BIOGRAPHY AND PORTRAITURE RESEARCH

Biography and Portraiture Research

Biography and Portraiture Research

Introduction

Qualitative research methods constitute a broad umbrella domain of various research traditions and investigative and analytic practices (Locke, 1997). Currently, the domain's traditions and practices have enjoyed some 90 years of evolution and adaptation as professionally established practices for generating knowledge in the social sciences. Within particular schools of thought in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and psycho logy, qualitative research has comprised the investigative foundation for a number of rich knowledge traditions, for example, symbolic interactionism, cognitive anthropology, and ecological psychology, respectively (Jacob, 1987).

In the younger discipline of management and organizational studies, qualitative re search approaches have been used since their inception. Exemplars of qualitative research here abound, with some winning “Best Paper” awards from Administrative Science Quaterly (Barker, 1993; Henderson and Clark, 1990) and the Academy of Management Journal (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Gersick, 1988; Isabella, 1990).

In the more delimited field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, re searchers more recently have turned their attention to the possibilities for inquiry created by these approaches (c.f. Lee, Mitchell, and Sablynski, 1999). For example, in the opening issue of the renamed Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, the editors make the statement.

The Modernist Paradigm

Researchers choosing to work in this paradigm, of course, are linked through history to those intellectuals who sought to replace the authority of church and monarch with a reliance on reason. Modernism's grand project has been to direct scientific inquiry toward the discovery of universal ordering principles for behavior. Such ordering principles or laws are to be embedded in a theoretical framework that would provide for prediction and control of behavior independent of peculiarities of time and context (Guba and Lincoln, 1994). Research in the modernist paradigm is carried out through the hypothetico-deductive method; it is directed towards the elaboration of theories whose approximations to reality are composed in the form of a priori hypotheses subsequently verified or refuted against empirical instances.

Qualitative research from within this paradigm provides researchers opportunities to allow the “real” world of work to inform and shape their theorizing. Existing con ceptualizations can be checked and confirmed, extended and revised. Researchers can gain insight into why results obtained through quantitative means occurred, identifying the process through which discovered outcomes are generated. And, serendipitous findings can be generated that spur new research and theory development.

The opportunities created by qualitative research in this tradition are evident in Buessing, Bissels, Fuchs and Perrar's (1999) study of work satisfaction. These authors were interested in understanding why traditional satisfaction research yielded such high rates of satisfaction. Consistent with the hypothetico-deductive method, they began by posing a model suggesting that satisfaction actually takes several forms. Data were gathered from 46 nurses in 3 psychiatric hospitals via semi-structured interviews, Q-sort (a card-based method in which subjects choose from seven statements on forms of work satisfaction), and questionnaires that focused on forms of satisfaction. This effort identified 6 forms of work satisfaction that were predicted by their model and two “new” forms of ...