Qualitative Inquiry

Flick, Uwe

doi: 10.1177/1077800416655829pmid: N/A

Discussions around constructing a new critical qualitative inquiry need to reflect challenges on three levels: (a) Inquiry can be critical about the issues under study—a social or political problem to be addressed in a critical perspective; (b) critical approaches to methods and approaches in current research—other forms (e.g., quantitative research) or parts of the mainstream of qualitative research; and (c) a major challenge is to remain able to really do empirical qualitative research addressing social problems and to remain reflexive. Articles in this special issue address these to make a contribution to constructing a new critical qualitative inquiry.

Denzin, Norman K.

doi: 10.1177/1077800416681864pmid: N/A

What are the key issues confronting the call for a new critical inquiry? How to create a new family of terms for a new critical inquiry, terms slip and slide, fall over one another: critical embodied, transformative, dialogic, reflexive, participatory, emancipatory, narratives of resistance, plateaus, planes of composition, Deleuze, Guattari, assemblages, affect, nomadic inquiry, rhizomatic, love, loss, praxis writing as a way of being in the world. Writing framed around acts of activism and resistance. How do we move forward?

Fielding, Nigel G.

doi: 10.1177/1077800416657104pmid: N/A

Research funders throw down a gauntlet about the “grand challenges” of our time, like a cure for cancer, or eradicating poverty. But “normal science” is the practice of the particular. Our knowledge comes in glimpses, not the arc of the floodlight. This article argues that if we want to build a cumulative knowledge of the social, we need to synthesize, not fragment, and to talk across borders, not put up fences. Critical qualitative inquiry can be a vital corrective to the “grand challenge” mindset, but only if we help the wider research community understand our message.

Winter, Rainer

doi: 10.1177/1077800416657102pmid: N/A

With his path-breaking The Qualitative Manifesto. A Call to Arms (2010), Norman Denzin calls for qualitative inquiry to be carried out with the aim of contributing to the empowerment of subjects involved in the research. He pleads passionately and vehemently in favor of a research process that is led by the ideal of social justice. My contribution wants to plead for making radical equality between researchers and research subjects a core element of qualitative inquiries as well. For this purpose, I will turn to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has been largely ignored in qualitative inquiry. His work, though, is of central importance for critical qualitative research. The idea of equality opens up a new and more profound understanding of politics that would allow us to specify the political meaning of qualitative studies in late capitalism more accurately.

Charmaz, Kathy

doi: 10.1177/1077800416657105pmid: N/A

The pragmatist roots of constructivist grounded theory make it a useful method for pursuing critical qualitative inquiry. Pragmatism offers ways to think about critical qualitative inquiry; constructivist grounded theory offers strategies for doing it. Constructivist grounded theory fosters asking emergent critical questions throughout inquiry. This method also encourages (a) interrogating the taken-for-granted methodological individualism pervading much of qualitative research and (b) taking a deeply reflexive stance called methodological self-consciousness, which leads researchers to scrutinize their data, actions, and nascent analyses. The article outlines how to put constructivist grounded theory into practice and ends with where this practice could take us.

Flick, Uwe

doi: 10.1177/1077800416655827pmid: N/A

Critiques about the development in mixed-methods research (MMR) by some of its protagonists mention the following: ignorance of earlier developments, too much focus on designs rather than issues, more a metaphor than a mode of research, the belief in paradigms, and too much focus on methods instead of theoretical and methodological issues. Myths and mantras in the MMR literature are discussed here. For overcoming the limitations of MMR becoming evident in these critiques, myths, and mantras, triangulation is discussed. A revitalization of this concept in recent formulations (triangulation 3.0; systematic triangulation of perspectives) outlines triangulation as a framework of a critical and reflexive MMR.

Keller, Reiner

doi: 10.1177/1077800416657103pmid: N/A

Is there still a role for discourse research today, some 30 years after Michel Foucault’s death? A decade ago, French actor-network theorist Bruno Latour famously declared the end of critique as ethos and practice in the social sciences. What is more, arguments made about the contingency of historical phenomena even arm “enemy” forces. Empirical work therefore should be replaced by a politics of “matters of concern.” French sociologist Luc Boltanski added to this critique of critical perspectives by suggesting that an investigation into social modes of critique should replace critical sociology. The present contribution discusses both critiques of critique and the problems and limitations of the solutions proposed by both Latour and Boltanski. Against this background, and with a focus on discourse research, it stresses the ongoing need for precise empirical work as a condition for the social unfolding of critical perspectives.

Torrance, Harry

doi: 10.1177/1077800416649201pmid: N/A

Qualitative inquiry largely stands outside the current policy focus on experimental results—the “what works” agenda. Yet thinking and doing things differently—another form of experiment—could be more prominent in critical qualitative inquiry. The article will look at the ways in which qualitative inquiry is currently positioned in policy debate and reflect on whether or not a different form of “experimentalism” could generate a different form of knowledge about what “might work.”

Flick, Uwe; Hans, Benjamin; Hirseland, Andreas; Rasche, Sarah; Röhnsch, Gundula

doi: 10.1177/1077800416655828pmid: N/A

Migration is an issue for many countries. It affects several areas of social problems, for example, work and unemployment. A relevant issue to study in the context of unemployment and social welfare is, “Which are experiences of migrants with different language backgrounds in finding work and support?” For a running study with episodic interviews and mobile methods with migrants from the former Soviet Union to Germany, several issues are discussed in a “new critical inquiry”: Critical issues in the studied area (help, control, normative claims); applying (familiar) qualitative methods (interviewing in various languages and cultural backgrounds or mobile methods); triangulation in a new critical migration research.

Hsiung, Ping-Chun

doi: 10.1177/1077800416655826pmid: N/A

Chinese sociology was denounced and abolished as “bourgeois science” for more than a quarter of a century (1952-1979). This article examines the politics of rebuilding Chinese sociology. Examining lectures, reports, and essays associated with the first three officially approved research projects (1981-1986), I clarify why the quantitative paradigm was embraced by sociologists at the expense of qualitative inquiry. With the introduction of survey questionnaire methods from the West and the making of sociological knowledge “useful” within China, sociology rebuilt its disciplinary identity and legitimacy. Based upon my analysis, I lay out three thematic issues essential to a critical, decentered approach in qualitative research.