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Glesne, C. (2016). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (5th ed.). Pearson.

CH 8

Chapter 8 Crafting Your Story: Writing Up Qualitative Data

One hopes that one’s case will touch others. But how to connect? Not by calculation, I think, not by the assumption that in the pain of my toothache, or my father’s, or Harry Crosby’s, I have discovered a “universal condition of consciousness.” One may merely know that no one is alone and hope that a singular story, as every true story is singular, will in the magic way of some things apply, connect, resonate, touch a major chord.

(Pachter, 1981, p. 72)

Why do we write? The report is, of course, an expected part of what is in store when you sign on as a researcher. Some of you may write because you have to do so, but I suspect that most of you have larger intentions. Writing is not easy. Hours turn into days and days turn into months and months, sometimes into years, and you are still working on the same manuscript. Why would you invest so much time reading, researching, writing, and rewriting? At a basic level, you have observations, insights, and experiences you want to share. But why do you want to share them? What about those nagging voices of self-doubt that mutter, “It’s all been said before; nothing you say is really new. Who are you to think you have anything to say?” But when you quiet those voices and get down to writing, you know that underneath it all you want to connect with others, get them to think about something in a different way and, perhaps, act in a different way. In short, as Mary Pipher (2007) titles her book, you may be Writing to Change the World. If that be the case, then your writing needs to be read. For it to be read, it needs to engage. Fortunately, different people are engaged by different styles of writing, but no matter the style, writing that is read is writing in which the author is careful and deliberate in the use of words. Good writing gives shape to ideas and kindles imagination and visions of the possible.

In qualitative inquiry, writing ultimately gives form to the researcher’s clumps of carefully organized and analyzed data. It links together thoughts that developed throughout the research process and were jotted in journals. The act of writing inspires new thoughts and connections. Writing constructs the housing for the meaning that you and others make of the research endeavor. As writer, you engage in a sustained act of construction, which includes selecting a particular “story” to tell from the data you have analyzed, and creating the literary form that you believe best conveys your account. It perhaps matters to some—but needs no resolution—whether the researcher’s construction is more like that of an architect, proceeding from a vision embodied in a plan, or like that of a painter, whose vision emerges over time from intuition, sense, and feeling. For many, constructing a text is possibly some combination of both plan and intuition. This chapter touches on intuition, but it focuses on strategies for writing and possible forms and styles. But first, writing up research is situated in a discussion of representation.

The Conundrum of Representation

The contextual nature of knowledge along with the role of language in creating meaning has become a focal point of thought and conversations in qualitative inquiry. Labeled the crisis of representation by Marcus and Fischer (1999), these discussions have highlighting, in particular, (1) how the research report cannot be separated from the teller, the researcher; (2) how the language the writer chooses connotes specific values; and (3) how all textual presentations are “fashioned” and, thereby, in a sense, fictions. These ideas have influenced changes in qualitative inquiry writing as discussed in the sections to follow. They have also helped open space for creative forms in research representation, a topic addressed in the next chapter.

The Tale and the Teller

We create our own stories, but only as coauthors.

(Welch, 1994, p. 41)

Researchers have always told stories to friends and colleagues of research relationships, dramatic field events, and day-to-day drudgery, but in the past, they tended to omit such stories from written reports. They also left out reflections on subjectivity and on their interactions with people in the research site. Rather, they tended to present their research with an authoritative “this is the way it is” stance (Van Maanen, 1988), sometimes referred to as literary realism.

With their current emphasis on reflexivity, qualitative researchers today ask how social science and self are “co-created” (Richardson, 2000). From this perspective, what you know about your research—reflected in your interpretations—is intertwined with what you know about yourself. Therefore, authors increasingly write themselves into their texts, acknowledging that they have been there all along, creating meaning. How much authors reflect upon themselves and their work and how they inscribe themselves into their texts, however, varies in degree and style.

A text (all of it or a section) may take the form of what Van Maanen (1988) calls a “confessional tale.” In confessional tales, the point of view is not that of interviewees and others in the research site, but that of the fieldworker, relaying his or her field experiences. Authors of confessional tales often portray themselves as human beings who make mistakes and blunders, but who eventually learn the rules and come to see things in new ways.

Rebecca wrote a confessional tale about her early stages in exploring adolescent girls’ friendships. Passages within the tale convey her sense of insecurity and naïveté as she ventured into the field:

I move to a desk situated in front of the row the girls have claimed and set down my backpack. As I begin to unpack my materials I wonder how I should begin. “Hi, my name is Rebecca, and I’m here to tell you a little bit about my study that you agreed to be a part of.” All of the girls stare at me in silence, some with shadows of apprehension on their faces. I sit down on the desk behind me and adopt a stance and manner I hope minimizes my authority role.

