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

[James Ma]

Hello Martin, I agree with you entirely - social science is the science of
interpretation centring around the hermeneutic phenomenology of being human
- which chimes with post-positivism. James

On 16 December 2017 at 22:19, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>
wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
>

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