Qualitative Research

The focus is an ethical dilemma that arises, in an acute form, in interviews for studies using constructionist forms of discourse analysis. Informants typically assume that researchers are aiming to document their experiences, feelings, perspectives, etc., as features of a collectively shared world; an assumption that is probably reinforced by the rationales researchers provide, and by their behaviour. Yet, in such studies, the purpose of interviews is actually to generate displays of discursive practices, rather than to elicit information about the world or about people’s individual subjectivities. This discrepancy amounts to deception, but attempts to remedy it are likely to be counterproductive because of the gap between the natural attitude and a constructionist analytic orientation. From the perspective of some currently influential views about ethics, relating to informed consent and doing research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people, this would disqualify such research. However, these views are by no means beyond challenge. In these terms, discourse analysis poses important questions about currently accepted views of research ethics.

Reflecting on a research project that focussed on male student nurses, this article explores how far the philosophy and procedural steps of Grounded Theory enable a hidden voice to be heard. Developing a theory about the minority voice captures concepts underpinning pedagogic voicing. Males are a minority in nursing and hence project a smaller but representational voice to articulate their views on learning. Data obtained from two types of interviews are used to illustrate the analysis performed through the chosen analytical framework. The general message is not to take any analytical strategy at face value but to comprehend how the process produces a theory grounded from the data. This article discusses whether Grounded Theory is best considered as an analytical strategy and not a method using elements of Charmaz’s approach and how the strategic steps preserved the voice of the male nursing student.

This paper describes the foundations, introduces a conceptual model, and discusses uses of the commonplace journey methodology, an innovative and mobile qualitative research and pedagogical approach based on existential hermeneutic phenomenology. Using this mobile methodology, the researcher placed a theoretical approach to human–environment relations from outside the scholarly field of outdoor recreation and education in dialogue with travellers’ lived experience, activities, and understandings during an extended canoe expedition. Examples from the data and findings are used to further describe the processes, benefits, and challenges of this phenomenological methodology. Finally, the author describes four analytical techniques used to anchor interpretation and written theoretical accounts in lived practice and physical context.

This paper details a narrative analysis strategy called critical resistance analysis (CRA). The aim of a CRA is to bring forward the kinds of subjects participants draw on when talking about themselves in narrative interviews and to make explicit how those subjects are resisted and desired. The CRA is distinguished from other narrative analyses of self in that it focuses on resistance in both its structural, anti-hegemonic and ‘poststructural’, self-refusal forms. The latter kind of resistance is what Hoy (2005) refers to as ‘critical’ resistance; the desire to undo oneself. A CRA looks for participant resistance in narrative and antenarrative (Boje, 2001) data. Antenarratives are incomplete stories that are often too fragmented to analyze using traditional narrative methods and can be seen as powerful examples of meaning-making in progress. A CRA newly brings an antenarrative understanding to the study of self in four analytic foci: deconstruction trace, discourse-argument, resistance and intersubjectivity analysis. Together these analytic foci reveal the subjects narrative participants seek (not) to be and afford a more complex understanding of how participants struggle with and against themselves.

When conducting qualitative research, the modern-day researcher has a variety of options available in order to collect data from participants. Although traditional face-to-face interviews remain prominent, innovative communication technologies, such as Skype, have facilitated new modes of communication. While potential research populations have become increasingly geographically dispersed, technological advancements and software have made communicating over large distances more feasible. Because of this, research is no longer limited to face-to-face accessible participants, as online methods have facilitated access to global research participants. This article presents the experiences of two PhD researchers using Skype to interview participants. While findings show that there are benefits and drawbacks to the utility of Skype, this article argues that synchronous online interviewing is a useful supplement or replacement to face-to-face interviews. Concluding comments acknowledge that more research is required to more comprehensively understand how technologies challenge the basic assumptions of the traditional face-to-face interview.

In recent years, archival research in the social sciences is emerging as a vibrant field of qualitative research, with contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, epistemological standpoints, theoretical insights and methodological approaches. In this article, I explore archival research strategies in life-history research, drawing on my experience of working at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, reading the letters of Dora Carrington (1893–1932), an English painter, who lived and worked in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group. The archive in my analysis is theorized as a spatial and discursive apparatus of experimentation, whose configuration has an impact on the type of data and the kind of knowledges that will derive from it. Drawing on neo-materialist approaches in feminist science studies, what I suggest is that the researcher’s questions, interpretations, theoretical insights and analytical tropes emerge as intra-actions between space/time/matter relations and forces within the archive.