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This updated and expanded edition is a unique examination of qualitative research in the social sciences, raising and answering the question of why we do this kind of investigation. Rather than providing instructions on how to conduct qualitative research, The Science of Qualitative Research explores the multiple roots of qualitative research - including phenomenology, hermeneutics, and critical theory - in order to diagnose the current state of the field and recommend an alternative. The author argues that much qualitative research today uses the mind-world dualism that is typical of traditional experimental investigation, and recommends that instead we focus on constitution: the relationship of mutual formation between a form of life and its members. Michel Foucault's program for 'a history ontology of ourselves' provides the basis for this fresh approach. The new edition features updated chapters, and a brand new chapter which offers a discussion on how to put into practice Foucault's concept.

This volume offers a historical and critical analysis of the emerging field of the learning sciences, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and improving how children and adults learn. It features a wide range of authors, including established scholars who founded and guided the learning sciences through the initial turbulence of forming a new line of academic inquiry, as well as newcomers who are continuing to shape the field. This diversity allows for a broad yet selective perspective on what the learning sciences are, why they came to be, and how contributors conduct their work. Reflections on the Learning Sciences serves both as a starting point for discussion among scholars familiar with the discipline and as an introduction for those interested in learning more. It will benefit graduate students and researchers in computer science, educational psychology, instructional technology, science, engineering, and mathematics.

[A]n interpreter can no longer claim to teach the reader the meaning of a text, for without a subjective contribution and a context there is no such thing. Far more instructive will be an analysis of what actually happens when one is reading a text, for that is when the text begins to unfold its potential; it is in the reader that the text comes to life. . . . In reading we are able to experience things that no longer exist and to understand things that are totally unfamiliar to us; and it is this astonishing process that now needs to be investigated. Iser, 1980, p. 19 We have seen that standard practice in qualitative research – semistructured interviews followed by analysis through coding – embodies contradictory ontological commitments and notions of subject and object and of subjectivity and objectivity. On the one hand, each person is assumed to be a separate individual with personal and private experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and desires. On the other hand, scientific knowledge is assumed to be objective and general, impersonal and detached, with all personal elements eliminated. How, then, can scientific knowledge be derived from subjective experience? The qualitative research interview also draws confusingly from two models of language: discourse as a joint construction and language as a conduit. In the conduit model, what someone says is an “expression” of their experience or subjectivity. In the joint practice model, what is said is a product of two people, interviewer and interviewee. The semistructured interview uses the collaborative resources of language asymmetrically to render the interviewer invisible and encourage “disclosure” by the interviewee. The interviewee is encouraged to contemplate and reminisce about a topic outside the here and now, to confess to a patient but skeptical listener. In this respect, the interviewee’s subjectivity is an effect of the semistructured interview, not a preexisting, independent personal experience that is the content expressed in what is said.

The hallmark of the “linguistic revolution” of the twentieth century, from Saussure and Wittgenstein to contemporary literary theory, is the recognition that meaning is not simply something “expressed” or “reflected” in language: it is actually produced by it. Eagleton, 1983, p. 60 If we are to rethink the use of the interview as a tool in qualitative research, we must ask some fundamental questions. What does it mean to understand what someone says? What does it mean to understand a text? What is the “meaning” of a text? What is the relationship between a text and its author’s subjective experience? The coding approach to analysis assumes that the answers to these questions can be found in the conduit metaphor for language. This metaphor implies that words or short phrases “represent” objects and events, that experience is “put into” words, that to understand is to “unpack” this content from the form, and that this “meaning” can be repackaged in language that avoids indexicality. We have seen how unsatisfactory these answers are. But these answers are not the only ones possible. These questions have been asked for hundreds of years, and a variety of answers have been proposed. For 200 years, they have been topics of scholarly debate in philosophy, literary theory, and religion, in the field known as hermeneutics. Ironically, research with qualitative materials today more closely resembles the way people thought about these matters in the 18th century than it does contemporary views. The objective study of subjectivity has much in common with what is known as “Romanticist” hermeneutics. Yet the Romanticist view of interpretation, although very influential in the 1700s and for a considerable period afterward, searched for something unreachable. It required an endless circle of interpretation, or empathic leaps of identification with an author, or the appeal to a metaphysical notion of a universal life-force unfolding toward an objective end point.

