Research Methods

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity

Qualitative research is sometimes faulted for being imprecise and subjective compared to other research methods, particularly quantitative methods, so I will address those criticisms in advance.

First, the notion that quantitative or natural science research methods are objective is questionable. Scholars of the history and sociology of science have demonstrated that researchers of all fields are susceptible to influences from their societies. Thomas Kuhn's (1962) work on scientific paradigms is the best known of these works. In every field, the issues of what subjects to research, what questions are acceptable to ask, and how to report scientific findings are all subject to outside pressures. Bruno Latour (1987) describes the process of establishing scientific fact: scientists don't agree based on facts and evidence that convince them, but rather once they convince each other of something, that subject becomes fact. Many rhetoricians have examined scientific discourse to show how facts are not discovered, but are argued about until one side or another convinces the other to accept their worldview. (Bazerman, 1983)

Qualitative researchers understand "that research is an interactive process shaped by [their] personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity, and those of the people in the setting," and know "that science is power, for all research findings have political implications. There is no value-free science." (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, p. 3) All theory and knowledge—interpretations of reality—are temporal and provisional, both in that they can never be proven forever and that researchers live in particular times, subject to current ideas and beliefs. (Strauss and Corbin, 1994)

Furthermore, all researchers are always choosing what to tell about their research. They "would like to tell the whole story but of course cannot; the whole story exceeds anyone's knowing, anyone's telling." And they "pass along to readers some of their personal meanings of events and relationships—and fail to pass along others." And not only is the story told by the researcher socially constructed, but the readers generate meaning from the results only in comparison to their own situation. (Stake, 1994, p. 240)

It is also unwise to compare qualitative and quantitative research methods because they usually ask different questions about the same situation. "People looking at the same phenomenon in different ways see different things.... Our relationship to an event determines what we can see of it, and a research method is a way of defining a style with which a researcher can relate to his data or participate in its recognition." (Chernoff, 1979, p. 8)

The alleged imprecision of qualitative research was more fully discussed above, but is further refuted here by Becker who says that qualitative research:

"is really not much different from a more conventional, even positivist, understanding of method (cf. Lieberson 1992), except in being even more rigorous, requiring the verification of speculations that researchers will not refrain from making. So the first point is that ethnography's epistemology, in its insistence on investigating the viewpoint of those studied, is indeed like that of other social scientists, just more rigorous and complete." (1998)

Although this is not a full treatment of these issues, in all of these ways, qualitative methods can be argued to be no less objective than other methods of research.

Overview | Fieldwork | Objectivity vs. Subjectivity |
My Role as Participant Observer | Description of the Data

Contents | Introduction | Background | Methods | Description | Conclusion | References