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A HISTORY OF QUALITATIVE INQUIRY IN SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH1

Frederick Erickson

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what their actions mean to them. It identifies meaning-relevant kinds of things in the world—kinds of people, kinds of actions, kinds of beliefs and interests— focusing on differences in forms of things that make a differ- ence for meaning. (From Latin, qualitas refers to a primary focus on the qualities, the features, of entities—to distinctions in kind—while the contrasting term quantitas refers to a pri- mary focus on differences in amount.) The qualitative researcher first asks, “What are the kinds of things (material and symbolic) to which people in this setting orient as they conduct everyday life?” The quantitative researcher first asks, “How many instances of a certain kind are there here?” In these terms, quantitative inquiry can be seen as always being preceded by foundational qualitative inquiry, and in social research, quantitative analysis goes haywire when it tries to shortcut the qualitative founda- tions of such research—it then ends up counting the wrong kinds of things in its attempts to answer the questions it is asking.

This chapter will consider major phases in the development of qualitative inquiry. Because of the scale of published studies using qualitative methods, the citations of literature present illus- trative examples of work in each successive phase of qualitative inquiry’s development rather than an exhaustive review of litera- ture in any particular phase. I have referred the reader at various points to additional literature reviews and historical accounts of qualitative methods, and at the outset, I want to acknowledge the comprehensive historical chapter by Arthur Vidich and Stanford Lyman (1994, pp. 23–59), which was published in the first edi- tion of this Handbook. Our discussion here takes a somewhat different perspective concerning the crisis in authority that has developed in qualitative inquiry over the last 30 years.

This chapter is organized both chronologically and themati- cally. It considers relationships evolving over time between five foundational “footings” for qualitative research: (1) disciplinary perspectives in social science, particularly in sociology and anthropology; (2) the participant-observational fieldworker as an observer/author; (3) the people who are observed during the fieldwork; (4) the rhetorical and substantive content of the qualitative research report as a text; and (5) the audiences to which such texts have been addressed. The character and legiti- macy of each of these “footings,” have been debated over the entire course of qualitative social inquiry’s development, and these debates have increased in intensity in the recent past.

2 I. OrIgIns Of QualItatIve research

In the ancient world, there were precursors to qualitative social inquiry. Herodotus, a Greek scholar writing in the 5th century B.c.e., had interests that were cross-cultural as well as historical. Writing in the 2nd century c.e., the Greek skeptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus conducted a cross-cultural survey of morality, showing that what was considered right in one society was con- sidered wrong in others. Both he and Herodotus worked from the accounts of travelers, which provided the primary basis for comparative knowledge about human lifeways until the late 19th century. Knowledge of nature also was reported descrip- tively, as in the physics of Aristotle and the medicine of Galen.

Descriptive reporting of everyday social practices flourished again in the Renaissance and Baroque eras in the publication of “how to do it books” such as Baldassar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and the writing of Thoinot Arbeau (Orchésographie) on courtly dancing, of Johann Comenius (Didactica Magna) on

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pedagogy, of Isaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) on fishing, and of John Playford (The Division Viol) on how to improvise in play- ing the viola da gamba. The treatises on dancing and music especially were descriptive accounts of very particular practices— step-by-step description at molecular grain size. Narrative descriptive reports were also written in broader terms, such as the accounts of the situation of Native Americans under early Spanish colonial rule in Latin America, written by Bartolomeo de las Casas in the 16th century, and the 17th-century reports French Jesuits submitted to superiors regarding their missionary work in North America (Relations). A tension between scope and specificity of description remains in contemporary qualitative inquiry and reporting.

