EVALUATIVE CRITERIA AND EPISTEMIC COMMUNITIES 103example, if “I trust you,” we can pursue a project together. Likewise, if the results of a study are
judged trustworthy, they can be implemented or built upon. Another part of this term’s appeal is
its consistency with interpretive presuppositions. As Riessman observes, “‘Trustworthiness’ not
‘truth’ is a key semantic difference: The latter assumes an objective reality; the former moves the
process into the social world” (2002, 258). “Trustworthiness” captures researchers’ very human
longing to produce research for a social purpose (even if that purpose is furthering academic
research rather than immediate real-world applicability). Indeed, the first Lincoln and Guba crite-
ria text (1985) applied this general term to both positivist and interpretive research. It rivals the
positivist standards of “validity and reliability” in its clarity while, at the same time, emphasizing
the humanistic aspect of interpretive research.
As a noun, “reflexivity” can be a bit opaque, but the term builds on the verb “to reflect,” an act
of contemplation associated with the familiar activity of keeping a diary, which, in everyday
parlance, implies not simply recording events but thinking about one’s “self” in relation to “oth-
ers.” In scholarly activity, this criterion encourages a research practice in which the researcher
understands him- or herself to be the means, the instrument used, to produce the research product.
This understanding, in turn, demands specific efforts to document and analyze this role. Some
commentators (Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont 2003, 195; Ellis and Bochner 2003) decry “hyper-
reflexivity” as indicative of scholarly navel-gazing or solipsism (autoethnography,^15 in particu-
lar, has been indicted for such excesses); but, as a general criterion, what reflexivity communicates
is that researchers cannot expect to hide behind “third-person,” omniscient exposition—the so-
called view from nowhere or God’s-eye view (Haraway 1988, Harding 1993). The term’s success
may be due to its implied and easily understood admonition “to reflect on one’s research role.” It,
too, is consistent with interpretive presuppositions that the meanings of language and action are
not self-evident in life or research and must, therefore, be robustly analyzed.
“Triangulation” implies a multidimensionality to the research process, a connotation that may
have contributed to its widespread acceptance as an evaluative criterion within the interpretive
gestalt. That is, multidimensionality is consistent with the interpretive sensitivity to the various
forms or genres of data and to the possibility of complexity and richness that comes from working
across genres. Methodological discussions of triangulation emphasize this richness by noting not
only the extent to which data from multiple sources, methods, researchers, and/or paradigms
present possibilities for corroboration, but also that they are likely to bring to light inconsistent
and even conflicting findings (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Mathison 1988). And so, al-
though its multidimensionality attracts researchers, this fuller understanding of triangulation also
compels researchers committed to trustworthiness to grapple with, rather than discount, inconsis-
tent and conflicting findings. Rather than embracing the ideal of parsimony, called for by meth-
odologically positivist research methodologies, interpretive researchers argue that simplicity should
be “an empirical finding rather than a theoretical commitment” (H. Becker 1998, 44).^16
Second-Order Concepts: Informant Feedback/Member Checks, Audit,
and Negative Case Analysis
By comparison with the four first-order terms just discussed, the three second-order concepts are
much more clearly “techniques” addressing the “how to” of achieving trustworthy research. Each
one invokes a set of methods for answering three questions commonly put to researchers:
- “How do you know that your study’s ‘representations’ are recognizable by the people
you studied? How does the reader know ‘these words,’ ‘these views,’ are theirs, rather