Gaining qualitative perspective: A career interview with Roy Ruckdeshel

Family background

Roy grew up in a working class family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of immigrants. His mother was a “housekeeper maid kind of person” who worked for “for some rich folk,” and his father was a “truck driver for this catering firm.” Of his father, Roy said

he worked very hard for very little money … He worked these long hours and … He was part of the Teamsters, but …  the Teamsters did nothing for him. So he put in a lot of time, a lot of work in, without much by way of remuneration.

Roy’s father “was old school,” having been born in Germany and fought “in the Prussian cavalry or something like that, in World War I.” Family lore has it that he jumped ship” at a U.S. port. Although he became a U.S. citizen, some “30 years later,” Roy’s father “never gave up on his German identity.” On the other hand, his mother was “born in Austria” and “hated Germans. So there was no conversation about the old country, I never learned to speak German,” reported Roy, “a fact I rue, I wish I would have been exposed.”

The family lived in the housing projects, an experience that shaped Roy’s identity, “We weren’t poor-poor, but working class poor – public housing, that’s where we lived … for this part of my life. I remember the shame of that, I remember … I internalized a good deal of shame.”

In spite of the family’s circumstances, Roy’s parents ensured a rigorous education for their son:

I went to this Wisconsin Synod Lutheran high school … it is the most conservative of the branches of Lutheranism. And I also went to this Wisconsin Lutheran Synod grade school. I ended up there because my parents and I weren’t happy with me being in the neighborhood school. I don’t know how they ever afforded it, but I ended up going through the whole Wisconsin Lutheran thing, and it’s a very different world, it’s the 5,000 years old world … It’s the most traditional brands of Lutheranism, the kind that would have trouble with lesbian-gay phenomena, have trouble with [the] pro-life thing.

In spite of his working class roots, Roy concluded of his parents,

I think in fairness to them … I was always encouraged to go as far as I could. There was never a thing where you are not going to go to college or anything like that. It was understood I would have to find a way to pay for it, but those were the days when colleges and universities …  [were] affordable, it was ridiculously affordable when the books were more expensive than tuition. So … thank God for that, I don’t know if …  [I had to face the] kinds of economic realities kids now have, I might have taken a different path.”

Viet Nam War: A context for educational decisions

Roy came of age during the tumultuous period of the mid-1960s. He noted “all the unrest that was happening” and “the war in Vietnam, it was just starting to heat up.” Lyndon Johnson had ascended to the U.S. Presidency after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Reelected in 1964, U.S. involvement in the Viet Nam War escalated dramatically during the Johnson Administration. By 1967, the year Roy graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, there were nearly 500,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Viet Nam. In the nine years between 1964 and 1973, “the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million” (U.S. Army History). Roy, along with millions of other young men, would make a series of educational and professional decisions in this context.

Although the policy of compulsory military draft pre-dated the Viet Nam War, the war’s escalation put previously inert policy into practice. In the earliest years of Roy’s post-high school education, deferments for military service were “granted to students who enrolled in college-level” Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) (U.S. Army History). So Roy had joined ROTC. However, after serving “for like a year and a half,” he said, “whether I read the tea leaves, or I just was unhappy with the thought of being sent to the war or whatever, I thought ‘I’m leaving ROTC.”

By the time he graduated, in 1967, things had changed. “There was very much the threat of the draft at that time,” and “it looked like I could be drafted at that point.” The situation gave him pause,

So I was starting to think about options – multiple perspectives, here. I didn’t feel like going to Canada … I didn’t feel like trying to trick the draft board … like eating ten tons of chocolate. I don’t know how much of that stuff was mythological anyway.”

Roy had “read the tea leaves” correctly. Circumstances changed dramatically in late 1969 when Congress initiated a lottery system for the draft that did not include deferment for ROTC cadets. It was also the year Roy graduated with his MSW. He said, “along the way I did get a draft notice, and I did report to the draft board. Gave it some thought, but I did go.” Roy who has been nearsighted his entire life wryly observed,

for the first time in my life my lousy vision was to my advantage. I am very near-sighted and the person who did the examination – I failed the first one, I can’t even see the wall, so then they take you in an afternoon to be seen by an ophthalmologist, someone who is less likely to be fooled.

A sociological twist on the road to social work: Rigor and methods

Roy also volunteered “at a local neighborhood house … a facility that provides all kind of services to boys and girls and kids and, to some extent, adults” which was located “within the confines of the public housing project” in which he grew up and it “got me interested in actual social work.”

