Abstract
What is qualitative research? Aspers and Corte (2019) make a case for a definition that they believe captures what many qualitative researchers intuitively know. Although I agree with many of the authors’ points, I argue that the effort to identify what makes qualitative research qualitative requires there to be a clear single thing to define, and there is not; that confronting this fact forces their paper into a central contradiction; and that in spite of these and other problems, the paper succeeds in crystalizing questions that qualitative researchers must grapple with today. The authors’ most valuable contribution may be less its definition than the issues we are forced to clarify when concluding what we think about it.
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Notes
Though the paper labels that last element is “improved understanding,” I do not believe that term captures what the authors propose is distinctive. The paper later clarifies that a “hallmark of qualitative research” is understanding “in the phenomenological sense” which “requires meaning” (Aspers and Corte 2019, 154). Thus, the distinctive feature would seem to be not “improved understanding” but “a concern with meaning.”
We now understand the point in the abstract that “a qualitative dimension is present in quantitative work as well” (Aspers and Corte 2019, 139).
The paper used existing studies to identify a long list of elements. However, it does not rely on them to decide which elements to include in its final definition.
And either both are ideal types or neither is, for one cannot convincingly contrast real practice to an imaginary and deliberately narrow ideal. Doing so would be the definition of straw-man argumentation. The paper’s stated aims and its final definition make clear that, for the authors, “qualitative research” is neither mere shorthand nor an ideal type; it is a distinct, specific approach to analysis with four elements. Indeed, the term “ideal type” occurs throughout the paper, but never to describe qualitative research.
References
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Acknowledgements
I thank Tara García Mathewson and Jessica Calarco for comments that have improved this paper. I thank Lisa Albert for editorial assistance.
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Small, M.L. What is “Qualitative” in Qualitative Research? Why the Answer Does not Matter but the Question is Important. Qual Sociol 44, 567–574 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09501-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09501-3