n your paper, you will present the benefits of ethnographical research in terms of understanding a unique social world, as well as understanding the qualitative researcher’s role in performing and reporting on ethnographic research. You will do this through the resources provided, your own research of immersive ethnographical approaches, and also through critiquing Dr. Loïc Wacquant’s work.
In your paper, include the following sections/components:
Role of Researcher (One to two pages)
- Explain the researcher’s role in qualitative research in general and specifically in an ethnographic approach.
- Discuss the unique issues that researchers should be concerned about in qualitative research.
- Explain the challenges researchers face in ethnographical research.
- Discuss specific actions researchers can take to ensure they retain their ethical and neutral stance in performing qualitative research and reporting their qualitative research results.
Loïc Wacquant’s Research (One to two pages)
- Summarize what Loïc Wacquant’s research was about.
- Determine whether or not Wacquant maintained an ethical and neutral stance.
- Justify the research approach Wacquant chose to take.
- Explain whether or not this could have been possible with a quantitative research study.
Impact of Research (One page)
- Discuss how qualitative research and, in particular, ethnographic research, can inform our understanding of unique social worlds.
- Describe the potential impact of research in supporting positive social change through public policy.
Qualitative Research in Psychology, 8:81–92, 2011 Copyright © Loïc Wacquant
ISSN: 1478-0887 print/1478-0895 online
DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2010.544176
Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter
LOÏC WACQUANT
University of California, Berkeley, California
Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris
This article recounts how I took up the ethnographic craft; stumbled upon the Chicago boxing gym that is the central scene and
character of my field study of prizefighting in the black American ghetto; and designed the book Body and Soul so as to both
deploy methodologically and elaborate empirically Pierre Bourdieu’s signal concept of habi- tus. Habitus is the topic of
investigation: the book dissects the forging of the corporeal and mental dispositions that make up the competent pugilist in the
crucible of the gym. It is also the tool of investigation: the practical acquisition of those dispositions by the analyst serves as
technical vehicle for better penetrating their social production and assembly. The apprenticeship of the sociologist is a
methodological mirror of the apprenticeship undergone by the empirical subjects of the study; the former is mined to dig deeper
into the latter and unearth its inner logic and subterranean properties; and both in turn test the robustness and fruitfulness of
habitus as guide for probing the springs of social conduct. Properly used, habitus not only illuminates the variegated logics of
social action but also grounds the distinctive virtues of deep immersion in, and carnal entanglement with, the object of
ethnographic inquiry.
Keywords: apprenticeship; carnal sociology; ethnography; habitus; social action; subjectivity; theory
In this article, I recount how I took up the ethnographic craft; stumbled upon the Chicago boxing gym that is the
main scene and character of my ethnography of prizefighting in the black American ghetto; and designed the book
Body and Soul that reports on its findings so as to both deploy methodologically and elaborate empirically Pierre
Bourdieu’s signal concept of habitus (Wacquant 2004a). I draw out some of the biographical, intellectual, and
analytic connections between this research project on a plebeian bodily craft, the theoret- ical framework that
informs it, and the macro-comparative inquiry into urban marginality of which it is an unplanned offshoot. I sketch
how the practicalities of fieldwork led me from the ghetto as implement of ethnoracial domination to embodiment as
a problem and resource for social inquiry. Through this reflection on becoming a prizefighter, I argue for the use of
fieldwork as an instrument of theoretical construction, the potency of carnal knowledge, and the imperative of
epistemic reflexivity. I also stress the need to expand the textual genres and styles of ethnography so as to better
capture the Strum und Drang of social action as it is manufactured and lived.
The concept of habitus supplied at once the anchor, the compass, and the course of the ethnographic journey
recapped in Body and Soul. It is the topic of investigation: the
Correspondence: Loïc Wacquant, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California- Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720,
USA. E-mail: loic@uclink4.berkeley.edu
81
82 L. Wacquant
book dissects the forging of the corporeal and mental dispositions that make up the com- petent boxer in the crucible
of the gym. But it is also the tool of investigation: the practical acquisition of those dispositions by the analyst serves
as technical vehicle for better pen- etrating their social production and assembly. In other words, the apprenticeship
of the sociologist is a methodological mirror of the apprenticeship undergone by the empirical subjects of the study;
the former is mined to dig deeper into the latter and unearth its inner logic and subterranean properties; and both in
turn test the robustness and fruitful- ness of habitus as guide for probing the springs of social conduct. Contrary to a
commonly held view that it is a vague notion that mechanically replicates social structures, effaces history, and
operates as a “black box” that obviates observation and confounds explana- tion (see Jenkins 1991 for a standard
regurgitation of these nostrums), it emerges that Bourdieu’s sociological reworking of this classic philosophical
concept is a powerful tool to steer social inquiry and trace out operant social mechanisms. Properly used, habitus not
only illuminates the variegated logics of social action; it also grounds the distinctive virtues of deep immersion in
and carnal entanglement with the object of ethnographic inquiry.
From the South Pacific to the South Side of Chicago
Since the notion of habitus proposes that human agents are historical animals who carry within their bodies acquired
sensibilities and categories that are the sedimented products of their past social experiences, it is useful to begin with
how I came to ethnographic research and what intellectual interests and expectations I brought with me to the South
Side of Chicago. My initiation to fieldwork predates my entry in graduate school at the University of Chicago in
1985. To fulfill my military duties (as every French male had to do back then), by a stroke of luck I was assigned to
do a stint of civilian service in the South Pacific as a sociologist in a research center of ORSTOM, France’s former
“office of colonial research.” I spent two years in New Caledonia, a French island northeast of New Zealand, in a
small research team—there were only three of us—at the time of the Kanak uprising of November 1984. This means
that I lived and worked in a brutal and archaic colonial society, because New Caledonia in the 1980s was a colony of
the 19th-century type that had survived virtually intact to the end of the 20th century (see Bensa 1995 for an
account). It was an extraordinary social experience for an apprentice-sociologist to carry out research on the school
system, urbanization, and social change in the context of an insurrection, under a state of emergency, and to observe
in real time the struggles between the colonials and the independence forces, and to have to reflect in a concrete way
about the civic role of social science. For instance, I was privileged to participate in a closed congress of the Kanak
Socialist National Liberation Front in Canala at the height of the clash, and I also traveled all the way around the
“Grande Terre” (the main island) and made several sojourn in Lifou Island at the home of friends who were longtime Kanak militants at a time when practically no one was moving about in the territory.
The New Caledonian crucible sensitized me to ethnoracial inequality and to spatial consignment as a vector of social
control—the Kanaks were largely relegated to isolated rural reservations and hypersegregated neighborhoods in the
capital city of Nouméa. It also alerted me to the variegated workings of rigid hierarchies of color and honor in
everyday life and to the crucial place of the body as a target, receptacle, and fount of asymmetric power relations.
And it exposed me to extreme forms of deprecative racial imagery: the native Melanesians were typically pictured as
“super-primitives” devoid of culture and his- tory, even as they were rising to seize their historical fate (Bourdieu &
Bensa 1985). All
Habitus as Topic and Tool 83
of this would prove immensely useful later, on the South Side of Chicago, where germane treatments of African
Americans were current. It is in New Caledonia that I read the clas- sics of ethnology, Mauss, Mead, Malinowski,
Radcliffe-Brown, Bateson, etc. (especially works on the South Pacific: the Trobriand Islands were just nearby) and
that I kept my first field notebooks. The very first was scribbled among the tribe of Luecilla, in the Bay of Wé, at
Christmas 1983, about a year before the independentist uprising (its highlight was a section on going bat-hunting
and having to eat the roasted proceeds of our expedition at dinner that evening). Field notations found their way into
my first publications on edu- cational inequality, colonial conflict, and the transformation of Melanesian
communities under the press of capitalist expansion and French rule.
At the close of my Caledonian sojourn, I got a four-year fellowship to go do my doctorate at the University of
Chicago, the cradle of U.S. sociology and home of the main tradition of urban ethnography. When I arrived in Upton
Sinclair’s town, my intention was to work on a historical anthropology of colonial domination in New Caledonia,
but I got unexpectedly derailed and detoured into America’s dark ghetto. On the one side, the New Caledonian gates
were abruptly shut after I filed a complaint against the mediocre bureaucrat who was my supervisor in Nouméa and
had forced his name as co-author of a monograph on the school system that I had carried out by myself (Wacquant
1985). The directors of the Institute in Paris hastened to cover up for the cheater and effectively banned me from the
island. On the other side, I found myself confronted day-to-day with the gruesome reality of Chicago’s ghetto, or
what was left of it. I was assigned the last student-housing unit available on campus, the one nobody had wanted,
and so lived I on 61st Street, at the edge of the poor black district of Woodlawn. It was a constant tremor and
puzzlement to have right under my window this quasi-lunar urban landscape, with its unbelievable decay, misery,
and violence, backed by a totally hermetic separation between the white, prosperous, and privileged world of the
university and the abandoned African- American neighborhoods all around it. Coming from Western Europe where
such levels of urban blight, material destitution, and ethnic segregation are unknown, this questioned me profoundly
on a quotidian level, intellectually and politically. It is at this point that the second decisive encounter of my
intellectual life took place, the one with William Julius Wilson (the first was with Pierre Bourdieu, five years earlier,
when I decided to convert from economics to sociology after hearing a public lecture by him, see Wacquant 2002a).
