Definition
The combining of different methods within the same study design. The purpose of such a combination may be additive, with different methods addressing dif- ferent sub-topics (often sequentially), or interactive, with the same sub-topic being approached from different angles.
Distinctive Features
Additive multiple methods are frequently used at different stages of the research process. Thus, a large-scale quantitative survey may begin with some focus groups to familiarize researchers with lay terminology and concepts, to be followed by depth interview piloting to check on the
comprehensibility and acceptability of possible survey questions. Similarly, focus groups can be used at the end of a project to feed back early findings to research subjects or key informants. However, additive multiple methods can also run in parallel, most notably in the case of qualitative process evaluations (Parry Langdon et al., 2003) conducted alongside survey evaluations in controlled trial designs, in order to try and answer the ques- tion of why the trial intervention has succeeded or failed. The main premise of additive multiple methods is that there is always one best method for any given particular research task, so that addressing a particular research ques- tion hinges on breaking the answering of that question down into particu- lar specific tasks and then selecting a method best suited to completing that specific task.
Interactive multiple methods (discussed at length under ‘triangulation’) serve to extend and deepen an analysis. Thus, the most useful interactive mul- tiple methods are not qualitative and quantitative methods (since the findings from such methods are rarely straightforwardly commensurate), but rather combinations of different qualitative methods, focused on the same topic or research task. Thus, while additive multiple methods aim for comprehensive coverage, interactive multiple methods aim for depth of analysis of a narrower topic.
The use of multiple methods in rapid assessment forms a special case, in that different methods are chosen in an attempt to both extend coverage and deepen the fragmentary and superficial picture yielded by any one method.
Examples
Barbour (1999) has reviewed, with examples, the case for combining qualita- tive and quantitative methods in health services research.
Evaluation
The use of multiple methods has been associated with overblown claims that interactive multiple methods can validate the subsequent analysis. This is not the case (see triangulation), but a commitment to multiple methods (both additive and interactive) has become the hallmark of a rigorous research design.
Associated Concepts:
Focus Groups, Interviews, Key Informants,
Piloting, Process Evaluation, Rapid Assessment, Triangulation.
Multiple Methods
Key Readings
*Barbour, R. (1999) ‘The case for com- bining qualitative and quantitative approaches in health services research’, Journal of Health Services Research and Policy, 4: 39–43.
Parry Langdon, N., Bloor, M., Audrey, S. and Holliday, J. (2003) ‘Process evalu- ation of health promotion interven- tions’, Policy and Politics, 31: 207–216.
N
Narratives
Definition
Narratives are continuous stories or accounts of people’s experiences. A narrative account could relate to a complete life story, but equally it may refer to the account of a discrete event, such as an experience of pregnancy, which has a clear beginning and ending.
Distinctive Features
Narrative analysis has been popular among many disciplines within the social sciences. For example, linguists might examine the internal structure of nar- ratives, psychologists might focus on the process of recalling and summarizing stories, and anthropologists might look at the function of stories cross-culturally. The increasing popularity of narrative analysis is reflected in the publication of a dedicated journal on the method (The Journal of Narrative and Life History). While narratives are traditionally associated with face-to-face-interviews, nar- ratives can also be collected through documents such as diaries, biographies or ethnographic fieldnotes (Lieblich et al., 1998).
One of the strengths of narrative analysis is that humans are natural story-tellers. It is argued that through such stories we reveal not only our expe- riences but also our identity (Lieblich et al., 1998). We know and reveal our- selves to others by the stories that we tell.
One of the principles of the narrative method is minimal interviewing. Researchers are required to concede control of the interview to the narrative- teller, suppress any desire to interrupt and become a passive audience to the story being told. Often biographic narrative techniques use a single initial narrative-inducing question at the beginning of the interview such as ‘tell me about your experiences at school’ or even as broad as ‘tell me the story of your life’. Like depth interviews, narrative researchers use a broad topic guide. If uninterrupted, respondents are likely to continue in an extensive narrative. These rich and lengthy data mean that narrative researchers tend to use small respondent samples in their research.
