Qualitative analysis: The art of building bridging relationships

Abstract

In a recently published special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, the opening editorial entitled, ‘‘Qualitative data after coding’’ sets out the issue’s premise, dealing with the gap between theory and methodology (St. Pierre and Jackson, 2014). The title’s reference to ‘‘after coding’’ does not mean after—as in following the activity of coding—but rather after, as in an era post-coding in which coding is no longer touted as the building block of qualitative analysis. Reminding us of Patti Lather’s characterization of qualitative analysis as a ‘black hole’, the issue’s co-editors, Elizabeth St. Pierre and Alecia Jackson, argue that this black hole is so difficult to ‘‘describe and explain to the non-positivist’’ that ‘‘we have resorted to equating qualitative data analysis with coding.’’ (p. 715). St. Pierre and Jackson trace the coding problem to decades of defending interpretative qualitative inquiry against critiques stemming from ‘‘scientifically based research’’ which confounded already ‘‘confused epistemological and ontological commitments.’’ The end result, they conclude, is ‘‘a social science approach that claims to be interpretive supports a positivist, quasi-statistical analytic practice—coding data’’ (St. Pierre and Jackson, 2014 p. 715). It is a custom that is Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(2) 145–153 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015571210 qsw.sagepub.com