ROLE OF SUBJECTIVITY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative Research Methods

Traditional research directs its attention outward, onto individuals who are not seen as doing research. They are often assumed to be different from us academic 'real researchers'. When we call them our 'subjects' in research studies we are often only using a codeword to cover up the fact that we treat them as if they were objects rather than human beings. Quantitative methods which rely on organizing data statistically lead us to this way of looking at individuals and their problems. This is not to say that quantitative methods necessarily make researchers dehumanise people, but there is a powerful tendency for the systematic fracturing and measurement of human experience to work in this way. That approach also fits with the surveillance and calibration of individuals in society outside the laboratory. Of course, there are researchers who use statistical approaches to combat this, and they try to empower their 'subjects', but they then, of course, have to turn around and look at what the research itself is doing.

This is where qualitative research perspectives are helpful, for they can help us tackle what quantitative researchers say about objectivity and their attempt to see statistics as simply dealing with 'objective facts'. If we do that, then we will see that what research usually takes to be a problem subjectivity can actually be turned into part of the research process itself. This would have to be a research practice that studied and conceptualised how the inevitable messiness of social life worked itself through in our action and experience in the world, rather than attempting the rather hopeless task of trying to screen it all out to get a crystal-clear 'objective' picture of the 'facts' that are really there underneath.

Interpretation in qualitative research

Qualitative research is an essentially interpretative endeavour. This is why researchers working in this tradition are often uneasy about including numeric data in their studies or in using computer software to analyse material. This queasiness about numbers is understandable, but there is no reason why qualitative research cannot work with figures, with records of observations, or with statistics as long as it is able to keep in mind that such data does not speak directly to us about facts 'out there' that are separate from us. Every bit of 'data' in research is itself a representation of the world suffused with interpretative work, and when we read the data we produce another layer of interpretations, another web of preconceptions and theoretical assumptions. Numeric data can help us to structure a mass of otherwise incomprehensible and overwhelming material, and statistical techniques can be very useful here, but our interpretations are also part of the picture, and so these interpretations need to be attended to.

Most social research is still deeply affected by empiricism, in which it is believed that the only knowledge worth having in science is that obtained by observation through the five senses (and only the ...