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.
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 University 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 literature had suggested. I also realized that [the concept of] “modernization” did not capture the economic issues that concerned local residents. . . . The 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 independence? 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 disagreements, 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 characterize 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 literature, 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 studied 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 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 public 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 “opportunistic” (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 previously, including in his family or the surrounding community. Such prior knowledge of cultures and languages is also one of the advantages of what in anthropology and 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 personal 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 perspective, 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 logic of inquiry—reasoning that begins with theories, which lead to hypotheses, 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 questions 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 follows 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 confronted the field-based social realities that did not fit the hypotheses of his deductive 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 explicate 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 puzzling (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 explanations 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 deduction and induction, “abduction” may be a difficult concept to grasp initially: its prefix does not endear it as a word. Considering its uses in other contexts and its meanings there might help: from Latin roots meaning to lead away, an abduction is the “leading away” of one individual by another (typically through the use of force, without the former's intention or volition); one person abducts another.6 In abductive reasoning, the researcher's thinking is led, or, more actively, directed, in an inferential process, from the surprise toward its possible explanation(s).7 The researcher may feel caught up in the puzzle, and if there is an ensuing “struggle,” it is the researcher grappling with the process of sense-making: of coming up with an interpretation that makes sense of the surprise, the tension, the anomaly. Their shared inferential process is what may make abduction and induction appear to be similar, if not identical; but abduction's point of departure—a puzzle or surprise—marks its distinctiveness, as does its search for possible explanations that would render the surprise less surprising. Unlike inductive (and deductive) reasoning, it is not immediately after general principles or propositions induced from specific events (or general laws deduced from testing hypotheses against data): the explanation(s) it generates is (are) as situated as the puzzle with which it begins. A second contrast lies in their respective senses of movement: both deduction and induction are described as following a step-wise, linear, “first this, then that” logic; whereas abduction follows a much more circular-spiral pattern, in which the puzzling requires an engagement with multiple pieces at once.8 Whether one's favorite analogy is a jigsaw puzzle, Rubik's cube, or Sudoku, the non-linear, iterative– recursive play with different possible resolutions that these suggest are useful in thinking about abductive inquiry.
But where do puzzles or surprises come from? Although qualitative and interpretive researchers often say that their puzzles emerge from the field, a more precise articulation of this process would be to say that they commonly derive from a tension between the expectations researchers bring to the field (based on their prior knowledge, discussed in the previous section) and what they observe and/or experience there. As Friedrichs and Kratochwil (2009: 714) put it, rather more formally, an abductive logic of inquiry is typically brought into play “when we become interested in a class of phenomena for which we lack applicable theories.” The search for explanation presumes that the occurrence of this surprise is not random—that whatever it is entails patterned action and is therefore subject to explanation. So, when Lichterman (2002: 123), quoting Michael Burawoy, talks about researchers making discoveries “when repeated observation reveals an ‘anomaly’,” he is pointing to the kind of surprise that sets the researcher off in search of an explanation.
What makes a surprise or a puzzle “anomalous” is a misfit between experience and expectations, the latter often informed by theory relevant to the research question. A research design that seeks to test pre-developed concepts rooted in the theoretical literature may falter on the shoals of lived experience. The experience surprises, in light of the theory the researcher has brought to the field, which may be an inadequate explainer of that experience, misapprehending it, if not missing it altogether (Lichterman 2002: 124). (We note here briefly, and then return to the idea below and in Chapter 4, that positivist research designs, drawing on an experimental prototype, would require the researcher to hold fast to the initial design; but from an interpretive perspective, changing a design in light of field realities would be par for the course.) A research design might also, however, be inspired by expectations deriving from experience itself, with the puzzle emerging from the contrast between two events or conversations or other experiences (one version of the “intertextuality” we take up in Chapter 5). The researcher might then turn to theoretical literature in search of an explanation. In either case, the effort to resolve the puzzle and make the theory-event or event-event contrast less anomalous is what “abducts” the researcher's reasoning, capturing her thinking and leading or directing her explanatory efforts to a new bit of theorizing (often revising or extending an existing theory in some fashion). Where one begins one's theorizing depends on what sorts of concepts and/or categories one is interested in—another aspect of prior knowledge, and the place where theoretical literature clearly plays a role, as discussed in the next section.
We might speculate (on the basis of further analysis of his chapter and the discussion at the conference panel at which it was originally presented) that the first of these scenarios is precisely what happened to Zirakzadeh: his theoretical preparations led him to certain expectations of what he would find in the field; but specific events and experiences once he got there led him to be surprised—and perhaps also to some bewilderment at that surprise—and then, further, to experience a certain tension between expectations and lived experiences. In an effort to resolve this puzzle, he began to theorize, drawing on his prior theoretical knowledge and on other sources, in ways that rendered these events explainable.
