Challenges for a New Critical Qualitative Inquiry

Introduction

In the last decade, a new interest in critical qualitative inquiry has developed. This interest has become a need to take up a number of challenges facing new trends on various levels: First, in the societal development, which has intensified social problems and social inequality and weakened the situation and impact of social and societal communities. Second, on the level of scientific development, which tends to narrow down the understanding of what social science is and to look at certain approaches like the rabbit facing the snake. Examples here are evidence-based education or health, the un-reflected belief in Randomized Control studies (RCT) as the one and only approach, but also the sometimes naïve fascination of Mixed Methods Research (MMR) in many contexts. Third, on the level of politics and, in particular, of science politics and some predominant concepts of what (social) science is, what it should provide.

What is Critical Qualitative Research?

There are a number of recent suggestions of how to define critical qualitative inquiry, which are also the orientation for some of the contributions to this special issue. One of these references comes from Norman Denzin (2015, p.31), who holds:

The pursuit of social justice within a transformative paradigm challenges prevailing forms of inequality, poverty, human oppression, and injustice. This paradigm is firmly rooted in a human rights agenda. It requires an ethical framework that is rights and social justice based. It requires an awareness of “the need to redress inequalities by giving precedence . . . to the voices of the least advantaged groups in society.” (Mertens, Holmes, & Harris, 2009, p. 89)

Kathy Charmaz (2017) refers directly to this outline in her approach:

When I speak of critical inquiry, I include concerns and studies about social justice, although it is an ambiguous and elastic concept. In its various forms, critical inquiry addresses power, inequality and injustice. Consistent with Donna Mertens (2009) and Norman Denzin (2015, p. 31), I see critical inquiry as embedded in a transformative paradigm that seeks to expose, oppose, and redress forms of oppression, inequality, and injustice. (p. 35)

Rainer Winter (2017, p. 28), for example, takes up the political claims linked to Denzin’s (2015) approach in this context:

But we stand firmly behind the belief that critical qualitative inquiry inspired by the sociological imagination can make the world a better place . . . Critical scholars . . . are committed to creating new ways of making the practices of critical qualitative inquiry central to the workings of a free democratic society. (p. 41)

These suggestions move on the more political level of a new critical qualitative inquiry. However, this is not the only one relevant in this context.

Levels of a New Critical Qualitative Inquiry

We can identify at least three levels on which a critical qualitative inquiry approach can become relevant, discussed, and developed:

For making such a multilevel approach work, we should think about what the research practice oriented implications of this approach look like. Our own studies, for example (see Flick et al., 2017; Flick & Röhnsch, 2014;), in mostly cases are developed in the following steps if we want to make a contribution of societal relevance with qualitative methods:

From the perspective of a critical qualitative inquiry, this means on the first level, that in this case, a qualitative study is addressing social problems of vulnerable groups for making a contribution. In many cases, like in this example, the power of qualitative inquiry comes also from the fact that it is able to work with hard-to-reach groups. These groups otherwise often refuse to participate in research or are too small to become visible in representative studies (see Flick, 2015a, p. 600). In a broader sense, such an approach is taken in critical health psychology (see Murray, 2015). Here social situations of vulnerable groups are studied starting from a more general critique of mainstream health psychology. Research is done mostly by using qualitative methods, which then are often seen as social transformation (see Flick, 2015b).

On the second level, this means that we should critically reflect which methods to apply for studying such an issue once identified. Even more, this means that we should be careful, reflexive, and critical about the way, how we apply them in the concrete cases and fields. This implies issues of research ethics, of equality in the relation to the participants and of keeping in mind of how to make them benefit from participating in our research and from the research in general. Can we develop suggestions of how to change, or improve the practices in the field and in the institutions involved in the field, in the problem, and in our research?

On the third level, this means that a critical approach toward and in qualitative inquiry should not lead to the consequence of stopping to do empirical research completely. The critical discussions about methods; about data, data collection, and analysis; and about findings and writing about them should not have as a consequence that we tangle up in meta-theoretical discourses about the problems and limitations of our approaches and forget the “world out there” where social problems exist and people might benefit from insights coming from our research.

This last level shows the dialectical relation of challenges and critique and research in this context: Critical qualitative inquiry will challenge a lot of taken-for-granted assumptions about methods and about how to use them and how to do research. At the same time, one challenge is to remain in the game and to continue with doing qualitative research, identifying issues and people concerned by them, and trying to identify problems and possible suggestion of how to solve them. And finally, the challenge is to avoid being just driven aside by the common trends in social research—the challenges defined by policy makers and funders, which may foresee limited spaces for qualitative and critical research (see Fielding, 2017)—and the establishment of the new “pet” approaches in the public and administrative image of social research (see for RCT studies in the context Torrance, 2017; for MMR the discussion in Flick, 2017).

