971). And it is equally clear in how interpretive empirical scholars approach physical artifacts, such as governmental buildings and other built spaces in which acts of research interest take place (see, e.g., G. Mosse 1975, Yanow 2006a). In political science, where we are most familiar with these issues and debates,6 the interpretation of theoretical texts is often explicitly framed as “non-empirical” research, leading political theory graduate students in some programs to be exempted from research methods courses required of all others (Schwartz-Shea 2003). But this understanding of textual analysis rests on meanings of “empiri- cal” that are narrowly cast and increasingly contested. Political theorists interview (Bellah et al. 2007 ), for instance; work in archives on contemporaneous materials in ways that parallel historical research (especially social history; see, e.g., Darnton 1984, 2003, Davis 1983) situating correspondence, diaries, paintings, and other texts and text-analogues in contemporary social, political, and cultural contexts (e.g., Ferguson 2011, Bellhouse 2011); and analyze college catalogues (Kaufman-Osborn 2006) or methodological practices (Norton 2004).7 In empha- sizing that this book engages “interpretive empirical” research, we also have these kinds of work in mind (although we also note that the manuscripts reporting on such research often have a rather different “voice” from those reporting on field observations, likely due to different intended audiences and dissemination outlets, including conferences, journals, and book publishers). Fourth, although it is itself something of a misnomer, we use the shorthand “positivist research” to refer to those forms of research that rest on realist onto- logical and objectivist epistemological presuppositions,8 in order not to have to Introduction 7 repeat what is a linguistic and conceptual mouthful every time we want to refer to that kind of research; we do the same with “interpretive research.”9 Likewise, we use the phrases “positivist researcher” or “interpretive researcher” as shorthand references to the approach a researcher uses in a particular project. We do not intend thereby to equate a research approach with an individual’s identity or to reify this link, as some researchers choose to move between approaches, depend- ing on the research question they are engaging. Some researchers do specialize in one approach or another; for them, personal identity and research identity may be more intertwined than for others who are more ambidextrous, so to speak. The possibility and ease of such movement depends on an individual’s inclination toward and specialization in certain forms of research, as well as on the breadth or narrowness of graduate methods training and what is made available to students as they are socialized to their discipline’s practices. It can be challenging, for instance, to develop a “research ear” for both metaphor analysis and formal modeling and to master the technical intricacies of both. The ability of a single researcher to “mix” methods or methodologies—so-called mixed methods research—is related to this point. We defer a consideration of such mixing to Chapter 8. Fifth, we make reference at times to phases of a research project, distinguishing “fieldwork” (which we use in reference to archival research as well as to its more traditional participant observer, ethnographic, and interviewing designation) from “deskwork” (more focused analytic activities, typically away from the field) and Essay “textwork” (the more focused preparation of the research report).10 We do so in full recognition of the fact that these activities are intertwined: although fieldwork itself may be separate in both time and space from the other two phases, analysis often begins in the field, if not beforehand, and continues through the preparation of the research manuscript or presentation; and chunks of text may come directly from notes prepared in the field or from the research proposal. Still, we find it useful for heuristic purposes at times to mark and use this distinction. Lastly, one of the things that makes the topic of research design so fraught with tension and miscommunication is that various epistemic communities often use the same word to mean different things—without recognizing those differences and, therefore, without understanding the reasons for the miscommunications that ensue. For instance, an experimentalist’s understanding of what makes research valid differs from validity’s meaning in other research approaches, reflecting differ- ent modes of thinking about the way(s) in which research is done. To take another example, in some cases, naturalist has been used to describe research on biological and physical topics in the understanding that those scientists can conduct their studies from positions outside of the research domain. There, the “behaviors” of plant cells, bacteria or rock and mineral formations are “natural” and indifferent to such observation and to the results of the study (e.g., Bevir and Kedar 2008; for an in-depth analysis of this latter point, see Oren 2006a). But a large section of the qualitative–interpretive research world uses naturalist to refer to precisely the opposite kind of research, in which the researcher is firmly positioned within the 8 Introduction community and setting under study (e.g., Schatzman and Strauss 1973, Lincoln and Guba 1985, Erlandson et al. 1993, Athens 2010)! This research is “naturalist” in that the researcher engages in activities that are naturally occurring in such set- tings—e.g., observing people, talking to them, and/or taking part in the course of their everyday, “natural” activities in their own, “natural” settings, much as “ordinary” members of that setting would comport themselves. In yet another instance, constructionism and constructivism are used in different disciplines, or even in different subfields of the same discipline, with different meanings. International Relations, for instance, has developed its own historically grounded use of these terms with their own particular meanings and reference points (see, e.g., Green 2002, Hopf 2002, P. Jackson 2002: 258, n. 12); but that field’s use of these terms is often at odds with the broader methodological and methods literature. Similarly, experimentalists and others use the term subject in reference to persons who are the objects or units of study; whereas in other types of research, “subject” is seen as denying persons agency, and the terminology has shifted to “research participants.”11 Researchers working with these terms need to make themselves aware of such differences, as conversations often develop in which scholars end up speaking past each other because they assume that scholarly terms are being used to mean the same thing, when this is, in fact, not the case. This discussion of language and nomenclature in the methods and methodo- logical literature links to a different question: the meaning of “design” in this book’s title. It has two; they are intertwined; and we have already been using them interchangeably and will continue to do so. On the one hand, interpretive research design—imagine the stress on the first word—could mean the outline of the steps a researcher would follow in planning a research project using an inter- pretive approach. This is the sense that marks much of Chapter 1; it is design as object, as noun. At the same time, interpretive research design—where the noun has almost the quality of a gerund—is somewhat more dynamic, emphasizing the thought processes and ensuing strategies that go into designing interpretive