Qualitative Inquiry

Koelsch, Lori E.

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456957pmid: N/A

This article presents an application and expansion of the patchwork quilt metaphor for qualitative research. Building upon work by Saukko, I constructed a virtual quilt out of participant interviews. Participants were interviewed about “unlabeled” sexual experiences. Transcripts were analyzed using the Listening Guide, “sewn” into individual patches, and combined into a larger patchwork. This project is a prototype, and is intended to represent one possibility for presenting and organizing research on the Internet. Although the quilt was developed while researching young women’s sexual experiences, it can be used to study many different content areas.

Sassi, Kelly; Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456958pmid: N/A

This article explores the affordances and risks of practicing friendship and mentorship as methodological approaches in two qualitative studies: (a) the mentor’s study in a diverse 9th grade classroom and (b) the protégé’s subsequent study of teacher professional development in the same school. Friendship methodology, as theorized by Tillmann and others, is extended to include protection and mentoring. The effect of mentoring is demonstrated through examples of the former protégé’s own research. Explosive moments in each study demonstrate how research can be analyzed and the course of the research projects influenced within a friendship/mentorship context. Like friendship-as-method, mentorship as methodology can result in rich data, but there is also the potential for more transparent and rigorous data analysis when the researcher is a mentor because the mentor can model research skills for the protégé-participant. Thus, mentorship as methodology socializes peers into the conventions of qualitative research.

Gorman, Geraldine

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456959pmid: N/A

This piece examines the sequelae of divorce and the intersection of private loneliness and public belonging. It considers the impact of place on one’s sense of identity.

Hanauer, David I.

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456960pmid: N/A

This poetic-narrative autoethnography employs expressive writing in exploring the author’s experiences of living and growing up as a second generation Kindertransport survivor. The methodological approach involved selecting poems from two books of poetry written about the Holocaust by the author during the 1980s and adding narrative reflections explicating the author’s perspectives and understandings of his experience. The poetic-narrative autoethnography focuses on the difficulties in connecting to an unspoken, painful past family history and explores the difficulties of writing and telling this particular story. This study offers a first insight into the experience and consciousness of being a second-generation Kindertransport survivor.

Hampton, Reg

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456961pmid: N/A

Wine, especially good wine, is something special. It has always been so. But why is good wine so much more than the sum of its parts? Researchers in both the traditional and social sciences have been attempting to answer that question since the first glasses of wine were poured centuries ago. Wine may be history’s most puzzling and most tested beverage. This work employs artistic inquiry in the form of a fictional short story to suggest attempts to define wine are doomed to failure, and that wine’s mystical powers emerge in conversation about it.

Smith, Claire

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456962pmid: N/A

Can the two narrative autoethnographic stories I perform here help me to therapeutically deal with the losses they describe? The first story speaks of my PhD defense and its aftermath. I consider the event a loss that is clothed in accomplishment; I work through my feelings by writing about them. The second story describes a medical loss. After attaining the PhD degree I finally acknowledge that I have Dystonia, placing me in the unfamiliar world of the chronically ill. I use therapeutic autoethnography to reflect on both stories, and I ruminate over how the stories are entwined but very different. They have each (re)shaped my identity; I am in the never-ending process of (re)storying my self. Although the artifacts garnered from living these stories may be construed as reminders of loss, I have found a way to minimize the two losses by working with both artifacts together.

Phillips, Catherine

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456963pmid: N/A

This article is about two interconnected subjects: the politics of acute illness and the representation of such politics in writing. I present three narratives that were provoked by the witnessing of family member’s hospitalization. The narratives focus on the experience of technology and fall within autoethnographic traditions (Denzin, 2003; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Richardson, 2000), as well as the burgeoning realm of publications that narrate authors’ experiences of the illness of a loved one (Dideon, 2005; Oates, 2011; Want, 2010).In taking seriously the “emergent nature of critical inquiry” (Denzin, 2010), I intentionally move in and out of the narratives inorder to demonstrate how negotiations with “everyday technology” are taken-for-granted. I concern myself with how technology is the primary mode of care and argue that its prolific use calls for a politicization of medicine such that we can see how patients and medical staff alike are configured as mechanistic.

Hesse-Biber, Sharlene

doi: 10.1177/1077800412456964pmid: N/A

Most disciplines within the health and social sciences regard randomized control trials (RCTs) as the “gold standard” of evidence-based practice (EBP). The move toward mixed methods within evidence-based research has proven daunting to many researchers, and few best practices for RCT mixed methods studies currently exist. This article provides some strategies for incorporating mixed methods into RCT designs. Furthermore, the author argues for the value of also infusing a multimethodological approach into RCT mixed methods projects to further offer research strategies for enhancing the credibility of RCT research findings through, for example, incorporating participants’ lived experiences and methodological reflexivity into the research process. The bulk of this article presents four case studies that analyze how researchers in diverse fields have taken a multimethodological praxis into account in their RCT mixed methods projects, including the integration of a mixed methods multimethodological component into RCT research designs. The author also addresses the missed opportunities in these studies to maximize the validity of RCT projects by using mixed methods and multimethodological designs.