This is one of the reasons that “stranger-ness” is so important in generating interpretive knowledge, a point that is clearest in ethnographic or other participant observer research but also operational, in its own way, in interview and archival or documentary research (Agar 1996/1980, P. Jackson 2006, Riles 2006). Being a stranger to one's physical setting or topic (in the case of archival research)—and trying to hold on to that quality for as long as one can—is desirable in order to see as explicitly as possible what for situated knowers is taken-for-granted, common sense, and tacitly known. Strangers are constantly violating norms, often meeting strong reactions from those who know the unwritten rules. The surprises that emerge out of such encounters are often the sources of puzzles that spark an abductive reasoning process. Yet at the same time, approximating ever more closely the “familiarity” with which situated knowers navigate their physical and cognitive settings is important for generating understanding of what is puzzling only to a stranger. Striking and maintaining a balance between being a stranger and being a familiar, as difficult as it is to achieve, lies at the heart of generating research-relevant knowledge.
In crafting research designs (and advising those undertaking them), as Agar (2010) notes, the key question to ask and answer should be not “What is your research plan?” but “Where are you going to start looking for answers to your puzzle?” and “Now where are you going to look?” This brings to mind an old joke about a passerby who sees a drunk looking for his lost keys under a street lamp. Wanting to be helpful, the passerby asks the man where he dropped his keys. When he points to a place at some distance from where they are standing, the passerby asks him, with some surprise and consternation, why, then, he is looking over here. “Here is where the light is,” the drunk explains, pointing to the overhanging lamp. Although the joke is told at his expense, there is some experiential, and even pedagogical, truth to it. As good teachers know, learning departs from what one already knows, from where the light is, so to speak (see, e.g., Freire 1970). Interpretive researchers look both “here” and “there,” in an ever-widening set of concentric circles (see Figure 2.1): in seeking to puzzle out our perplexed expectations, we might well start looking “here” where the light—familiar literature or setting—is; and we move our way, gradually, over “there,” in an effort to bring light to an ever-expanding realm.
FIGURE 2.1 Beginning “where the light is” and expanding the research in ever-widening circles.
This depiction enacts an idea inscribed in the hermeneutic circle, a way of articulating the sense-making that goes on in interpretive processes. A concept developed in the nineteenth century work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1976) and further extended by his student Hans Georg Gadamer (1976), among others, a hermeneutic, sense-making circle expresses the idea that there is no fixed starting point for inquiry: the process of sense-making begins wherever the individual “is” in her understanding at that moment, with whatever grasp of things she has at that time. It also suggests that there are no “conclusions” in the sense-making research cycle: there are only momentary stopping points, to collect one's thoughts, perhaps to publish or otherwise disseminate what one understands at that point in time, before one continues on the interpretive path. As the interpretive dance “moves forward in time in a continual process toward deeper and richer understanding” (Bentz and Shapiro 1998: 170), the resulting research style is better conceived of as a spiral than as a circle.9 It was Gadamer who observed that as a description of sense-making, the hermeneutic circle characterizes learning processes in general. By this logic, a researcher begins a project, whether in the field or in a text, with some degree of prior knowledge—that is where the metaphoric light is shining; and his sense-making develops both as he confronts particular elements and as he gains a sense of the wider context. The circle-spiral describes the intimate relationship between part and whole: how the meaning of a phrase or act depends on its relationship to the whole, but, as well, that the meaning of the whole cannot be grasped independent of its constituent parts.
Another analogy, also illustrated by Figure 2.1, captures a different facet of abductive ways of knowing. Skipping a stone over a pond's surface creates ripples in the water; the stone sinks below the surface, but we continue to track those ripples, the impression the stone leaves on the water (at least for a while longer). Interpretive research tracks the residual “ripples” encountered when events— stone-surprises—impact people, places, acts: those things we wish to understand. The stone-surprise may no longer be visible, but we can surmise that a stone had been there when we see the ripples, and we can “look” to clarify aspects of the impact it had as it passed.10 The “looking” is the talking, observing (and perhaps doing), and reading that comprise interpretive research as we search to clarify and explain the puzzle of the surprising ripples. To mix a metaphor, in the mathematical sense in which a bouncing ball that keeps halving the height of its bounce never ceases motion, human actions and events may continue to ripple even after the stone and its impact can no longer be seen. The intersubjective sense that various people make of a stone-surprise—their agreements (tacit and otherwise), certainly, but especially their contested interpretations—reverberate through time, manifested in diverse ways, from memorials and museums to debates over national identity and origins.