research. This is the meaning that informs much of the book and lies at the root of its subtitle—Concepts and Processes. If the reader finds our discussion of design- ing for interpretive research more narrative in its treatment by contrast with the typically more stepwise, procedural approach of traditional textbooks, it is due to these dual meanings and our emphasis on the second of the two. The one area of interpretive methods that receives short shrift in this book is the more “creative” side of the methodological family: methods drawing on poetry, play-writing and performing, painting, and other artistic endeavors. Given our own empirical engagements in the political sciences (specifically, with public policy, public administration, political sociology, and feminist and gender studies) and in organizational studies, where research engagements tend to be rather tradi- tional and such methods are not commonly found, we have not included specific examples of them, nor do we engage the particularities of the kinds of designs and justifications they require. The journal Qualitative Inquiry is a major source for Introduction 9 such work, and we happily refer readers interested in such methods to the articles there and to their references. In sum, researchers in the social sciences across the board need more effective preparation for designing research projects, whether in the field or in archives, that are shaped and supported by phenomenological, hermeneutic, and allied methodological presuppositions and argumentation. We hope the volume engages readers across the full spectrum of these disciplines, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as those in “applied” or professional degree programs: educational studies, nursing and allied health studies, organizational studies, pub- lic administration, public policy analysis, urban and regional planning, and others too numerous to list. Because of the specific orientation we take, we anticipate that intersectionality scholars and feminist researchers, many of whose approaches intersect with and overlap interpretive ones, will also find the book speaking to their concerns. A Sketch of the Book As the first volume in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, this book treats concepts and processes in interpretive empirical research design, and the methodo- logical issues they raise, looking across methods of generating and analyzing data. Although it engages some very practical issues, such as the structure of research proposals, it is not a how-to volume, as many methods—especially of data analysis (e.g., ethnomethodology, semiotics, metaphor or category analysis; Feldman 1995, Yanow 2000)—follow specific logics of inquiry and require specific designs. We discuss some topics in an overview fashion, relying on other volumes in the series to flesh these out, each in ways appropriate to its own method. Chapter 1 is devoted to the whys and wherefores of research design, and Chapter 2 then explores the logic of inquiry of interpretive research, with par- ticular attention to where research questions come from. It sketches out abduc- tive ways of knowing before turning to the methodological underpinnings of interpretive research: the ideas from hermeneutic and phenomenological phi- losophies that are enacted in various forms of meaning-focused, context-specific, interpretive research methods. Research designs, however, require not only a specification of a research question and a theoretical domain; they also need a specification of planned sources of evidence relative to that research question and domain, as well as a sense of how those data will be analyzed. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 engage the kinds of issues that inform choices of data sources: contextuality, its several implications (e.g., for concept development, access, forms of evidence), and, finally, issues in evaluating the trustworthiness or “goodness” of an interpre- tive research project. Chapters 7 and 8 then take up issues that situate research designs in a broader context. The rationale underlying the middle section of the book requires a bit more explanation. The design parts of an intended research project are often 10 Introduction articulated in the context of a research proposal, as discussed in Chapter 1 and outlined there in Table 1.1. Most textbook discussions of research design explore it in linear fashion, following the contours of the completed outline of such a proposal. Because we are interested in the concepts and processes that go into thinking about interpretive research and what distinguishes it from other research approaches, we take a different tack in Chapters 3 to 6. We engage, instead, the kinds of issues a researcher thinking interpretively would need to consider in carefully formulating the steps of a plan. In doing so, we note the elements that are common to research proposals whatever their epistemological and ontological presuppositions. But we pay close attention to the significant differences that arise when one takes an interpretive approach. Due to the practice, begun in the early 1970s, of requiring statistics courses in social science curricula, most, if not all, researchers today are familiar with the kind of research design that is typical of a positivist methodology, with its attend- ant concepts. Most methods textbooks, many of them required reading in gradu- ate and some undergraduate coursework (see Thies and Hogan 2005), lay out its presuppositions, often designated “the” scientific method (as if there were only one). Many design concepts and terms, such as operationalization, sampling, and falsifiability, are, therefore, second nature to most researchers, who are not aware that these are grounded in positivist research methodologies and, therefore, less appropriate for other research approaches. Because of the prevalence and dominance of these and other terms, positiv- ist researchers, and even those doing interpretive research, may have difficulty recognizing this misfit. In Chapters 3 to 6, because of many researchers’ greater familiarity with positivist-informed concepts, we have situated our discussion of interpretive research characteristics and criteria in close proximity to those on the whole more familiar terms. This enables us to show where and how interpretive methodologies part company with those terms and to explain the ways in which interpretive researchers think about related concepts and processes. Interpretive researchers need a language for responding, for instance, to questions and com- ments that emerge from a positivist paradigm, such as: What is your independent variable? How did you operationalize that concept? Is that a falsifiable proposi- tion?12 In articulating the reasons that those terms are not good fits for interpretive research design elements, we argue for certain concepts that are more directly linked to interpretive presuppositions and whose use helps surface those differ- ences. In some cases, other concepts and terms better connect to and reflect inter- pretive presuppositions and extant research practices. We take this up at length in these four chapters. Specifically, Chapter 3 explores the implications for designing research of the central characteristic that distinguishes meaning-focused inquiry from other approaches: the role of context. In interpretive research, meaning-making is key to the scientific endeavor: its very purpose is to understand how specific human beings in particular times and locales make sense of their worlds. And because Introduction 11 sense-making is always contextual, a concern with “contextuality”—rather than “generalizability”—motivates research practice and design. In this chapter, we explain this concern and take up its implications for concept development and understandings of hypothesizing and causality. The three of these play out dif- ferently in interpretive research because of its emphasis on context and on the situatedness of both researchers and “researched.” Context has further implications for the character of evidence: where and how am I going to find “my data,” what will those data look like, and, when I am interacting with research participants, what sort of researcher role will I assume as I co-generate those data with them? What emerges from this discussion is a fuller understanding of the necessity for flexibility in interpretive research design. These matters are explored in Chapters 4 and 5. The ways in which evidence is generated, and the ways in which such processes are discussed in an interpretive research manuscript, are key to how the trustworthiness of a researcher’s knowl- edge claims will be evaluated by a diverse range of readers. Chapter 6 takes up various processes through which researchers designing interpretive projects can anticipate checking on their sense-making in the field, in data analysis, and in writing. Chapters 7 and 8 move beyond the details of a research design itself to look at research designs in their broader contexts. In Chapter 7 we take up some of the largely silenced areas of field research: the play of emotions in the field, researchers’ sexuality, and, in particular, the “wheelchairedness” and other physi- cal constraints under which some researchers work, all of which might well be anticipated in thinking through a research design but are commonly not spoken of. We also look at two issues gaining attention these days, human subjects pro- tections and data archiving, both problematic from the perspective of interpretive methodologies, whether for procedural or ethical reasons. And we relate elements of a research design to sections of the manuscripts that report on the research. In Chapter 8 we consider “mixed methods” research before turning our attention to still broader issues involved when interpretive research crosses over to other epistemic communities, such as during reviews of various sorts. To avoid misunderstanding concerning the book as a whole, we add three caveats. First, if some readers are expecting to find polemics here against modes of research other than interpretive ones, they will, we trust, be disappointed. While the contrasts we draw between interpretive and positivist approaches can simplify exposition in the laying out of contrasts between their respective designs, we have been at pains to avoid caricaturing positivist thinking and design, in particular, and we alert readers to possible simplifications where this arises. We do not see positivism as a negative development in the world of ideas or as a derogatory term. In fact, neither of us would be in our present positions or writing this book, for reasons of sex, in both of our cases, and, in one case, of religion, were it not for the heritage of social positivism’s emphasis on universality having entered into the social and political world of its day. Both French and American revolutions 12 Introduction were fought for egalité /equality—for the 1789 Déclaration des droîts de l’homme and the statement in the US Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal,” the political manifestations of positivism’s idea of universal scientific laws. Subsequent civil rights movements of all sorts have fought to realize that principle. We use “positivism” as an umbrella term to refer to many types of research, from experimental research with its hypothesis-testing ideal, which seems to have set the gold standard for ideas about quantitative methods, to survey and other variables-based, statistical research, to studies conceived of as basically “descrip- tive,” including some forms of historical and comparative case study analysis. (See Note 7.) Given the behavioralist orientation dominating many social science graduate programs by the time we got there, both of us were trained in survey research design and/or statistical analyses of various sorts, one of us peregrinating further than the other along that path. Yet we are pluralists in our methodological convictions. While we are, ourselves, more inclined toward an interpretive meth- odological position, we hold that certain kinds of research questions lend them- selves much better to survey research or experimentation, and it would be foolish to undertake, say, semiotic squares or ethnomethodological analyses to address these (e.g., because of time or other resource constraints, or simply because one wants information on a very focused matter across a large number of respondents, rather than in-depth, meaning-focused stories concerning their work or lives). Our interest here is in laying out the methodological grounding for interpre- tive methods in the context of research designs, and in doing so in a way premised on the view that different modes of science are characterized by different stand- ards and criteria of evaluation, even if all scientists share, in one way or another, an interest in the procedural systematicity and attitude of doubt that legitimate knowledge claims. Given the over 40-year prominence of behavioralist and statis- tical approaches to the full range of social sciences, two generations of scholars (at least, in the US) have been trained or educated largely without exposure to that grounding—or, for that matter, to the ontological and epistemological grounding of positivist-informed methods. Those researchers who would have been edu- cated to a different, more pluralist way of looking at the social science world are, on the whole, no longer educating students or reviewing manuscripts, leading to a more monocular view of “science.” We would like to recover and build on the broader view that characterized scientific practices of earlier times. Second, even as we write about the logic of interpretive inquiry, we take to heart cautions against “methodism”—a preoccupation with methods that subju- gates the substantive issues under study to the dictates of technical requirements, as if these could somehow ensure the truth of knowledge claims.13 Graduate stu- dents, in particular, may sometimes be paralyzed by the imposed or felt need to conform to such dictates, when it should be their substantive concerns, instead, that motivate their research endeavors. When methodological awareness degen- erates into a “check list” assessment process that ignores substantive issues, that Introduction 13 is one indicator that methodism has taken over. Such a move should be resisted vigorously, in our view, for interpretive as well as positivist research projects. “How we know” is an essential part of science; but without a deep concern for the “what,” research would be a sterile exercise. Finally, in treating positivist research approaches, we have engaged their repre- sentation in textbooks and other discussions, rather than delving into the detailed nuances of research practices such as those found in more sophisticated methodo- logical analyses among positivist scholars (e.g., Brady and Collier 2010, articles in such journals as Evaluation Research, Organizational Research Methods, Political Analysis, Sociological Methods & Research) or in actual scientific practices. Our rea- soning for doing so is that, on the whole, more students (and perhaps others) are likely to be introduced to research methods through methods textbooks than through the more nuanced