Qualitative Research

Taking field notes (or otherwise documenting observation) is at the very core of ethnographic research. However, relatively speaking, this task has hardly been covered in the research methods literature. With this as a point of departure, this article draws on an analysis of 247 short field notes taken in various situations by student observers. It aims to explore the immediate act of taking field notes while doing observation. By inductive analysis, 10 different ‘modes’ of observation are drawn from the field notes. This analysis demonstrates on one hand that fresh observers are capable of quickly grasping important aspects of observed interaction and on the other hand that principles of field note taking and researcher positioning need to be addressed further.

In this article, we reflect on our contrasting experiences of using focus groups in two different empirical research projects, one that explored the attitudes of mature students in further education towards possible participation in higher education, the other that examined young women’s relationships to feminism. In particular, we analyse the ways in which our research questions and approaches were challenged, honed and sometimes transformed in the light of our participants’ responses to our chosen method of research. For, while the mature students of the former project - many of whom had previously experienced formal education as negative - felt discomfort at the atmosphere of collective examination that the group engendered, and resisted discussion on their thoughts and feelings, the young women of the latter study welcomed the legitimacy that the formal focus group lent to their desire to discuss the socially taboo subject of feminism. We thus seek to show how we gained knowledge and understanding about our research topics through our participants’ responses to the method we selected as well as through their direct contributions in the research moment.

The article addresses the ambiguities around my researcher role and racial/ethnic identity as a Korean Adopted American qualitative researcher working with Korean Born, Korean American high school students. These ambiguities stem from my attempts to be recognized and accepted by the participants as an insider researcher. However, the participants delineated and established my researcher role and racial/ethnic identity as an outsider, which ultimately had a profound influence on our relationship and the overall research project. Accordingly in this article, I reflect on my racial/ethnic identity development and research role by discussing: 1) how my racial/ethnic identity led me to believe that I held insider status with the participants, 2) how my racial/ethnic identity was challenged by the participants, and 3) how my researcher role and racial/ethnic identity were ultimately modified through interactions with the participants.

In this article, abduction is introduced in relation to theorizing in grounded theory. Theoretical insights are inevitable cornerstones of the development of a grounded theory and abduction is worked out as a type of inference that characterizes this development. How abduction could be used in grounded theorizing is shown in a grounded theory research on ‘organizing doubt’, i.e. the way Dutch army units are formed with self-organizing capabilities that can be deployed during crisis operations. The authors show that two concepts from organizational theory that are central in this grounded theory’s analytical framework - i.e. ‘dynamic complexity’ and ‘self-organization’ - are developed and embedded in a substantive theory on ‘organizing doubt’ by abductive reasoning.

Findings from ethnonmethodological (EM) and conversation analytic (CA) studies have contributed significantly to an understanding of how social order is produced on a moment-by-moment basis. Recently, researchers have examined a wide variety of talk drawn from research interviews using EM and CA methods, including standardized survey interviews, focus groups, and open-ended conversational interviews. The purpose of these kinds of analyses has been to explicate how descriptions and accounts are produced and co-constructed by researchers and participants of research projects. This article reviews studies that have used ethnomethodological methods, including membership categorization analysis (MCA) and CA, to investigate interview data. The diversity of work conducted and approaches taken by EM, MCA, and CA researchers in their analyses of data generated in research interviews is outlined, and the implications of findings for qualitative researchers with respect to the teaching of qualitative research methodology and qualitative data analysis are provided.

The overall aim of our research was to produce an ethnography of ballet as a social practice. We draw upon our fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London) where we conducted 20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff, and observed ‘the company at work’, in class, rehearsal, and performance. We explored dancers’ (n = 9) and ex-dancers’ (who are now administrators, teachers, and character dancers: n = 11) perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that have occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. In this article, we draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, physical capital and cultural capital. The main focus of our article is an extended discussion of our threefold distinction between individual habitus, institutional habitus and choreographic habitus. Although our ethnography of the body is set within the elite cultural field of professional classical ballet, we hope that our research adds to debates on the interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and society, and on the salience of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus for understandings of the social world.