The Contexts of Context:Broadening Perspectives in the (Re)use of Qualitative Data

Abstract

Questions of ‘context’ are one of the central issues on which debates about re-using qualitative data pivot. Advocates of reuse propose guidelines about how much and what kind of context to include when archiving qualitative data. Sceptics are concerned about the possibility of ever including enough context. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of accessing the context of the production of the original qualitative data is often the issue on which the possibility of re-using qualitative data flounders. Context, and its close companion, reflexivity, are seen as so intrinsic to the process of qualitative research, that without access to these, reuse of qualitative data remains impossible or at best limited. At a moment when the debate over reuse risks becoming increasingly polarised, this paper seeks more fruitful possibilities for reuse, by suggesting that despite persistent ruminations on context, we have not yet paid enough attention to context. Paradoxically the attention to (particular) contexts has excluded attention to other contexts. Certain contexts have been privileged, particularly the context of the original research, which is often reduced to the reflexive production of the data by the researcher. Other contexts are then lost, such as the contemporary context of data (re)generation. The taken-for-grantedness of context in qualitative research has meant that work on context in other domains such as literary theory, cultural studies and history has not been invoked in these dialogues. Yet drawing on this work can enable us to shift attention from context as something static and fixed and bounded, to the process/es of the identification and construction of context. In this way we can understand reusing qualitative data as being about the process of recontextualising data, opening up a more productive notion of reuse and more possibilities of meaning-making from reusing data.