Deceptively Approachable: Translating Standards in Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is deceptively approachable. With no high-end statistics or computational methods, outsiders and novices alike often feel that they can judge such research “cold,” having neither thought much about it, much less practiced it. After all, they can read the text and understand it, especially when qualitative researchers often take pains to make their prose readable. This has unfortunate results: It creates a lot of random noise in evaluation, but it also means that evaluators will tend to revert to their implicit habits of evaluation —either based on prior theoretical and political commitments, or developed through work with very different methods—when they sit on recruitment, funding, or award committees. At the heart of Small and Calarco’s Qualitative Literacy there is thus a seemingly simple question: How do we know good qualitative research when we see it? How can we tell when it isn’t? When we teach and read quantitative research, we have a more-or-less agreed upon sense of the way methods should be used and evidence should be supported. While there is never complete agreement, reviews of quantitative work tend to converge around a statistically-defined shared set of standards. Qualitative research is a different beast. While qualitative researchers usually detect good research when they see it, they seem to have a harder time turning this implicit knowledge of craft into a set of guidelines. If the impetus of the book already makes it worthwhile, the key move it makes is as important: rather than gravitating towards quantitative standards and attempting to make qualitative research as close as possible to quantitative reasoning, Small and Calarco (much as Small did in his How many cases do I need?) are adamant that the standards are both rigorous, and quite different. Book Review Symposium: Qualitative Literacy