Wilson is the most eminent African-American sociologist of the second half of the 20th century and the foremost
expert on the nexus of race and class in the United States. His analysis of “Blacks and American Institutions” in The
Declining Significance of Race (Wilson 1978) set the parameters for that subfield of social research in 1978. He was
one of the faculty who had initially attracted me to Chicago, and so when he offered me a chance to work with him
on the big research project on urban poverty he had just started (roughly, the agenda marked out by his book The
Truly Disadvantaged; Wilson 1987), I jumped at the opportunity and quickly became his close collaborator and coauthor. This allowed me to get straight to the core of the subject and also to get a close-up look at how this scientific
and policy debate operated at the highest level, especially in the philanthropic foundations and “think tanks” that
shaped the resurgence of the problematic of race, class, and poverty in the inner city. That is how I started my
investigations, first as an acolyte of Wilson and then by myself, on the transformation of the dark ghetto after the
riots of the 1960s, by striving to break with the pathologizing vision that pervaded and distorted research on the
question.
I owe a huge personal and intellectual debt to Bill Wilson, who was a mentor at once demanding and generous. He
stimulated and supported me, and he also gave me
84 L. Wacquant
the freedom to diverge from his analyses and at times to go in a direction diametrically opposed to his. By example,
he taught me intellectual courage: to pursue the big picture, to dig deep into the details, to ask the hard questions,
even when this entails ruffling a few social and academic feathers along the way. He also invited Pierre Bourdieu to
speak to his research team on his Algerian research on urbanization and proletarianization from the early 1960s
(Bourdieu et al. 1963). As it turned out, Bourdieu had tried to get The Declining Significance of Race translated into
French a few years earlier. This meeting and the ensuing discussion solidified my sense that I could make a link
between Bourdieu’s early anthropological inquiries into the lifepaths of Algerians subproletarians and the contemporary predicament of the residents Chicago’s black ghetto which preoccupied Wilson. But I did not know just
how yet.
Ethnography played a pivotal role at that juncture, on two counts. On the one hand, I took more anthropology than
sociology courses because the sociology department at the University of Chicago was dull intellectually and because
I was viscerally committed to a unitary conception of social science inherited from my French training. The courses,
works, and encouragements of John and Jean Comaroff, Marshall Sahlins, Bernard Cohn, and Raymond Smith
pushed me toward fieldwork. On the other hand, I wanted to quickly find a direct observation post inside the ghetto
because the existing literature on the topic was the product of a “gaze from afar” that seemed to me fundamentally
biased if not blind (Wacquant 1997). That literature was dominated by the statistical approach, deployed from on
high, by researchers who most often had no first- or even second-hand knowledge of what makes the ordinary reality
of the dispossessed neighborhoods of the Black Belt, and who fill this gap with stereotypes drawn from common
sense, journalistic or academic. I wanted to reconstruct the question of the ghetto from the ground up based on a
precise observation of the everyday activities and relations of the residents of that terra non grata and for this very
reason incognita (see Wacquant [1992] 1998a for an early effort).
I deemed epistemologically and morally impossible to do research on the ghetto with- out gaining serious first-hand
knowledge of it because it was right there, literally at my doorstep (in the summertime, you could hear gunfire going
off at night on the other side of the street), and because the established works seemed to me to be full of implausible
or per- nicious academic notions, starting with the scholarly myth of the “underclass” which was a veritable
intellectual cottage industry in those years (see Katz 1993 and Gans 1995 for critical accounts and Wacquant 1996
for a conceptual dissection). As a white Frenchman, my formative social and intellectual experiences made me a
complete foreigner to this milieu and intensified the need I felt to acquire some practical familiarity with it. After a
few aborted attempts, by accident I found a boxing gym in Woodlawn, some three blocks from my apartment, and I
signed up saying that I wanted to learn how to box, quite simply because there was nothing else to do in this context.
In reality, I had absolutely no curiosity about or interest in the pugilistic world in itself (but I did want to get good
exercise). The gym was to be just a platform for observation inside the ghetto, a place to meet potential informants.
Habitus Comes to the Gym
But, very quickly, that gym turned out to be, not only a wonderful window into the daily life of young men in the
neighborhood, but also a complex microcosm with a history, culture, and an intense and rich social, aesthetic,
emotional, and moral life of its own. In a matter of months, I formed a very strong carnal bond with the regulars of
the club and with the old coach DeeDee Armour, who became a sort of adoptive father to me. Gradually I found
Habitus as Topic and Tool 85
myself attracted by the magnetism of the “Sweet Science” to the point where I spent most of my time in and around
the gym. After about a year, the idea grew on me to dig into a second research subject, namely, the social logic of a
bodily craft. What is it that thrills boxers? Why do they commit themselves to this harshest and most destructive of
all trades? How do they acquire the desire and the skills necessary to last in it? What is the role of the gym, the
street, the surrounding violence and racial contempt, of self-interest and pleasure, and of the collective belief in
personal transcendence in all this? How does one create a social competency that is an embodied competency,
transmitted through a silent pedagogy of organisms in action? In short, how is the pugilistic habitus fabricated and
deployed? That is how I found myself working on two connected projects simultaneously—two projects ostensibly
very different from each other but in fact tightly linked: a carnal microsociology of the apprenticeship of boxing as
subproletarian bodily craft in the ghetto, which offers a particular “slice” of this universe from below and from
inside (Wacquant 2004a), and a historical and theoretical macrosociology of the ghetto as instrument of racial
closure and social domination, providing a generalizing perspective from above and from the outside (Wacquant
2008).
I had started writing a field diary after every training session from my first afternoon at the gym, initially to
overcome the overpowering sense of being out of place on the pugilis- tic scene on so many levels and not knowing
really what I would do with these notes. Now I shifted to taking systematic notes and to exploring the various facets
of the Sweet sci- ence. The notion of habitus immediately came to me as a conceptual device to make sense of my
personal experiences as a boxing apprentice and a scaffold to organize my ongoing observation of pugilistic
pedagogy. I had read Bourdieu’s anthropological works front and back during my Caledonia years. So I was fully
familiar with his elaboration of the notion, intended to overcome the antinomy between an objectivism that reduces
practice to the mechanical precipitate of structural necessities and a subjectivism that confuses the per- sonal will
and intentions of the agent with the spring of her action (Bourdieu [1980] 1990; see Wacquant 2004b for a
genealogy and exegesis of the notion). The author of Outline of a Theory of Practice had retrieved habitus from a
long line of philosophers, stretching from Aristotle to Aquinas to Husserl, to develop a dispositional theory of action
recognizing that social agents are not passive beings pulled and pushed about by external forces, but skillful
creatures who actively construct social reality through “categories of perception, appre- ciation and action.” Unlike
phenomenology, however, Bourdieu insists that, while being resilient and shared, these categories are not universal
(or transcendental, in the language of Kantian philosophy) and that the generative matrix they compose is not
unchanging. Rather, as the embodied sediments of individual and collective history, they are themselves socially
constructed.
As the product of history, habitus produces individual and collective practices, and thus history, in accordance with
the schemata engendered by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences which, deposited in each
organ- ism in the form of schemata of thought and action, tend, more surely than all formal rules and all explicit
norms, to guarantee the conformity of practices and their constancy across time. (Bourdieu [1980] 1990, p. 91F)
Four properties of the concept of habitus suggested its direct relevancy for disclosing the social making of
prizefighters. First, habitus is a set acquired dispositions, and no one is born a boxer (least of all, me!): the training
of fighters consists precisely in physical drills, ascetic rules of life (concerning the management of food, time,
emotions, and sexual
86 L. Wacquant
desire), and social games geared toward instilling in them new abilities, categories, and desires, those specific to the
pugilistic cosmos (Wacquant 1998b). Second, habitus holds that practical mastery operates beneath the level of
consciousness and discourse, and this matches perfectly with a commanding feature of the experience of pugilistic
learning, in which mental understanding is of little help (and can even be a serious hindrance in the ring) so long as
one has not grasped boxing technique with one’s body (Wacquant 1995a). Third, habitus indicates that sets of
dispositions vary by social location and trajectory: individuals with different life experiences will have gained
varied ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; their primary dispositions will be more or less distant from those
required by the Sweet Science; and thus they will more or less invested in and adept at picking up the craft. This
certainly accorded with my personal experience and notations on the disparate behaviors of my gym mates over
time, as they tangled with the competing lure of the street and the gym, adapted to the authority of our coach, and
sought to remake their self in accordance to the exacting demands of the trade. Fourth, the socially constituted
conative and cognitive structures that make up habitus are malleable and transmissible because they result from
pedagogical work. If you want to pry into habitus, then study the organized practices of inculcation through which it
is layered (Wacquant 1995b).
The “magical moment” of fieldwork that crystallized this theoretical hunch and turned what was initially a side
activity into a full-blow inquiry into the social logics of incarnation was a rather inglorious one: it was getting my
nose broken in sparring in May 1989, about nine months into my novitiate. This injury forced me to take a long
“time out” away from the ring, during which Bourdieu urged me to write a field report on my initiation for a
thematic issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in preparation on “The Space of Sports.” The result was
a long article that showed me that it was both feasible and fruitful to convert the theory of action encapsulated by the
notion of habitus into an empirical experiment on the practical production of prizefighters at the Woodlawn gym
(Wacquant 1989, 2002a). This article was soon augmented by more direct engagement with habitus on the
theoretical front.