[The task] consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to language ( langue ) and to speech. It is this “more” that we must reveal and describe. Foucault, 1969/1972, p. 49 The third approach to critical inquiry we shall consider is that of Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Foucault developed a form of critical inquiry that explored knowledge, power, and human being itself as products of history and culture. His work throws light on the central aspects that define a form of life, as well as how investigation itself always arises in a form of life. Foucault reversed Kant’s critique: whereas Kant had claimed to show how seemingly contingent aspects of human experience, such as causality, are actually necessary and universal, Foucault aimed to show how apparent necessities are actually contingent. Unlike Habermas, he didn’t view language as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental domain. Unlike Bourdieu, he didn’t view science as a field that produces knowledge that can transcend its circumstances. Indeed, Foucault’s historical critique was directed especially at the “universal truths” of the modern biological, psychological, and social sciences. These turn out, in his analysis, to be outcomes of contingent historical events. But we shall see that Foucault did not consider truth to be indistinguishable from opinion, politics to be merely the play of power, or ethical judgments to be culturally relative. Whereas Habermas focuses on individual know-that, on reflection and decision making, and Bourdieu emphasized know-how, the embodied knowledge of habitus, Foucault recognized both formal knowledge and informal practical know-how and explored the relationship between them, as well as their relation to the acting knower.

We cannot measure such sciences against the requirements of a science of verification: we cannot judge them by their predictive capacity. We have to accept that they are founded on intuitions which we all do not share, and what is worse that these intuitions are closely bound up with our fundamental options. These sciences cannot be wertfrei [value-free]; they are moral sciences in a more radical sense that the eighteenth century understood. Finally, their successful prosecution requires a high degree of self-knowledge, a freedom from illusion, in the sense of error which is rooted and expressed in one’s way of life; for our incapacity to understand is rooted in our own self-definitions, hence in what we are. Taylor, 1971, p. 57 In the 1970s, a number of calls were made for a new kind of interpretive social science that would have ethnography at its center (e.g., Bernstein, 1976; Dallmayr & McCarthy, 1977; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979). In this chapter I will examine three of these calls: Charles Taylor’s proposal for an interpretive approach to political science, Anthony Giddens’s hermeneutically informed sociology, and Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology. In each case, interpretation – hermeneutics – was regarded as an important, even central, element. In each case, immersion in the social practices of a community – that is to say, ethnographic fieldwork – was considered crucial (though at the same time, as we shall see later, ethnography itself was in crisis). In each case – in sociology, political science, and anthropology – it was claimed that the new approach would resolve core dualisms that had plagued the discipline. And, in each case, it was said that this would be because we would study the key relationship of constitution between humans and the world. This chapter begins our exploration of this notion of constitution, a notion that will lead us to a new way of practicing fieldwork. Once again, it will turn out to be important to get the ontology right.

Coding is analysis. Miles & Huberman, 1984, p. 56 The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a temporary imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge; then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies. Polanyi, 1967, p. 20 In the standard qualitative research project, the step after conducting an interview is to transcribe it and analyze the material obtained. The analysis of qualitative material causes much anxiety and confusion for researchers, especially students conducting research for the first time. Yet remarkably little is said about analysis in many introductory qualitative research textbooks, and what is said is often unclear. For example, Seidman's (1998) comprehensive book Interviewing as Qualitative Research includes only 14 or so pages on the topic of analysis out of a total of 124.Maxwell, in an otherwise excellent book titled Qualitative Research Design , writes in the chapter titled “Methods: What Will You Actually Do?” that his discussion “is not intended to explain how to do qualitative data analysis” (Maxwell, 2005, p. 95, emphasis original). This is odd coming from someone who offers an “integrative approach” to qualitative research design and insists, surely correctly, that all the elements of project design should interrelate.Maxwell talks only in general terms about analytic strategies of “categorizing” and “connecting,” and it is not clear how these link to the research questions that orient a study or to the other components – goals of the study, theoretical framework, and others – whose interconnections he considers carefully. These are not isolated cases. Generally only extremely brief characterizations of data analysis are offered; for example, that it is “a process of looking for significant statements, and comparing what was said in different interviews” (Blaxter, Hughes, & Tight, 2001). But what counts as “significant”? Is an interview really composed of “statements”? Why compare interviews, and how is the comparison made? What is the outcome of this comparison? Despite the lack of detail, there is general agreement that analysis is a matter of “coding.” Miles and Huberman state baldly that “[c]oding is analysis” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 56).