In addition to the Viet Nam War, it was a period when racial tensions were boiling over in a number of U.S. cities. Roy noted “there was considerable unrest … in the cities. Detroit, and others. Milwaukee did have a … whatever you want to call it … a racial unrest situation.” So, while in the social work program, Roy wrote a master’s thesis entitled, “An Analysis of Black Power Responses in the Milwaukee Study of Civil Disorder” which he found fascinating but much of the rest of the MSW curriculum left him uninspired. “Probably this is an unfair thing to say … but – I thought it was not very rigorous. I thought there was a lot to be left desired in what we were being taught.”

Roy’s perception that social work lacked rigor drove him to select a PhD program in sociology, foreshadowing a life-long quest to infuse the rigor he found in the social science of sociology with the practical aspects of social work. “Well, I want to pursue academia,” he remembered, “but I am not sure I want to pursue social work, I think maybe where I belong is sociology …” It was “more rigorous anyway than the social work that I was exposed to.” So his next educational stop was Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, for a doctoral degree in Sociology.

At Case, Roy’s concerns about rigor took a methodological turn. Roy took courses with Lloyd Rogler and Irwin Deutscher exposing him to qualitative methods. Both professors were prominent sociologists. Rogler had done extensive field work among the poor in Puerto Rico and continued to develop his ideas on participatory observation as a method of study. Deutscher “was very interested in the study of the relationship between attitudes and behavior, believing there was a disconnect between attitudes one had … and what you were actually doing in behavior.” Reported Roy, so “I got interested in symbolic interactionism.” Deutscher also had an activist bent and would ultimately publish a book, “Making a Difference: The Practice of Sociology.” Its thesis was that “measurement techniques can interfere with understanding” how social programs work (Deutscher, 1999). Deutscher’s book sought to bridge the gap between theory and applied research in order to produce a “useful sociology.” Interestingly, all these ideas—measurement, rigor, social theory, and useful practice—will become clearly evident in Roy’s own writing as a mature scholar.

Nonetheless at the time, Roy’s ultimate assessment of symbolic interactionism and qualitative research echoed a common refrain, “my initial take on it was that it wasn’t very rigorous.” So in spite of the influence of Rogler and Deutscher when it came time to design his own dissertation study, “I did a conventional survey dissertation,” following the path expected of students at the time. Intrigued by “the sociology of education,” Roy surveyed 100 public grade school teachers, employed in under-resourced elementary schools in Cleveland, asking them “50 questions worth” of information. A condition of access to the teachers was “I had to interview them at their time and choice of location. And a lot of them chose to do it while they were in school.” Unexpectedly, this offered an inside glimpse of the working conditions faced by the teachers in the struggling public school system which was “hard-pressed” and “not in good shape.”

The in situ interviews led Roy to two startling discoveries. First, the information he gained from the teachers before and after the formal survey was far more interesting than that gleaned from the survey instrument itself. “So even though it was a structured interview I talked to them before and after, and I came to think that was far more useful, that conversation, than what was in my survey.” In particular, he recalled speaking to one teacher. “I said, ‘Well, how are you doing?’ and he said ‘Well, not too good.’” One of his students had just “tried to strangle him.” Roy’s second discovery was that observational evidence supplemented the survey. “I was exposed to more of the actual educational environment … only kind of a surface look. But still – it made an impression on me.”

Both discoveries influenced Roy’s overall thinking about the survey project, if not his immediate course of action. When he asked his advisor if he could include some of these informal interactions in his dissertation thesis he was warned, “No, don’t … You could put a little preface on it or something if you want, but don’t make a big deal out of it.” So, in the end, Roy did a “conventional data analysis, cross-tabs path analysis, etc … Stuff like that” and produced a traditional dissertation entitled “Teachers and their Unions: A rank and file perspective.” However, not willing to let the matter drop entirely,

when it came the time for me to defend it I chose an unusual tack: I chose to attack my own dissertation! On the grounds that I thought we were missing much – a lot by doing this kind of survey stuff, and that the far more interesting stuff was what would happen before or after the interview.

Significantly, while working on his doctorate, Roy also met his future wife Mary Kuester. At the time, she was a social work student. Commenting on his continual dance between social work and sociology he said, “The other part of the irony is I met my wife at Cleveland, Case Western, and she was in social work … And [the social work school] was literally the other side of the street, in Cleveland.”

