Editorial

Welcome to Volume 16 of Qualitative Research. We are delighted to celebrate the 16th year of the journal’s existence. During this time it has established itself as a major international scholarly outlet for the best research and debates in qualitative methodology. Due to the hard work, enthusiasm and expertise of the founding editors, Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont, we have inherited a truly distinctive and well-loved journal. We consider it our great responsibility to continue to promote and maintain the high standards set by its founders. Their journal has played a key role in nurturing and promoting the continuing success of the ‘qualitative turn’ in social research methodology. The extent to which it has done so is readily apparent. In their first editorial in 2001, the founding editors noted that qualitative methods were strong in the disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, geography and social policy, but relatively weak in economics, psychology and political science. Thanks to the increasing ranks of psychologists, economists and political scientists who have embraced qualitative methodology in topics central to their disciplines, it would be hard to make that assertion with confidence today. The linguistic turn, the editors then noted, was already nudging many of these traditionally more quantitative and positivistic disciplines in a qualitative direction. Humanities researchers, too, were then just joining the field of empirical research in significant numbers, and their contribution to qualitative methodological development has since become more visible and substantial. The turn to more mixed methods approaches over the past 15 years has had a further, important influence – albeit one with both positive and more negative effects for qualitative work, bringing with it risks of impoverishment of qualitative depth and a loss of the distinctive contribution that qualitative methodology brings to social inquiry. However, it is no longer necessary, or credible, to complain that qualitative methods are not taken seriously in the wider research community. We recognise that there are many ways in which qualitative methodology is practiced and applied, which are visible in the proliferation of approaches, appropriations and innovations. Following the lead of the founding editors, we intend to maintain the position of Qualitative Research as the authoritative source on qualitative methodological rigour within this landscape.

The founding editors made particular mention of the linguistic turn in 2001 – a major legacy of the last quarter of the 20th century. Since that first issue of the journal, those methods associated with the linguistic turn, employing narrative, discursive, visual, hermeneutic and more broadly ‘communicative’ approaches, have gone from strength to strength, becoming more sophisticated. This heterogeneous array of research areas has contributed to and benefitted from an increasing technical sophistication in handling both large and small corpuses of textual and visual data, often aided by computer software, as well as finding new digital settings to explore (as we discuss further below). They have been joined by other vigorous growth areas. The focus on textually-produced meaning, for example, has recently been supplemented, and rejected by some, in favour of a greater emphasis on the materialities of practice. Approaches in the phenomenological traditions, long associated with more linguistically-aware research, have recently been paying greater attention to embodied, sensory and object-focused ways of knowing. Of course, there is a long tradition in QR of close analysis of extra-linguistic domains of action and interaction and contributions continue to be made from fields such as ethnomethodology and pragmatics that explore these in a range of everyday and institutional settings. Indeed, such empirical studies have often involved methodological innovation in terms of data capture, analysis and representation. Equally, recent reflections on the nature of ‘action’ and practice suggest new ways of conceiving spaces of situated meaning-making. These include new materialisms, post-embodiment perspectives, new forms of phenomenologically-informed, sensory and grounded research, practice theory directions, Deleuzian approaches invoking assemblages and interweavings, actor-network theory, post-humanisms and inquiries into lay normativities. In so far as these continue to pay careful attention to the intellectual and emotional labour of everyday sense-making, they enrich and extend our methodological sensibilities. Many have troubled the assumptions of a more narrowly conceived semiotics focused on the centrality of human discourse and action. Nevertheless, it needs to be said that these affective, embodied and materialist ‘turns’ have necessarily built upon the foundations of the linguistic one, rather than represented a departure from them.

Since 2001, too, newer, more applied disciplines, as in business, organisational and health research have come more clearly to the fore. Studies in science technology, sport and leisure, art and culture could still be invoked in the 2001 editorial as small, specialised fields. They have now developed robust identities of their own, and established lively strands of qualitative methodological research such that many now hold their own conferences and have even launched their own online journals. One further field where real world inquiry has benefitted from the establishment of qualitative methods within the social sciences is environmental and risk studies. Here interpretive risk research makes a distinctive contribution to substantive empirical inquiries, at the forefront of research into entrenched and risk-full social practices and assemblages.

