Envisioning qualitative inquiry: a view across four decades

Abstract

Who are qualitative inquirers, what do they do that makes them a community of practice and how do they assess their work? Qualitative inquiry is a confederacy in the model practiced by the Iroquois of autonomous and independent groups, sharing common terrain, who gather in certain venues for dialogue about similar concerns and disputed controversies. The community of qualitative researchers is also becoming one of an emerging number of interdisciplinarities in academe, scholarly domains characterized by cross‐disciplinary and multidisciplinary activity addressing the complexity of human experience and by endeavors transcending disciplinary boundaries that synthesize and integrate as well as analyze and separate. Having developed from positivist, interpretivist and postpositivist orientations, having contributed to the twentieth century’s critical scholarship in areas such as feminist study and postcolonialism, and having been challenged by the thinking of postmodernists and poststructuralists, qualitative inquiry is now characterized by an emergent postinterpretivism.