Since Roy had both a doctoral degree in sociology and a master’s degree in social work, he was poised to capitalize on a moment that saw university social work departments hiring faculty with doctoral degrees from related disciplines because of the dearth of those from social work. He noted, “it appeared to me that I had a better chance at getting a position in a social work program than I had in a sociology program.”

To some extent, this fortunate combination of personal and professional commingling of social work and sociology led Roy to his faculty position at SLU, a Jesuit institution, in the social work department in 1974. It was a position he held for the rest of his life.

His wife found employment “at Barnes Hospital and for a period of time was the Manager of Social Work for Barnes. She was a social work administrator.” Roy confessed

she was very skilled and professional as a social worker … and she is the better social worker than am I, I mean she really is, far and away … And she has always been a strong advocate of social work. Our kids have been respectful of social work, but they … went in different directions, mostly education, actually. Counseling and education.

Teaching at St. Louis University: A decisive qualitative turn

SLU offered both BSW and MSW degrees. Roy started teaching in the area of human behavior where he immediately attempted to nudge the existing curriculum away from a “neo-Freudian” approach to one encompassing “symbolic interactionist.” That continued, Roy chuckled, until “someone tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘You know, you really ought to run that through committees.”

His sociological training in social structures was always present. He engaged in:

All kind of looking behind the individual, looking constantly for structures, for social groupings and what things mean more on a … societal and systemic level. So at times I get pretty hostile to psychology. Psychology is my whipping boy/girl, because so much stuff comes out of … the psychological perspective, and it’s all ‘the individual this and the individual that,’ and the sociologist in me won’t have any of that. So, I mean, you can talk about things being an individual responsibility, and certainly some of what I believe is an individual response, but I see myself as embedded in social systems … in social structures and in social relationships and that’s … The question, the old chicken and egg question of which comes first, the individual or the social. They come together, there is no answer to that one. But we live in a world that psychologizes things a lot … In so many ways that is wrong, it doesn’t get at the heart of the matter, it puts the blame in places where it shouldn’t be.

Intersecting areas of scholarship: A qualitative perspective

Of his own career as a scholar, Roy noted it coincided with a time when

there wouldn’t have been enormous pressure to publish, there was some pressure to publish, you want to get to be a tenured associate and publish, but it wasn’t like you need 20 articles or 30 or something like that, so I knew I had to publish but I didn’t feel under enormous pressure and … I didn’t publish a lot initially.

This synthesis of ideas and solidification of interest is evident in four early articles. In the first, Roy and a colleague Buford Farris, carefully traced the history of social thought—including the merging of phenomenology and pragmatism to produce ethnomethodology—in order to explore the possibility of linking social action and social structure in a common conversation (Farris and Ruckdeschel, 1981). In their words, “The issue is one of integrating a theory of action with a theory of social structure or social system” and argued that common ground can be found by taking an interactionsist approach. Furthermore, if this approach of “theories of action and of structure” is accepted, “then one must of necessity have an information gathering mechanism. This would appear to be a research task” for which positivistic approaches would be ill-suited. They saw the solution in methodologies that recognized a subjective human actor as the primary instrument for data gathering. In short, they write, “We are not arguing for the ‘application’ of qualitative research to community organization. We are arguing instead for the qualitative-community organizers-researcher!” (p. 131). In hindsight, this article is interesting for the careful treatment of social theories, the bridging of macro and micro approaches, and the insistence that theory is not distinct from methodology but rather connected and continuous.

In the second article, the same pair wade into a raging debate existing among social work scholars of the day. At the time, the use of “single case design” (SCD) was being promoted as a panacea for a number of ills. Among them was the lack of evidence of effectiveness of social work models of intervention. This inadequacy was being “explicitly tied” to assessments about the rigor of methodological designs professing to evaluate effectiveness. In this context, Walter Hudson famously posited two axioms. The first was, “If you cannot measure the client’s problem, it does not exist.” The second was, “If you cannot measure the client’s problem, you cannot treat it.” The SCD (also known as Single Subject Design, N = 1, or ABA design) called for practitioners to evaluate their own practice using quasi-experimental designs in which a single subject became the object of a pre and post-intervention evaluation. Of course, doing so relied heavily on a question of what measurement was used.

