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

[Martin John Packer]

Hello James. Well, it isn’t. But it ought to be!  :)

Martin

> On Dec 17, 2017, at 4:15 PM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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