While I was carrying out my investigations on boxing and on the ghetto, I was in permanent contact with Pierre
Bourdieu, who encouraged and guided me. Upon learning that I had signed up to learn how to box at the Woodlawn
Boys Club, he had written me a note that said essentially, “Stick it out, you will learn more about the ghetto in this
gym than you can from all the surveys in the world.” (Later on, as I got deeper into my immer- sion, he got a bit
scared and tried to get me to pull back. When I signed up to fight in the Chicago Golden Gloves, he first threatened
to disown me as he feared that I would get hurt, before realizing that there was no need to panick: I was well
prepared for this trial by fire.) Bourdieu came to Chicago several times, visited the gym, and met DeeDee and my
boxer friends (I introduced him to them as “the Mike Tyson of sociology”). During one of these visits, we hatched
the project of a book that would explicate the theoretical core of his work, aimed at the Anglo-American readership,
since it was on this front that there were the strongest distortions and obstacles to a fertile grasp of his models. We
devoted three years to writing this book across the Atlantic (by fax, phone, letters and meetings every few months),
entitled An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), in which we disentangle the nexus of
habitus, capital, and field. During those years, I led a sort of Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde existence, boxing by day and
writing social theory by night. In the afternoon, I would go to the gym, train, hang out with my buddies, and “conversate” on end with our coach DeeDee before driving him home at closing time. And, later that evening, after
having typed my fieldnotes, I would switch to the book manuscript with Bourdieu. It was in turns intoxicating,
invigorating, and exhausting. But the daytime
Habitus as Topic and Tool 87
sessions as a student of pugilism offered both a respite from theoretical cogitation and pow- erful stimuli for
thinking through the abstract issues tackled in the book in very mundane empirical terms. The sociology of the
ghetto (which I had extended to encompass a com- parison with the postindustrial transformation of the French
urban periphery), the carnal ethnography of the skilled body, and theoretical work with Bourdieu: all of these strands
were elaborated together and at the same time, and they are all woven together.
The boxing project is an ethnography in a classic mold in terms of its parameters, a sort of village study like the ones
British anthropologists conducted in the 1940s, except that my village is the boxing gym and its extensions, and my
tribe the fighters and their entourage. I retained this structural and functional unity because it encloses the boxers
and carves out a specific temporal, relational, mental, emotional, and aesthetic horizon which sets the pugilist apart,
pushes him to “heroize” his lifeworld, and thereby raises him above his ordinary environs (Wacquant 1995c). I
wanted, first of all, to dissect the cloven relation of “symbiotic opposition” between the ghetto and the gym, the
street and the ring. Next, I sought to show how the social and symbolic structure of the gym governs the
transmission of the techniques of the Manly art and the production of collective belief in the pugilistic illusio. And,
finally, I wished to penetrate the practical logic of a corporeal practice that operates at the very limits of practice by
means of a long-term apprenticeship in “the first person.” For three years, I melted into the local landscape and got
caught up in the game. I learned how to box and participated in all phases of the preparation of the pugilist, all the
way to fighting in the big amateur tournament of the Golden Gloves. I followed my gym buddies in their personal
and professional peregrinations. I dealt on a routine basis with trainers, managers, promoters, etc., who make the
planet of boxing turn and share in the spoils of this “show-business with blood” (Wacquant 1998c). In so doing, I
was sucked into the sensuous and moral coils of pugilism, to the point where I seriously envisaged interrupting my
academic trajectory to turn professional.
However, as the foregoing should have made clear, the object and method of this inquiry were not of the classic
mold. Body and Soul offers an empirical and methodolog- ical radicalization of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. On
the one hand, I open the “black box” of the pugilistic habitus by disclosing the production and assembly of the
cognitive categories, bodily skills and desires which together define the competence and appetence specific to the
boxer. On the other hand, I deploy habitus as a methodological device, that is, I place myself in the local vortex of
action in order to acquire through practice, in real time, the dispositions of the boxer with the aim of elucidating the
magnetism proper to the pugilistic cosmos. This allows me to disclose the powerful allure of the combination of
craft, sensuality, and morality that binds the pugilist to his trade as well as impresses the embodied notions of risk
and redemption that enable him to overcome the turbid sense of being superexploited (Wacquant 2001). The method
thus tests the theory of action which informs the analysis according to a recursive and reflexive research design.
The idea that guided me here was to push the logic of participant observation to the point where it becomes inverted
and turns into observant participation. In the Anglo- American tradition, when anthropology students first go into
the field, they are cautioned, “Don’t go native.” In the French tradition, radical immersion is admissible—think of
Jeanne Favret-Saada’s ([1978] 1980) Deadly Words—but only on condition that it be coupled with a subjectivist
epistemology which gets us lost in the inner depths of the anthropologist-subject. My position on the contrary, is to
say, “go native” but “go native armed,” that is, equipped with your theoretical and methodological tools, with the
full store of problematics inherited from your discipline, with your capacity for reflexivity and analysis, and guided
by a constant effort, once you have passed the ordeal of initiation,
88 L. Wacquant
to objectivize this experience and construct the object, instead of allowing yourself to be naively embraced and
constructed by it. Go ahead, go native, but come back a sociolo- gist! In my case, the concept of habitus served both
as a bridge to enter into the factory of pugilistic know-how and methodically parse the texture of the work(ing)
world of the pugilist, and as a shield against the lure of the subjectivist rollover of social analysis into narcissistic
story telling.
From Flesh to Text
Some of my critics, conflating the narrative form of the book for its analytic contents and mistaking my work for an
extension of the “study of occupations” in the style of the second Chicago School (Hughes 1994), did not even
notice the double role which the concept of habitus played in the inquiry and even complained about the absence of
theory in the book (Wacquant 2005c). In fact, theory and method are joined to the point of fusion in the very
empirical object whose elaboration they make possible.
Body and Soul is an experimental ethnography in the originary meaning of the term, in that the researcher is one of
the socialized bodies thrown into the sociomoral and sensuous alembic of the boxing gym, one of bodies-in-action
whose transmutation will be traced to penetrate the alchemy by which boxers are fabricated. Apprenticeship is here
the means of acquiring a practical mastery, a visceral knowledge of the universe under scrutiny, a way of elucidating
the praxeology of the agents under examination, as recommended by Erving Goffman (1989) in a famous talk on
fieldwork—and not the means of entering into the subjectivity of the researcher. It is absolutely not a fall into the
bottomless well of subjec- tivism into which “auto-ethnography” joyfully throws itself (Reed-Danahay 1997), quite
the opposite: it relies on the most intimate experience, that of the desiring and suffering body, to grasp in vivo the
collective manufacturing of the schemata of pugilistic perception, appreciation, and action that are shared, to varying
degrees, by all boxers, whatever their origins, their trajectory, and their standing in the sporting hierarchy (Wacquant
2005a). The central character of the story is neither “Busy” Louie, nor this or that boxer, and not even DeeDee the
old coach, in spite of his central position as conductor: it is the gym as a social and moral forge.
Indeed, I hold that with this project, I did in an explicit, methodical, and above all extreme manner that which every
good ethnographer does, namely, to give herself a prac- tical, tactile, sensorial grasp of the prosaic reality she studies
in order to shed light on the categories and relations that organize the ordinary conduct and sentiments of her
subjects. Except that, usually this is done without talking about it or without thematizing the role of “co-presence”
with the phenomenon being studied, or by making (herself and others) believe that this is a mental process and not a
bodily and sensual apprenticeship which pro- ceeds beneath the level of consciousness before it becomes mediated
by language. Body and Soul offers a demonstration in action of the distinctive possibilities and virtues of a carnal
sociology which fully recounts the fact that the social agent is a suffering ani- mal, a being of flesh and blood, nerves
and viscera, inhabited by passions and endowed with embodied knowledge and skills—by opposition to the animal
symbolicum of the neo- Kantian tradition, refurbished by Clifford Geertz (1974) and the followers of interpretive
anthropology, on the one hand, and by Herbert Blumer (1966) and the symbolic interac- tionists, on the other—and
that this is just as true of the sociologist. This implies that we must bring the body of the sociologist back into play
and treat her intelligent organism, not as an obstacle to understanding, as the intellectualism drilled into our folk
conception of intellectual practice would have it, but as a vector of knowledge of the social world.
Habitus as Topic and Tool 89
Body and Soul is not an exercise in reflexive anthropology in the sense intended by what is called “poststructuralist”
or “postmodern” anthropology, for which the return of the analytic gaze is directed either onto the knowing subject
in her personal intimacy or onto the text that she delivers to her peers and the circuits of power-knowledge in which
it trav- els, in a contradictory and self-destructive embrace of relativism (Hastrup 1995; Marcus 1998). Those forms
of reflexivity, narcissistic and discursive, are rather superficial; they certainly constitute a useful moment in a
research undertaking by helping to curb the play of the crudest biases (rooted in one’s identity and trajectory,
affects, rhetorical effects, etc.). But they stop the movement of critique at the very point where it should start,
through the constant questioning of the categories and techniques of sociological analysis and of the relationship to
the world these presuppose. It is this return onto the instruments of con- struction of the object, as opposed to the
subject of objectivation, which is the hallmark of what one may call epistemic reflexivity (Bourdieu & Wacquant
1992, pp. 36–46; Bourdieu 2002). And here is another difference with the “egological” or textual reflexivity of the
subjectivist anthropologists: epistemic reflexivity is deployed, not at the end of the project, ex post, when it comes to
drafting the final research report, but durante, at every stage in the investigation. It targets the totality of the most
routine research operations, from the selection of the site and the recruitment of informants to the choice of
questions to pose or to avoid, as well as the engagement of theoretic schema, methodological tools and display
techniques, at the moment when they are implemented.