Simultaneously with the 17th-century writing on everyday practices, the quantitative physics of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton was being established. As the Enlightenment devel- oped, quantitatively based inquiry became the standard for physical science. The search was for general laws that would apply uniformly throughout the physical world and for causal relations that would obtain universally. Could there be an equi- valent to this in the study of social life—a “social physics”—in which social processes were monitored by means of frequency tabulation and generalizations about social processes could be derived from the analysis of frequency data? In England, Wil- liam Petty’s Political Arithmetic was one such attempt, pub- lished in 1690. In France and Germany, the term statistics began to be used to refer to quantitative information collected for purposes of the state—information about finance, population, disease, and mortality. Some of the French Enlightenment phi- losophers of the 18th century saw the possibility that social pro- cesses could be mathematically modeled and that theories of the state and of political economy could be formulated and empir- ically verified in ways that would parallel physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

As time went on, a change of focus occurred in published narrative descriptive accounts of daily practices. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the activities of the leisured classes were described, while the lower classes were portrayed patronizingly at the edges of the action, as greedy, lascivious, and deceitful, albeit clever. (A late example can be found in the portrayal of the lusty, pragmatic countrymen and women in Picander’s libretto for J. S. Bach’s Peasant Cantata, written and performed in 1742.) By the end of the 18th century, the everyday lives of servants and rustics were being portrayed in a more sympa- thetic way. Pierre Beaumarchais’s play, The Marriage of Figaro, is an example. Written in 1778, it was initially banned in both Paris and Vienna on the grounds that by valorizing its servant characters and satirizing its aristocratic characters, it was dan- gerously subversive and incited insubordination. By the early 19th century, the Brothers Grimm were collecting the tales of German peasants, and documentation of folklore and folklife of commoners became a general practice.

By the mid-19th century, attempts were being made to define foundations for the systematic conduct of social inquiry. A fun- damental disagreement developed over what kind of a “science” the study of society should be. Should such inquiry be modeled after the physical sciences, as Enlightenment philosophers had hoped? That is what Auguste Comte (1822/2001) claimed as he developed a science of society he would come to call sociology; his contemporary, Adolphe Quetelet (1835/2010) advocated the use of statistics to accomplish a “social physics.” Early anthro- pologists with foundational interests in social and cultural evolution also aimed their inquiry toward generalization (e.g., Morgan, 1877; Tylor, 1871); they saw the comparative study of humans as aiming for general knowledge, in their case, an understanding of processes of change across time in physical and cultural ways of being human—of universal stages of development from barbarism to contemporary (European) civilization—comparative study that came to be called ethnol- ogy. Like Comte, they saw the purposes of social inquiry as the discovery of causal laws that applied to all cases, laws akin to those of physics and chemistry.

In contrast, the German social philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1883/1989) advocated an approach that differed from that of natural sciences (which he called Naturwissenschaften). He advocated conducting social inquiry as Geisteswissenschaften— literally “sciences of the spirit” and more freely translated as “human sciences” or, better, “human studies.” Such inquiry was common to both the humanities and what we would now call the social sciences. It focused on the particulars of mean- ing and action taken in everyday life. The purpose of inquiry in the human sciences was understanding (verstehen) rather than proof or prediction. Dilthey’s ideas influenced younger scholars—in particular Max Weber and Georg Simmel in soci- ology and early phenomenologists in philosophy such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. His ideas became even more influential in the mid-20th century “hermeneutical turn” taken by philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas and by anthropologists such as Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz.

The emergence of ethnography. In the last quarter of the 19th century, anthropologists began to use the term ethnography for descriptive accounts of the lifeways of particular local sets of people who lived in colonial situations around the world. These accounts, it was claimed, were more accurate and comprehen- sive than the reports of travelers and colonial administrators. In an attempt to improve the information quality and comprehen- siveness of description in traveler’s accounts, as well as to sup- port the fieldwork of scholars in the emerging field of anthropol- ogy, the British Society for the Advancement of Science pub- lished in 1874 a manual to guide data collection in observation and interviewing, titled Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travelers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands (available

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–45

at http://www.archive.org/details/notesandqueries00readgoog). The editorial committee for the 1874 edition of Notes and Que- ries included George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, Edward Tylor, and Francis Galton, the latter being one of the founders of modern statistics. The Notes and Queries manual continued to be reis- sued in further editions by the Royal Anthropological Society, with the sixth and last edition appearing in 1951.

At 6 ½ by 4 inches, the book could be carried to field settings in a large pocket, such as that of a bush jacket or suit coat. Rulers in both inches and centimeters are stamped on the edge of the cover to allow the observer to readily measure objects encoun- tered in the field. The volume contains a broad range of ques- tions and observation topics for what later became the distinct branches of physical anthropology and social/cultural anthro- pology: topics include anatomical and medical observations, clothing, navigation, food, religion, laws, and “contact with civi- lized races,” among others. The goal was an accurate collection of facts and a comprehensive description of the whole way of life of those who were being studied.