To take an extended example from the field research of one of us (Yanow 1996): Why would a national government community center corporation in poor city neighborhoods and rurally-located towns use cutting-edge architectural designs and comparatively opulent construction materials for its buildings? Why would an organizational founder compare the as yet undesigned and unplanned community center entity to a “functional supermarket”? Why, ten years after beginning operations, would the CEO of the organization still be asking, in the public forum of the annual meeting, what the organization's goals are? And why did the existing implementation literature not provide a satisfactory explanation of the public policy dynamics within which these and other organizational puzzles were playing out? Each of these surprised, and at times confounded, the researcher's expectations. An example each from the realms of physical materiality, language, acts, and theory: each, the first two in particular, left ripples in its wake that reverberated long after the initial stone was thrown, so to speak. Each could be studied only by starting when its surprising aspect was recognized: when it became clear, for instance, that there was nothing “natural” in seeing a community center as a supermarket (functional or otherwise). And research and analysis could proceed only by starting where the “light” was: reading correspondence, annual reports, and other documentary materials in organizational archives and newspaper morgues; visiting multiple centers across the country to see and study their designs; talking, in formal interviews and informal conversations, with retired and still active founders, national and local government officials, agency and department heads, center directors, community organizers and other center staff, neighborhood residents, and so on.
Here is the iterative–recursiveness so characteristic of abductive reasoning. It is iterative in that the same logic of inquiry is repeated over and over again. It is recursive in that we perform abduction within abduction within abduction, as one “discovery” leads to another—much as a hermeneutic circle-spiral might suggest. The different kinds of engagements in the research setting took place “at the same time”—some of them within a single day, others within a single week or, at times, month. It is only in retrospect that the learning process can be described in what sounds like a very patterned way. At the time, all of the strands of puzzlement felt intertwined, much more like a tangled ball of yarn than like a neat circle-spiral. A sequence of surprises, especially on related topics, can elicit the feeling, as Kathy Ferguson (2011) put it with respect to research in archives, of “Oh, look, there's another one!” Although exhilarating, it can also at times be overwhelming. Still, what was learned from one source contributed to understanding other sources; one bread crumb led to another, as the rings of “light” fanned out; until gradually, what had seemed anomalous was no longer so: the puzzles could be explained, rendered more “normal,” in various ways. This iterative– recursive strategy that characterizes abduction builds on both human learning and the joy of curiosity. As Agar (2010: 289) says, “Surprises never stop; just the time and money do.”
Abductive reasoning on its own does not require that one search for meaning, or that that meaning be context-specific, as Agar (2010: 290) notes. But interpretive research does! Since in research settings there are likely to be impediments that make the original, clear pattern of ripples difficult to discern in all but unusual circumstances, that explanatory search in interpretive research requires not just external, objective “looking” but “interpretive looking” from a position among the ripples, so to speak. It requires both the iterative–recursive processes characteristic of an abductive logic of reasoning and a focus on contextual meaning: this lamp post, not all lamp posts, not even that one over there—although after the researcher knows more about both lamp posts, she might find that the same meanings that characterize events “here” hold for those “over there,” or some other researcher might extend the first study to a second site, and so on. This focus on meaning and insistence on its contextuality or situatedness, as well as on the situatedness of those claiming knowledge of it, whether researchers or researched, are central characteristics of interpretive research, ones that distinguish it from positivist-inflected research. The methodological sources of this distinctiveness rest in different treatments of the “reality status” of what is being studied and its “know-ability”—that is, on ontological and epistemological presuppositions, to which we return at the end of this chapter.
The notion of abductive reasoning makes available a number of ideas that enable us to speak more clearly about several features of interpretive research in ways that the language of induction does not permit. We list them here, pointing to the chapter or section in which they are taken up at greater length. For one, the researcher needs to attend to and register the presence of a surprise or a puzzle: as things, acts, words, concepts, etc., that surprise do not arrive pre-labeled as such, attention must be paid. And, as Agar (1986) makes clear, in the process of becoming more familiar with the research topic, including its settings, actors, and so forth, without careful fieldnote practices (discussed in Chapter 5) or other sense-making methods the researcher may forget what was initially surprising. Second, marking something as surprising requires attending to the expectations and other prior knowledge one brings to the field. We see this in Zirakzadeh's reflections on his research process: he makes explicit in his narrative the ways in which the theoretical literature led him to expect certain things, but field realities did not follow suit, leading to a tension between expectations and experience that he sought to resolve by theorizing in different ways. Moreover, interpretive researchers try to retain an openness to the possibility of surprises, as well as to resist the “rush to diagnosis” that prematurely closes down analytic possibilities (discussed further in Chapter 6).
A third feature highlighted by attending to abductive reasoning is that new concepts, relationships, explanations or accounts are created in the process of theorizing these surprises or puzzles. This point draws attention to the iterative– recursive relationship between theory and data in interpretive research and to the researcher's dual role as both participant-familiar (even in a metaphoric sense, when working with documents) and theorist-stranger: the abducting surprise comes from encounters in the field and/or the archive, informed by but not necessarily beholden to prior encounters in the literature. The explanations of that surprise may come through juxtaposition with other field or theoretical encounters. We extend this line of thinking in the next section.