So Body and Soul is a reflexive book in the sense that the very design of the inquiry forced me to constantly reflect
on the suitability of the means of investigation to its ends, on the difference between the practical mastery and the
theoretical mastery of a prac- tice, on the gap between sensorial infatuation and analytic comprehension, on the
hiatus between the visceral and the mental, the ethos and the logos of pugilism as well as of sociology. Likewise,
Urban Outcasts (Wacquant 2008), the companion book of macroso- ciology which draws up a comparison of the
structure and experience of urban relegation in the black American ghetto and the French urban periphery, is a work
of reflexive urban sociology because it ceaselessly interrogates the very categories it puts into question and into
play—“underclass,” “inner city,” “banlieues,” hyperghetto, anti-ghetto, precariat—to think the novel configurations
of marginality in the city. And because it rests on a clear-cut demarcation between folk categories and analytic
categories, which is for me the plinth of reflexivity.
Epistemic reflexivity is all the more urgently needed by ethnographers as everything conspires to invite them to
submit to the preconstructions of common sense, lay or schol- arly. By methodological duty, they must be attentive
to the agents they study and take seriously their “point of view.” If they do their job well, they also find themselves
bound to these agents by affective ties that encourage identification and transference (for an astute analysis of the
methodological use of transference in Body and Soul, see Manning 2005). Finally, the public image of ethnography
(including, regrettably, in the eyes of other social scientists) likens it to story-telling, diary-writing, if not to epic. So
much to say that the anthropologist or sociologist who relies on fieldwork must double the dose of reflexivity. This is
what I tried to demonstrate in “Scrutinizing the Street” about recent trends and foibles in U.S. urban ethnography
(Wacquant 2002b). The considered target of my critique is not the three books on race and urban poverty that I
subject to a meticulous analytic dissection (and still less their authors, who are here simply points in academic space,
or their political positions, to which I am completely indifferent), but a certain epistemolog- ical posture of
unreflective surrender to folk apperceptions, to ordinary moralism, to the seductions of official thought and to the
rules of academic decorum. This posture is the
90 L. Wacquant
fount of serious scientific errors, as these errors are systematic and have both ordinary and scholarly common sense
on their side.
To enable the reader to experience the thrills of the apprentice-boxer and to make palpable both the logic of the
fieldwork and its end-product required adopting a quasi- theatrical mode of writing. How to go from the guts to the
intellect, from the compre- hension of the flesh to the knowledge of the text? Here is a real problem of concrete
epistemology about which we have not sufficiently reflected, and which for a long time seemed to me nearly
irresolvable (notwithstanding the varied attempts at and discussions of formal innovation and poetic construction
among anthropologists). To restitute the car- nal dimension of ordinary existence and the bodily anchoring of the
practical knowledge constitutive of pugilism—but also of every practice, even the least “bodily” in appearance,
including sociological analysis—requires indeed a complete overhaul of our way of writ- ing social science. In the
case at hand, I had to find a style breaking with the monological, monochromatic, linear writing of the classic
research account from which the ethnogra- pher has withdrawn and elaborate a multifaceted writing mixing styles
and genres, so as to capture and convey “the taste and ache of action” to the reader (Wacquant 2004a, pp. vii–xii).
Body and Soul is written against subjectivism, against the narcissism and irrational- ism that undergird so-called
“postmodern” literary theory, but that does not mean that we should for that deprive ourselves of the literary
techniques and instruments dramatic exposition that this tradition gives us. That is why the book mixes three types
of writing, intertwined with each other, but each given priority in one of the three parts, so that the reader slides
smoothly from concept to percept, from analysis to experience. The first part anchors a classic sociological style in
an analytic mold that identifies at the outset structures and mechanisms so as to give the reader the tools necessary
for explaining and understand- ing what is going on. The tone of the second part is set by ethnographic writing in the
strict sense, that is, a dense depiction of the ways of being, thinking, feeling, and acting proper to the milieu under
consideration, where one encounters again these mechanisms but in action, through the effects they produce. The
experiential moment comes in the third part, in the form of “sociological novella” that delivers felt action, the lived
experience of a subject who also happens to be the analyst.
The weighed combination of these three modalities of writing—the sociological, the ethnographic, and the literary—
according to proportions that become gradually inverted as the book progresses, aims to enable the reader to feel
emotionally and understand ratio- nally the springs and turns of pugilistic action. For this, the text weaves together
an analytic lattice, stretches of closely edited field notes, counterpoints composed of portraits of key protagonists
and excerpts from interviews, as well as photographs whose role is to foster a synthetic grasp of the dynamic
interplay of the factors and forms inventoried in the analy- sis, to give the reader a chance to “touch with her own
eyes” the beating pulse of pugilism. Here again, everything hangs together: the theory of habitus, the use of
apprenticeship as technique of investigation, the place accorded to the sentient body as vector of knowledge, and
formal innovation in writing. Indeed, there is no point in carrying out a carnal sociology backed by practical
initiation if what it reveals about the sensorimotor magnetism of the universe in question ends up disappearing later
in the writing, on the pretext that one must abide by the textual canons dictated by Humean positivism or neoKantian cognitivism.
Many social researchers view theory as a set of abstract notions that either float high up in the pure sky of ideas,
disconnected from the nitty-gritty of the conduct of inquiry, or constitute responses to the empirical questions that
the latter raises, to be discovered in the real world, as in the approach labeled “grounded theory.” This is a
misconstrual of the
Habitus as Topic and Tool 91
relationship of theory and research, and ethnography in particular. Whether the investigator is aware of it or not,
theory is always driving field inquiry because, as Gaston Bachelard (1971) taught us, “the vector of knowledge goes
from the rational to the real,” and not the other way around. And it must of necessity engage observation in order to
convert itself into propositions about an empirically existing entity. This applies to habitus, which like every
concept, is not an answer to a research question but rather an organized manner of asking questions about the social
world—in the case recounted here, a methodical plan to vivisect the social fabrication of pugilists in their workaday
environment.
References
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Blumer, H 1966, Symbolic interaction, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, CA.
Bourdieu, P [1980] 1990, The logic of practice, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bourdieu, P 2002, ‘Participant objectivation: the Huxley medal lecture’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 281–94.
Bourdieu, P & Bensa, A 1985, May, ‘Quand les canaques prennent la parole’, Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales, vol. 56, pp. 69–85.
Bourdieu, P, Darbel, A, Rivet, J-P & Seibel, C 1963, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, Mouton, Paris
and The Hague.
Bourdieu, P & Wacquant, L 1992, An invitation to reflexive sociology, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, and Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bensa, A 1995, Chroniques Kanak. L’ethnologie en marche, Ethnies, Paris.
Favret-Saada, J [1978] 1980, Deadly words: witchcraft in the Bocage, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Gans, H 1995, The War against the poor, Pantheon, New York.
Geertz, C 1974, The interpretation of cultures, Basic Book, New York.
Goffman, E 1989, ‘On fieldwork’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 123–32. Hastrup, K 1995, A
passage to anthropology: between experience and theory, Routledge, London. Hugues, EC 1994, On work, race, and the
sociological imagination, LA Coser (ed.), University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Jenkins, R 1991, Pierre Bourdieu, Routledge, London.
Katz, MB (ed.) 1993, The “underclass” debate: views from history, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Manning, P 2005, Freud and American sociology, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Marcus, G 1998, Ethnography through thick and thin, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Reed-Danahay, D (ed.) 1997,
Auto/ethnography: rewriting the self and the social, Berg, New York. Wacquant, L 1985, L’École inégale. Éléments de
sociologie de l’enseignement en NouvelleCalédonie, Editions de l’ORSTOM with the Institut Culturel Mélanésien, Paris.
Wacquant, L 1989, November, ‘Corps et âme: notes ethnographiques d’un apprenti-boxeur’, Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 80, pp. 33–67.
Wacquant, L 1995a, ‘The pugilistic point of view: how boxers think and feel about their trade’,
Theory & Society, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 489–535.
Wacquant, L 1995b, ‘Pugs at work: bodily capital and bodily labor among professional boxers’, Body
& Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 65–94.
Wacquant, L 1995c, ‘Protection, discipline et honneur: une salle de boxe dans le ghetto américain’,
Sociologie et sociétés, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 75–89.
Wacquant, L 1996, ‘L’‘underclass’ urbaine dans l’imaginaire social et scientifique américain’, in S
Paugam (ed.), L’exclusion: l’état des saviors, pp. 248–62, Editions La Découverte, Paris. Wacquant, L 1997, ‘Three pernicious
premises in the study of the American ghetto’, International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 341–53.
