Qualitative Inquiry

This article raises serious questions about the relativist approach to assessing qualitative research that has been championed by John K. Smith and various colleagues. They reject not just empiricism but also what they refer to as “neorealism.” Against both these positions, they advance an antirealist, anti-ontological argument to the effect that we should not assume the reality of social phenomena as existing independently of our knowledge claims about them; insist that assessing the value of research findings is always a practical matter, rather than an issue of method; and claim that we must abandon epistemic in favor of moral criteria in assessing social research. On the basis of detailed scrutiny of their arguments, it is shown that neither the critique of neorealism they present nor the alternative approach they recommend is coherent or convincing.

How researchers can go about judging, or adjudicating among, different knowledge claims recently has become a highly contested issue. In this response to Hammersley, we argue that he has not been able to justify his neorealist position that we can/must appeal to an independently existing reality, which can be known as it really is, to sort out our differences. To the contrary, we argue that we must accept relativism, not in the sense of “anything goes,” but in the sense that as human beings we are finite. As a result, any criteria we pose for judging knowledge claims always is, as it must be, the product of time and place contingent agreement.

Part 1

This narrative and poetic rendering acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. It is a storying of critical research issues and events as performances of lived experience. It is a métissage of hybrid, but interrelated, themes that find cohesion through fragmentation and coalescence, severance, and regrowth. These themes are invoked by the (inter)relationship of the metaphors of roots/routes and the play on meaning through the play on words. The storying is a journey of seeking that calls forth, highlights, and attempts to dislodge, or “root out,” the dilemmas and contradictions in discourses and practices that emerge through the choices we make as we search or “root”—like a wild sow in the sod—for routes toward transcendence. This ethical seeking occurs as we reflexively unearth our understandings of the histories, epistemologies, practices, and prejudices of ours and others' roots/routes and routedness/rootedness. Part II of “Roots/Routes” follows Part I.

Part II

This narrative acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. Following Part I of the same research journey of rootedness/routedness, it debates the nature of transformation and transcendence beyond personal and political paradoxes informed by neoliberalism and related repressive globalizing discourses. Through a more personal, descriptive, and philosophical approach, the author seeks to move, in a reflexive manner, beyond the delimiting roots of deficit discourse and its unrootedness with the daily, local, and lived. Through the use of a nontraditional writing–research approach, the author explores other, less objectifying, ways of being in research and attempts to provide alternative pedagogies of possibility away from dichotomous and positivist research engagement. By confronting socially constructed knowledges and identities, and “(re)sourcing” these through “humble togetherness” (Ubuntu), the storying seeks to find a transcendent spirituality through the routes/roots of research and achieve the emergence of transformative possibilities through pedagogies of hope!

This narrative acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. Following Part I of the same research journey of rootedness/routedness, it debates the nature of transformation and transcendence beyond personal and political paradoxes informed by neoliberalism and related repressive globalizing discourses. Through a more personal, descriptive, and philosophical approach, the author seeks to move, in a reflexive manner, beyond the delimiting roots of deficit discourse and its unrootedness with the daily, local, and lived. Through the use of a nontraditional writing—research approach, the author explores other, less objectifying, ways of being in research and attempts to provide alternative pedagogies of possibility away from dichotomous and positivist research engagement. By confronting socially constructed knowledges and identities, and “(re)sourcing” these through “humble togetherness” (Ubuntu), the storying seeks to find a transcendent spirituality through the routes/roots of research and achieve the emergence of transformative possibilities through pedagogies of hope!

This article suggests that unlike their well-off counterparts who apply to college in the fall and know they will go somewhere when the applications have been sent, low-income students face unique challenges that extend the process in a manner entirely different from the wealthy. The notion that college-going is a cultural interpretation is circumscribed by constantly shifting forces rather than a rational choice. The author offers portraits of three 17-year-old male Latino youth who attend the same school to demonstrate how different their stances are toward college. The purpose is to move away from the essentialized notions of student identity. Even with three seemingly similar students the manner in which they interpret how to go about applying for college differs. The narrative strategy works from a standpoint that has sought to understand the meanings of applying to college from the perspectives of the three youth with whom the author has worked.