In what Roy described as his “breakthrough article,” he and Farris took a strong stance against this approach (Ruckdeschel and Farris, 1981). For them, every aspect of this argument was problematic. In particular, they feared the loss of context and the reductionist tendencies of equating evaluation and practice with measurement. In addition, they argued that client’s “feelings, desires, and wants” had to be factored in which required subjective and interactionist strategies. Of the article, Roy said:

So we wrote this article and it was pretty much a frontal assault on the subject of single design, and I sent it off to Social Work and they said ‘We are not interested. This is not rigorous enough, this does not add any value to practice.’ So then we sent it to Social Casework (now Societies and Families)  … And they published it. And that article got a lot of attention because it hit at about the right time when … Oh, let’s face it, the single subject design was full of crap. There were a lot of problems with it, and it was being taught in the most simplistic, positivist, as a quasi-experimental design, violating all kind of statistical assumptions … so the timing was right … it opened some doors for me … It allowed me to do more writing in that area, and so … if there was a turning point it was that. It was a turning point for me.

Building on the evaluation debate, Roy wrote a third article with a colleague in Social Work, Don Malon in which they examined the growing body of literature “on evaluation and the assessment of practice” (Ruckdeschel and Malon, 1982). They rejected the one-size-fits all research methodology or what they call, “an implicit assumption underlying some of this namely that the research model is treated as a constant or a given and that the practice modality is treated as a variable.” It is an assumption that they fear “inevitably leads one to ask how practice must conform to the requirements of research.” Instead, they call for a wide range of research methodologies to be available to evaluate a wide range of practice models. Significantly, they wrote, “our concern is not with whether a research model is right or wrong per se, but rather with how the assumptions of the research model line up with the assumptions of the practice model.”

Finally, in the work that Roy considers “one of my best” and most important piece of scholarship, he makes a full-throated argument for the “qualitative perspective” rather than viewing qualitative research “simply as a methodology.” In doing so, he fuses theory and methodology rather than seeing them as two distinct concepts. He argues that the qualitative perspective

is built around a set of assumptions about human behavior—a social theory—and a corresponding set of techniques for gathering data about that behavior. In the perspective, the social theory and the methodology stand in dialectical relationship to each other.

Birth of a qualitative journal

In 1999, Ian Shaw, a faculty member at Cardiff University in the U.K. approached Roy about a new idea. “He was very interested in publishing … a journal” which would be dedicated to qualitative research. Roy admitted, “I didn’t know him – at all. I mean, I was a classic American sociologist social worker, I didn’t know anything about Europe – there’s a continent over there.” He laughed, “That’s about it.” Roy’s response was, “‘Really … a whole new journal in qualitative methods?’ And I thought ‘Oh, why not?’” Roy says of Ian, “He deserves all the credit for initiating the whole concept of this journal. I never try to say otherwise.”

Both men had independently reached the conclusion that social work scholars needed a home for their work which seemed to be largely shut out of the mainstream journals. Both men had wrestled with questions of making sense of social work practice, theory, and research. Both were interested in social work practice but also structural theories, often inspired by sociology. In addition, Ian continually challenged Roy’s admittedly U.S.-centric worldview—a limitation that continues to plague U.S. social work scholarship—and insisted on taking a more globally inclusive perspective.

At a time before Skype, the pair did “a lot of emails.” But eventually “we decided we needed to actually get together to flesh out the details of the journal.” Ian traveled to St Louis and the pair spent “like two weeks” at Roy’s place designing a new journal. ¹ Among the important decisions was that it would be “published through … the UK – not the U.S.” because “We knew that we wanted it to be an international journal.” Ian would be responsible for developing the “European side of things,” Roy “was going to take care” of the American side, and eventually the pair would invite Robyn Munford to “handle the Asia side.”

The men also worked on the all-important first editorial, A Room with a View (Shaw and Ruckdeschel, 2002). Among other things, it laid out a “broad canvas” of interest and urged authors to “challenge the basic assumptions of social work research and practice” (p. 6). They hoped to be inclusive of research and practice as well as embrace the “international and interdisciplinary nature of those worlds” (p. 6).

Starting the new journal was both “very exciting” as well as “very time-consuming.” Back in “the old days,’ Roy reminisced—not altogether fondly—“my God, we actually sent out copies” of manuscripts by postal mail, “you know? Wow, I mean, that was something. It took forever and that is why, when email came along, that was like a huge, huge advance for us” he said laughing but also adding, “Although I still remember the time people [said] ‘I don’t do email’.”