92 L. Wacquant
Wacquant, L [1992] 1998a, ‘Inside the zone: the social art of the hustler in the Black American ghetto’, Theory, Culture &
Society, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 1–36.
Wacquant, L 1998b, ‘The prizefighter’s three bodies’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, vol. 63, no. 3, pp. 325–52.
Wacquant, L 1998c, ‘A flesh peddler at work: power, pain, and profit in the prizefighting economy’, Theory & Society, vol. 27,
no. 1, pp. 1–42.
Wacquant, L 2001, ‘Whores, slaves, and stallions: languages of exploitation and accommodation among professional fighters’,
Body & Society, vol. 7, no. 2/3, pp. 181–94. (Special issue on Commodifying Bodies)
Wacquant, L 2002a, ‘Taking Bourdieu into the field’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, pp. 180–86.
Wacquant, L 2002b, ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography’, American Journal of
Sociology, vol. 107, no. 6, pp. 1468–1532.
Wacquant, L [2000] 2004a, Body and soul: notebooks of an apprentice boxer, Oxford University Press, New York.
Wacquant, L 2004b, ‘Habitus’, in J Beckert & M Zafirovski (eds.), International encyclopedia of economic sociology, pp. 315–
19, Routledge, London.
Wacquant, L 2005a, ‘Carnal connections: on embodiment, membership and apprenticeship’, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 28, no. 4,
pp. 445–71. (Response to the special issue on Body and Soul, vol. 28, no. 3, Fall 2005)
Wacquant, L 2005b, ‘Shadowboxing with ethnographic ghosts: a rejoinder’, Symbolic Interaction, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 441–47.
(Response to the symposium Body and Soul)
Wacquant, L 2008, Urban outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Wilson, WJ 1978, The declining significance of race: Blacks and changing American institutions, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Wilson, WJ 1987, The truly disadvantaged: the inner city, the underclass, and public policy, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
About the Author
Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre
européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of the Lewis
Coser Award of the American Sociological Association, his interests span incarnation, ethnoracial domination,
urban inequality, the penal state, and social theory. Wacquant’s books have been translated into a dozen languages
and include Body and Soul: Notebooks of An Apprentice Boxer (2004), Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology
of Advanced Marginality (2008), Punishing the Poor: The New Government of Social Insecurity (2009), and Deadly
Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (2011).
Copyright of Qualitative Research in Psychology is the property of Routledge and its content
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Chapter 9 Qualitative Methods
Qualitative methods demonstrate a different approach to scholarly inquiry than methods of quantitative
research. Although the processes are similar, qualitative methods rely on text and image data, have unique
steps in data analysis, and draw on diverse designs. Writing a method section for a proposal or study for
qualitative research partly requires educating readers as to the intent of qualitative research, mentioning
specific designs, carefully reflecting on the role the researcher plays in the study, drawing from an everexpanding list of types of data sources, using specific protocols for recording data, analyzing the information
through multiple steps of analysis, and mentioning approaches for documenting the methodological integrity
or accuracy—or validity—of the data collected. This chapter addresses these important components of
writing a good qualitative method section into a proposal or study. Table 9.1
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint-50#s9781506386720.i1178) presents a
checklist for reviewing the qualitative methods section of your project to determine whether you have
addressed important topics.
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The qualitative method section of a proposal requires attention to topics that are similar to a quantitative (or
mixed methods) project. These involve telling the reader about the design being used in the study and, in this
case, the use of qualitative research and its basic intent. It also involves discussing the sample for the study
and the overall data collection and recording procedures. It further expands on the data analysis steps and the
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methods used for presenting the data, interpreting it, validating it, and indicating the potential outcomes of
the study. In contrast to other designs, the qualitative approach includes comments by the researcher about
their role and their self-reflection (or reflexivity, it is called), and the specific type of qualitative strategy
being used. Further, because the writing structure of a qualitative project may vary considerably from study
to study, the method section should also include comments about the nature of the final written product.
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9.1 The Characteristics of Qualitative Research
For many years, qualitative writers had to discuss the characteristics of qualitative research and convince
faculty and audiences as to their legitimacy. Now these discussions are less frequently found in the literature
and there is some consensus as to what constitutes qualitative inquiry. Thus, our suggestions about the
method section of a project or proposal are as follows:
Review the needs of potential audiences for the proposal or study. Decide whether audience
members are knowledgeable enough about the characteristics of qualitative research that this section
is not necessary. For example, although qualitative research is typically accepted and well-known in
the social sciences, it has emerged in the health sciences only in the last couple of decades. Thus, for
health science audiences, a review of the basic characteristics will be important.
If there is some question about the audience’s knowledge, present the basic characteristics of
qualitative research and consider discussing a recent qualitative research journal article (or study) to
use as an example to illustrate the characteristics.
If you present the basic characteristics, what ones should you mention? A number of authors of
introductory texts convey these characteristics, such as Creswell (2016), Hatch (2002), and Marshall
and Rossman (2016).
Natural setting: Qualitative researchers tend to collect data in the field at the site where
participants experience the issue or problem under study. Researchers do not bring
individuals into a lab (a contrived situation), nor do they typically send out instruments for
individuals to complete. This up-close information gathered by actually talking directly to
people and seeing them behave and act within their context is a major characteristic of
qualitative research. In the natural setting, the researchers have face-to-face interaction,
often extending over a prolonged period of time.
Researcher as key instrument: Qualitative researchers collect data themselves through
examining documents, observing behavior, or interviewing participants. They may use a
protocol—an instrument for recording data—but the researchers are the ones who actually
gather the information and interpret it. They do not tend to use or rely on questionnaires or
instruments developed by other researchers.
Multiple sources of data: Qualitative researchers typically gather multiple forms of data,
such as interviews, observations, documents, and audiovisual information rather than rely
on a single data source. These are all open-ended forms of data in which the participants
share their ideas freely, not constrained by predetermined scales or instruments. Then the
researchers review all of the data, make sense of it, and organize it into codes and themes
that cut across all of the data sources.
Inductive and deductive data analysis: Qualitative researchers typically work inductively,
building patterns, categories, and themes from the bottom up by organizing the data into
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increasingly more abstract units of information. This inductive process illustrates working
back and forth between the themes and the database until the researchers have established a
comprehensive set of themes. Then deductively, the researchers look back at their data from
the themes to determine if more evidence can support each theme or whether they need to
gather additional information. Thus, while the process begins inductively, deductive
thinking also plays an important role as the analysis moves forward.
Participants’ meanings: In the entire qualitative research process, the researchers keep a
focus on learning the meaning that the participants hold about the problem or issue, not the
meaning that the researchers bring to the research or that writers express in the literature.
Emergent design: The research process for qualitative researchers is emergent. This means
that the initial plan for research cannot be tightly prescribed, and some or all phases of the
process may change or shift after the researcher enters the field and begins to collect data.
For example, the questions may change, the forms of data collection may shift, and the
individuals studied and the sites visited may be modified. These shifts signal that the
researchers are delving deeper and deeper into the topic or the phenomenon under study.
The key idea behind qualitative research is to learn about the problem or issue from
participants and to address the research to obtain that information.
Reflexivity: In qualitative research, inquirers reflect about how their role in the study and
their personal background, culture, and experiences hold potential for shaping their
interpretations, such as the themes they advance and the meaning they ascribe to the data.
This aspect of the methods is more than merely advancing biases and values in the study,
but how the background of the researchers actually may shape the direction of the study.
Holistic account: Qualitative researchers try to develop a complex picture of the problem or
issue under study. This involves reporting multiple perspectives, identifying the many
factors involved in a situation, and generally sketching the larger picture that emerges. This
larger picture is not necessarily a linear model of cause and effect but rather a model of
multiple factors interacting in different ways. This picture, qualitative researchers would
say, mirrors real life and the ways that events operate in the real world. A visual model of
many facets of a process or a central phenomenon aids in establishing this holistic picture
(see, for example, Creswell & Brown, 1992).
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9.2 Qualitative Designs
Beyond these general characteristics are more specific approaches (i.e., strategies of inquiry, designs, or
procedures) in conducting qualitative research (Creswell & Poth, 2018). These approaches have emerged in
the field of qualitative research since it has matured in the social sciences since the early 1990s. They include
procedures for data collection, analysis, and writing, but they originated out of disciplines in the social
sciences. Many approaches exist, such as the 28 identified by Tesch (1990), the 22 types in Wolcott’s (2009)
tree, and the five approaches to qualitative inquiry by Creswell and Poth (2018), and Creswell (2016).
Marshall and Rossman (2016) discussed five types common across five different authors. As mentioned in
Chapter 1 (s9781506386720.i598.xhtml) , we recommend that qualitative researchers choose from among the
possibilities, such as narrative, phenomenology, ethnography, case study, and grounded theory. We selected
these five because they are popular across the social and health sciences today. Others exist that have been
addressed adequately in qualitative books, such as participatory action research (Kemmis & Wilkinson,
1998), discourse analysis (Cheek, 2004), or participatory action research (Ivankova, 2015). In these
approaches, researchers study individuals (narrative, phenomenology); explore processes, activities, and
events (case study, grounded theory); or learn about broad culture-sharing behavior of individuals or groups
(ethnography).
In writing a procedure for a qualitative proposal, consider the following research tips:
Identify the specific approach that you will be using and provide references to the literature that
discusses the approach.
