Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives
Practice Module on This File

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: September 29 2002
Latest Update: September 29, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Subjectivity and Reflexivity in Qualitative Research:
Objectivity/Subjectivity in Theory and Research

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Katja Mruck sent word this weekend that the Ninth Issue, Volume 3, No. 3, September 2002, of the Forum: Qualitative Social Research is now online. The title of the issue is FQS 3(3) Subjectivity and Reflexivity in Qualitative Research, Part I. Edited by Katja Mruck, Wolff-Michael Roth & Franz Breuer. Available in English and German. Part II of the same title will be out in May, 2003.

Meanwhile, the issue is available at FQS: Vol. 3, No. 3. There are some pieces I think you might enjoy that would perhaps help clarify some of our disscussions on critical theory and feminist discourse. Backup. Link added September 29, 2002.

The quantitative/qualitative research argument mirrors the objective/subjective argument. Positivism and empiricism, favored by US sociology for decades has become a status characteristic issue: ojbective research is good; subjective research (even the use of "I" in a scientiffic report) is bad; quantitative research is good; qualitative research is sloppy and bad, and done only by those who "can't do real quantitative research." Like any other dichotomy, this one sucks, too. Positivism, empiricism, have done good things. We've also used them poorly and done harmful things with them. Like publishing that Blacks can be shown to be unable to do abstract thinking, based on the old, quantitative twin studies. UNTRUE. BAD MEASURE. But published in the Harvard Educational Review. Qualitative, ethnomethodological and phenomenological research have also done good things. And we've also a disaster to consider in the Rosenthal Self Fulfilling Prophecy, when the researcher neglected to check the validity of measurement and ended up with far worse results than Tolman's old Bright Rats/ Dull Rats study. (Nag me to put up links for resources on both of these. I'm writing from my head, not from notes right now. jeanne)

I found the introductiion to this issue of the Forum: Qualitative Social Research to be written so well I think it will help you with the issue. Oh, and why do you suppose this is a social justice issue? From another article in issue. Will finish tomorrow. jeanne:

"In particular, I try to provide a link between the 'qualitative-interpretive' approach on the one hand and the questions which quantitative researchers consider one-sidedly under the term of 'operationalisation' -- the relation of the hard interview facts we collect and analyse and the inferring from that material to the non-interview social and psychological realities with which our theory-questions are concerned.

To this end, I distinguish between theory-questions (TQs) in the discourse of the research community and interview-questions (IQs) in the language of the interviewees and problematise the relations betweeen the two in the designing and improvising material.

I operate he same distinction in the relation between the interview material elicited in the questioning and its problematic relevance to answering of the theory-questions that the interview data will it is hoped support.

It is this general question-posing / question-answering model that the lengthy sections on biographic-narrative interviewing and analysis are supposed to illustrate and support -- as well as being very important in their own right."