Qualitative Research and Representation

Last year in Qualitative Methods in Communication, we read Lindlof and Taylor's (2002) Qualitative Communication Research Methods, where they made clear the distinction between post-positivist and interpretive research methods. The interpretive/qualitative approach includes the following commitments (among a much longer list - found on pp. 11-12):

realities are plural, simultaneous, and local phenomena

research should privilege deep understanding of human actions, motives, and feelings. It should illuminate how cultural symbol systems are used to attribute meaning to existence and activity.

true knowledge is gained through prolonged immersion and extensive dialogue practiced in actual social settings

knowledge claims should preserve the subjective experience and motivations of social actors in their meaningful performances

Earlier in the chapter (p. 6) they note that "qualitative research in communication involves the performances and practices of human communication...Performances are local and unique interaction events. Their execution is collaborative and their significance is negotiable."

I share all of this as background to the material we read for this week, especially for those who may not have taken qual methods (whereas I had not had much exposure to "cognitive rhetoric"). Clearly one of the issues in all of this is how the researcher then represents the voices, perspectives and meaning-making activity of the participants. It was interesting to me to see how Flower, Higgins, and Long argue for the possibility of representation, including a fairly strong critique of self-reflexivity (I share much of their concern about navel-gazing, yet at the same time it seems to me a strength of qual research not to make a naive assumption about the ability to fairly represent the other if one doesn't remain aware of one's own social location).

It seems to me that, if we are to have any connection with the other, we will always be representing their voices, perspectives, and meaning-making activity, if only by the way we replay the home movies in our minds. Yet that does not mean, I believe, that we give up on trying to listen in the transformative way outlined in this week's reading. The process of articulating and hearing rival hypotheses can be such a transformative process, yet I wonder, in the end, how truly the voices of those who are not the authors of the article are being represented. As we learned in qual, even a transcript of a conversation is not "what really happened." And, if the final product is an article/book chapter so dense with academese that even a language-buff academic like me is falling asleep, I wonder how the participants in the research would respond. Would they feel represented? included?