After the introductory meeting, Rebecca felt relieved to have completed her first research “act.” Despite feeling awkward, she encouraged the girls to talk, and she left excited by what was to come.

Linden (1993) states, “Fieldwork confessions abound, yet reflexive accounts of how other cultures and cultural ‘others’ act on field workers are rare” (p. 9). Reflexive accounts demand more than personal tales of research problems and accomplishments. They require thought about the researcher’s position and how the researcher affects and is affected by the fieldwork and field relationships, as Linden exemplifies in Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust (1993):

Writing this book has compelled me, repeatedly, to turn inward. Over and over again, I have examined the impress of the Holocaust on my Jewish consciousness. My self-reflections became an integral component of my research, inseparable from the book “about” Holocaust survivors I had initially planned to write. This process transformed my Jewish identity, and the book tells that story as well. (p. 2)

In the text, Linden presents her own memories, family stories, and evolving sense of identity along with the narratives of the Holocaust survivors.

In Translated Woman (1993), Behar addresses socioeconomic class differences between herself and Esperanza, a woman in Mexico with whom she conducted research for several years. Behar also reveals details of her family life as she was growing up that she perceived as influential in her research interpretations. Ever reflexive, she later discusses the effects of having written about her family. Her mother, angry at Behar’s exposure of the family’s “dirty laundry,” asks, “If you had to ask Esperanza for permission to write about her, why don’t you have to ask permission to write about us?” (Behar, 1995, p. 72). Since we are relational beings, exposing lives of others is a hazard of writing that requires careful attention whether you are composing thematic reports or autoethnographies.

Another potential risk of inserting the self into texts is using research as a kind of self-therapy or to focus as much on the self as on another. Cynically referred to as ethnonarcissism, some accounts appear to be ways for people to make more of themselves than of the world around them. As a researcher, you are inseparable from your findings. Just what to write about yourself in the text—and how much—remains, however, an issue worthy of consideration. As Goodall (2008) asserts, what is important about incorporating your perspectives is “what you do with them. . . . What do they enable? What do they constrain . . .? How do these details make the story more credible as well as more interesting?” (p. 25).

The Researcher’s Language

Whatever reality is, besides existent, our sense of it . . . comes inevitably out of the way we talk about it.

(Geertz, 1995, p. 18)

Meaning is more complex than the definition of words. The very choice of the language you use—whether clear and coherent, complex and disruptive, removed and formal, or personal and evocative—tells a story in addition to what you mean it to say. For example, consider researchers who pepper reports with utilize, finalize, and other ize-ending words instead of shorter terms such as use and finish. By their word choice, they take on the air of academic pretension, but not necessarily that of good writers, as Strunk and White (1979) remind us.

For another example, in crafting this book , I want to write in a style accessible to those of you who are novice researchers, to use clear, expressive language and examples that engage. But what meaning does my language choice produce? What messages does such writing convey? Certainly, I simplify much and simply ignore more. I gloss over historical catalysts and social philosophies. I do so not because they don’t matter but because my primary intent is to welcome in those of you new to qualitative research. I trust that you will go on to read, discuss, and discover elsewhere variety and complexity in research perspectives and methodologies. In doing so, however, am I inviting you into a seemingly intriguing and appealing adventure without warning you properly of all the hidden alleys and curves? Am I encouraging “bad science” if some of you read this text and think that you now know all about being a qualitative researcher? I don’t want to deceive or to provide a false sense of knowing, but both may be possibilities because of the language I choose.

“Language does not ‘reflect’ social reality, but produces meaning, creates social reality,” states Richardson (2000, p. 928). For example, passive, disembodied sentences (“The study was conducted . . .”) convey a sense of objectivity where researchers and their actions (excitement, worries) disappear. For another example, return to my discussion of writing this text and my intent to use clear, accessible language. Lather (1996) states that “plain speaking” can imply “a mirroring relationship between the word and the world” (p. 527). She argues that sometimes we need to read and not easily understand in order to move our thinking beyond the taken-for-granted. Tsing (1993) takes a similar perspective, referring to her own ethnographic writing strategies as “guerrilla tactics of multiple, uneasily jostling theories and stories . . . in which curiosity is not overwhelmed by coherence” (pp. 32–33). In essence, Lather and Tsing push me to ask questions of language use in this text, and I urge you to do so as well, not only of this text but also of your own.

