Qualitative Inquiry

A case is made that encountering the narrative of another person is one of the ways the Self discovers itself. In finding traces of another within oneself, as one does in encountering the narrative of another, the Self is able to appreciate its own meaning. But the narrative represents more than merely capturing another’s story. In meeting the eyes and hearing the story of another, one not only takes responsibility for the Other; one begins to assume responsibility for oneself. The encounter inherent in the narrative, therefore, gives birth to the devotion of one person to another and makes possible the discovery of what one defines as being human.

This study examines the environment and worldview of Sgt. T, a veteran officer in charge of a specialized police unit. Sgt. T, along with his staff of officers and social workers, monitors a major transportation hub in a large urban setting for runaway and homeless youth as well as other minors unaccompanied by adults. The author uses skullduggery, first introduced by Sgt. T to mean “nothing is as it appears,” as an interpretative lens and explores both its dangers and its usefulness. This includes the role skullduggery plays in field access and how it is used in managing interpersonal transactions, maintaining authority, and as an organizing worldview. New priorities and new skullduggeries suggest the inevitable extinction of this youth unit, yet broader lessons are at stake. Empirical material, collected in the field, was primarily conversational and narrative.

In this essay, the authors sketch out a dialogic consideration of how identity is constituted in qualitative research. They call into question the role of the researcher, asking how he or she not only helps construct his or her own identity in and through the research project but also how the researcher works to maintain the very identities and phenomena he or she thinks he or she is working to deconstruct. The authors put these issues into play with a dialogue, weaving their voices and their independent research projects together to illuminate how different scholars in different sites work to performatively (re)constitute the “subjects” in and of their research. Ultimately, the form of this essay makes possible the immediacy of the authors’ struggle within their scholarly practice, ending with a vision for new ways of hearing identity in production.

Doing good qualitative research requires engaging with the ethical and epistemological challenges of deliberately entering into relationships with people to learn about them. The authors draw on an event in their personal lives for insight into research relationships, hoping to deepen their understanding of how these relationships feel and work from research participants’ perspectives. The authors present their experience in two linked vignettes to explore ways research participants might experience research about their experiences of loss, pain, shame, and social stigma and to address ways researchers can begin to understand how it feels to be the “written about” in research projects about such topics. They frame their discussion around three areas that arise from the vignettes: the increased risk to research participants when they like and trust researchers who misunderstand their experiences, the personal costs of disclosure, and the need for flexible research plans that can adapt to the interpersonal demands of intimate research relationships.

The author considers the underrated and marginalized role of the researcher as storyteller by sharing stories of her own life, first as a researcher and insider, and second, as one who suffered bullying and abuse at her workplace at the time. The stories are interleaved between the theoretical argument and deliberately stand in the foreground. They are not interpreted in the discussion but attest through substance and example to what the argument is trying to convey. Sharing these stories challenged two taboos that researchers traditionally face: those surrounding the methodological process and those concerned with political content. Future researcher-storytellers are encouraged to take risks. Writing of one’s own life experiences is concluded to be writing on the edge—and without a safety net. However, the rewards inevitably stem from connecting with those who want to know.

Through interweaving her student’s troubling confessional self-disclosure revealed in a course assignment with a disturbing account taken from her own adolescent experience, the author considers the pedagogical challenges as well as the personal and political consequences of silence and of witnessing and the irrevocability and interpretive indeterminacy of such self-disclosure.

This article reflects on Me Mahi Tahi Tatou, a government-sponsored study of race relations in New Zealand schools. It focuses on ways in which the New Zealand bicultural framework shaped conditions of communication and voice among those involved in conducting the study. In Me Mahi Tahi Tatou, well-intentioned attempts to support the voice of a historically marginalized group were undermined by a reductive identity politics. Political and institutional pressures and a positivist-empiricist research culture further supported a mechanistic approach to social inclusion. The article argues that a meaningful approach to difference and voice in inclusive research requires critical attention to the conditions of communication and the micro-politics of the day-to-day interactions that shape the meaning of social categories in practice.

Joining the ongoing dialogue regarding the need for reflexivity in qualitative research, this tale of the author’s “natural” childbirth and subsequent research into the field of midwifery explores the tension between postmodern and modern aspects of her Self. The former accepts a lived experience of fragmented, separate selves and partial truth, whereas the latter wants an integrated, whole Self and absolute truth. Using introspection, this tension is understood in terms of two different forms of cultural patterning, the female gaze and the masculine pull. Moreover, the author believes that the term natural serves as a self-contained opposite that allows mothers and researchers to bridge these two cultural patterns.

This article takes up a number of autobiographical texts written at different times and in different styles about the same incident, the end of a marriage. The author traces discourses of femininity and romance as well as discourses about what it means to be “a writer” through fragments of these texts. In exploring the stultifying effects of the discourses that were taken up by the subject in each particular (con)text, the author struggles to open up alternative readings, writings, and possibilities.