Fourth, the requisite attending to expectations and giving accounts provides a methodological rationale for reflexivity, including on one's own positionality, another hallmark of interpretive methodologies and a subject treated at length in Chapter 6.
In departing from that which puzzles, abductive reasoning is a far cry from beginning with formal hypotheses. This explains something else about interpretive research design: why it is so challenging to write research proposals that stipulate ahead of time, before immersion in the field, what the researcher expects to find in that research, such as the concepts meaningful to actors (i.e., in non-interpretive language, the concepts to “measure” or “test”). Interpretive research puzzles draw on field engagements that the researcher cannot fully anticipate or know ahead of time—including those puzzles that tell the researcher that the existing literature is missing something, in that it does not provide an adequate explanation of what the researcher has encountered in field experiences or in archival documentation of events, thoughts, experiences, and so forth. For this reason, the conduct of interpretive research is, perforce, dynamic and flexible, and that flexibility is echoed in research designs that, for all their detailed forethought and planning, must remain open.
Indeed, the abductive logic of inquiry that characterizes interpretive research rests on the idea that researchers will learn more about their research question in the process of conducting their research. From the perspective of researcher learning, the circle-spiral's unfolding process contrasts with the “front-loading” of the hypothesis-testing model. A tremendous amount of preparation goes into the initial phases of that research design, and once hypotheses are formulated, variables designated, and tests designed, researchers are expected “simply” to apply these to the test site(s).11 Whatever learning takes place in the context of applying the design to the site(s) is bracketed and put on hold until the analysis of the data during deskwork and their presentation during textwork phases of the project. Moreover, that learning cannot be treated as part of the knowledge claims of the study. It is treated, instead, as speculative, perhaps being mentioned in the concluding section of the research manuscript as a direction for further study, precisely because it has not been tested with independent evidence (see, e.g., the discussions in King et al. 1994: 20–23 and Lamont and White 2009: 85–86). We take up these points in discussion of design flexibility in Chapter 4.
By contrast, the circle-spiral model denotes a process that has just as much advanced preparation, but in which learning transpires across the “life-span” of the research project, including during the fieldwork phase. Aspects of the design are very carefully worked out beforehand, to the extent possible. But such ongoing learning is expected to, and typically does, revise the research design while its implementation is in progress. This also helps explain the requisite flexibility of interpretive research and its design, as the researcher needs to respond to field conditions, considered further in Chapter 4.
Where Do Research Questions Come From?
The Role of Theory and the “Literature Review”
For interpretive research, then, both empirical material and theoretical literature are necessary, but neither is sufficient on its own:12 there is a recursive and reiterative process not only across data sources in the field, but also between theoretical and field encounters. The initial part of a research proposal (item 1 in Table 1.1), which is also usually considered part of the research design, typically begins with a “review” of those portions of a field's literature that are significant in the formulation and discussion of the research question in the project being designed. In addition to framing the domain of the research project, this review demonstrates the researcher's scholarly competence in the field of study to those evaluating the proposal, at the same time that it signals the researcher's aspiring or actual membership in a particular theoretical and epistemic community.
The phrase itself, “literature review,” may seem daunting: the literatures relevant these days to a research topic are often extensive. How can one possibly “review” all that has been written on that topic? Here is where the distinction between a research topic and a research question becomes useful: as noted earlier, a research “question,” however formulated, is not the same as a research “topic.” The former is far more focused, and the thinking underlying it more developed, than the latter, and that focus can be a way of narrowing the range of literature considered. The implementation of welfare policy, for instance, might be considered a general research topic; how clients and street-level bureaucrats differently experienced the 1996 US welfare policy reforms (Soss 2000) articulates a possible research question—and it points to the underlying existence of researcher expectations about what these experiences might have entailed, based on prior knowledge that derives from experience and/or theoretical literature, as well as to methods appropriate to studying that question, both of which would be elaborated in a research design.
Having narrowed a research topic to a question, a researcher might consider what the ongoing academic or research conversation is that he wishes to join: in which epistemic community is it being carried out, and who are the main parties to this conversation? It might help novice researchers to envision this piece of writing as the record of a dinner party conversation to which the leading thinkers who have something to say about the research question have been invited. The researcher greets his guests at the door, hands each a glass of wine or prosecco, leads them into the living room, and introduces each to the others. After the requisite weather chat, a conversation then develops among them—focusing on the researcher's question! What does each of them have to contribute to its discussion? Where do they agree, and where do they disagree? The record of this conversation, written up by the researcher, constitutes the major part of that “literature review.” (Understanding which scholars constitute this epistemic community and in which conferences and journals its conversation is being carried out suggests likely outlets for later dissemination of the research.)