In research with young people about their experiences of rural and urban environments, the authors were struck by how participants in their rural case study used fiction to explain their experiences. The participants' use of fiction lead the authors to an additional rich vein of empirical material and analysis not foreseen at the beginning of the research. The authors outline the young people's use of fiction to frame their understanding of stereotyping and note the benefits of assembling a critical reading of fiction within the project. The authors conclude by revisiting the usefulness of fiction as a frame for young people's meaning making and as a source of empirical material in its own right. At the same time, they highlight the benefits of a qualitative research design that allows space for serendipitous trajectories of the collection and analysis of empirical material to evolve.

The exit of approximately 2,000 Vietnamese orphans in April 1975 through Operation Babylift is a key part of Vietnam War debates. The Babylift volunteers, American women who aided with the children's evacuation, published autobiographies of their involvement and publicly commemorated the history. This article uses pedagogy, collective memory, and commemoration theory to examine how Vietnamese adoptees negotiate the volunteers' accounts and how they reclaim their history by labeling the volunteers' narratives as inadequate, recognize their community's agency, and create new commemorations. The article uses interviews, participation observation, and Vietnamese adoptee written life stories to discuss Vietnamese adoption. It also explores some issues of using life story texts in ethnographic research.

This article explores how three modalities of writing dissertation, memoir, and autoethnography negotiate the tensions between poststructuralist and psychoanalytic notions of truth as experienced by survivors of trauma. Although the nebulous nature of truth contrasts with the healing powers of speaking one's truth, this article argues that autoethnography in its experimentally analytic potential to produce meaning in and out of original contexts allows the writer to unearth the multiple truths of trauma. In doing so, the writer/survivor can heal while sharing with others the politics and hope of speaking about our traumatic truths.

“truth” is an issue of public discussion, research, and everyday performance. Processes of navigating truth, however, are obscure and often unknown. In this project, the authors highlight truth(s) of written life texts. They conceive of truth as a rather than the “rhetorical device” to use for evaluating personal research and believe that demanding factual, historical truth-of-life research is faulty and problematic. By illustrating how genre, trust, memory, and confession influence truth telling, the authors hope to question and enhance truth-related conversations.

This narrative seeks to engage the reader by creating a verbal portrait of the author's father-in-law, Bob, as he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. The portrait is a collection of caregiving accounts shared by the author and her husband, Todd, who became Bob's primary caregivers. The author presents a counternarrative to overly sentimental and resistant accounts of Alzheimer's Disease while also demonstrating ways self-respect and dignity remain intact despite the deteriorating effects of the illness and the drastic ways Alzheimer's changes family relationships.

The narrative in this discussion article portrays the quest by two researchers to find their scholarly identity in their craft. The central issue in this narrative piece as design type of this inquiry is the space of knowledge crafting— distinguishing between adopted knowledge from the theories that sustain our thinking and the realities that they encounter in the research fields where knowledge grows in dynamic ecosystems that they wish to engage with and try to explicate and to understand. The central conundrum or the academic puzzle in this narrative is thus that they receive mixed messages about the interface between them, the researchers, the presented empirical world, and the theories from which they have learned. They are not sure where or when they speak in their own voices or portray their own identities.

Social relationships are enacted and remembered through interpersonal relationships and replayed through the media as the author uses a defining personal experience, that of her son's drug addiction, to rethink, analyze, and resituate herself in the world. The result draws attention to the messy juxtaposition of social structures and policies with personal loss, grief, anger, and episodes of joy and courage. Crack, whether drug, fissure, gibe, highlights remembered fragments which allow the author to tell her stories in ways other than those originally considered. As those personal stories are interwoven with public moments such as school desegregation and changes in telecommunications and popular culture, a social commentary is offered that defamiliarizes the familiar, evokes rather than represents, and therefore offers the reader entry into the narrative, the cultural critique.

The purpose of this article is to provide university instructors pedagogical applications for popular film in graduate-level qualitative research methods courses. Media instruction has a longstanding tradition in Grade K-12 classrooms, and the power of “edutainment” in our visually oriented, electronically mediated, and performative culture should not be underestimated or dismissed by university professors for their masters- and doctoral-level classrooms. Excerpts from strategically selected popular films introduce qualitative research topics, illustrate basic principles and techniques of inquiry, generate classroom discussion and reflection, clarify misunderstood constructs, function as referential mnemonics, and teach selected principles more effectively than traditional classroom pedagogy. In these film excerpts, art imitates qualitative life, and art is used to teach the science of naturalistic inquiry.