methodological literature. And it is these ideas that have taken hold, broadly, often presenting a picture of “the scientific method” and other procedural issues in ways that do not always resemble what practicing researchers do. For example, “replication” is an often cited practice that is said to demarcate “true” science from “pseudo” science. Yet, as Zimmer (2011) reports in discussing publications in Science and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychol- ogy, it does not appear to be much practiced or valued, nor even effectual. We recognize that the practices involved in the implementation of research designs are complex and that in its execution, research does not always implement initial plans exactly (an issue for IRBs; see Chapter 7). Moreover, in practice, there may be more overlap between interpretive and positivist research than our heu- ristic dichotomy (see Table 6.1) and our discussions here portray.14 Our purpose is to help those from diverse research communities recognize interpretive research as a distinctive logic of inquiry and to develop what this means at the design stage. All too often, interpretive research projects are acknowledged upon completion to be significant contributions to knowledge and/or practice, but the positivist language of design tends to foreclose that appreciation at the proposal stage, with a deleterious effect on funding. And just as the positivist label elides huge differences in scientific practices, so, too, does the interpretive label. Interpretive schools and methods have family resemblances, in Wittgenstein’s sense—but they also have specific differences. This variety limits the extent to which we can spell out specific designs or design principles. For this reason, the book rests at a certain level of generality, emphasiz- ing concepts and processes of interpretive research design—albeit with concrete illustrations from published research—to achieve utility across a wide range of interpretive practices. “Science” is not, and has never been, a single practice. Even within the natural and physical sciences, scientific processes and procedures are done differently by botanists and chemists, astronomers and zoologists. Moreover, what it has meant to do science and to be scientific has been changing over time, ever since natural philosophy developed and eventually turned into “science.”15 Interpretive social 14 Introduction science takes its place within this panoply of meanings and practices. Our mission in this volume is to provide interpretive researchers, as well as those who review or teach such research, with the rationale to understand and argue for the logic of inquiry underlying this kind of science in ways that are consistent with inter- pretive methodological presuppositions and the methods that enact them. The “new” engagement with or (re)turn to interpretive methodologies and methods does not eschew design, rigorous systematicity or explanatory (constitutive) cau- sality. None of these need be sacrificed in doing science that stays true to interpre- tive presuppositions. 1 WHEREFORE RESEARCH DESIGNS? FIGURE 1.1 What is this? Photo credit: Merlijn van Hulst. What is this? How does it work? And how will you figure that out? Whatever it is—we will get to that later—it is represented here through a photograph. That means that you are restricted to observing it with your eyes (assuming you are sighted, another issue to take up later, in Chapter 7) as you 16 Wherefore Research Designs? seek to make sense of it. It is analogous, in this sense, to a word, a phrase or a visual image you might encounter during field research, whether in historical documents you have accessed in an archive or in contemporary research-relevant documents made available to you in the organization or other setting in which you are talking to people (including formal interviewing) and/or observing. If you have only the document(s) or painting, say, to go on, as in historical research, you will have to figure out the meaning of the unknown term(s) or image on your own, using the judgment that you have been developing in an “intertextual” fashion as you have been studying other materials, perhaps from other sources, that come from the same time period and the same or similar context. (More on this in Chapter 5.) But if you encounter an unfamiliar word or phrase in contemporary documen- tary research or in the course of an interview or more casual conversation, you can ask for clarification—what it means, when it is used, how it is different from some other term or concept. We do this all the time in learning new languages, on entering new workplaces or on moving to new locations. Whether it is an unfamiliar concept that you have encountered or an object, you will want to know how it is used and not used, with what meanings and referents or in what settings and activities, by whom, for whom it has other meanings or usages, and so on. And much like learning a new word in the context of its verbal usage, if you encounter an unfamiliar object while talking to people (who tell you about it) or while observing them (as they use it, with whatever degree of participation on your part), you develop an understanding of it based on its physical (in addition to its linguistic) usage—where it resides or is stored, how it is handled, what people do with it, what it feels like to use it, on what occasions or in what circumstances it is used, who is forbidden from using it, and so forth. Here, the material world of “objects” and other physical artifacts can include built spaces, such as executive office suites or labor union meeting halls or street corners where strikers or youth congregate, and events (including regularly recurring ones, analytically termed rituals or ceremonies), as well as the items that populate these spaces and events and which are used in them. “Research design” refers to the basic structure of a research project, the plan for carrying out an investigation focused on a research question that is central to the concerns of a particular epistemic community. That is a community of schol- ars who share a way of seeing and defining research problems and questions and a way of generating knowledge about these, as articulated in its theoretical or other research literature (see further discussion at the end of Chapter 2). The research design is where the kinds of questions spoken to in the previous two paragraphs, concerning objects, acts, language, actors, settings, and so forth, are articulated and where the researcher indicates how she plans to engage these. The conduct of research entails making choices about all of these matters, including both research questions and sources of evidence that will bear on them, as well as about particu- lar data-generating and -analyzing processes. These choices are worked through Wherefore Research Designs? 