But, from the researcher's perspective, this conversation can also leave or create “holes” (missing pieces or problems) in its account of the issue—pointing toward the puzzle that the researcher wishes to resolve. Here is where the researcher's voice joins the ongoing conversation—which continues in seminar debates and on the printed page long after the guests have finished their coffee and parted company. How will the researcher's thinking and theorizing and the research that is being designed (as described in subsequent sections of the proposal) contribute to filling this hole, resolving these problems, expanding the epistemic community's understanding of the identified puzzle by providing missing pieces (which later makes a contribution to that wider understanding through the dissemination of the research, items 3 and 4 in Table 1.1), and so forth?13
Ah, but you ask: if the puzzle or anomaly emerges only from an encounter between expectations and field realities, how can it be articulated in the literature review, whose development is understood to precede the formal research design, which in turn precedes field or archival research? It is worth remembering that although books and articles may be read from page 1 to their end, they are not always written that way. The hermeneutic circle again appears: one has to start somewhere, with whatever (prior) knowledge is at hand. In the iterative–recursive abductive engagement between theory and lived experience, the puzzle that the research seeks to explain grows from lesser to greater specificity (and, hence, clarity) as sense-making proceeds along the circle-spiral. Here, too, is that other characteristic of interpretive research—that in research designs, not only are there not formalized hypotheses; the expectations that drive the research and which will be confronted with field realities can be only partially spelled out prior to the commencement of data generation (unlike what would be the case were the research subject to the strictures of positivist approaches, experimental design in particular), precisely because of the dynamism of the social world researchers expect to find. These constitute provisional “hunches” about what might make the initial puzzle less puzzling. They will be subjected to confirmation or refutation in an iterative fashion in the field, and revised as necessary.
Interpretive research designs may therefore appear, to those familiar with hypothesis-testing ones, less programmatic and more dynamic and open-ended by contrast. This greater openness and flexibility to respond to local circumstances reflects their underlying logic of inquiry, not the (in)adequacy of the researcher or of the proposed project. It is a response to researchers’ expectations of finding the social world they study to be dynamic (and nuanced), rather than stable and fixed. But this doesn't mean that interpretive researchers are always on “shaky” or “loose” ground. Rather, it means that, like captains of a ship, they are more attuned to changing weather conditions and riding the resulting waves, instead of strictly following the initial course that they might have laid out on dry ground.14
In developing the literature review section of a research design—which sows the seeds for what is commonly the first main section of a research manuscript (see Chapter 7)—the researcher articulates the research question. Some disciplines and their journals, some universities or departments, some individual dissertation advisors understand this to mean literally a formally constructed question, and some places or advisors further expect it to be written with a nested series of sub-questions and even sub-sub-questions, in numbered sequence (1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2, etc.). In other cases, disciplines or advisors expect a more narrative identification of the focus of research and its entailments, although even here this is commonly spoken of as a research “question,” even when it does not take that form. Joe Soss (personal communication, 1 March 2010) suggests that the formulation of formal questions and nested sub-questions “too often assumes a hypothesis-testing model. Committee members push students to state the question they will answer and then show how their design will guarantee an answer that, in principle, could go ‘either way’,” i.e., either confirm or refute the hypothesis.
We agree with Soss's suggestion that although for pedagogical purposes it can be useful to ask students to formulate formal questions, “we . . . should view these questions as starting points that will give [researchers] a foundation for developing better questions in the field.” His explication of this strategy itself enacts the iterative–recursive thinking and field-based learning that characterizes an abductive logic of inquiry:
The point is not to ask the question so that you can go out and find the answer. The point is to ask a question so that you can clarify your thinking now and raise the odds that you'll discover what's wrong with your thinking when you get into the field. . . . The initial question sets you on a path, and, while it may get disrupted in the field, it's likely to get disrupted in ways that reflect your original formulation.
(Joe Soss, personal communication, 1 March 2010, original emphasis)
And he adds, in a thought consistent with the flexibility that characterizes interpretive research, “We need to promote the assumption that questions should change during research and also fight the idea that this means we should care less about the initial formulation of the question” (personal communication, 1 March 2010, original emphasis). This formulation of the matter provides the basis for engaging the character of “hypotheses” in interpretive research, discussed further in Chapter 3.