Provide some background information about the approach, such as its discipline origin, the
applications of it (preferably to your field), and a brief definition of it (see Chapter 1
(s9781506386720.i598.xhtml) for the five approaches or designs).
Discuss why it is an appropriate strategy to use in the proposed study.
Identify how the use of the approach will shape many aspects of the design process, such as the title,
the problem, the research questions, the data collection and analysis, and the report write-up.
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9.3 The Researcher’s Role and Reflexivity
As mentioned in the list of characteristics, qualitative research is interpretative research; the inquirer is
typically involved in a sustained and intensive experience with participants. This introduces a range of
strategic, ethical, and personal issues into the qualitative research process (Locke, Spirduso, & Silverman,
2013). With these concerns in mind, inquirers explicitly identify reflexively their biases, values, and personal
background, such as gender, history, culture, and socioeconomic status (SES) that shape their interpretations
formed during a study. In addition, gaining entry to a research site and the ethical issues that might arise are
also elements of the researcher’s role.
Reflexivity requires commenting on two important points:
Past experiences. Include statements about past experiences with the research problem or with the
participants or setting that help the reader understand the connection between the researchers and the
study. These experiences may involve participation in the setting, past educational or work
experiences, or culture, ethnicity, race, SES, or other demographics that tie the researchers directly to
the study.
How past experiences shape interpretations. Be explicit, then, about how these experiences may
potentially shape the interpretations the researchers make during the study. For example, the
experiences may cause researchers to lean toward certain themes, to actively look for evidence to
support their positions, and to create favorable or unfavorable conclusions about the sites or
participants.
How can reflexive thinking be incorporated into your qualitative study (Creswell, 2016)? You can write notes
about your personal experiences during the study. These notes might include observations about the process
of data collection, hunches about what you are learning, and concerns about reactions of participants to the
research process. These ideas can be written as memos—notes written during the research process that reflect
on the process or that help shape the development of codes and themes. In writing these reflective notes, how
do you know whether you are being sufficiently reflexive for a qualitative study? Sufficient reflexivity occurs
when researchers record notes during the process of research, reflect on their own personal experiences, and
consider how their personal experiences may shape their interpretation of results. Also, qualitative
researchers need to limit their discussions about personal experiences so that they do not override the
importance of the content or methods in a study.
Another aspect of reflecting on the role of the researcher is to be aware of connections between the researcher
and the participants or the research sites that may unduly influence the researcher’s interpretations.
“Backyard” research (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992) involves studying the researcher’s own organization, or
friends, or immediate work setting. This often leads to compromises in the researcher’s ability to disclose
information and raises issues of an imbalance of power between the inquirer and the participants. When
researchers collect data at their own workplaces (or when they are in a superior role to participants), the
information may be convenient and easy to collect, but it may not be accurate information and it may
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jeopardize the roles of the researchers and the participants. If studying the backyard is essential, then the
researcher is responsible for showing how the data will not be compromised and how such information will
not place the participants (or the researchers) at risk. In addition, multiple strategies for validation (see
approaches to validation later in this chapter) are necessary to demonstrate the accuracy of the information.
Further, indicate steps taken to obtain permission from the institutional review board (IRB) (see Chapter 4
(s9781506386720.i817.xhtml) ) to protect the rights of human participants. Attach, as an appendix, the approval
letter from the IRB and discuss the process involved in securing permissions. Discuss steps taken to gain
entry to the setting and to secure permissions to study the participants or situation (Marshall & Rossman,
2016). It is important to gain access to research or archival sites by seeking the approval of gatekeepers,
individuals at the site who provide access to the site and allow or permit the research to be done. A brief
proposal might need to be developed and submitted for review to gatekeepers. Bogdan and Biklen (1992)
advanced topics that could be addressed in such a proposal:
Why was the site chosen for study?
What activities will occur at the site during the research study?
Will the study be disruptive?
How will the results be reported?
What will the gatekeeper gain from the study?
Comment about sensitive ethical issues that may arise (see Chapter 4 (s9781506386720.i817.xhtml) ). For each
issue raised, discuss how the research study will address it. For example, when studying a sensitive topic, it is
necessary to mask names of people, places, and activities. In this situation, the process for masking
information requires discussion in the proposal.
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9.4 Data Collection Procedures
Comments about the role of the researcher set the stage for discussion of issues involved in collecting data.
The data collection steps include setting the boundaries for the study through sampling and recruitment;
collecting information through unstructured or semi-structured observations and interviews, documents, and
visual materials; as well as establishing the protocol for recording information.
Identify the purposefully selected sites or individuals for the proposed study. The idea behind
qualitative research is to purposefully select participants or sites (or documents or visual material)
that will best help the researcher understand the problem and the research question. This does not
necessarily suggest random sampling or selection of a large number of participants and sites, as is
typically found in quantitative research. A discussion of participants and the site might include four
aspects identified by Miles and Huberman (1994): (a) the setting (i.e., where the research will take
place), (b) the actors (i.e., who will be observed or interviewed), (c) the events (i.e., what the actors
will be observed or interviewed doing), and (d) the process (i.e., the evolving nature of events
undertaken by the actors within the setting).
Discuss the strategies being used to recruit individual (or cases) to the study. This is a challenging
aspect of research. Indicate ways of informing appropriate participants about the study, and cite the
actual recruitment messages sent to them. Discuss ways to provide incentives for individuals to
participate, and reflect on approaches that will be used if one method of recruitment is not
successful.
Comment on the number of participants and sites involved in the research. Aside from the small
number that characterizes qualitative research, how many sites and participants should you have?
First of all, there is no specific answer to this question; the literature contains a variety of
perspectives (e.g., see Creswell & Poth, 2018). Sample size depends on the qualitative design being
used (e.g., ethnography, case study). From a review of many qualitative research studies, we have
some rough estimates to advance. Narrative includes one or two individuals; phenomenology
involves a range of 3–10; grounded theory, 20–30; ethnography examines one single culture-sharing
group with numerous artifacts, interviews, and observations; and case studies include about four to
five cases. This is certainly one approach to the sample size issue. Another approach is equally
viable. The idea of saturation comes from grounded theory. Charmaz (2006) said that one stops
collecting data when the categories (or themes) are saturated: when gathering fresh data no longer
sparks new insights or reveals new properties. This is when you have an adequate sample.
Indicate the type or types of data to be collected. In many qualitative studies, inquirers collect
multiple forms of data and spend a considerable time in the natural setting gathering information.
The collection procedures in qualitative research involve four basic types and their strengths and
limitations, as shown in Table 9.2
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint-54#s9781506386720.i1195) .
A qualitative observation is when the researcher takes field notes on the behavior and
activities of individuals at the research site. In these field notes, the researcher records, in an
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unstructured or semi-structured way (using some prior questions that the inquirer wants to
know), activities at the research site. Qualitative observers may also engage in roles varying
from a nonparticipant to a complete participant. Typically these observations are openended in that the researchers ask general questions of the participants allowing the
participants to freely provide their views.
In qualitative interviews, the researcher conducts face-to-face interviews with participants,
telephone interviews, or engages in focus group interviews with six to eight interviewees in
each group. These interviews involve unstructured and generally open-ended questions that
are few in number and intended to elicit views and opinions from the participants.
During the process of research, the investigator may collect qualitative documents. These
may be public documents (e.g., newspapers, minutes of meetings, official reports) or private
documents (e.g., personal journals and diaries, letters, e-mails).
A final category of qualitative data consists of qualitative audiovisual and digital
materials (including social media materials). This data may take the form of photographs,
art objects, videotapes, website main pages, e-mails, text messages, social media text, or
any forms of sound. Include creative data collection procedures that fall under the category
of visual ethnography (Pink, 2001) and which might include living stories, metaphorical
visual narratives, and digital archives (Clandinin, 2007).
In a discussion about data collection forms, be specific about the types and include
arguments concerning the strengths and weaknesses of each type, as discussed in Table 9.2
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint54#s9781506386720.i1195) . Typically, in good qualitative research the researchers draw on
multiple sources of qualitative data to make interpretations about a research problem.
Include data collection types that go beyond typical observations and interviews. These unusual
forms create reader interest in a proposal and can capture useful information that observations and
interviews may miss. For example, examine the compendium of types of data in Table 9.3
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint-54#s9781506386720.i1196)
that can be used, to stretch the imagination about possibilities, such as gathering sounds or tastes, or
using cherished items to elicit comments during an interview. Such stretching will be viewed
positively by graduate committee members and by editors of journals.
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Note: This table includes material adapted from Bogdan & Biklen (1992), Creswell & Poth (2018), and
Merriam (1998).
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Source: Adapted from Creswell & Poth (2018).
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9.5 Data Recording Procedures
Before entering the field, qualitative researchers plan their approach to data recording. The qualitative
proposal or project should identify the procedures the researcher will use for recording data.
Observation protocol. Plan to develop and use a protocol for recording observations in a qualitative
study. Researchers often engage in multiple observations during the course of a qualitative study and
use an observational protocol for recording information while observing. This may be a single page
with a dividing line down the middle to separate descriptive notes (portraits of the participants, a
reconstruction of dialogue, a description of the physical setting, accounts of particular events, or
activities) from reflexive notes (the researcher’s personal thoughts, such as “speculation, feelings,
problems, ideas, hunches, impressions, and prejudices”; Bogdan & Biklen, 1992, p. 121). Also
written on this form might be demographic information about the time, place, and date of the field
setting where the observation takes place.
