Qualitative Inquiry

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

This article describes some of the essential features of a methodological approach to studying individuals’ deeper motivations and experiences. The overall approach consists of “interviewing for feeling” with “the participant as ally and co-contemplator,” “conceptually developed essentialist portraiture,” and cross-case discussion, with an epistemology based on C. H. Cooley’s principle of “sympathetic introspection.” The heart of the article is an example of an analysis of excerpts from an interview with an English as a second language teacher regarding her interest in language. The analysis illustrates how to see and conceptualize the manner in which certain essential aspects in the participant’s consciousness and overall orientation evolve in time. This example is then used to illustrate several concerns of portraiture and the epistemological presuppositions of the approach.

This article describes and critically examines the collaborative research process between an urban university’s research center and its community partners. The authors link the theoretical framework of collaborative research, participatory action research, and critical pedagogy to their personal experiences involving two collaborative research projects in which they participated. The projects were designed to foster engagement of youth in civic life through social research and to raise awareness of social inequality and injustice. The authors critically examine various phases of research with a particular focus on the following challenges: recruitment and attendance issues, development, language and methods issues, and the university and funding agency-driven push for a “product.” The authors point out the strengths and weaknesses of the collaborative approach and problematize issues not visible in the final research reports. Finally, strategies for enhancing the quality of the collaborative research involving youth are proposed.

Ethical research communities provide important guidance for those conducting communication research projects. However, researchers face serious ethical dilemmas when their memberships in multiple ethical communities create conflicting ethical obligations. The present study explores conflicting demands between competing ethical communities to provide a series of reflexive questions researchers can ask themselves as they negotiate the contradictory terrain of their ethical communities. To accomplish this task, the authors explore the ethical dilemmas faced by one researcher as she conducted research on sexual harassment.

This article is an unusual reflexive text. It has two authors, two voices, two embodied experiences, and two sociological biographies in dialogue. The empirical focus is capoeira, but the ethnographic experience is common to many cultural forms. Capoeira is the Brazilian dance and martial art, done to the music of the berimbau. Classes are offered in many European countries, as well as in North America. Two sociologists, one a practitioner, the other a sedentary observer, collaborate to study what attracts students outside Brazil to capoeira, how it is taught to non-Brazilians, and how the classes and social events are enacted and understood. The dualities of the collaborative and contrastive engagements are explored in this article, which focuses on how to do fieldwork on an embodied skill. Physical activity, musical apprenticeship, and a multilingual environment are all made problematic in their collaborative reflections.

Poetic prose—a creative, novel, qualitative technique developed by the author—is used to present in a multivocal, interactive, and interwoven style the findings of in-depth, thematic interviews with 12 African American mothers with deaf daughters. This style of interweaving the voices of participants in a creative prose is indicative of African American cultural and oral tradition. It permits and deepens the reader’s ability to emotionally and spiritually connect with experiences and emotions of African American mothers with deaf daughters. Womanism/Black feminism offers a powerful conceptual framework for organizing and evoking these experiences of women as mothers and girls as daughters.

This autoethnography explores the pain and unexpectedness of personal and professional learning in being challenged to find an other “voice” after years of being a “responsible anarchist” within the academy’s traditional expectations. It tells of the emotions in setting forth on a self-chosen quest to uncover and understand the history of the author’s shame as a female academic with management responsibility but without a doctorate until relatively late in her career and some of the ways in which she chose unconsciously to ameliorate this along the way. The commitment to persist with the process of writing that explores emotional resistances born of history, images, and experiences of vulnerability was a deeply personal, embodied experience for the author. Indirectly, the experience of the story demonstrates how writing spontaneously and unknowingly with a desire for self-understanding has the power to uncover what goes on below the surface of experience and identity.

Creating found poetry from theoretical literature offers an arts-based approach to literature review in inquiry. Found poetry has a long history of practice in poetry as the imaginative appropriation and reconstruction of already-existing texts. This article presents literature-voiced research found poems that express distillations and crystallizations of a wide range of writing in contemporary continental philosophy and performance theory. The suite of poems forms part of a current dissertation inquiry in the form of a curriculum theory of audience in performance and education.

The United States of America has had a long history of stigmatizing the issue of mental health. The current push in and outside social organizations to break the silence around mental health is beginning to make inroads toward positive social change, but we are a long way from conquering the negative stereotypes that adversely affect the lives of millions of people. This play was written in response to a lived experience during a walk through a cemetery for former residents of an asylum that used to exist on what are now Ohio University grounds.

This autoethnography details the author’s efforts during the past eight years to write and publish her dissertation research on the narratives of father-absent daughters, most notably Elizabeth’s story. The author’s understanding of father-absence is situated within the multifaceted and constantly evolving discursive fields of scholarly research and personal experience. As a “vulnerable observer,” locating her own narrative within that field of stories lies at the heart of the author’s writing. This research story illustrates the ongoing challenge of creating a livable personal narrative through “a primary act of imagination.”