So far, so good. But what constitutes an “adequate” literature review can vary according to the epistemological presuppositions endorsed by a scholarly community. Interpretive and positivist research can be equally theoretical, but the purpose, value, and character of theory are conceived of quite differently. Interpretive and positivist approaches differ in how the literature is handled in the research writing and what work it is expected, and made, to do in the logic of inquiry enmeshed in the research design. In positivist research the literature review and the generation of hypotheses are intimately connected—the literature is assessed in order to generate precise hypotheses that are or can be related to specific theoretical propositions. In interpretive research, the research literature is typically used to develop the researcher's prior knowledge about the issues that inform a research question, as well as about the setting in which the research will be carried out. Theorizing remains connected to lived experience, understood in all of its messy contextuality, rather than following more “formal” expostulations in language and logic, often in mathematical forms.15
And then there is the “peculiar” status of concepts in interpretive research, at least from the perspective of other, more objectivist approaches.
Do Concepts “Emerge from the Field”?
More on Theory and Theorizing
In arguing that they want to allow the relevant concepts to “emerge from the field,” interpretive methodologists have obscured the status of theory and theorizing in their work for those in other epistemic communities, in ways that are not helpful for mutual understanding. As noted in Chapter 1, the phrase is intended to signal an orientation toward concepts as they are encountered and used in the lived experience of those who are “native” to the context that the researcher is studying (by contrast with concepts defined a priori by the researcher, privileging theoretical literature over lived experience). Understood among members of interpretive epistemic communities as a kind of shorthand for a broader set of methodological concerns, this articulation is not the most precise description of research processes to use in discussing interpretive knowledge generation with members of other epistemic communities, implying as it does that researchers enter the research arena as blank slates, with no prior knowledge, whether theoretical–conceptual or experiential.
Phenomenologically, this is not possible—one always brings one's prior knowledge, based on experience and on personal, educational, and other background, to a setting (whether research or other). Researchers do not enter the field or the archives as tabulae rasae, but they do seek to ascertain and explore concepts as these are used by the human agents they are studying—the everyday, “ordinary language” (the concept comes from Austin and Wittgenstein; see Schaffer 2006) that characterizes the setting being studied, in its time and in its place. Given their focus on meaning-making and the production of contextual knowledge, interpretive research projects are designed to foster context-specific, situated (“bottom-up”) concept development. This approach contrasts with the considerable attention to a priori concept formation and the associated operationalization of concepts into variables and indices that characterize positivist research, whether quantitative or qualitative (Adcock and Collier 2001).
The statement about concepts emerging from the field also minimizes the role played by the theoretical literature that informs the research question, focusing and shaping the researcher's attention in particular ways, discussed above. Misunderstandings or even misuse of Glaser and Strauss's “grounded theory”—one of the methods commonly cited by qualitative and interpretive researchers (Glaser and Strauss 1967; see also Locke 1996)—have contributed to this confusion. As clarified by Strauss and Corbin (1990), this method posits a particular, iterative relationship between theory and data, the former both emerging from and framing the latter. Although the concepts-from-the-field shorthand resonates with members of interpretive epistemic communities, because its literal sense can be methodologically misleading for both newer interpretive researchers and those in other epistemic communities, it needs to be used with care. Depending on the context within which it is used, its meanings may need to be spelled out.
Even though interpretive researchers seek to understand the concepts and meaning-making of those who are “native” to the context they are studying, it does not follow that they are simple conduits of research participants’ concepts; researchers are also, perforce, sense-makers. In other words, the ontological character of the representations of the worlds they study, as assembled and published in research texts, is also of concern. An interpretive methodological approach understands researchers’ texts as “ways of world-making” (Goodman 1978)—not merely describing the social and political worlds they present, but actually creating them for the reader through the judicious selection of words and phrases (see also Clifford and Marcus 1986, Golden-Biddle and Locke 1993, 1997, Gusfield 1976, Polkinghorne 1988, Van Maanen 1988). As Kevin Bruyneel (2011) writes, with reference to postcolonial analysis and citing Giyatri Spivak, this understanding translates into a refusal of “the notion that there are objective or benign ways to write and to read . . . .” Such issues of representation have been extensively theorized in interpretive, feminist, and other methodological literatures (e.g., Becker 1967, Nader 1972, Harding 1993) in terms of researcher identity and power. The latter are manifest in choice and articulation of an initial research topic and question, in the ways in which evidence is generated (rather than discovered), and in deskwork and textwork treatments—all issues considered initially in a design. “Writing up the results,” then, is not an afterthought of interpretive research, a secondary task of “mere communication” in which author-speakers direct a “signal” through a communications channel to a reader-receiver. It is understood, instead, as fundamentally a scholarly, political act of persuasion that requires careful attention to the many elements it can (or should) contain which produce a trustworthy research study (Schwartz-Shea 2006, Yanow 2009, Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2009). One element in particular, reflexivity (taken up in Chapter 6), provides one way these complex issues are recognized and made transparent for readers.