17 in designing the research, and the design document itself provides the rationales for those elements and processes chosen as well as, where appropriate, those not chosen. Crafting research designs also provides an opportunity to think through the two central hallmarks of scientific practice (as distinct, say, from a religious one): its systematic character, conducted with an attitude of doubt. When researchers (typically, those doing positivist-informed work) talk about “rigorous” research, it is its systematicity they are pointing to—a systematicity of procedure, of argu- mentation, which is how that hallmark would be discussed in interpretivist work. When those same researchers talk about “testability” (the requirement that prop- ositions be subjected to testing of various sorts), they are pointing to the same concern carried out by interpretive researchers in their own constant, reflexive questioning enacted in various ways to check on sense-making with respect to knowledge claims advanced, subjecting their research processes and analyses to doubt. The design of a research project, whether positivist or interpretive, dem- onstrates these two central characteristics of science, showing that the researcher has thought about them and how they will be engaged and enacted in the research process. Research designs are commonly found in research proposals; the two terms are even, at times, used interchangeably. Novice researchers might first encoun- ter a full-blown research design in crafting a proposal for thesis and/or disserta- tion research to be submitted to departmental committees for approval, although they might also encounter it, in whole or in part, in introductory coursework, especially in research methods courses. Research designs are also the backbone of research proposals submitted for funding by researchers at all levels of research seniority, in all disciplines and across all institutional arenas of research practice. Even when conducting a research project that does not require funding or other approval, crafting a research design can help the researcher prepare more system- atically for the research, thinking through the sorts of issues engaged in this book. This kind of preparation is conducted by interpretive researchers as much as it is by positivist ones. The thought experiment with which this chapter begins allows us to intro- duce what is perhaps the key difference between interpretive research and other ways of knowing, one that has central implications for designing research projects which enact an interpretive methodology. Note that in all of the circumstances discussed there, the meaning of the term or object—it could equally as well have been an event, interaction, situation, image, document, and so on—which the researcher seeks is its situated, contextual meaning: that specific to those who are its everyday creators and/or users. Other approaches to research typically begin by stipulating definitions of the concepts that researchers want to study ahead of time, then operationalizing those concepts in ways that are intended to render them “testable” when the researcher gets to the research setting (whether in the archives or in an interactive “field” that draws on interviews, surveys, field 18 Wherefore Research Designs? experiments, focus groups, and the like).1 This requires turning the concepts into variables abstracted from the lived experience they represent. Some of these vari- ables are understood to “depend on” other variables, and researchers conducting such research generate formal hypotheses about the relationships among these independent and dependent variables. They then conduct those “tests” to see how good—how accurate—the hypothesized relationships were as explanations or representations of the social phenomena of interest. Interpretive research designs, by contrast, do not set out to test key concepts defined before the research has begun. If they are interested in studying a particu- Essay lar concept (e.g., work practices, violence) or role (school principal, mid-level manager), they will have developed a sense of how those concepts or roles are dis- cussed in the established, research-relevant literature. This is what Geertz termed an “experience-distant” concept: “one that specialists of one sort or another... employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical aims” (Geertz 1983: 57). It is parallel to what Pike (1990) called an etic perspective on the concepts, categories, and rules of behavior that characterize the social group being studied, which is rooted in formulations meaningful to the scientific community studying that group. But interpretive researchers working with such concepts and perspec- tives are not bringing their own scientific definitions with them to field settings in order to test the accuracy of those understandings.2 Researchers want, instead, to understand how those concepts, roles, and so forth are used in the field. They want to let their understandings and, indeed, the very existence of concepts that are key to a particular setting or situation “emerge from the field”—as they often say, although that language is not unproblematic, as we discuss further in Chapter 2. What the phrase is meant to capture is the distinction between definitions that are shaped by interactions between the researcher and the theoretical literature, determined a priori before the field or archival research begins, and definitions of concepts that are shaped by their situational use and by the lived experience of those “naturally” working, playing, etc., in the study setting. These include those long gone whose lived experiences have been captured in the written word and stored in archives of various sorts or in oral histories, stories, narratives, and the like. This difference is of central significance for the design of a research project. We will pick up this discussion and add other points of distinction in later chap- ters; but first, we engage the importance of research designs and then look at a typical outline of one. Research Design: Why Is It Necessary? In the process of designing their research projects, researchers make choices. These can be of a theoretical, ontological, and/or epistemological character; researchers also choose specific methods of data generation and analysis to use in their studies. Researchers want their “findings”—the insights into the focus of Wherefore Research Designs? 19 their investigations, which emerge through systematic analyses of research-related evidence that has also been generated systematically—to be persuasive. They want the members of their epistemic, scientific communities, along with other readers, to accept their results. For research to be persuasive, the choices of method need to be consistent, logically, with the methodology—the presup- positions about the “reality status” (ontology) of what is being studied and its “know-ability” (epistemology). A research design presents these choices, along with the argumentation that explains and justifies their selection (at times, dis- cussing alternatives not chosen), in light of the intended purposes of the research project. A research design can usefully be seen as a signaling device (an observation brought out in analyses of scientific work from a practice perspective, which includes seeing its persuasive, political character): it communicates certain things to the reader of the research proposal, often without naming them explicitly. To begin with, a well-crafted research design signals to a reader, such as a reviewer of a grant or dissertation proposal, that the researcher has the ability to plan a research project, especially one of significant scope and ambition. It also signals that the researcher has mounted a serious engagement with the established literature particular to that research topic. The design itself indicates the extent to which it is feasible for this plan to be implemented, in general and with respect to the length of time designated in it. More indirectly, the text of the research design indicates that this researcher is qualified to carry out this research (in addition to whatever explicit arguments the researcher also makes, e.g., via an attached CV, references, and/or some other text). But importantly, a research design implicitly signals which epistemic commu- nity the researcher is a member of or is positioning her- or himself to join. This is done through many subtle ways. One of these is in the framing of the research question, including through the selection of literature. The research literature on most topics these days is quite large, such that a “literature review” does not, and cannot, encompass it all. In selecting those works that are key to a particular way of thinking about the topic, researchers position themselves in a particular epistemic community with respect to the subject of the research (discussed fur- ther in Chapter 2). Moreover, in the choice of methods and citations to methods sources, researchers also signal membership—this time, in a methodological epis- temic community. Reading a reference list often provides a quick indication of the ways in which a researcher is positioning her- or himself with respect to both theoretical and methodological concerns. An Outline of a Research Proposal, Including the Research Design An ideal-typical outline of a proposal to conduct an interpretive research project might look like that presented in Table 1.1. 