This encyclopedic approach to fieldwork and information collection characterized late 19th-century qualitative research, for example, the early fieldwork of Franz Boas on the north- west coast of North America and the two expeditions to the Torres Straits in Oceania led by Alfred Haddon. The second Haddon expedition involved fieldworkers who would teach the next generation of British anthropologists—for example, W. H. R. Rivers and C. G. Seligman, with whom A. R. Radcliffe Brown and B. Malinowski later studied. (For further discus- sion of the early history of field methods in anthropology, see Urrey, 1984, pp. 33–61.)

This kind of data collection and reporting in overseas set- tings was called ethnography, combining two Greek words: gra- phein, the verb for “to write,” and ethnoi, a plural noun for “the nations—the others.” For the ancient Greeks, the ethnoi were people who were not Greek—Thracians, Persians, Egyptians, and so on—contrasting with Ellenoi or Hellenes, as us versus them. The Greeks were more than a little xenophobic, so that ethnoi carries pejorative implications. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, ethnoi was the translation for the Hebrew term for “them”—goyim—which is not a compliment. Given its etymology and its initial use in the 19th century for descriptive accounts of non-Western people, the best definition for ethnography is “writing about other people.”

Perhaps the first monograph of the kind that would become modern realist ethnography was The Philadelphia Negro, by W. E. B. DuBois (1899). His study of a particular African American census tract combined demographic data, area maps, recent community history, surveys of local institutions and commu- nity groups, and some descriptive accounts of the conduct of daily life in the neighborhood. His purpose was to make visible the lives—and the orderliness in those lives—of people who had been heretofore invisible and voiceless in the discourses of

middle class white society and academia. A similar purpose and descriptive approach, combining demography and health statis- tics with narrative accounts, was taken in the reports of working class life in East London by Charles Booth (1891), whose col- laborators included Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Even more emphasis on narrative description was found in How the Other Half Lives, an account of the everyday life of immigrants on the lower East Side of New York City, written by the journalist Jacob Riis (1890) and illustrated with photographs. All of these authors—and especially Booth and DuBois—aimed for factual accuracy and holistic scope. Moreover, these authors were social reformers—Booth and the Webbs within the Fabian Socialist movement in England, Riis as a founder of “muckraking” jour- nalism and popular sociology, and DuBois as an academic sociologist who turned increasingly to activism, becoming a leader of the early 20th-century African American civil rights movement. Beyond description for its own sake, their purpose was to advocate for and to inform social change.

None of these early practitioners claimed to be describing everyday life from the points of view of those who lived it. They were outsider observers. DuBois, although an African American, grew up in a small New England town, not Philadelphia, and he had a Harvard education. Booth and the Webbs were upper middle class, and so was Riis. They intended to provide accurate descriptions of “facts” about behavior, presented as self-evidently accurate and “objective,” but not about their functional signifi- cance in use, or as Clifford Geertz (1973) said, what distin- guishes an eye blink from a wink (p. 6). To use terms that developed later in linguistics and metaphorically applied to ethnography, their descriptions were etic rather than emic in content and epistemological status.

Adding point of view. Portraying social action (as wink) rather than behavior (as eye blink)—that is, describing the conduct of everyday life in ways that make contact with the subjective ori- entations and meaning perspectives of those whose conduct is being reported—is the fundamental shift in interpretive (her- meneutical) stance within ethnography that Bronislaw Malinowski claimed to have accomplished a generation later. In his groundbreaking monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski, 1922), he said that ethnographic descrip- tion should not only be holistic and factually accurate, but should aim “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, his vision of his world” (p. 25).

During World War I, Malinowski, a Pole who had studied anthropology in England, was interned by British colonial authorities during his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia because they were concerned that, as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he might be a spy. He was not allowed to return home until the war had ended. Malinowski later made a virtue of necessity and claimed that his 4 years of enforced fieldwork and knowledge of the local language enabled

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him to write a report that encompassed the system of everyday life in its entirety and accurately represented nuances of local meaning in its daily conduct. After Malinowski, this became a hallmark of ethnography in anthropology—reporting that included the meaning perspectives of those whose daily actions were being described.

