Melissa Freeman

Standards of Evidence in Qualitative Research: An Incitement to Discourse

In a climate of increased accountability, standardization, federal control, and politicization of education research and scholarship, this article briefly reviews various positions outlined by qualitative researchers about quality in qualitative inquiry, showing how these are implicated in the acquisition, conceptualization, and use of qualitative evidence. It concludes by identifying issues in and challenges to setting standards of evidence for qualitative researchers in education.

Performing the Event of Understanding in Hermeneutic Conversations With Narrative Texts

The purpose of this article is to understand and explore the transformational potential of engaging with narrative texts in the context of research interviewing. Drawing from the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, the process of understanding is described and framed within a specific kind of dialogue with the world: the hermeneutical. What this kind of dialogue might look like in practice is explored using examples of participant responses to texts in the context of interviews on parental involvement. The implications for research are then discussed.

Nurturing Dialogic Hermeneutics and the Deliberative Capacities of Communities in Focus Groups

Dialogue is a central feature of focus groups. It is also a primary component of philosophical hermeneutic theories of understanding. Using a focus group with parents on the topic of state standardized testing in New York State, the author explores the process of creating focus group settings that nurture their relational and hermeneutic qualities and actively engage participants in the coconstruction of meaning and understanding. Central to this discussion is the use of alternative elicitation strategies such as using poetic displays of previous focus group transcripts to engage the participants.

Validity in Dialogic Encounters With Hermeneutic Truths

Hermeneutic theories of interpretation are at the core of qualitative methodologies and can be identified as belonging to either epistemological or ontological philosophical orientations. Concerns about validity in qualitative research have mainly been shaped by epistemological questions. What differentiates philosophical hermeneutics, an ontological perspective, from traditional hermeneutics is its radical departure from finding a “technique” of interpretation to proposing a hermeneutic ontology, where the hermeneutic task of understanding is thought to be our very way of being in the world. Unlike traditional interpretive approaches which often seek to maximize validity by eliciting a respondent’s account of an experience in a way that closely corresponds to that experience, philosophical hermeneutical approaches assert that the meaning of the experience is uniquely configured in the dialogic encounter itself. Dialogue is thought to offer a hermeneutic valence for people’s engagement with understanding and the means of encountering truth. Understanding, therefore, cannot be conceived of as a fixing of meaning but as an event in which meaning is generated and transformed. This article considers how philosophical hermeneutics might inform qualitative research when the aim is to understand.

‘Knowledge is acting’: working‐class parents’ intentional acts of positioning within the discursive practice of involvement

Positioning theory provides a lens through which to view the narrative accounts of working‐class parents as dynamic, intentional acts of positioning intended to gain the recognition of school personnel as full partners in the education of their children. Knowing that school personnel will not treat them with the kind of respect given middle‐class parents, but refusing to allow themselves to be viewed as if they were lower‐class parents, analysis of the accounts of working‐class parents reveals intentional acts of positioning that serve to: (1) fight against stereotypes, (2) guard against being made to feel inferior by maintaining vigilance and involvement, and (3) build cultural and social capital through dialog and deliberation. These acts of intentional positioning are also understood as knowledge‐generating activities where people come together in dialog to work toward a mutually acceptable solution. Implications for the development of dialog‐oriented parental involvement practices are offered.

The Hermeneutical Aesthetics of Thick Description

Thick description is often invoked by qualitative researchers as a form of representation after analysis such as coding has been completed. I argue that thick description can be more productively considered as an aesthetic encounter guiding the research process from beginning to end. Drawing on the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I demonstrate that thick description is more than an analytical consideration of context but is rather an articulation of how we see and understand. According to Gadamer, there is an aesthetic quality to our experiencing that is never completely rendered visible in our accounts. This is because we do not draw on context to make sense of the evidence presented; we see and understand in contexts—physical, historical, cultural, linguistic, moral, experiential, affective—that we venture in, as Clifford Geertz put it, as we conjure our interpretations of what is going on. It is only by allowing ourselves to be guided by the entity of study and critically questioning the complexity of our contextualized responses that we can gain a better grasp of this complex architecture that is analysis.

Knocking on Doors: On Constructing Culture

This reflective piece employs a layered text format and uses data from a pilot study on parents’ conceptualizations of parental involvement in schools to think theoretically about such issues as access, voice, and representation in interpretive research. As the researcher engages with the process of selecting participants for her research, a different kind of understanding of cultural access emerges. Access is eventually understood as not being solely a methodological tool for theoretical sampling purposes but an ontological framework that shapes the inquiry process from beginning to end. This researcher eventually adopts a narrative ontology that necessitates the participants’ active involvement in interpreting the meanings that the participants’ stories have on their lives.

Grafting the Intentional Relation of Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Linguisticality

This article seeks to reposition two philosophies central to qualitative research: hermeneutics and phenomenology from their current location in the interpretive traditions to one closer to the critical and radical traditions we believe are more congruent. We hope to show that these philosophies are most productive for qualitative research when considered as “grafted,” such as in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. By deepening two of these philosophies’ central constructs, intentionality and linguisticality, we not only make their ungrafting improbable, but also show the centrality of this hyphenated philosophy to qualitative research.

“Between Eye and Eye Stretches an Interminable Landscape”: The Challenge of Philosophical Hermeneutics:

While conducting phenomenological interviews on the experience of being a parent with children in school, the author comes to a deeper, more personal understanding of the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. How people use language—the form, content, and context of the words they use, whether in their interviews, analytic memos, or theoretical writings—is crucial to how they understand. As such, language is always communicative, relational, interpretive, and dynamic. The challenge for interpretive researchers is incorporating in their understanding of a topic the physical, emotional, situational, and relational conditions within which communication and thus understanding occur. In a series of poems, the author provides an aesthetic account of some of those conditions.

The Complexity of Practice Participant Observation and Values Engagement in a Responsive Evaluation of a Professional Development School Partnership

All social and professional practices are historically situated, evolving forms of acting and interacting. Evaluation, as a practice, is shaped by and shapes the practice evaluated. This article contributes to responsive and values-engaged evaluation approaches by reflecting on the space where these two practices intersect. The evaluative task was to document the nature of a partnership between a university and school district and how that partnership was being carried out in the form of a professional development school. The authors focus on the role that participant observation, as an interactive and responsive form of engagement, played in the evaluation. Through two lenses—observing the partners and observing ourselves—the authors critically reflect on their decision-making processes, assessing their accomplishments and shortcomings. The authors conclude by considering how they might further their engagement as values-engaged evaluators in this context in ways that support the development of both the evaluators and the evaluand.