Interview protocol. Plan to develop and use an interview protocol for asking questions and
recording answers during a qualitative interview. Researchers record information from interviews by
making handwritten notes, by audiotaping, or by videotaping. Even if an interview is taped, we
recommend that researchers take notes in the event that recording equipment fails. If audiotaping is
used, researchers need to plan in advance for the transcription of the tape.
The interview protocol should be about two pages in length. There should be some spaces between the
questions for the interviewer to write short notes and quotes in case the audio-recording device does not
work. The total number of questions should be somewhere between 5 and 10, although no precise number
can be given. It should be prepared in advance of the interview, and used consistently in all of the interviews.
It is helpful for the interviewer to memorize the questions so that he or she does not appear to be simply
reading the interview protocol. The interview protocol consists of several important components. These are
basic information about the interview, an introduction, the interview content questions with probes, and
closing instructions (see also Creswell, 2016). See Figure 9.1
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint-56#s9781506386720.i1201) .
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9.6 Data Analysis Procedures
A methods discussion in a qualitative proposal or study needs also to specify the steps in analyzing the
various forms of qualitative data. In general, the intent is to make sense out of text and image data. It involves
segmenting and taking apart the data (like peeling back the layers of an onion) as well as putting it back
together. The discussion in your study about qualitative data analysis might begin with several general points
about the overall process:
Figure 9.1 Sample Interview Protocol
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Simultaneous procedures. Data analysis in qualitative research will proceed hand-in-hand with other
parts of developing the qualitative study, namely, the data collection and the write-up of findings.
While interviews are going on, for example, researchers may be analyzing an interview collected
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earlier, writing memos that may ultimately be included as a narrative in the final report, and
organizing the structure of the final report. This process is unlike quantitative research in which the
investigator collects the data, then analyzes the information, and finally writes the report.
Winnowing the data. Because text and image data are so dense and rich, all of the information cannot
be used in a qualitative study. Thus, in the analysis of the data, researchers need to “winnow” the
data (Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012), a process of focusing in on some of the data and
disregarding other parts of it. This process, too, is different from quantitative research in which
researchers go to great lengths to preserve all of the data and reconstruct or replace missing data. In
qualitative research, the impact of this process is to aggregate data into a small number of themes,
something between five and seven themes (Creswell, 2013).
Using qualitative computer software programs for assistance. Also specify whether you will use a
qualitative computer data analysis program to assist you in analyzing the data (or whether you will
hand code the data). Hand coding is a laborious and time-consuming process, even for data from a
few individuals. Thus, qualitative software programs have become quite popular, and they help
researchers organize, sort, and search for information in text or image databases (see Guest and
colleagues’ [2012] chapter on qualitative data analysis software). Several excellent computer
software programs are available, and they have similar features: good tutorials and demonstration
files, the ability to incorporate both text and image (e.g., photographs) data, the features of storing
and organizing data, the search capacity of locating all text associated with specific codes,
interrelated codes for making queries of the relationship among codes, and the import and export of
qualitative data to quantitative programs, such as spreadsheets or data analysis programs. The basic
idea behind these programs is that using the computer is an efficient means for storing and locating
qualitative data. Although the researcher still needs to go through each line of text (as in hand coding
by going through transcriptions) and assign codes, this process may be faster and more efficient than
hand coding. Also, in large databases, the researcher can quickly locate all passages (or text
segments) coded the same and determine whether participants are responding to a code idea in
similar or different ways. Beyond this, the computer program can facilitate relating different codes
(e.g., How do males and females—the first code of gender—differ in terms of their attitudes to
smoking—a second code?). These are just a few features of the software programs that make them a
logical choice for qualitative data analysis over hand coding. As with any software program,
qualitative software programs require time and skill to learn and employ effectively, although books
for learning the programs are widely available. Demos are available for six popular qualitative data
analysis software programs: MAXqda (www.maxqda.com/ (http://www.maxqda.com/) ), Atlas.ti
(www.atlasti.com (http://www.atlasti.com) ), Provalis and QDA Miner
(https://provalisresearch.com/ (https://provalisresearch.com/) ), Dedoose (www.dedoose.com/
(http://www.dedoose.com/) ), and QSR NVivo (www.qsrinternational.com/
(http://www.qsrinternational.com/) ). These programs are available for both the PC and MAC
platforms.
Overview of the data analysis process (see Figure 9.2
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint-56#s9781506386720.i1210) ).
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As a research tip, we urge researchers to look at qualitative data analysis as a process that requires
sequential steps to be followed, from the specific to the general, and involving multiple levels of
analysis:
Step 1. Organize and prepare the data for analysis. This involves transcribing interviews,
optically scanning material, typing up field notes, cataloguing all of the visual material, and
sorting and arranging the data into different types depending on the sources of information.
Step 2. Read or look at all the data. This first step provides a general sense of the
information and an opportunity to reflect on its overall meaning. What general ideas are
participants saying? What is the tone of the ideas? What is the impression of the overall
depth, credibility, and use of the information? Sometimes qualitative researchers write notes
in margins of transcripts or observational field notes, or start recording general thoughts
about the data at this stage. For visual data, a sketchbook of ideas can begin to take shape.
Step 3. Start coding all of the data. Coding is the process of organizing the data by
bracketing chunks (or text or image segments) and writing a word representing a category in
the margins (Rossman & Rallis, 2012). It involves taking text data or pictures gathered
during data collection, segmenting sentences (or paragraphs) or images into categories, and
labeling those categories with a term, often based in the actual language of the participant
(called an in vivo term).
Figure 9.2 Data Analysis in Qualitative Research
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Step 4. Generate a description and themes. Use the coding process to generate a description
of the setting or people as well as categories or themes for analysis. Description involves a
detailed rendering of information about people, places, or events in a setting. Researchers
can generate codes for this description. This analysis is useful in designing detailed
descriptions for case studies, ethnographies, and narrative research projects. Use the coding
as well for generating a small number of themes or categories—perhaps five to seven
themes for a research study. These themes are the ones that appear as major findings in
qualitative studies and are often used as headings in the findings sections of studies (or in
the findings section of a dissertation or thesis). They should display multiple perspectives
from individuals and be supported by diverse quotations and specific evidence. Beyond
identifying the themes during the coding process, qualitative researchers can do much with
themes to build additional layers of complex analysis. For example, researchers
interconnect themes into a story line (as in narratives) or develop them into a theoretical
model (as in grounded theory). Themes are analyzed for each individual case and across
different cases (as in case studies) or shaped into a general description (as in
phenomenology). Sophisticated qualitative studies go beyond description and theme
identification and form complex theme connections.
Step 5. Representing the description and themes. Advance how the description and themes
will be represented in the qualitative narrative. The most popular approach is to use a
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narrative passage to convey the findings of the analysis. This might be a discussion that
mentions a chronology of events, the detailed discussion of several themes (complete with
subthemes, specific illustrations, multiple perspectives from individuals, and quotations) or
a discussion with interconnecting themes. Many qualitative researchers also use visuals,
figures, or tables as adjuncts to the discussions. They present a process model (as in
grounded theory), advance a drawing of the specific research site (as in ethnography), or
convey descriptive information about each participant in a table (as in case studies and
ethnographies).
Specific coding procedures. As shown in Table 9.4
(http://content.thuzelearning.com/books/Creswell.5819.18.1/sections/navpoint-56#s9781506386720.i1213) ,
Tesch (1990) provided the eight steps typically used in forming codes. In addition, give some
attention to the types of codes to develop when analyzing a text transcript or a picture (or other type
of visual object).
We tend to think about codes as falling into three categories:
Expected codes. Code on topics that readers would expect to find, based on the literature
and common sense. When studying bullying in the schools, we might code some segments
as “attitudes toward oneself.” This code would be expected in a study about bullying in the
schools.
Surprising codes. Code on findings that are surprising and could not be anticipated before
the study began. In a study of leadership in nonprofit organizations, we might learn about
the impact of geo-warming on the building of the organization and how this shapes the
location and proximity of individuals to one another. Without going out to the building
before the study begins and looking at it, we would not necessarily think about the codes of
geo-warming and location of offices in my study of leadership.
Codes of unusual or of conceptual interest. Code unusual ideas, and those that are, in and of
themselves, of conceptual interest to readers. We will use one of the codes that we
discovered in our qualitative study of a campus’s response to a gunman (Asmussen &
Creswell, 1995). We did not anticipate the code “retriggering” to emerge in our study, and it
surfaced from the perspective of a psychologist called into the campus to assess the
response. The fact that individuals were reminded of past traumatic incidents—retriggering
—prompted us to use the term as an important code and ultimately a theme in our analysis.
