The Dictionary of Human Geography

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There are many different qualitative

methods, and typologies for classifying them.

Winchester (2000), for instance, identifies

three categories of qualitative methods: oral

(e.g. unstructuredinterviewsandinterview-

ing,focus groups, and life histories), textual

analysis (seetextandtextuality) and partici-

pant observation (or ethnography). Despite the

diversity of qualitative methods used by geog-

raphers, Crang (2002, p. 650) notes a surpris-

ing tendency to favour interviews over

ethnography – surprising because ethnography

would seem to be more in line with field-based

geographical traditions. Yet Herbert (2000)

has calculated that only 3–5 per cent of journal

articles draw on ethnographic research. The

reasons for this are various, and include: diffi-

culties in gaining access (McDowell, 1998);

challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork

within existing institutional and funding

time frames (Cook, 2001b) and disciplinary

scepticism about the merits of ethnography

(Herbert, 2000).

Two further methodological omissions have

been noted. First, visual data tend to be

under-used, relative to oral testimony or text.

Crang (2003, p. 500) reasons that qualitative

researchers have been influenced by critiques

of vision as a medium for a detached, mascu-

linist, objectifying gaze: ‘If copresence is the

privileged ground of qualitative truth claims, it

is against a foil of ‘‘bad’’ vision’ (seevision

and visuality). Especially given heightened

concerns about the politics of representation,

‘qualitative fieldwork almost turns away from

the visual to avoid accusations of ‘‘academic

tourism’’ and objectification’ (p. 500). Rejec-

tion of the visual is, however, by no means

complete, and non-representational the-

oryand a focus onperformanceand the

bodyhave generated many intriguing experi-

ments with visual data and methodologies,

some of which are reviewed by Crang. In her

textbook on visual methods, Rose (2007

[2001]) provides an excellent overview of a

wide range of visual data; questions that can

be addressed through them; and a variety of

strategies for analysing them. An over-em-

phasis on discourse and representation

grounds a second concern about the limita-

tions of geographers’ use of qualitative

methods: this is that too little attention has

been directed to how people do things, as

opposed to how they see the world or what

they say about it. Smith argues that this has

prompted a ‘second crisis of representation’

that focuses on the limits of representability

(Smith, S.J., 2001, p. 28), and the importance

of knowing through practice and recording

fully sensual, richly emotional, momentary

practices of social lives. Although qualitative

methods are now widely used throughout the

discipline, Thrift (2000a, p. 244) notes that

even ‘cultural geography still draws on a re-

markably limited number of methodologies –

ethnography, focus groups, and the like –

which are nearly always cognitive in origin

and effect’. Large claims have been made of

themethodologicalimplications of non-rep-

resentational theory: it is ‘suggestive of noth-

ing less than a drive towards a new

methodological avant garde that will radically

refigure what it is todoresearch’ (Latham,

2003, p. 2000). Writing in 2005, Lorimer

notes that ‘the creativity [promised by non-

representational theory] in research design

and method still needs to be unshackled’

(p. 89). Given the emphasis on knowledge

through practice, there is renewed interest in

symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and

ethnomethodology. As much as using rad-

ically different methods, it may be a matter of

re-examining the potential of existing ones; for

instance, to excavate everyday practices in

archival evidence, or to conduct, experience

and record interviews as fully embodied con-

versational performances in which subtle shifts

inaffect, tone and bodily comportment are as

significant as what is said. And an argument

that social life exceeds discourse need not lead

researchers away from discourse; as Nash

(2000) has argued, even a practice such as

dance – one that drew a great deal of attention

in early formulations of non-representational

styles of thinking – is not excessive to discourse

but, rather, is a complex amalgam of discourse

and embodied knowledges. Language itself has

multiplerelations toaction: Chari(2003)draws

on linguistic anthropology to considerlan-

guageas an indexical and not just referential

practice, and to consider the multiple relations

between language and action.

Given an enquiring attitude about what

counts as useful knowledge and recent interest

in performance and the ‘doing’ of social life,

qualitative researchers are reassessing what

counts as valuable research ‘products’, includ-

ing relatively private and fleeting ones (Thrift,

2000). For instance, whilst conducting an eth-

nography in a village in Pakistan, a Muslim

community in which women supposedly dis-

approved of being photographed, Besio (Besio

and Butz, 2004) was asked by some of the

resident women to photograph them privately

in out-of-the-way places. Besio reads these

secretive photography sessions as expressions

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QUALITATIVE METHODS