Interpretively oriented (i.e., hermeneutic) realist ethnogra- phy presumed that local meaning is causal in social life and that local meaning varies fundamentally (albeit sometimes subtly) from one local setting to another. One way this manifested in anthropology was through cultural relativism—a position that Franz Boas had taken before Malinowski. By the late 1920s, anthropologists were presuming that because human societies were very different culturally, careful ethnographic case study documentation was necessary before valid ethnological com- parison could take place—the previous armchair speculations of scholars like Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan were seen as having been premature.

What is implied in the overall emphasis on the distinctive dif- ferences in local meaning from one setting to another is a pre- sumption that stands in sharp contrast to a basic presumption in natural science. There one assumes a fundamental uniformity of nature in the physical universe. For example, one can assume that a unit measurement of heat, or of force, or a particular chemical element is the same entity in Mexico City and Tokyo as it is in London—and also on the face of the sun and in a far distant galaxy. The presumption of uniformity of natural elements and processes permitted the statement of general laws of nature in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, and to a lesser extent in biol- ogy. In contrast, a human science focus on locally constructed meaning and its variability in construction presumes, in effect, a fundamental nonuniformity of nature in social life. That assump- tion was anathema to those who were searching for a social phys- ics. But qualitative social inquiry is not aiming to be a social physics. Or is it? Within anthropology, sociology, and educational research, researchers disagreed about this, even as they did eth- nographic case studies in traditional and modern societies.

A basic, mainstream approach was developing in qualitative social inquiry. We can see that approach as resting on five foun- dational grounds or footings: the disciplinary enterprise of social science, the social scientific observer, those who are observed, the research report as a text, and the research audi- ence to which that text is addressed. Each of these five was considered as an entity whose nature was simple and whose legitimacy was self-evident. In current qualitative inquiry, the nature and the legitimacy of each of those footings have been called into question.

First, the enterprise of social science. By the late 19th century, sociology and anthropology were developing as new disciplines, beginning to achieve acceptance within universities. Physical sciences had made great progress since the 17th century, and social scientists were hoping for similar success.

Next, the social scientist as observer. His (and these were men) professional warrant for paying research attention to other humans was the social scientific enterprise in which he was engaged—that engagement gave him the right to watch other people and question them. It was assumed that he would and should be systematic and disinterestedly open-minded in the exercise of research attention. The process of looking closely and carefully at another human was seen as being no more ethically or epistemologically problematic than looking closely and carefully at a rock or a bird. Collecting specimens of human activity was justifiable because it would lead to new knowledge about social life. (Unlike the field biologist the social scientist was not justified to kill those he studied or to capture them for later observation in a zoological museum—although some non-Western people were exhibited at world expositions and the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber had housed a Native Ameri- can, Ishi, at the anthropological museum of the University of California, Berkeley, making him available for observation and interview there—but artifact collecting and the writing of field- notes were the functional equivalent of the specimen collection and analysis methods of biologists and geologists.) Moreover, research attention in social inquiry was a one-way matter—just as the field biologist dissected an animal specimen and not the other way around, it was the researcher’s watching and asking that counted in social inquiry, not the attending to and ques- tioning of the researcher by the people whose daily lives were being studied.

Those who were observed as research objects (not as subjects but as objects) were thus considered as essentially passive par- ticipants in the research enterprise—patients rather than agents—there to be acted upon by observing and questioning, not there to affect the direction taken in the inquiry. Thus, in the division of labor within the process of qualitative social inquiry, a fundamental line of distinction and asymmetry was drawn between the observer and the observed, with control over the inquiry maximized for the observer and minimized for the observed.

That asymmetry extended to the process of producing the text of a research report, which was entirely the responsibility of the social scientist as author. Such reports were not written in collaboration with those whose lives were studied, nor were they accompanied by parallel reports produced by those who were studied (just as the finches of the Galapagos islands had not published a report of Darwin’s visit to them). In reports of the results of social inquiry by means of firsthand participant observation, the portrayal of everyday life of the people studied was done by the researcher.

