104 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
than yours?” Informant feedback/member checks is a specific way that researchers test
their own meaning making by going back to, and asking for feedback from, those studied.- “How exactly did you do this research?” Anticipating an imaginary audit leads researchers
to prepare for it by keeping detailed records of their research procedures. - “How does the reader know that you didn’t look only for confirmatory evidence?” Nega-
tive case analysis represents a set of techniques through which researchers check their
own preliminary meaning making by searching for evidence that would challenge those
initial ideas.
These labels and their cognates reflect and construct interpretive research practices in different
ways, incorporating aspects of the four first-order terms in the rich overlay of ideas that makes up
the interpretive gestalt.
“Informant feedback” and “member checks,” terms of anthropological and sociological ori-
gin, both respond to the first set of questions. Both of them recommend that the researcher go
back to the people studied for an assessment of whether the researcher has “got it right.” They
involve techniques for assessing the connections between the researcher and the situational actors
who, together, coproduce the data that are analyzed. As methodological discussions illustrate
(e.g., Emerson and Pollner 2002; Miles and Huberman 1994, 275–77), this is a complex endeavor
for many reasons, but the impulse behind the technique is indicative of the interpretive gestalt.
Whether data are accessed and generated through prolonged field research, in-depth interview-
ing, or document analysis, the recommended procedure of going back to “members” is based on
recognition of the potential for a gulf in understanding between the researcher and “others.”
Going back to “others” is more than the journalistic practice of “fact-” or “quote checking” (which
implies that there is a singular social reality that can be captured by the reporter); it is a fuller
recognition that what “others” have to offer may be quite complex, for example, their tacit knowl-
edge, insider vocabularies, and/or positioned understandings of an event, organization, or policy,
any of which the researcher may or may not have grasped. The charge is not to take members’
meanings for granted, as well as to guard against projecting contemporary meanings onto the past
or personal meanings onto another group.^17
Reflexivity, one of the first-order criteria, assists with “informant feedback/member checks”
because it helps the researcher to theorize the potential gulf between self and others, drawing on a
variety of factors that constitute, and potentially divide, human experience, including educational
attainment, social class, race, gender, profession, and historical period. Whether the researcher con-
ducts an in-depth interview with a single mother on welfare (as in Soss 2000), completes months of
participant-observation in the field offices of the Bureau of Land Management (Ginger 2000), or
pores over nineteenth-century court cases (Brandwein 1999), both “reflexivity” and “informant
feedback/member checks” caution researchers to go back again to check their “constructions” of
meaning against those of the actors studied (Lincoln and Guba 1985, 315).^18
There are a number of reasons why members’ reactions to researchers’ constructions may be
quite mixed, but one of the most significant is that the researcher is positioned between study
participants and potential audiences, and the two groups may have quite different interests in a
study’s implications. For example, the study results might be used to assist participants or they
might provide new means for their subjugation. How the researcher deals with this in-between
positioning depends not only on the identity and power of the studied group but on the researcher’s
purpose, which can vary from a commitment to “giving voice” to a marginalized group (e.g., the
homeless), as in some action research (see, for instance, Wang, Cash, and Powers 2000); to pre-
senting a group’s distinctive worldview for policy makers (e.g., medical students, as in H. Becker