70 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
The scientific method—it is always named with the definite article, itself implying a procedural
unity across all sciences—has traditionally been presented as having five or so steps, as in the
following composite example:- Identify research problem/
state hypothesis - Prepare research design
- Collect data
Observation/measurement/sampling - Process/analyze data
- Draw conclusion(s)/findings^6
The staged sequencing of steps—they are sometimes presented as a flow chart—enacts the
definitional meanings of rigor. Its graphic design suggests that the scientific research process is,
indeed, exacting, even rigid, without allowance for deviation. As research based on participant-
observation, conversational interviewing, and/or the close reading of documents is not “stiff” and
stepwise in this way—a point discussed below—it is, ipso facto, “not rigorous.” And the com-
mon, rather inchoate textbook descriptions of qualitative and interpretive methods that are found
in general textbooks corroborate, by inference, their status as the opposite of rigid, strict, “rigor-
ous” research (see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2002).
A defense of interpretive methods on procedural grounds against charges of non-rigor might
draw on its definition as meaning “exacting” but look even more to its companion term—
systematic—to stake a claim. When interpretive research is done well (meaning according to its
own established and accepted procedures), it is, in point of fact, carefully designed and crafted
and systematically carried out. Thickly descriptive work is rich in its detail and rigorous in its
argumentation. “Interpretive” does not mean “impressionistic.” The systematicity, however, is
different from that of quantitative methods; interpretive methods have their own procedural crite-
ria. Part of this difference lies in the characteristics that make many interpretive research methods
incapable of being rigorous in the other senses of that term—of unyielding and inflexible stiff-
ness. This is especially the case when interacting with people, but the point holds for documen-
tary evidence as well.
The researcher involved in conversational interviewing and observing-participating cannot
adhere “rigidly” to a research protocol. Such situations do entail more ambiguities and fewer
controls over others’ acts (precisely what survey questionnaires are intended to eliminate or sur-
mount). This would hold for any research orientation, such as phenomenologically influenced
ones, that accords others the full range of human agency, including legitimating others’ local
knowledge—their own expertise in their own lived experience. Not only can human responses
not be controlled, but the interpretive researcher does not seek to control them, beyond pointing
conversations toward explicating that which the researcher is assaying to understand. Document-
based research has similar characteristics in that the researcher does not and cannot know ahead
of time what she will find in the text. Any single discovery might set the research trajectory off
onto another path—to a different set of documents, a different archive, a different geographic
location, a different research question. The research has, then, an improvisational quality.
However, much as it is a misunderstanding of improvisational theater to imagine that the
whole of a performance is made up on the spot, so is it a misunderstanding of interpretive re-
search to think that procedures are spontaneously generated. Instead, in the same way that improv
company members engage in a tremendous amount of preparation in learning their theatrical