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On using predetermined codes. Another issue about coding is whether the researcher should
(a) develop codes only on the basis of the emerging information collected from participants,
(b) use predetermined codes and then fit the data to them, or (c) use some combination of
emerging and predetermined codes. The traditional approach in the social sciences is to
allow the codes to emerge during the data analysis. In the health sciences, a popular
approach is to use predetermined codes based on the theory being examined. In this case,
the researchers might develop a qualitative codebook, a table that contains a list of
predetermined codes that researchers use for coding the data. Guest and colleagues (2012)
discussed and illustrated the use of codebooks in qualitative research. The intent of a
codebook is to provide definitions for codes and to maximize coherence among codes—
especially when multiple coders are involved. This codebook would provide a list of codes,
a code label for each code, a brief definition of it, a full definition of it, information about
when to use the code and when not to use it, and an example of a quote illustrating the code.
This codebook can evolve and change during a study based on close analysis of the data
when the researcher is not starting from an emerging code perspective. For researchers who
have a distinct theory they want to test in their projects, we would recommend developing a
preliminary codebook for coding the data and then permitting the codebook to develop and
change based on the information learned during the data analysis.
Coding visual images. As mentioned earlier, visual data are becoming used more frequently
in qualitative research. These data sources represent images drawn from photographs,
videos, film, and drawing (Creswell, 2016). Participants might be handed a camera and
asked to take pictures of what they see. Alternatively, they may be asked to draw a picture
of the phenomenon under study, or reflect on a favorite picture or object that would elicit
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responses. Challenges in using visual images do arise in qualitative research. Images may
reflect trends of the culture or society rather than the perspectives of a single individual. It is
difficult to respect anonymity when images of individuals and places represent qualitative
data. Permissions are needed to respect the privacy of individuals providing visual data.
Despite these concerns, once the qualitative researcher obtains the visual data, the process
of coding comes into play. These steps often follow this procedure:
Step 1. Prepare your data or analysis. If hand coding, print each image with a wide
margin (or affix it to a larger piece of paper) to allow space to assign the code
labels. If using a computer, import all images into the application.
Step 2. Code the image by tagging areas of the image and assigning code labels.
Some codes might involve meta-details (e.g., the camera angle).
Step 3. Compile all of the codes for the images on a separate sheet.
Step 4. Review the codes to eliminate redundancy and overlap. This step also
begins to reduce the codes to potential themes.
Step 5. Group codes into themes that represent a common idea.
Step 6. Assign the codes/themes to three groups: expected codes/themes, surprising
codes/themes, and unusual codes/themes. This step helps to ensure the qualitative
“findings” will represent diverse perspectives.
Step 7. Array the codes/themes into a conceptual map that shows the flow of ideas
in the “findings” section. The flow might represent presenting the themes from a
more general picture to a more specific picture.
Step 8. Write the narrative for each theme that will go into the “findings” section of
a study or for a general summary that will go into the “discussion” section as the
overall findings in the study. (Creswell, 2016, pp. 169–170).
Further data analysis by type of approach. A helpful conceptualization to advance in the
method section is that qualitative data analysis will proceed on two layers: (a) the first basic
layer is the more general procedure (see above) in analyzing the data, and (b) the second
more advanced layer would be the analysis steps embedded within specific qualitative
designs. For example, narrative research employs restorying the participants’ stories using
structural devices, such as plot, setting, activities, climax, and denouement (Clandinin &
Connelly, 2000). Phenomenological research uses the analysis of significant statements, the
generation of meaning units, and the development of what Moustakas (1994) called an
essence description. Grounded theory has systematic steps (Corbin & Strauss, 2015; Strauss
& Corbin, 1990, 1998). These involve generating categories of information (open coding),
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selecting one of the categories and positioning it within a theoretical model (axial coding),
and then explicating a story from the interconnection of these categories (selective coding).
Case study and ethnographic research involve a detailed description of the setting or
individuals, followed by analysis of the data for themes or issues (see Stake, 1995; Wolcott,
1994). A complete description of the data analysis in a proposal, when the inquirer is using
one of these strategies, would be to first describe the general process of analysis followed by
the specific steps within the strategy.
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9.7 Interpretation
Interpretation in qualitative research involves several procedures: summarizing the overall findings,
comparing the findings to the literature, discussing a personal view of the findings, and stating limitations and
future research. In terms of overall findings, the question “What were the lessons learned?” captures the
essence of this idea (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). These lessons could be the researcher’s personal interpretation,
couched in the understanding that the inquirer brings to the study from a personal culture, history, and
experiences.
It could also be a meaning derived from a comparison of the findings with information gleaned from the
literature or theories. In this way, authors suggest that the findings confirm past information or diverge from
it. It can also suggest new questions that need to be asked—questions raised by the data and analysis that the
inquirer had not foreseen earlier in the study. Ethnographers can end a study, Wolcott (1994) said, by stating
further questions. The questioning approach is also used in transformative approaches to qualitative research.
Moreover, when qualitative researchers use a theoretical lens, they can form interpretations that call for
action agendas for reform and change. Researchers might describe how the narrative outcome will be
compared with theories and the general literature on the topic. In many qualitative articles, researchers also
discuss the literature at the end of the study (see Chapter 2 (s9781506386720.i658.xhtml) ). Thus, interpretation
in qualitative research can take many forms; be adapted for different types of designs; and be flexible to
convey personal, research-based, and action meanings.
Finally, part of interpretation involves suggesting limitations in a project and advancing future research
directions. Limitations often attach to the methods of a study (e.g., inadequate sample size, difficulty in
recruitment), and they represent weaknesses in the research that the author acknowledges so that future
studies will not suffer from the same problems. Suggestions for future research propose research themes that
studies might address to advance the literature, to remedy some of the weaknesses in the present study, or to
advance new leads or directions that can point to useful applications or knowledge.
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9.8 Validity and Reliability
Although validation of findings occurs throughout the steps in the research process, this discussion focuses on
how the researcher writes a passage in a proposal or study on the procedures to be undertaken to validate the
proposed study’s findings. Researchers need to convey the steps they will take in their studies to check for the
accuracy and credibility of their findings. Validity does not carry the same connotations in qualitative
research that it does in quantitative research; nor is it a companion to reliability (examining stability) or
generalizability (the external validity of applying results to new settings, people, or samples), topics
discussed in Chapter 8 (s9781506386720.i1063.xhtml) . Qualitative validity means that the researcher checks
for the accuracy of the findings by employing certain procedures, whereas qualitative reliability indicates
that the researcher’s approach is consistent across different researchers and among different projects (Gibbs,
2007).
Defining qualitative validity. Validity is one of the strengths of qualitative research and is based on
determining whether the findings are accurate from the standpoint of the researcher, the participant,
or the readers of an account (Creswell & Miller, 2000). Terms abound in the qualitative literature
that address validity, such as trustworthiness, authenticity, and credibility (Creswell & Miller, 2000),
and it is a much-discussed topic (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011).
Using multiple validity procedures. A procedural perspective that we recommend for research
proposals is to identify and discuss one or more strategies available to check the accuracy of the
findings. Researchers should actively incorporate validity strategies into their proposals. We
recommend the use of multiple approaches, which should enhance the researcher’s ability to assess
the accuracy of findings as well as convince readers of that accuracy. There are eight primary
strategies, organized from those used most frequently and easiest to implement to those used
occasionally and more difficult to implement:
Triangulate different data sources by examining evidence from the sources and using it to
build a coherent justification for themes. If themes are established based on converging
several sources of data or perspectives from participants, then this process can be claimed as
adding to the validity of the study.
Use member checking to determine the accuracy of the qualitative findings by taking the
final report or specific descriptions or themes back to participants and determining whether
these participants feel that they are accurate. This does not mean taking back the raw
transcripts to check for accuracy; instead, the researcher takes back parts of the polished or
semi-polished product, such as the major findings, the themes, the case analysis, the
grounded theory, the cultural description, and so forth. This procedure can involve
conducting a follow-up interview with participants in the study and providing an
opportunity for them to comment on the findings.
Use a rich, thick description to convey the findings. This description may transport readers
to the setting and give the discussion an element of shared experiences. When qualitative
researchers provide detailed descriptions of the setting, for example, or offer many
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perspectives about a theme, the results become more realistic and richer. This procedure can
add to the validity of the findings.
Clarify the bias the researcher brings to the study. This self-reflection creates an open and
honest narrative that will resonate well with readers. Reflexivity has already been
mentioned as a core characteristic of qualitative research. Good qualitative research
contains comments by the researchers about how their interpretation of the findings is
shaped by their background, such as their gender, culture, history, and socioeconomic
origin.
Present negative or discrepant information that runs counter to the themes. Because real life
is composed of different perspectives that do not always coalesce, discussing contrary
information adds to the credibility of an account. A researcher can accomplish this by
discussing evidence about a theme. Most evidence will build a case for the theme;
researchers can also present information that contradicts the general perspective of the
theme. By presenting this contradictory evidence, the account becomes more realistic and
more valid.
Spend prolonged time in the field. In this way, the researcher develops an in-depth
understanding of the phenomenon under study and can convey detail about the site and the
people that lends credibility to the narrative account. The more experience that a researcher
has with participants in their settings, the more accurate or valid will be the findings.
Use peer debriefing to enhance the accuracy of the account. This process involves locating a
person (a peer debriefer) who reviews and asks questions about the qualitative study so that
the account will resonate with people other than the researcher. This strategy—involving an
interpretation beyond the researcher and invested in another person—adds validity to an
account.
Use an external auditor to review the entire project. As distinct from a peer debriefer, this
auditor is not familiar with the researcher or the project and can provide an objective
assessment of the project throughout the process of research…