20 Wherefore Research Designs? TABLE 1.1 An ideal-typical outline of a proposal for funding, IRB or doctoral committee approval of a research project Project Title Abstract 1. Research question 2. Methods a. For generating data (for privacy issues, see 4a) b. For analyzing data 3. Anticipated learning The purpose of the research in light of broader theorizing 4. Anticipated dissemination of research manuscript a. Confidentiality of organizational, participants’ or other identities, and other privacy issues 5. Timetable 6. Budget [if applicable] References Appendices [e.g., applicant qualifications] Sources: In addition to our general familiarity with such outlines from years of teaching, advising, writing proposals, etc., we have drawn on several specific sources in compiling this outline, among them the Haverland-Yanow Netherlands Institute for Governance “General Methodology” research design course syllabus and the Graduate Research Fellowship Application, Eccles Graduate Fellowship Application, and Institutional Review Board project template, all at the University of Utah. Individual departments, faculties, universities, or funders are likely to have their own specific requirements for proposals, leading to differences in terminol- ogy and/or in the order in which they expect these items to appear. Some will want other, fewer, or additional sections. The subsection under item 4 is intended to indicate that placement of some information is variable: privacy concerns could equally as well be discussed in the methods section, as noted. Within this general proposal outline, it is item 2—the planned methods for generating and analyzing data—that constitutes the research design in its purest form. However, as a methods plan would make little sense without the research question (item 1) that motivates it, the research question is also considered part of the design. And it is the connection between research question and methods that reviewers evaluate. They are likely to ask: Do the research methods (item 2) con- nect logically to the focus of the research (the research question, item 1)? They might frame their evaluation in terms of whether the research methods (item 2) “address” the research question (item 1) in ways that are likely to lead, logically, to the anticipated learning from the research that would potentially make a con- tribution or be of value or significance to the research community or some other Wherefore Research Designs? 21 audience (item 3). And they are also likely to be asking: Is the research question (item 1) worth investigating? That is, what is its significance, addressed to some extent in item 1 in terms of debates in the relevant theoretical literature, as well as, in one form or another, in item 3 in terms of the likely value of its projected learning for the academic or other community? As research is carried out with some eye toward the future—toward its contribution to a scientific undertaking or its potential utility in addressing some policy or practice—and as the dissemina- tion of that learning is key to enacting that contribution, item 4 (dissemination) is also at times considered part of a research design. You might be thinking that this outline does not look all that different from any other you’ve seen before. In part, that is because we have written it as an ideal type, reflecting the broadest understanding of the items that are often called for, whether by funding agencies, IRBs, doctoral committees, or some other evaluating body, regardless of methodology. When we look at the contents of several of these sections when fleshed out from an interpretive methodological perspective, however, as we do in the next chapters—especially the treatment of a research question and the issues that arise in generating data—the differences between interpretive and positivist content become clear. For instance (and to anticipate the later discussion), the distinction drawn in item 2 between methods for generating data (2a) and methods for analyzing those data (2b) points to a difference between interpretive and some qualitative research designs, on the one hand, in which the generation and analysis of data are often intertwined, and quantitative and some other forms of qualitative research designs, on the other hand, in which data generation and analysis are completely separate. The distinction is useful in showing how interpretive–qualitative and positivist–qualitative research part company: as noted in the book’s introduction, both use the same methods for generating data—some combination of observing, talking, and close reading— but their orientations toward those processes are quite different and they often use very different methods in analyzing those data. In addition, this section (usu- ally called “Methods”) is where the methodological orientation of the research might be discussed. We note that this is not common for positivist research, although interpretive researchers might be expected to make their presupposi- tions explicit. Some of the language commonly used in talking about the parts of a research proposal—in particular, “projected results,” “impact,” “outcomes,” “find- ings”—derives from experimental research and its design, a point we take up more fully in Chapter 4. For this reason, we have not used those terms in Table 1.1, relying instead on language that is a better fit with interpretive research. Chapters 3–6 explore the contents of item 2 (research methods) at length, as seen from an interpretive perspective. Before then, Chapter 2 takes up in greater detail what it means to do research from the perspective of interpretive logics of inquiry or ways of knowing. 