Where do concepts come from? Concepts emerging from the field in a bottom-up fashion—concept development, rather than a priori concept formation—clearly demarcates interpretive from positivist research designs. At a more philosophical level, this discussion points to the interrelationships among “facts,” “concepts,” and “theories.” Whereas “theory” is often understood as conjectural, “fact” is taken to have the opposite meaning—as certain, real, truthful, proven. But “facts” can be understood as crystallized concepts—areas of lived experience that have produced widespread intersubjective agreement such that only a historical excavation can reveal their constructedness. The facticity of “time” as understood now, for example, only formally emerged with the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference. “Concepts” stand between “facts” and “theories”—and this position, which encompasses some slippage between the other two, depending on the research approach, explains their distinctive treatments in interpretive and positivist logics of inquiry.
In the last several sections, we have been chasing the puzzle, abductively, of where research questions come from. What this discussion should bring into high relief is the notion that interpretive research does not begin with formal hypotheses, nor does it have a single, uniform, universal first step. Instead, it begins with something puzzling. And that may originate with some personal experience (sometimes in a work setting, but not always) that the researcher is puzzling about and wishes to understand more fully; or it may have its origins in some aspect of a discussion in the theoretical literature that the researcher likewise finds puzzling and wishes further to understand. The research idea develops out of an iterative engagement between the two—lived experience and theory—and becomes more fully articulated in the process of thinking back and forth between and across them.16
With this clarification of the place of concepts in interpretive research and the roles of prior knowledge, expectations, puzzles, and theoretical literature in generating research questions, we turn in the final section of this chapter to a more explicitly philosophical–methodological rendering of the ontological and epistemological presuppositions that underpin interpretive methodologies and methods.
Where Do Research Questions Come From? Ontological and
Epistemological Presuppositions in Interpretive Research
Underlying the preceding discussion is a set of methodological presuppositions concerning the ontological and epistemological standpoints that inform a particular piece of research. Much has been written on this topic, and as our purpose in this volume is to engage at greater length with research designs than with the philosophy of (social) science—to the extent that these can be separated—we will give only enough of a background to show how the foregoing discussions and the subsequent chapters relate methodologically to these philosophical tenets. We point the reader to the brief bibliography at the end of the chapter and to the reference sections of other cited works for treatments of these topics at greater length.
In brief, the differences between research approaches that are informed by positivist philosophical presuppositions and those informed by interpretivist ones hinge on whether the scientist treats research and the theories it “tests” or generates and supports as an exact replication mirroring the social-political world, which the researcher studies from a position external to that world, or sees research findings as resulting from intersubjective, meaning-focused processes that themselves interact with and potentially shape the worlds we study. Even though, within the philosophy of science, neopositivists have accepted the idea that observation is theory-laden—which would mean that the researcher is always positioned within a way of seeing and knowing characteristic of an epistemic community (one meaning of Kuhn's use of “paradigm”; Kuhn 1996: 176–91), rather than capable of purely external observation and exact replication—this view has largely not made it into textbook and other discussions of empirical research and, in particular, into the evaluative standards used to assess empirical work.
To return to the example of interviewing, from the perspective of a methodology informed by positivist presuppositions, which hold that social realities exist independently of the researcher or the researched, interviews would be conducted to ascertain what “really” happened in a particular situation; and if different interview “subjects” provide different versions of what should be, in this view, a singular truth, the data are suspect. In this approach, an interviewer is, or should be, concerned with whether subjects are lying; and if they are, the material they narrate is not considered good data and cannot be used (on this and the counterargument, see Fujii 2010).
By contrast, from the perspective of a methodology informed by interpretivist presuppositions, which hold that we live in a world of potentially multiple, intersubjective social realities in which the researcher (as well as the researched) is also an interpreter of events that transpire and sometimes an actor in them, an interview might be conducted to ascertain how the particular person interviewed experienced the event in question; and if different interview participants provide different versions of the event, that is normal and to be expected. Indeed, it is precisely those differences that are of analytic interest to the researcher, as they suggest what is significant—what is meaning-ful—about the event to each person speaking. What the researcher is after, in fact, are the several interpretations, in order to understand wherein the differences of experience and interpretation lie. This is what Gusfield (1963), for instance, did in analyzing changing intersubjective attitudes toward drinking that led to the US temperance movement, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, and its eventual repeal. Luker (1984) follows a similar path in analyzing the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” groups in the US abortion debates, noting that what divided their members is a set of values concerning the meaning of woman and motherhood. In public policy studies, such analyses can help explain difficulties in policy implementation (in environmental policy, e.g., see Linder, 1995, on electro-magnetic frequency emissions or Swaffield, 1998, on the meanings of “landscape” in New Zealand policy debates).