Depictions and Interpretations

A life as lived is what actually happened. . . . A life as told, a life history, is a narrative, influenced by the cultural conventions of telling, by the social context.

(Bruner, 1984, p. 7)

A life as told is a re-presentation of that life; the life and the telling are not the same. Rather, the narrative—the telling or the writing—is always an interpretation of other peoples’ lives, an interpretation that qualitative researchers struggle with representing.

For many years, the realist tale (Van Maanen, 1988) was the dominant form of ethnographic representation. Authors minutely documented details of the lives of people studied, using closely edited quotations to portray participants’ points of view. The researcher, however, was absent from much, if not all, of the text, taking a position of “interpretive omnipotence” (Van Maanen, 1988, p. 51) in relaying observations and interviews in a way that assumed that the life and the telling were practically the same. In other words, the representation appeared to be true to life.

In his 1967 book Tally’s Corner, Liebow explored the lives of “streetcorner” men who hung out on Tally’s Corner in inner-city Washington, DC, in the early 1960s. In an appendix, Liebow discusses, among other things, his own background and issues of class and race (he is Caucasian; the streetcorner men are African American). In the text, however, Liebow (1967) primarily presents descriptions of what he heard and saw, words of people with whom he spoke, and generalized interpretations such as the following:

A crucial factor in the streetcorner man’s lack of job commitment is the overall value he places on the job. For his part, the streetcorner man puts no lower value on the job than does the larger society around him. He knows the social value of the job by the amount of money the employer is willing to pay him for doing it. In a real sense, every pay day, he counts in dollars and cents the value placed on the job by society at large. (p. 57)

Liebow’s writing is clear, descriptive, and engaging. In his portrait of a group of inner-city African American men and their relationships with work, women, children, and friends, Liebow provides the reader with an unquestioning sense of “this is the way it really is.”

How you represent others has consequences. In the 1970s, Edward Said was influential in confronting the perceived neutrality of realist tales and other inquiry presentations. He argued, for example, that researchers who portrayed study participants as “exotic” or “backward” were assuming positions of privilege as investigators who could classify people and, in the process, silenced, objectified, and dominated those they described (Dicks et al., 2005). How language use assigns value continues as a focal point within conversations about research representations.

Giving up an authoritative stance means that you no longer can profess to know everything, but from my perspective, you can claim to know something. Your knowledge, however, is always partial, situated in a particular context with specific historical understandings (Richardson, 2000). That your understanding is incomplete does not make it unimportant, nor does it mean that you scatter methodological discipline and rigor to the wind. You may, however, want to try out various representational forms and make even more explicit your role as cocreator of research tales. Keep the crisis of representation context in mind as you continue this chapter.

Mind-Sets for Approaching Research Writing

By the time we finish reading a good ethnography, adroit rationalization has made familiar what at first seemed strange, the other, and has estranged us from what we thought we knew, ourselves.

(Shweder, 1986, p. 38)

A woman once asked me to review and provide feedback on dissertation work that she was completing at another university. She had developed interview questions (both closed- and open-ended) and had scheduled interviews with administrators throughout the nation, but she had not yet collected any data. Nonetheless, she had compiled a document of nearly 200 pages, divided into five chapters: introduction to the problem, review of literature, methods, findings, and summary with recommendations. She had completed the first three chapters and much of the last two, leaving blank spaces for percentages and applicable phrases once the data were available.

I do not know how many dissertations and research reports are written this way; not many, I hope. Those that are cannot do justice to the data in that they forfeit interpretation. They neither show respect for the time and input of respondents nor call on analytic and creative qualities of the writer. And they do not succeed in making the strange familiar or in estranging us from ourselves.

This section addresses three mind-sets that may be helpful to assume as you set out to write up your work: artist, translator/interpreter, and transformer.

Artist

To make meaning of data, writers employ technical procedures that are to some extent routine and mechanical, but writers of good qualitative studies also are artists who create. In his edited book Extraordinary Lives (1986), Zinsser states:

[Research] is only research. After all the facts have been marshaled, all the documents studied, all the locales visited, all the survivors interviewed, what then? What do the facts add up to? What did the life mean? This was the central question for the six biographers, and to hear them wrestling with it was to begin to see where the craft crosses over into art. (pp. 17–18)

Craft involves the strategies and procedures authors use to write their documents. The form and style of the presentation require artistic sensibilities, which seem to involve a mixture of discipline and creativity. As artists, qualitative researchers move into the murky terrain where some may regard them as journalists, fiction writers, or worse. As artists, they seek imaginative connections among events and people, imaginative renderings of these connections, and imaginative interpretations of what they have rendered. They do this not only in the worthy cause of making their work accessible, but also to do full justice to what they have endeavored to understand. Chapter 9 focuses on these artistic renderings.

