Abstract
Within the recent slew of work exploring qualitative social research, this book’s clear and comprehensive structure is an important contribution to our knowledge of the philosophical and epistemological foundations within qualitative research paradigms. At first glance, Qualitative Social Research appears to boldly go where many scholars have gone before. Indeed, a number of seminal works have explored the processes by which metric and interpretive approaches outline different procedures as well as the strengths and limitations of newer hybrid approaches (for example, Anderson 2012; Lindlof and Taylor, 2011).
The book briefly but concisely provides an overview of the existing perspectives on different research paradigms in order to map how the truth and method were at odds with one another. This claim is largely accurate, though Hans Georg Gadamer (1992 [1976]) in his universal hermeneutics has made an extensive foray into the provisional realities invented by methods and techniques and their broader philosophical consequences. In fact, the authors’ perspective is rather ambitious. Specifically, the authors demonstrate to what extent the fundamental philosophical differences between the research paradigms may differ and how the broad aim of the research varies according to these basic beliefs and values. Thus, they underline the importance of the researcher’s doxa and stored knowledge and argue that whatever method the researcher applies, an ‘imbedded objectivity’ waiting somewhere for discovery, it does not exist.
The authors’ fluid and highly readable writing style will appeal to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. The book engages students and prospective researchers with a conversational writing style and an acknowledgement of the student as a user of the research with taken for granted truths. The book’s consistent critical perspective allows students to achieve a realistic understanding of the accomplishments and problems that are part of the research. Having said that, label this book as a guidebook or simple retooling of earlier theoretical work on the qualitative social research is to miss the nuance of the analysis. Most instances are coming from ‘real world’ experiences and it goes far beyond describing its findings. At a time when much of the literature on digital media concentrates on comparing the features of websites, e-mail, texting and blogging, the book critically confronts ‘big data’ that provide exciting opportunities for researchers and ‘raise questions about both the extent to which our everyday lives are under surveillance and our ability to consent to having our data used for research purposes’ (p.127).
Throughout the book, the authors successfully enter into dialogue with different paradigms, show the importance of the researcher’ self-reflexivity. Each chapter starts with a brief overview and an accessible presentation of the key topics and ends with an analysis of the importance and implications of relevant concepts. The book provides resources for further reading from key books and key authors thus helps with concept retention. The first chapters outline within comparative tables the four major research paradigms of positivist, post-positivist, critical and constructivist approaches and their distinctive features and patterns. This perspective stimulates the debate around their ‘embedded objectivity’ and the way the researcher produces knowledge while using them.
The book demonstrates the nuances of the key terms of qualitative research paradigm with reference to the grounded theory terminology and discusses them with empirical instances. Given the somewhat disparate nature of previous research on the different versions of grounded theory in social research, this overall look brings welcome clarification regarding their link between epistemological, practical, ethical, political and methodological issues.
In subsequent chapters, the study’s well-written design helps readers to observe people and texts and ‘physical traces’ as objects and other traces that people leave behind including non-textual digital traces. One of the most interesting features of the book is its creative use of techniques and processes where there is paucity of research such as graffiti analysis and the use of accretion and erosion measures for the analysis of physical traces describing their relative advantages and disadvantages.
Taken in its entirety, Qualitative Social Research makes an important and timely contribution to the study of qualitative research and to its contentious and challenges. The authors also demonstrate the value of critical thinking and discuss important trends influencing the future of that research.