The discussion throughout the chapter and, indeed, the book as a whole rests on key ideas that derive from hermeneutics and phenomenology. Focusing on the fact that human meanings are not expressed directly, but instead are embedded by their creators in (or projected onto) the physical, linguistic, and enacted artifacts they create, hermeneutic thinkers articulated a set of guidelines that could be agreed upon within an interpretive or epistemic community for making meaning of those artifacts. Initially, this meant interpreting the written word: given its origins in sets of contending rules for interpreting Biblical texts, hermeneutics’ initial concern in its application to the social world more broadly was with written artifacts (including, e.g., fiction, poetry, non-fiction; here is where interpretive methods’ linkage to mid- to late-twentieth-century literary theories and the focus on language come from). This conceptualization was later extended to analyses of spoken language, acts, and physical artifacts and their meanings. The older hermeneutic idea of formal sets of accepted rules to guide interpretation is carried forward in some types of social science, such as conversation analysis in some of its forms. In other modes of analysis, what is carried over from hermeneutics is primarily the idea that “text analogues” (Taylor 1971; see also Ricoeur 1971) are susceptible of interpretation in order to learn their intersubjectively shared, and different, meanings. Ethnographic, participant observation, ethnomethodological, and other modes of analysis are infused with this understanding of their meaning-focused, semiotic character: they seek to elicit meaning by rendering spoken words and/or acts, and the objects referred to or used in these, as written texts and applying to them a hermeneutic analytic sensibility.
Phenomenology, from Edmund Husserl's late-nineteenth-century writings to Alfred Schütz's mid-twentieth-century ones, focuses on the meaning-making that takes place in the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) of the individual and in social, political, cultural, and other groups. Everyday life is understood to consist of common sense, taken for granted, unspoken, yet widely shared and tacitly known “rules” for acting and interacting, the articulation of which constitutes one of the central concerns of phenomenological analysis (including ethnomethodology, its and other forms of conversation analysis, symbolic interaction, ethnography, and participant observation). The social scientist, himself embedded in that social reality, must estrange himself sufficiently from that unspoken, intersubjective common sense to render it “uncommon,” reflect on it, and make sense of it.
The key ideas generated by these philosophies which together form the backdrop for interpretive methods are:
- • that the artifacts humans create, whether in the form of language, objects, or acts, embody what is meaningful to their creators at the time of their creation;
- • that those artifacts may, however, have other meanings to other (groups of) people who encounter and/or use them: knowledge is situated and contextual (or “local”), as are “knowers” (including researchers);
- • that what is meaningful at the time of an artifact's creation might change over time or in a different location of usage;
- • that meaning-making—the interpretation and understanding of those artifacts and their meaning—has no one, single starting point; instead, meaning-making begins wherever it begins, with whatever the interpreter (including researchers) knows or understands at that point in time, in that place (his or her prior knowledge);
- • that meaning-making draws on “lived experience”—a term that has come in some treatments to include the holistic, embodied ways in which humans move through the world;
- • that meaning-making is a social practice, as well as an individual one (in many cases, the former providing the interpretive repertoire for the latter);
- • that language is not a transparent referent for what it designates nor does it merely “mirror” or “reflect” an external world but, instead, plays a role in shaping or “constituting” understandings of that world, and is itself, in this sense, one of the “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman 1978).
One additional point: phenomenologists have been criticized, largely by critical theorists, for being too preoccupied with individual meaning-making, at the expense of a consideration of more institutional phenomena, including power. Whereas this criticism may well hold at the level of philosophy, when phenomenology is brought into the context of political and other social sciences, its concerns tend to shift, or expand, to include collectives such as organizations, communities, governments, and the like. What might be called an “applied” hermeneutic phenomenology, then, perforce engages power dynamics—although the extent of this engagement varies among scholars and across disciplines and analytic approaches, with discourse analysts perhaps more inclined than ethnomethodologists to focus on power and related dimensions. Further explication of these and other ideas in interpretive thinking can be found in the list of sources that follows on the next page.
A Short Bibliography of Key Sources in Interpretive
Social Science
Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books.
Brown, Richard Harvey. 1976. “Social Theory as Metaphor.” Theory and Society 3: 169–97.
Bruner, Jerome S. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Burrell, Gibson and Morgan, Gareth. 1979. Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann.
Dallmayr, Fred R. and McCarthy, Thomas A., eds. 1977. Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Fay, Brian. 1996. Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–32. New York: Basic Books.
Hawkesworth, M. E. 1988. Theoretical Issues in Policy Analysis. Albany: SUNY Press.
Hiley, David R., Bohman, James F., and Shusterman, Richard, eds. 1991. The Interpretive Turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
McCloskey, Donald N. 1985. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1983. Methodology for the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds. 1979, 1985. Interpretive Social Science, 1st and 2nd eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1971. “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.” Review of Metaphysics 25: 3–51. Reprinted in Dallmayr and McCarthy, 1977, 101–31 and in Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979, 25–71 (both cited above).