Guiding Questions for Developing This Special Issue

Transferring the idea of these three levels of a new critical qualitative inquiry, a number of questions can be identified, which were guiding the selection of contributions to this special issue and the discussions in the articles:

However, this list of questions was not given to the authors as an orientation for what to cover in their article. It serves as an organizational orientation for this special issue as a whole.

The Contributions to This Special Issue

The idea for this special issue has been developed in the context of a plenary at the 11th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2015). Articles in this issue take up some of the points that have been raised in this introduction so far and complement them with some wider considerations. The contributions to this special issues approach our topic on three levels, focused in three sections.

In the first section, we find three articles about more conceptual considerations about challenges for a new critical qualitative inquiry. The first article, “Critical Qualitative Inquiry” by Norman Denzin outlines key issues for what is discussed as new critical inquiry. Key elements are to design research in dialogic and emancipatory way, giving voice to participants in underprivileged circumstances, for example. For embedding this understanding of research, Denzin retells the history of a (critical) qualitative inquiry and discusses the criticisms it has faced throughout this history. He also raises the question of who “owns” research and tries to define what science is and should do so that the claims of a critical approach are fulfilled. The theses and agendas presented in this article lead to outlining a concept of research around the idea of social theater performance and of linking the present situation with the historical and future developments of a critical qualitative inquiry.

In the second article about “Challenging Others’ Challenges: Critical Qualitative Inquiry and the Production of Knowledge,” Nigel Fielding discusses more current problems such an approach is facing in the political field. The challenges he concentrates on are much more on a political and governmental level, resulting from current expectations about what social research can and should provide: Answers to what is seen as “grand challenges” such as cure for cancer or global warming. Although social science research in general has problems of providing simple and unambiguous answers to such challenges, these expectations tend to enforce the trend of fragmentation of research landscapes into particular aspects rather than to develop a cumulative knowledge of the social. The “grand challenges” concept leads at the same time to a concentration of research funding (fewer, bigger project dealing with big data). This trend has as two consequences: Smaller projects more focused on critically exploring issues and contributing to change circumstances, promote social justice, and reduce social inequality rather than on immediately solving such “big” problems have difficulties of becoming funded. And it becomes difficult to clarifying the relevance of their findings. As a solution, Fielding underlines the need for critical qualitative inquiry to help the wider research community to understand its messages.

The third article is again more theoretical and conceptual. It comes from Rainer Winter. He emphasizes a central issue of a critical qualitative inquiry and discusses “The Idea of Equality and Qualitative Inquiry.” For this purpose, he links the works of Denzin as outlined in the first article here with that of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has developed his concept of radical equality in critical distinction from Pierre Bourdieu’s research (e.g. Bourdieu et al., 2000). In Winter’s (2017) words, Rancière emphasizes an approach to “people’s sense of their own knowledge” (p. 30) over the influence of institutions and their own social backgrounds. Winter discusses Rancière’s concept of active equality for the issue of migration and the challenge of migration research to give voice to those who have made this experience and seen as migrants. This will allow to challenge nation state policies that turn migrants into objects and to develop a new understanding (see also the article of Flick et al. in this special issue). Finally, Winter emphasizes that, similar to Denzin, Rancière’s concept of politics is strongly influenced by theater and performance.

The second section of this special issue focuses on specific research programs from an angle of a critical qualitative inquiry. It comprises again three papers. First, Kathy Charmaz outlines “The Power of Grounded Theory for Critical Inquiry” and discusses why in particular the constructivist grounded theory approach she has developed is useful in this context. For this purpose, she links it back to Pragmatism as an epistemological background of grounded theory. The major contribution of constructivist grounded theory to critical qualitative inquiry is for her that the former permanently throughout the research process defines emergent critical questions and thus emphasizes to interrogate taken-for-granted methodological concepts. The result is a stronger methodological self-consciousness that links both approaches. In her understanding of critical qualitative inquiry, which she defines first, she strongly focuses on its potential of studying and contributing to social justice as a major issue. Again, the relevance of understanding participants’ experiences, meanings, and actions is highlighted and that researchers’ and participants’ lives blend and that research should contribute to criticize and oppose to institutions and power.

The next article by Uwe Flick takes up the idea mentioned by Charmaz that a major task of critical qualitative inquiry is to interrogate taken-for-granted methodological concepts. This article takes a skeptical perspective on the trend to establishing MMR as a new and standard research “paradigm,” when it discusses “Mantras and Myths: The Disenchantment of Mixed Methods Research and Revisiting Triangulation as a Perspective.” The main focuses are the attempt to “sell” this approach as something new by ignoring earlier traditions, the trend to see methods and specific combinations of methods as more important than the issues to be studied when propagating the approach, the reduction of methodological issues to questions of research design, or the misconception of (qualitative vs. quantitative) paradigms in MMR. As a way out of some of the dead ends discussed for MMR in this article, a more reflexive embedding of this approach in a wider concept of a systematic triangulation of perspectives is suggested. This includes a more reflexive and critical answer to the question, when this approach is really needed for an issue and a study.