A key (and arguably essential) feature of a narrative account is that it should have a sequence with a clear beginning and end. The narrator should tell the story in the same sequence of events as they happened so that the cause and effect of the events are clear. In addition to the importance of the story trajectory, Labov (1972) has argued that fully formed oral narratives have six properties:
• Abstract (a summary of the story) • Orientation (time, place and people) • Complicating action (what happened) • Evaluation (why this is important) • Resolution (what finally happened)
• Coda (bridging the audience back to the present)
Toolan (1988) has described other characteristics of narratives. These include a degree of artificial fabrication, that is, narratives are constructed in a different way to spontaneous conversation. Aspects of the talk such as pace and emphasis have usually been planned and sometimes even performed to other audiences. Narrative tellers also tend to use ‘displacement’, that is, speakers refer to events and people that are removed in space and time. Narratives also tend to have a rhetorical function. Accounts are expected to have some kind of effect on the audience with the narrator typically making a moral point.
Analysis of narrative accounts is concerned with the examination of how respondents impose order on to their story, the linguistic and cultural resources that it draws upon and how the narrator seeks to persuade the listener of the story’s authenticity (Reissman, 1993). Narrative analysts have argued that traditional qualitative analysis tends to dissect stories during the analysis process thereby using data out of context and suppressing the narrative. In contrast, narrative analysis is concerned with how the story is told, what is told, what is omitted and what is emphasized. Thus, the key analytical question for narrative researchers is: ‘why did that respondent tell their story in that way?’
Examples
Williams (1984) interviewed 30 patients with arthritis to explore their under- standings of the cause of their illness. In his paper he describes three cases in detail in which the patient used narrative reconstruction to explain their ill- ness in terms of the world in which they lived. ‘Bill’ reconstructed his illness as a public or political issue, ‘Gill’ explained her illness in terms of the con- flicts she experienced in her social roles, and ‘Betty’ narrated how her illness
lay within God’s will. These three respondents, who faced the biographic disruption of a chronic illness, therefore reconstructed a coherent self within their narratives. The paper demonstrates how people often use narratives when there has been a breach between their ideal and real selves or between the self and society.
Cortazzi (1993) took an unusual approach to narrative analysis in that he collected nearly a thousand ‘narrative anecdotes’ from interviews with teachers working within UK primary schools, supplemented by naturally occurring data collected in staff rooms and school corridors. Using narrative-inducing questions such as ‘have you had any children in your class who have had a breakthrough recently?’ he discovered dominant metaphors emerging in their stories. These led him to develop a linear model of learning that encompassed learning as a struggle, a light dawning (which happens suddenly or was noticed suddenly), joy, and finally the reward of teaching. At the end of his chapter he reflects that while some may dismiss the accounts as mere anec- dotes, when collected together these stories show evidence of common experi- ence, perception and thinking among teachers.
Evaluation
Narratives are representations of people’s lives and therefore essentially ficti- tious. However, as researchers rarely have direct access to people’s experiences it is necessary to use people’s own representations of their lives. Most narrative researchers take a middle view that narratives should neither be treated as fiction, nor should they be taken at face value as complete and accurate ver- sions of reality (Lieblich et al., 1998; Reissman, 1993). Their point is that truth becomes a secondary concern to the narrative researcher’s primary interest in how his or her respondent sees him or herself when asked to recall his or her experiences.
In addition to validity, the reliability of narrative accounts has also been a potential source of concern. It is unlikely that a narrative told on one occa- sion to one researcher will mirror the same story told on a different occasion to a different researcher. However, as Reissman (1993) points out, telling complex and often emotionally charged stories should vary because stories are told within a context. While constructed around a core, the story will vary accord- ing to the expressed aim of the interview, the mood of the narrator and his or her relationship with his or her audience.
Associated Concepts:
Biographies, Diary Methods, Fieldnotes,
Interviews, Oral History, Reliability, Validity (see Reliability).
Narratives
Naturalism
Definition
Naturalism is the philosophical (properly epistemological) position, associated particularly with qualitative research in the symbolic interactionist and Goffmanian traditions, which requires that social life should be studied, as far as possible, in its naturally occurring state, and not through the artificial prisms of postal surveys, formal interviews, or psychological laboratory experiments.
Distinctive Features
Naturalism developed as an epistemology in contradistinction to the positivist position dominant in the social sciences in the 1950s, which sought to establish objective facts via research exploring and replicating testable (falsifiable) hypo- theses conducted by neutral scientific observers. As Hammersley and Atkinson (1995: 6) put it, while positivist social science drew its inspiration from twentieth- century physics, naturalism drew on nineteenth-century biology: Goffman, in a letter, (disarmingly?) described his work as that of a ‘one-armed botanist’ (quoted in Bloor, 1996). Naturalist research aspires simply to a descriptive realism, rather than seeking to derive universal explanatory laws of human conduct.
