Moving beyond description in qualitative analysis: Finding applied advice

Abstract

There is nothing wrong with description in qualitative analysis. In fact, thick description is the bedrock upon which much of the best qualitative research is built. Or, as Jane Gilgun (2015) argues, description is often the foundation upon which interpretation and theory development is based in qualitative inquiry. That said, all too often from where I sit in my editor’s chair, I see articles that rest on thin description, at best. The authors’ repeat what their participants have said in summary fashion and then stop, leaving a reader to wonder what the significance of the work. Or, to use the question so often posed to U.S. students of research methods, so what? Last year, a group of four early-to-senior scholars were invited by a group of doctoral students to participate in a panel discussion at the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) conference held in the United States in January 2015. I was honored to be a member of this panel which was dubbed Beyond Description: A Workshop on Moving from Description to Analysis in Qualitative Social Work Research. The student organizers included two from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, Aditi Das and Amanda Michelle Jones, as well as Charity Hoffman from the University of Michigan. The students asked their seniors to think about how we moved from describing qualitative data to interpreting it during analysis. They asked, ‘‘how did we do that heavy lifting’’? The SSWR session was lively and provocative and appeared to be well received by those in attendance. For this reason, it seemed worth trying to expand on these conference comments. The net results are published in this issue of Qualitative Social Work. The opening article is by Jane Gilgun. Jane elaborates in her piece entitled, ‘‘Beyond description to interpretation and theory in qualitative social work research’’ (Gilgun, 2015). Her article is followed by a talented early-career scholar, Tina K. Sacks who writes an essay entitled, New pathways to analysis through thick description: Historical trauma and emerging qualitative research (Sacks, 2015). Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(6) 731–740 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015612859 qsw.sagepub.com