392 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
researcher bringing a very human, skeptical systematicity to the study of a problem, versus a
researcher intending to be detached from that essential humanity. Therein lies the source of our
concern, and our hope.NOTES- The first Handbook of Qualitative Research was published in 1994 and the second edition in 2000. To
update the massive second edition (1,143 pages), it was broken up into three separate tomes: Landscape of
Qualitative Research, 2003, 696 pages; Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, 2003, 480 pages; and Collecting
and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, 2003, 704 pages. Sage markets these as the “definitive source for
qualitative researchers.” - The Inter-University Faculty Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods (CQRM) was formed in
- The Web site, hosted by the Arizona State University Department of Political Science, is http://www.asu.edu/
clas/polisci/cqrm/. - The encyclopedia lists the following general categories for qualitative research: basic qualitative
research, discourse/conversation analysis, ethnography, interviewing in qualitative research, life history/
biography, qualitative data analysis, and sampling in qualitative research. - The workshop was conducted in 2003 and the NSF report was issued in 2004; see Ragin, Nagel and
White (2004). - Part I is entitled “General guidance for developing qualitative research projects” and part II is entitled
“Recommendations for designing, evaluating, and strengthening qualitative research in the social sciences.”
Appendix 3 of the report contains the twenty-four papers presented at the workshop, wherein substantive
issues are discussed in considerably more depth than in the sections focused on here. Nevertheless, it is these
sections that have the imprimatur of the National Science Foundation in the sense that they represent the
“guidance” and “recommendations” of the agency based on the workshop as a whole. - Tashakkori and Teddlie’s (1998) Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Ap-
proaches is another example of the subjugation of interpretive concerns to positivist assumptions and pur-
poses. This case is more puzzling: Despite explicit discussion of epistemological issues, the interpretive
purpose of understanding meaning and meaning making is absent and the language of variables and causal-
ity, preeminent. See also Tashakkori and Teddlie (2003). - But such a meaning-focused study is unlikely to tackle 150 disparate cultural sites!
- For an extensive discussion of the origins and the confusing contemporary usage of the term “quali-
tative,” see the section entitled “So What’s Wrong with ‘Qualitative’?” pages xv–xix in the introduction to
this book. Suffice it to say here, some research using the “qualitative” label is interpretive and our discussion
hereafter applies to that research. - Joe Soss (chapter 6, this volume) argues that a question-driven research project can lead the re-
searcher to use some methods some times and others at other times. Other researchers are more firmly
embedded in ontological-epistemological positions (or the positions are embedded in their way of being
in the world), such that they are more likely to frame all or most of their research questions from one
perspective rather than another. We have no intention of essentializing or reifying researchers’ method-
ological identities, and we have tried to refrain from labeling chapter authors in ways that are not in
keeping with their own self-definitions. Indeed, it would be curious if such ontological-epistemological
positions were correlated with psychometric test scores or personality-career inventories or some other
developmental psychology scheme. Anecdotal evidence suggests that methodological stances, in fact,
behave as a stage theory (as in the work of Jean Piaget, Abraham Maslow, or Lawrence Kohlberg) would
suggest (i.e., with each stage prerequisite to succeeding ones): Given present educational systems, with
schooling predominantly in positivist images of science, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to conceive
of interpretive science as a science; but it is only from the vantage point of interpretive science that this
point makes any sense. - Dvora Yanow thanks Tim Pachirat (personal communication, 2003) for drawing her attention to the
fact that positivist and interpretive researchers most likely understand “testability” in different ways. As he
notes, the difference reflects, at least, the distinction between seeing findings as reflections of objective
reality—as reflected in the statement “I was wrong about my findings”—and seeing them as constructions of
that reality. The latter invokes the researcher’s willingness to subject his findings to scrutiny in an attitude of