22 Wherefore Research Designs? There is one item missing from the outline in Table 1.1 that we think merits attention, thought, and discussion but that, typically, has not been part of a research proposal: research ethics. Meskell and Pels (2005: 1) argue that the “dom- inant tendency [is] to disembed, exteriorize, and alienate ethics from everyday scientific practice,” an observation consistent with the general silence on ethics in this ideal-typical research proposal outline (see also Lincoln and Denzin 2003: 4–5). Silence on this topic has been mitigated to some extent by requir- ing researchers working with “human subjects” to indicate whether they have already obtained or will obtain Institutional Review Board approval (IRB) for their designs. But ethics boards’ approval is not the same as engaging with ethical issues. In fact, the addition to research proposals of inquiries about IRB approval seems largely to have sidelined discussions of research ethics, as IRB procedures bureaucratize the topic. We see this in perusing the two dozen methods text- books on our shelves: about half of them have no discussions of ethics, and those that do primarily engage questions of informed consent.3 In interpretive social science, ethical concerns are not a separate subject, but instead emerge throughout the project, “reembedded in the practices, politics, and presentation of research results” (Lincoln and Denzin 2003: 5). The interpre- tive emphasis on the agency of those studied along with its understanding of field interactions as relational (both discussed in Chapter 4) means that consideration and contemplation of research ethics needs to be integrated into designs. Unfortu- nately, as we take up in Chapter 7, the contemporary ethics review environment (at least in the US) means that interpretive researchers’ energies are often absorbed in trying to show why ethics issues are different for these forms of research and how IRB policies are, at times, ill-suited and may even be harmful to its stated goals. We look forward to a time when research proposal outlines include ethics discussions rather than marginalizing them.4 But wait! What was that object with which we began? It is commonly known, in English, in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and perhaps elsewhere), as a glove stretcher. This one, made of mahogany, was purchased at a flea market in Amsterdam in 2009; non-wooden ones can be found in ivory or bone. But now that you know its name—albeit in one language and several national settings—what do you know about it? Or, to put the point more bluntly, as physicist Richard Feynman learned from his father on a walk in the Catskill mountains: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom de Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they But what if it is a painting of a bird? Wherefore Research Designs? 23 call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (Feynman 1988: 13–14) And Feynman adds, parenthetically: “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something” (1988: 14). In interpretive research, we seek to understand what a thing “is” by learn- ing what it does, how particular people use it, in particular contexts. That is, interpretive research focuses on context-specific meanings, rather than seeking generalized meaning abstracted from particular contexts. Glove stretchers were used in Victorian times—late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries—to stretch the fingers of cotton, lace, or kid gloves when new or after they had been washed and dried, to make it easier to get the glove on, especially given the custom of wearing gloves a size smaller than the hand, because of contemporaneous notions of fashion and beauty. But more than that: understanding how a word or an object, a ritual, ceremony or other act is used, in context, potentially reveals (or raises questions about) assumed, unspoken or taken-for-granted ideas about a range of values, beliefs, and/or feelings. In this example, knowing more about this wooden object and its intended uses at the time of its creation raises questions about contemporaneous ideas concerning such values as modesty, dignity, and respectability, or about beliefs concerning what constitutes “proper” dress and what it means to cover the hands and to cover them properly, or about feelings concerning going out in public with bare hands, rather than covered ones, in terms of status, social class, femininity, and so on. That is, understanding what an object is can tell us a lot about the world of which it is a part.5 And the point holds for words, phrases, images, and other human artifacts, as well as for acts. Could that object depicted at the beginning of the chapter “be” something else? Of course—but by that statement, an interpretive researcher does not mean to suggest that the object (or word, or act, etc.) has an essential, timeless, universal meaning. Its identity—its meaning-in-use, as it were—is seen as context-specific (to both time and place). To know the answer to that question, we would need to observe its use in situ, by users “native” to that setting, to talk to them about that usage and perhaps to use it ourselves, or to find a primary text that details such adaptive reuse (or a secondary one that rests on primary sources). That purchased glove stretcher in the photo, for instance, serves one of the authors very well as a book mark, at some times, and at others as a large paper clip. These are the sorts of issues that interpretive research designs engage. 2 WAYS OF KNOWING Research Questions and Logics of Inquiry Interesting work begins not just with a problem... but with a puzzle.... Great leaps forward... often take place when someone sees puzzles, where others have only seen facts. —Robert O. Keohane (2009: 360) Research designs answer the question: How are you going to conduct the research that will address your research question? Before one can even begin to design a research project, then, one needs not only a topic of research but a research question—and, although sometimes used interchangeably, the two are not the same!1 Articulating that research question itself can reveal the approach or logic of inquiry it contains and rests on; and that logic of inquiry—that way of knowing—itself presupposes the answer to the question: Where does this research question come from? Let’s get at this matter through a research story. Armed with theories and concepts from his doctoral studies at the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley, Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh set out to survey 50– 100 political activists, first in Pamplona, then in Bilbao, for his dissertation on the sociological origins of nationalist movements, looking at the case of Basque separatists. In his words: By the end of my stay in Pamplona, I realized that ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, a Basque nationalist liberation organization] was much more multidimensional and programmatically eclectic than U.S. academic litera- ture had suggested. I also realized that [the concept of] “modernization” did not capture the economic issues that concerned local residents.... The Ways of Knowing 25 voices and views of Basque politics were more numerous and diverse than I had expected. By the time I reached the Bilbao metropolitan area,... I had decided to jettison my survey. I had discovered that whenever I used it..., my battery of questions (for example: How intensely do you feel about independ- ence? How would you classify yourself in terms of class status?) bored the respondents. The survey had little to do with how nationalists (and local residents in general) saw themselves, understood their political disagree- ments, and defined their political options. I concluded that if I were to write a dissertation that would be meaningful for everyday people (a legacy of my New Left background that I could not shake), I had to find a way to represent the world that captured participants’ understandings, feelings, and choices. (Zirakzadeh 2009: 104) How did Zirakzadeh get from his research design to his field research? Or more precisely, how might he have gotten to his research question, even before he came up with the formal design, and what happened to that design as he became ever more immersed in field realities? We do not know how he himself would answer these questions—he doesn’t say, nor have we interviewed him; but these passages enable us to illustrate how an interpretive researcher might proceed. Rather