Naturalism is also concerned fundamentally with capturing the cultural meanings attributed to social phenomena, a preoccupation that had its
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Key Readings
Cortazzi, M. (1993) Narrative Analysis. London: Falmer Press.
Josselson, R. and Lieblich, A. (eds) (1993) The Narrative Study of Lives. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Josselson, R., Lieblich, A. and McAdams, D. (2003) Up Close and Personal: The
Teaching and Learning of Narrative Research. Washington: American
Psychological Association.
Labov, W. (1972) ‘The transformation of experience in narrative syntax’, in W. Labov (ed.), Language in the Inner
City. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
University Press. pp. 27–44.
*Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R. and Zilber, T. (1998) Narrative Research:
Reading, Analysis and Interpretation.
London: Sage.
*Reissman, C. (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Toolan, M. (1988) Narratives: A Critical Lin-
guistic Introduction. London: Routledge.
Williams, G. (1984) ‘The genesis of chronic illness: narrative reconstruc- tion’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 6(2): 175–200.
warrant both in the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago School (with its dictum that ‘If men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences’ – Thomas, 1923) and the phenomenology of Husserl and his follower Alfred Schutz, who described the interpretation of the social world in terms of an individual’s ‘stock of knowledge’, and the response to that inter- pretation in terms of an individual’s ‘recipes for action’ (Schutz, 1970). The qualitative researcher must seek to capture these meanings through an immer- sive understanding in the culture under study. This immersive understanding is the verstehen of Max Weber and has earlier roots in the nineteenth-century hermeneutic writers. Thus, the researcher is no neutral observer but is his or her own research instrument, seeking empathetic appreciation of a culture through the experience of co-participation.
Examples
Carey’s (1975) history of the Chicago School contains many short accounts of individual pieces of naturalistic research. An appropriate exemplar of the nat- uralistic approach is Becker’s (1953) study Becoming a Marihuana User, on how novice users must learn from more experienced users on how to interpret the physical experiences of drug use as pleasurable – a very widely cited study that has laid the foundation for subsequent studies of ‘deviant’ activity, but which never had any discernable impact at all on government drug policies.
Evaluation
The lack of policy impact of Becker’s study is typical of naturalistic studies, a consequence partly of their descriptive focus and partly of their uncertain generalizability. However, naturalistic studies have been subject to more fun- damental criticisms than their lack of policy pay-off. Naturalistic studies (with their claim to be able to represent an apprehensible social reality) suffered under the same fate as positivist social science, undermined by the new Kuhnian philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1970) which pointed to the relative and provisional nature of all scientific claims. But naturalistic studies’ claims to grasp social reality through direct immersive experience of a culture have also been derided as romanticism, kindred to the nineteenth-century romantic poets’ attempts to directly apprehend ‘Nature’ (Silverman, 1989). Relatedly, postmodernism has attacked the idea that social worlds are coherent (and describable) wholes and has also pointed out that the descriptions of social worlds furnished by naturalistic researchers are not transparent, but rather are persuasive texts with rhetorical devices designed to influence readers and confound critics.
Naturalism
Qualitative researchers have responded to these criticisms of naturalism. Naïve realism has given way to the ‘subtle realism’ of Hammersley (1992) and postmodernism has spawned the ‘reflexive turn’ in ethnography. It may be argued that, while the postulate of intersubjectivity (that one human being can imaginatively place him or herself in the position of another) remains the basis for all human interaction, there thus remains a qualified warrant for reporting social reality on the basis of immersive understanding.
Associated Concepts:
Ethnography, Generalization, Phenomeno-
logical Methods, Postmodernism, Reflexivity, Symbolic Interactionism.
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Key Readings
Becker, H. (1953) ‘Becoming a marihuana user’, American Journal of Sociology, 59: 41–58.
Bloor, M. (1996) ‘Review essay: Philip Strong (1945–1995), an appreciation of an essayist’, Sociology of Health &
Illness, 18: 551–564.
Carey, J. (1975) Sociology and Public Affairs:
The Chicago School. London: Sage.
Hammersley, M. (1992) What’s Wrong
with Ethnography. London: Routledge.
*Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1995) Ethnography: Principles in
Practice (2nd edn). London: Routledge.
Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Schutz, A. (1970) Reflections on the
Problem of Relevance (ed. R.M. Zaner).
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silverman, D. (1989) ‘The impossible dreams of reformism and romanti- cism’, in J. Gubrium and D. Silverman (eds), The Politics of Field Research. London: Sage.
Thomas, W.I. (1923) The Unadjusted Girl. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.