Translator/Interpreter

We construct a truth, but not the only truth. We represent reality; we don’t reproduce it.

(Goodall, 2008, p. 23)

The ethnographer is sometimes described as a translator of culture. The researcher works to understand another’s world and then to translate the text of lived actions into a meaningful account. Although the translator metaphor suggests struggle with representing nuances of meaning, it also can imply that the researcher is an objective middleperson, rather than someone whose perspectives and personality affect the portrayed account. As previously discussed, qualitative researchers are interpreters who draw on their own experiences, knowledge, theoretical dispositions, and collected data to present their understandings of particular processes and situations. As interpreters, they think of themselves not as authority figures who get the “facts” on a topic, but as meaning makers who make sense out of the interaction of their own lives with those of research participants. “An ethnography,” explains Shweder (1986), “begins with an ethnographic experience: With your eyes open you have to go somewhere. Yet a culture is never reducible to what meets the eye, and you can’t get to ethnographic reality by just looking” (p. 38). He likens culture to a black hole that you can know “only by inference and conjecture” (p. 38). Inference and conjecture are mainstays of the interpretive process. Inferences are made about the relationship of one thing to another, on the basis of carefully collected, carefully analyzed data.

Translations in this interpretive sense can help both researchers and readers to see differently, to know new things. In Michaels’s exquisitely written novel Fugitive Pieces (1996), the main character, as a small boy, watched his family get killed in Nazi Germany. He could not talk of it until much later, after he moved to Canada and learned English. Translating the events out of their language of origin allowed him to explore what happened and what the events meant for his life and for others. Fiction writers and poets learn that when they are surprised by what their writing reveals to themselves, their effort is working. Like the character in Michaels’s book, qualitative research writers seek translations that will allow them to reveal and reorder in surprising and meaningful ways what they have observed, heard, and experienced.

Transformer

It is to the role of transformer—not necessarily in the sense of reformer but rather of catalytic educator—that many writers of qualitative research aspire. As others read your story, you want them to identify with or be a witness to the problems, oppression, worries, joys, and dreams that are the collective human lot. By reflecting on others’ lives in light of their own experiences, readers acquire new insights and perspectives on some aspect of human interaction and, perhaps, are moved to action. This process of learning about self through understanding others is a gift of qualitative research done well. Shweder (1986) equates ethnography to “intellectual exorcism” and states, “Forced to take the perspective of the other, we are wrenched out of our self. We transcend ourselves, and for a brief moment we wonder who we are” (p. 38).

Writing up your work so that it contributes to transformative experiences requires the application of both disciplined procedures and artistic creativity to meaningful data. Goodall (2008) states, “The power of the story is its ability to change your life. And not just yours, but other people’s lives as well” (p. 13). This chapter will return to such possibilities, but concentrates first on the disciplined procedures of writing.

Transformer

It is to the role of transformer—not necessarily in the sense of reformer but rather of catalytic educator—that many writers of qualitative research aspire. As others read your story, you want them to identify with or be a witness to the problems, oppression, worries, joys, and dreams that are the collective human lot. By reflecting on others’ lives in light of their own experiences, readers acquire new insights and perspectives on some aspect of human interaction and, perhaps, are moved to action. This process of learning about self through understanding others is a gift of qualitative research done well. Shweder (1986) equates ethnography to “intellectual exorcism” and states, “Forced to take the perspective of the other, we are wrenched out of our self. We transcend ourselves, and for a brief moment we wonder who we are” (p. 38).

Writing up your work so that it contributes to transformative experiences requires the application of both disciplined procedures and artistic creativity to meaningful data. Goodall (2008) states, “The power of the story is its ability to change your life. And not just yours, but other people’s lives as well” (p. 13). This chapter will return to such possibilities, but concentrates first on the disciplined procedures of writing.

he written-conversation idea is easily extended by choosing a person you know—a friend, relative, colleague, or research participant—and writing with that person in mind.

If the written-conversation idea fails, don’t underestimate the power of dialog. Getting together with another person and talking through the statement “What I am really trying to say in this section is . . .” will often enable you to move beyond your sticking point.