The asymmetry in text production extended further to text consumption. The written report of social inquiry was addressed to an audience consisting of people other than those who had been studied—the community of the researcher’s fel- low social scientists (and perhaps, of policymakers who might

Chapter 3 A History of Qualitative Inquiry in Social and Educational Research–2–47

commission the research work). This audience had as its pri- mary interests the substantive significance of the research topic and the technical quality of the conduct of the study. The suc- cess of the report (and of the author’s status as a reporter) was a matter of judgment residing in the scholarly community. The research objects’ existential experience of being scrutinized during the researcher’s fieldwork and then described in the researcher’s report was not a primary consideration for the readers of the report, nor for its author. Indeed those who had been studied were not expected to read the research report, since many were not literate.

For a time, each of these five footings had the stability of canonical authority in the “normal science” practice of qualita- tive inquiry. That was a period that could be called a “golden age,” but with a twinge of irony in such a designation, given what we now know about the intense contestation that has developed recently concerning each of the footings.

2 II. a “gOlden age” Of realIst ethnOgraphy

From the mid 1920s to the early 1950s, the basic approach in qualitative inquiry was realist general ethnography—at the time it was just called ethnography. More recently, such work has been called realist because of its literary quality of “you are there” reporting, in which the narrator presents description as if it were plain fact, and general because it attempted a compre- hensive description of a whole way of life in the particular set- ting that was being described—a setting (such as a village or an island or, later, an urban neighborhood or workplace within a formal organization) that was seen as being distinctly bounded. Typically, the narrator wrote in third person and did not portray him- or herself as being present in the scenes of daily life that were described. A slightly distanced authorial voice was intended to convey an impression of even-handedness—conveying “the native’s point of view” without either overt advocacy of custom- ary practices or explicit critique of them. (For a discussion of the stance of detachment, see Vidich & Lyman, 1994, p. 23.) Usually, the social theory perspective underlying such work was some form of functionalism, and this led authors to focus less on conflict as a driving force in society and more on the comple- mentarity of various social institutions and processes within the local setting.

Ethnographic monographs in anthropology during this time followed the overall approach found in Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1922) Argonauts, where he said that an adequate ethnography should report three primary bodies of evidence:

1. The organisation of the tribe, and the anatomy of its culture must be recorded in firm, clear outline. The method of concrete, sta- tistical documentation is the means through which such an outline has to be given.

2. Within this frame the imponderabilia of actual life, and the type of behaviour must be filled in. They have to be collected through minute, detailed observations, in the form of some sort of ethnographic diary, made possible by close contact with native life.

3. A collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore, and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionem, as documents of native mentality. (p. 24)

What was studied was a certain village or region in which a named ethnic/linguistic group resided. The monograph usually began with an overall description of the physical setting (and often of subsistence activities). This was followed by a chapter on an annual cycle of life, one on a typical day, one on kinship and other aspects of “social organization,” one on child rearing, and then chapters on certain features of the setting that were distinctive to it. (Thus, for example, Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 monograph on a herding people, The Nuer, contains detailed description of the aesthetics of appreciation of color patterns in cowhide.) Narrative vignettes describing the actions of particu- lar people in an actual event were sometimes provided, or typi- cal actions were described more synoptically. These vignettes and quotes from informants were linked in the text by narrating commentary. Often maps, frequency tables, and analytic charts (including kinship diagrams) were included.

Notable examples in British and American anthropology during this period include volumes by students of Franz Boas, such as Margaret Mead’s (1928) semipopular account, Coming of Age in Samoa. Raymond Firth, a student of Malinowski, pro- duced We the Tikopia (1936/2004), E. E. Evans-Pritchard, a stu- dent of Malinowski’s contemporary, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (who himself had published a monograph The Andaman Islanders in the same year as Malinowski’s Argonauts, 1922) published The Nuer in 1940. David Holmberg (1950) published a study of the Siriono, titled Nomads of the Longbow. In addition to American work on indigenous peoples of the Western Hemi- sphere, there were monograph series published on British colo- nial areas—from Australia, studies of New Guinea, Micronesia, and Melanesia, and from England, studies of East Africa, West Africa, and So

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