Abstract
After having tried for some time to overview the contemporary field of qualitative research to give a lecture for a professorship in that area, my idea at the outset of writing this article was to address whether changes in qualitative research should be viewed as recurrent revolutions as highlighted by Denzin and Lincoln (2000; 2005), or as a field of continuing key themes and long-standing tensions, as conceptualized by Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2003). However, during my writing, after one detour into the May 2009 issue of Current Sociology and a second detour into the July 2009 issue of Qualitative Research, my attention focused on to how critical debate and review are displayed in different methodological positions of qualitative research. In my reading, the discussion in Current Sociology between main stream and postmodern methodological positioning revealed an utterly one-way feminist critique; this was also the case in one of three book reviews of The Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005) in the referred issue of Qualitative Research. My puzzle over this critical stance, and my third detour, into Yvonne Lincoln’s discussion of twenty-five years of qualitative and new paradigm research in the January 2010 Issue of Qualitative Inquiry, helped evolve the following notes on a methodological discussion. The notes are partly structured by a temporal narrative over personally lived qualitative research, and partly by an epistemological narrative of a methodological discussion, interwoven with the passing of time when writing.
Highlights
After having tried for some time to overview the contemporary field of qualitative research to give a lecture for a professorship in that area, my idea at the outset of writing this article was to address whether changes in qualitative research should be viewed as recurrent revolutions as highlighted by Denzin and Lincoln (2000; 2005), or as a field of continuing key themes and long-standing tensions, as conceptualized by Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2003)
Even at the end of the 1990’s, life as a qualitative researcher was relatively safe and sound through my theoretical and observational PhD-study of truly small body subjects (Løkken, 2000a). This was an inquiry based on my edification (Løkken, 2000b) of Merleau-Ponty’s The phenomenology of perception (1962), on Adler and Adler’s chapter on ‘observational techniques’ in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994), on Riessman’s Narrative Analysis (1993) and on Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience (1997)
When given the free choice of focus to lecture for a professorship in qualitative methods (Løkken 2008), the time had come for me to update and deepen my relationship to the debate about our canon, as comprehensively provided by Denzin and Lincoln (2000, 2005) and as introduced by Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2001), and followed by their book in 2003 on the key themes of continuity and change within the history of qualitative research
Summary
When I was working with my Master’s thesis in Early Childhood Education towards the end of the 1980’s in Norway, qualitative methods was not included in the portfolio of research methods at my university. With cues like hermeneutics and phenomenology, holistic perspective and inductive analysis, the choice of methods mainly was between naturalistic observation, depth interview and content analysis, listed with each method’s advantages and disadvantages, and through which meaning was to be interpreted into and out of human interaction in cultural contexts This was all about the researcher’s empathetic comprehension on the basis of her or his subjective experience, and the same researcher’s systematical analysis and arrangement of collected material, and the adherent interpretation and (re-)presentation. Even at the end of the 1990’s, life as a qualitative researcher was relatively safe and sound through my theoretical and observational PhD-study (yes, still observational) of truly small body subjects (Løkken, 2000a) This was an inquiry based on my edification (Løkken, 2000b) of Merleau-Ponty’s The phenomenology of perception (1962), on Adler and Adler’s chapter on ‘observational techniques’ in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994), on Riessman’s Narrative Analysis (1993) and on Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience (1997). When given the free choice of focus to lecture for a professorship in qualitative methods (Løkken 2008), the time had come for me to update and deepen my relationship to the debate about our canon, as comprehensively provided by Denzin and Lincoln (2000, 2005) and as introduced by Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2001), and followed by their book in 2003 on the key themes of continuity and change within the history of qualitative research
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