Establish or join a writing group. Not only does this kind of interaction provide ongoing feedback; it helps to establish regular deadlines. As well intentioned as you are in setting your own short- and long-term due dates, there is nothing like having to be accountable to others to help you meet those deadlines.

Finally, immerse yourself in exemplary ethnographies and qualitative studies, as well as in novels, poetry, and great works of literature (during nonwriting hours). Your reading provides models and sources of inspiration. “Read widely as well as deeply,” advises Murray (1986, p. 149).

Once you have started writing, keep at it. The carefully organized files and clumps of notes are the makings for the qualitative researcher’s text. As your “to do” clumps shrink in number, you have evidence of progress.

Keeping At It

In Beryl Markham’s (1942/1983) conception of progress, “A word grows to a thought—a thought to an idea—an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take” (p. 154). You should not wait until you know exactly what the thoughts, ideas, and words should be before beginning to write. Writing “helps people generate, develop, organize, modify, critique, and remember their ideas” (Fulwiler, 1985, p. 23). When working on one analytical theme and, perhaps, incorporating an interviewee quotation as an example, another example often jumps to mind, filed elsewhere. As you write, you begin to see new ways in which your data connect. British historian Sir Steven Runciman (in Plante, 1986) emphasizes the role of writing in the forming of ideas: “When I’m writing, I’m dealing with something being revealed to me all the time. I get the insight when I’m actually having to try to put it into words” (p. 78). Writing helps you to develop thoughts and ideas and to discover what you know and what else you need to know. It is best to begin sooner rather than later.

Although you may begin writing with an overall organizational plan, the act of writing is likely to reshape the plan, reorganize the pieces, subsume some sections, and add others. For example, the process of writing restructured Peshkin’s outline for one of his books:

Writing up is a continual process of organizing and reorganizing your research information and analytic thoughts. Once your writing begins, the data bits you have carefully sorted into segregated clumps will look different. No longer homogeneous, they need to be sorted into subclumps that possibly make up subsections of the text. For example, suppose you have a major code on “resolving conflict” for a study of first-year principals. Under “resolving conflict,” you had further categorized the data by techniques used, such as “holding meetings,” “using humor,” “turning the matter over to others,” and “ignoring the situation.” Now, suppose that within the subclump “turning the matter over to others,” you realize, through reading and thinking about the interview data there, that first-year principals sometimes turn budget conflicts over to the school board and personnel conflicts over to the superintendent. Your data scraps could be arranged accordingly. To write up your data, you continuously, progressively sort and consider relationships of one piece of data to another. Through this process, you increasingly impose order on your data. Yet, at the same time, the order is flexible; it continuously changes, shaped by the ideas that your writing generates.

At this stage, you are engaging also in the analytic process of selecting which data, of all the data you collected, to use in the text. Wolcott (2009) describes this as “the painful task” (p. 16) of getting rid of data and states, “The idea is to discover essences and then to reveal those essences with sufficient context, yet not become mired by trying to include everything that might possibly be described” (p. 39). In fact, “during the composition of a monograph or a visual documentary—your best indicator of activity may be not output but outthrow” (Plath, 1990, p. 374). Ask your committee members to describe the most wearisome qualitative research paper or dissertation they have read. Most likely, they will depict reports where authors felt compelled to insert every quotation collected in list-like fashion with little analysis or interpretation.

Kvale (1996, pp. 266–267) provides eight guidelines for reporting interview quotations. I emphasize three: (1) Quotes should not make up more than half the text in any descriptive or analytical chapter; (2) quotes should be kept short, ordinarily no more than half a page; and (3) quotes should be interpreted with the researcher clearly stating what perspective they illuminate. These are not hard-and-fast rules. A whole chapter, for example, may be primarily the edited words of an interviewee. As guidelines, however, they may assist you to let go of some of your data. Ask of each chunk, “Does this bit of evidence move the story along?” (Plath, 1990, p. 376).

The organizational procedures of writing are relatively easier to discuss than what makes writing more than a linear report of what was done and learned. Your composition conveys how you interpret and make meaning of what you saw and heard. No mechanical procedures exist for meaningful writing. It helps to be so immersed that you are open to those flashes of insight that come when least expected. Such moments make connections and provide perspectives that allow troublesome pieces to fall into place. Revisiting your work after it has sat awhile assists as well.

Drafts and Revisions

Expect your work to go through a number of drafts before it reflects the polish of a well-crafted manuscript. The first draft of your manuscript is like a roughly hewn form emerging from a scu

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