Some of the newer developments emergent in the research landscape at the journal’s launch have since become well-established. This is, of course, particularly the case in the turn to computer-mediated technologies – salient at the time principally in what the editors saw as a then-emerging (and limiting) consensus on the use of qualitative coding software. The impact of new digital networking technologies has been immense. The need to find research methods adapted to the internet age has been a major energiser of qualitative research innovation and technological development. Multimodal and hypermedia approaches have both continued and deepened the vein of semiotic innovation beyond verbal language as well as responded to these new digital landscapes of multimedia communication. CAQDAS development has taken new directions, providing opportunities to integrate and interrogate a variety of data types that include text, images, audio and video data in increasingly complex and novel ways, thereby facilitating a step change in fine-grained studies of social interaction

Other traditions hailed in the original editorial appear to have lost comparative ground. We have already noted developments that take the linguistic turn in new directions. The performative, dramaturgical and autobiographical methods (particularly for representing research findings) noted by the editors as newly buoyant in 2001 have not made notable strides away from the margins since then. (Perhaps if they became mainstreamed they would lose their intrinsic impact.) Realist traditions of writing and doing fieldwork were seemingly under question at that time by the still-vigorous influence of postmodernism. This mantle has since fallen from view and, ironically, is now principally invoked to refer to past research (although the influence of post-structuralism undoubtedly continues in the Deleuzian traditions already mentioned, as well as under other epithets). The founding editors were right to be sceptical of postmodernism’s claims then to be fundamentally new and to be the only non-positivist game in town: the journal has continued to publish many articles that foreground the continued relevance of foundational interpretive traditions. Meanwhile, realism, contrary to appearances in 2001, has continued to supply the dominant mode of ethnographic representation, even after the long fallout attendant on the ‘crisis of representation’. Some of this may well be due to pressures, discussed below, to produce ‘outputs’ designed to attain higher citations in ‘REF-ready’ contexts and other national forms of research performance auditing. The editors in 2001 were already warning us of the dangers of bureaucratised forms of research. On the other hand, life-history, diary and biographical methods, together with photo-elicitations, mosaic and collage experimentations have gone from strength to strength, invigorated by the multiplying digital forms that these can take in social media platforms, as already mentioned. And new ways of interrupting what the founders termed the ‘privileged position of the observer-author’ have continued to be sought, and found, within feminist methodologies, LGBT interventions, post-colonial and post- and trans-human perspectives. Multi-vocal forms of representation, therefore, continue to be developed and we are seeing plenty of lively and experimental submissions from researchers seeking to present their work in more collective, less authorial, anti-oppressive ways.

Doing justice to multiple voices in our research continues to animate the qualitative research community. Indeed, one of the ways in which the contribution of qualitative methods remains distinctive is in the rigorous, systematic and close attention to the accomplishment of intersubjectivity and the operation of what Schutz called ‘the natural attitude’. This is not just about capturing the nuances and lived experiences of our participants but holding their worlds in analytic focus. This ambition, we are pleased to report, is alive and well, as current submissions to the journal attest. Emergent forms of qualitative research have turned to participatory methods in order to draw out the ways in which people might be said to be ‘experts in their own lives’. The strengthening of co-production and participation agendas has enabled research to come to the centre that otherwise might have remained marginalized. As engaging members of the public gains increasing ground as a means of enhancing credibility for academic research, participatory research can bring with it significant advantage – both for scholars and, one hopes, for those members themselves.

We are particularly glad to be welcoming many more submissions from non-western research contexts and authors which deal with methodologies developing in and sensitive to issues in the global south. Many of these are registering and engaging head on the negative impacts of unequal, neoliberal forms of uneven development worldwide. Social change such as migration flows, the impacts of climate change, austerity and rapidity of economic development are all issues of concern to social scientists and lend themselves to qualitative work. In addition to pressing problems arising when people’s lives are afflicted by the daily grind of poverty, we note also that there are significant questions to be answered that are stimulating research about threats to the environment, human societies and well-being that come with affluence. Qualitative research in all its variety can assist with finding contextually sensitive ways of addressing global questions and uncertainties about environmental and climate change and their associated social risks, drawing particular attention to how they take effect in local contexts and affect people’s everyday lives.

These new directions reflect the ways in which qualitative research has never fitted easily into standardised procedures or formulaic modes of representation. Again, the founding editors cautioned against fashioning ready ‘toolkits’ for qualitative research that ultimately only limit its ambition and claims. Ethnography set in train efforts to represent the messiness and multi-layered qualities of diverse everyday lives. Other qualitative developments taking on this mantle have highlighted issues of temporality along with the ethical, epistemic and representational challenges that come along when considering people’s lived lives and told stories alongside one another. Here one possible focus can be on subjects whose biographical experiences are framed and take shape in diverse and intriguing ways in view of the way they inhabit different generations and historical epochs. Important questions have also been raised about how it is possible to avoid unsophisticated binaries that set up unhelpful divisions in qualitative analysis between psychological and social aspects of subjectivity. Indeed, we have been pleased to receive submissions, and look forward to future contributions, that tackle the ways in which the representation of worlds and ‘telling about society’ are necessarily more complex for qualitative researchers and their data. Again, we intend that Qualitative Research remains a vibrant and critical forum for the leading edge of such debates.

