[Xmca-l] The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[Martin John Packer]

Cambridge University Press, in their infinite wisdom, have just published an expanded second edition of my book The Science of Qualitative Research. It will be a perfect holiday gift for a loved one!  :)

The book continues to make the case that a common view of qualitative research — that it amounts to a set of techniques for describing people’s subjective experience — is mistaken. I propose that in fact qualitative research can take us beyond the taken for granted ontological dualisms of subjectivity/objectivity, mind/world, and appearance/reality. Human beings have created the worlds, the cultures, in which we live, and we are products of these worlds. Qualitative research can be the study of the ‘ontological complicity’ that people have with the social reality in which they live, and the ‘constitution’ in which specific ways of being human are formed. The constituents of qualitative research — and in the book I focus on three: interviews, analysis of interaction, and ethnographic field work — can be combined and aligned to focus on ontology, in a scientific study of the constitution of human beings. This science is centrally a matter of interpretation, of hermeneutics, not of coding. 

The new material includes a discussion of the centrality of constitution (not only causation) in every scientific discipline -- think of Watson and Crick discovering how DNA is constituted -- in Chapter 1. Discussion of Bruno Latour’s work has been included in several chapters: there are treatments of his book Laboratory Life, of actor-network theory, and of his Inquiry into Modes of Existence.

In addition, a new final chapter presents as an example and case study the research conducted by Löic Wacquant with boxers in south Chicago. Wacquant joined the gym, learned to box, and came to be on familiar terms with the men who were becoming constituted as boxers. His ethnographic fieldwork focused on the bodily practices of the boxing life, while his interviews illustrated how the boxer’s ontological complicity with this life builds a way of understanding the gym, and the body. Wacquant helps us to see the ideals and morality that are inherent in a boxer’s way of human being, of being human. His research illustrates the potential of qualitative research to enable us to recognize the diverse ways in which people make themselves into particular kinds of person, so we can better understand the ethical freedom that is key to being human. This, in my view, is what makes this kind of scientific investigation both exciting and important.

CUP:
<http://www.cambridge.org/co/academic/subjects/social-science-research-methods/qualitative-methods/science-qualitative-research-2nd-edition?format=HB&isbn=9781108404501>

Amazon:
<https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9781108417129>

Facebook author’s page:
<https://www.facebook.com/pg/The-Science-of-Qualitative-Research-2e-1851273521851365/posts/?ref=page_internal>

Martin