As it happened

This conference [ICQI] came up very early … pretty close to when the journal came out, so this became a point of salvation for me, especially given the … other conferences in social work – like SSWR, I never felt at home at SSWR.

Roy reflected on the importance of QSW and ICQI for the next generation of qualitative researchers. Bringing QSW and ICQI to life, “that was our role. That’s why we were there.” He noted

And you see it so clearly when you see those discussions in social work circles. You still see the way that doctoral students and assistant professors talk about feeling isolated, in need of support, and being in departments that are completely hostile to qualitative methods. It is still the case, even though it is a lot better …  [but]  … you are still the odd personnel, you are still the one who is going to have a hard time publishing a lot of things, because of their nature, you still are going to have more difficulty getting funding - you can, it is possible, but it is not … it is not an easy road to take.

Qualitative analysis of university politics and good citizenship

Among other things, Roy was very active in faculty governance at SLU. He served on the Faculty Senate, headed the School Rank and Tenure Committee, and joined the university Rank and Tenure Committee. He said, “I thought they were important … I thought that was my obligation … So, I was … really, pretty active in faculty governance.”

In addition, Roy served in an administrative role as the director of the Master’s Program. He briefly flirted with the idea of applying for deanships but after dealing “with administrative matters as Director of the masters’ program,” and siting on “I don’t know how many dean searches,” he thought, “Oh my God, what you have to do to get to be a dean, and the grief you go through.’ I abandoned that idea.”

More significantly, however, Roy played a very active role in protecting—as best he could—the school from a series of threats within the University itself. Roy observed,

A university is an inherently political machine … and I suppose … almost anybody in an academic position, are inevitably confronted with political issues in universities, and with the many ways in which a person can be silenced, a voice can be silenced.

In the first, a new university president “felt we were not paying for ourselves” and “made the argument that … if a unit is not financially capable,” it should be eliminated. The President pointed a finger at social work. The net result was “a big battle.” Roy said, “This whole process was a very political process and I was involved in the team of faculty that negotiated with him, with the President.” Roy volunteered “because I could see the handwriting on the wall. If you want to make a difference even in your own survival you would better do things that are helpful to that survival.” In the end, it was an effective strategy, the school remained standing but they lost “something like four faculty positions, four or five.”

In another cost saving measure, the University attempted to merge the School of Social Work with Education based on “the mythological grounds that we would be more cost-effective.” Roy again became actively involved. A temporary result was, “We merged with … other kinds of service oriented programs [and became] The College of Education and Public Service.” The merger was a cost-saving fiasco. Roy laughed sarcastically, “The funny thing [is] when you take a bunch of units that are all financially struggling … it’s not going to lead to a big financial gain.”

Closer to Roy’s retirement, there was yet another call for reorganization. Roy thought “So, oh my God … This is crazy, not again.” Nonetheless, Roy volunteered to be “involved in the negotiations up and down the line.” In spite of believing his faculty contingent had produced “the better of the argument” in their “counterpaper, the efforts turned out to be for naught. “We ended up … eventually merging with the School of Public Health … My emeritus position [is] as ‘Emeritus Faculty of the School of Public Health and Social Justice.’

Roy worried about the loss of independence for the school and about its longer term impact. “It has implications for social work curricula. I didn’t like it, I fought against it … I made my point, I thought it would have long-term deleterious effects” He said, adding “It is an environment that, over time, will change the nature of the way social work is taught and delivered.”

A qualitative perspective: ‘It’s who I am.’

“My view of self, I think, has evolved.” Roy said, “I am a qualitative methods researcher.  … I am not looking for any other label, not seeking any other label … And it is kind of who I am.” Pointing to his article on a qualitative perspective, he lamented, “sometimes your best articles are not the ones that get the most attention.” Yet his qualitative perspective carries, “across all forms of practice and life.”

He continued,

If you look at life in social work and politics as a qualitative methodology, as a perspective, you see it in a very different way … I always look at politics, I always look at school battles, always look at them through that lens, I never look at them in any other way, and in a Catholic school there is always the tendency for somebody to take … the high moral ground and invoke high moral principles, when it is really a political battle that’s going on … But, in my view, what’s going on here is … you invoke this [high moral ground] to try and change the conversation, and in fact you are negating the conversation.