This success notwithstanding, there are always new threats, departures and challenges to address. Many of these stem from transformations in the wider globalised and neo-liberal context we currently face, particularly in the growing commercialisation of research and the importation of business-administration models into research environments. Those we will mention below include new funding and academic accountability regimes, new forms, pressures and modes of researcher and participant mobility, new demands to be innovative for its own sake and to create methodological ‘brands’. Positive effects can be identified of researching with different stakeholders and to promote the impact agenda, as we have noted already for proponents of methodologies that emphasize participation and co-production of knowledge. However, it is not always to researchers’ advantage when they are required to respond to these pressures and are faced with the attendant dangers of formalisation. Indeed, the definition and auditing of what counts as impact can often sit uncomfortably alongside, and even exclude, more messy forms of method. Already in 2001, the editors cautioned against emerging tendencies towards increased standardisation of research techniques; they argued against a narrowing of the open exploratory spirit that characterizes the best of qualitative research. They saw fit to warn the research community that ‘it is foolish to try to read off specific methods of data collection or strategies of analysis from specific theoretical orientations’ and ‘singularly unproductive to constrain the complexities of social inquiry within the bounds of narrowly sectarian theory’. Unfortunately, the temptations to seize hold of methodological and theoretical badges, often falsely packaged as new schisms and radical departures, have only intensified since the journal’s founding. This is resulting in more submissions to the journal seeking to market methodological innovations, often using an ever expanding, and yet sometimes conceptually constrained, vocabulary of neologisms. Whilst we wish to recognise the energy and excitement of new directions in the qualitative turn, we are also aware of the danger of establishing and entrenching new silos, just as the founding editors were. Disciplinary links need to continue to be made across a range of work especially when they provide a possible means of creating advantage out of unlikely situations and unwelcome pressures.

We also need to be cautious of rushing to make over-simplistic links to new (highly fundable) intellectual domains. These include the push for more collaborations between the social sciences and the humanities as well as between these and natural science fields such as genetics and micro-biology. These need to have a mutually beneficial purpose, rather than being pursued for their own sake. There are exciting and worthwhile opportunities in doing good interdisciplinary work that builds what are very necessary bridges between the domains of science, social science and the humanities. In a complex and uncertain world, cross-disciplinary collaborations are essential to understand it, and to represent it, as well as opportunistically advantageous for attracting grant funding. We are seeing a notable increase in submissions from researchers collaborating on arts-based projects and practices. Nevertheless, pressures to pursue interdisciplinary collaborations can sometimes also limit the horizons of qualitative research. Intellectual pressures exist to embrace a flat ontology, but we do not need to go to neuroscience to find messiness and multi-layered understandings.

Another big challenge for QR has been the sheer proliferation of data that the research community has had to grapple with in recent years. Of particular note is the rhetoric and reality surrounding big and broad social data associated with social media streams and other ‘open sources’. Whilst this raises challenges for Qualitative Research it also represents a series of opportunities: for example, methodographic studies of new data generation practices, the examination of the relation between ‘small’ and ‘big’ data in the digital age and observational studies of digital metrics, measurement practices and institutional as well as everyday cultures. This is something that will be explored in further detail in a forthcoming themed issue of QR.

Every period has its sense of new times, uncertainties and big challenges, as well as an awareness of accompanying opportunities. As the founding editors asserted in 2001, we have been here before. Remembering, they insisted, is key – as well as welcoming exciting innovation. We wish to continue this legacy. We share their aversion to the amnesia that often accompanies claims to methodological ‘discovery’. In conclusion, we invite our authors to reflect upon what it is that has long made forms of social inquiry that are covered by the sometimes unhelpful umbrella of ‘qualitative research’ analytically distinct from existing alternatives. We recommend that qualitative researchers of all stripes remain unapologetic in their commitment to tackling the complexities of everyday life, the local and the ways in which people’s worlds are constructed and experienced. More than this, we encourage our readers and authors to recognise the legacy bequeathed by pioneers past and current – and indeed the founding editors Paul and Sara – whose methodological work and teaching was always in service of the production of lucid accounts of social phenomena and practice. These represented attempts to gain ever clearer views of ‘where the action is’ – not in some simplistically empiricist mode but rather out of a great respect for the detail of social life. It might well be said that qualitative research is experiencing a moment of crisis; questions of adequacy, ethics and accuracy abound and are perhaps exacerbated within digital society. We, on the other hand, wish to foster the vital contribution that qualitative research has to make to understanding, describing and intervening in the current contours of culture and, moreover, of the future of qualitative social science. And we close by thanking all of those who have contributed to making this journal the success that it is – the Editorial Board, our authors and our readers – and for your continued support over the next four years.