In the third article in this section, Reiner Keller asks, “Has Critique Run Out of Steam?—On Discourse Research as Critical Inquiry.” He takes Bruno Latour’s (2004) critiques of social constructionism and discourse analysis and Boltanski’s (2009/2011) concept of critical capacities (instead of critical sociology) as starting points for positioning discourse research in the context of the sociology of knowledge. Finally, he sees discourse research in the tradition of Foucault as a matter of experimentation. The most important issue for Keller (2017) in this context is the identification of “questions that matter” today for the study of discourses. With this aspect, he picks up an issue already discussed by Fielding in his article. Keller emphasizes that it should be less political instances but rather critical researchers who define, what matters as for being studied. The critical perspective here comes from “de-objectifying” reifications and ostensive “evidences.”

The third section of this special issue turns the focus on fields of empirical research using a critical qualitative inquiry approach. Harry Torrance takes the field of education as an example for discussing more broadly the idea of “Experimenting with Qualitative Inquiry.” He continues to develop a point made by Keller before (referring to discourse research) but refers and extends it to the current situation of educational and social research. First, he clarifies that experimentation in social research should not be reduced to the concept of “randomized control designs (RCT).” This connects with the approach of Charmaz’s and Flick’s articles highlighting that general approaches in social research should not be reduced to seemingly “taken-for-granted” approaches. Torrance emphasizes that RCT is just one approach to experimentation in social research (as MMR is just one approach to using multiple methods or perspectives—see Flick’s article). He continues that qualitative inquiry also could and should work with experiments, that is, with interventions in the field that are studied. In this context, he refers to examples such as Garfinkel’s (1967) “crisis experiments.” Then Torrance links his argument to more recent discussion of new materialism picking up the French thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari and pleads for studying the “new that emerges in situ through engagement and entanglement in and with the world” (emphasis in original). The consequence is that (critical) qualitative inquiry should evolve more toward change and involvement in the interest of their participants.

A field of critical qualitative inquiry mentioned already as an example in Winter’s article is in the focus of the next article. Uwe Flick, Benjamin Hans, Andreas Hirseland, Sarah Rasche, and Gundula Röhnsch (2017) discuss in their article “Migration, Unemployment and Life World—Challenges for a New Critical Qualitative Inquiry in Migration” an empirical study of their own. It focuses on migrants who came from the Former Soviet Union and who are long-term unemployed in Germany. Both concepts—being a migrant and being unemployed—are issues, which bear the risk for researchers of taking a too narrow perspective. The authors, first, outline the field defined by these two concepts and the sociopolitical context in Germany dealing with these two problems. Then, they present two short case studies for illustrating that we need more than just interviews if we want to contextualize our insights in a broader life-world-oriented perspective. Besides interviews with professionals, interviews with migrants and mobile (go-along) methods are used for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the participants’ life worlds. The article ends with a critical discussion of current migration research. Against the background of a critical discussion of interviews and of mobile methods for their respective limitations, the needs for triangulating both approaches in this field and for transcending the limits of migration research in the field of unemployment are outlined. In this example, the idea mentioned in several other articles in the special issue becomes tangible—that we need a comprehensive understanding of participants’ life worlds, experiences, knowledge, and practices for a critical approach of qualitative inquiry to be able to foster change in that area.

The final article by Ping-Chun Hsiung (2017) takes a much broader case for demonstrating the potentials of critical qualitative inquiry. In her article about “The Politics of Rebuilding Chinese Sociology in 1980s,” she analyzes how sociology was re-established around the expectation to address “urgent” social problems and to be useful and relevant. She also shows how this lead to importing survey methods (seen as the main sociology method) from the West, which connects to the articles by Fielding and Torrance as science was narrowed down to problem solving with a specific methodological approach. Hsiung develops a critical, decentered approach, which interrogates such political expectations and the taken-for-granted import of established methods but is globally informed and locally situated.

All in all, the series of papers in this special issue shows different ways and levels of approaching the topic of a new critical qualitative inquiry: on one hand by taking issues with a political and social justice implication (such as migration, for example, as in the articles by Charmaz and Flick et al.), and by spelling out the theoretical issues around critique in and through research. On the other hand by reflecting political and administrative contexts of social research (such as the articles by Fielding and Torrance) and by taking a critical view on particular research approaches and the expectations linked to them by political and scientific audiences (e.g., in the articles by Flick and Torrance). As some of the articles show, the points of references are coming from a rather global approach to discussing social and qualitative research (see also Flick, 2014): from the example of developments in China’s reconstruction of sociology (in the article by Ping-Chun Hsiung) to the growing interest in French thinkers as background for discussing epistemologies of critical qualitative research (in the articles by Denzin, Winter, Keller, and Torrance). All of the articles have taken a perspective on critical qualitative inquiry that intends to advance research practice with a critical view to highlight the contributions qualitative inquiry can make to addressing social and societal problems adequately in research.