than start out with a philosophical discussion of ontological and epistemological priors, we will use these illustrations to derive the key methodological elements that character- ize interpretive research, outlining them in brief at the end of the chapter. We begin with a series of answers to the question: Where do research questions come from? Where Do Research Questions Come From? The Role of Prior Knowledge The germ of an idea for research may come from the formal scholarly litera- ture, but it need not do so. Sometimes it comes from scholars’ everyday, human experiences—from their own histories and lives: particular gender, race-ethnic, or other perspectives, prior professions or occupations, volunteer positions, and activities that span the possibilities from religion to sports. It is not uncommon, for instance, for interpretive researchers to conduct research that returns them to places familiar from prior activities, in which they draw on previously acquired cultural knowledge (such as places where they previously worked, lived, or stud- ied for other purposes or where they have family or ancestral roots). Moreover, interpretive research can at times begin without the researcher quite knowing it—for instance, while talking with people with whom the researcher regularly Your research, kinda 26 Ways of Knowing interacts or while visiting a particular site, in either case without the intention of doing research on that topic or in that setting. Examples of such beginnings might include Goffman’s (1963) research on pub- lic behavior (see Homan 1991: 117–118), Becker’s (1963) on jazz musicians’ drug use, Liebow’s (1993) on homeless women, Venkatesh (2008) on his Chicago slum research, or Wacquant’s (2004) research on boxing, which he describes as “oppor- tunistic” (p. 9). Sociologist Beate Littig reports that her study of the “sequential use” aspects of a neighborhood sauna emerged from her 20-year membership in a group that met weekly “to sweat,” and her analysis of the meaning of high heels worn by women in tango dance sessions (milongas) developed after she had been dancing for ten years (personal communication, 11 January 2011). In both cases, she could not have developed a research question without intimate, “local” knowledge of the settings and their modes of action and interaction, something she acquired over extended periods of weekly activity.2 Prior setting-related knowledge can include places where the spoken language(s) is (are) something the researcher learned previ- Com ously, including in his family or the surrounding community. Such prior knowledge p of cultures and languages is also one of the advantages of what in anthropology and Gioia other disciplines is known as “native ethnography” (Narayan 1993) or “at-home ethnography” (Alvesson 2009, Leap 1996). This and other kinds of a priori knowledge—drawing on a classic Kantian and then phenomenological (neo-Kantian) point about new understanding emerging from prior knowledge, including experiential knowledge—is seen as an integral part of interpretive methodologies. Although positivist researchers may also be motivated to pursue particular questions or research topics as a function of per- sonal experience (e.g., a US Congressional scholar may have been motivated to pursue that topic as the result of an undergraduate internship there or a job as a legislative aide), textbook discussions rarely acknowledge such experience and may even present it as something to be contained and avoided (as it would be in positivist research approaches; see Chapter 6). From an interpretive per- spective, in contrast, not only is the role of a priori knowledge in subsequent research explicitly acknowledged. It is seen not only in shaping the development of research interest, but also as potentially playing a key role in the conduct of that research. Indeed, sometimes such experiential or other background knowledge can later be key to such conduct—e.g., to obtaining access to a community or to interviewing in a given language. But how does such prior knowledge translate into a research question? Where Do Research Questions Come From? Abductive Ways of Knowing Examining the passage from Zirakzadeh’s research experience and the essay from which it is excerpted, we can find at least two different logics of inquiry at work. Methods textbooks typically note that quantitative research follows a deductive Ways of Knowing 27 logic of inquiry—reasoning that begins with theories, which lead to hypoth- eses, from which testable concepts are generated and then tested against a set of observations (i.e., deducing the particular from the universal). The initial research design implied in Zirakzadeh’s narrative—to administer a survey questionnaire and then, presumably, to analyze the resulting answers in statistical terms, in order to test one or more hypotheses—is an example. His concepts and his survey ques- tions derived from the theories in the academic literature he had been reading. They were the source of his research question; and his design—which would have been submitted to his Ph.D. supervisor (but not, at that time, to an IRB, which came into being subsequently)—would have plotted out both the procedures for administering his survey questionnaire to “collect” his data and the techniques he planned to use in analyzing them. By contrast, as methods textbooks would point out, qualitative research fol- lows an inductive logic of inquiry—reasoning that begins with observations of particular instances from which general laws are developed (i.e., inducing the universal from the particular). One might understand Zirakzadeh’s statement that he wanted to “represent the world that captured participants’ understandings, feelings, and choices” in this light. These two logics and the contrast between them have been widely discussed until very recently, and still are presented in methods textbooks, as if they exhausted the possible logics of inquiry in research.3 But there is a third logic of inquiry at play in social scientific ways of knowing, one that methodologists are increasingly suggesting informs interpretive research: abduction. Given what Zirakzadeh says about his unfolding thinking as he con- fronted the field-based social realities that did not fit the hypotheses of his deduc- tive research design, we can find this logic, too, as we reflect on his ex post facto account of his research process. Articulated first, and at length, by US pragmatist Charles Peirce,4 abductive reasoning begins with a puzzle, a surprise, or a tension, and then seeks to expli- cate it by identifying the conditions that would make that puzzle less perplexing and more of a “normal” or “natural” event. One asks oneself, in other words, what circumstances would render an event, a word, a relationship, or whatever else one is seeking to explain more “commonsensical”—less surprising, less puz- zling (see, e.g., Agar 2010, Locke et al. 2008, Van Maanen et al. 2007).5 In this puzzling-out process, the researcher tacks continually, constantly, back and forth in an iterative–recursive fashion between what is puzzling and possible expla- nations for it, whether in other field situations (e.g., other observations, other documents or visual representations, other participations, other interviews) or in research-relevant literature. The back and forth takes place less as a series of discrete steps than it does in the same moment: in some sense, the researcher is simultaneously puzzling over empirical materials and theoretical literatures. For those accustomed to thinking in terms of ded

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