Yvonna S. Lincoln

Emerging Criteria for Quality in Qualitative and Interpretive Research

Not only are the boundaries of interpretive research as yet undefined, but criteria for judging the quality of such research are even more fluid and emergent. Developing criteria are nominated and cautions in applying them are discussed. The author also suggests two critical insights: The most promising of these criteria are relational, and they effectively collapse the distinction between quality (rigor) and research ethics.

Epistemological and methodological bases of naturalistic inquiry

How suitable is the rationalistic paradigm for research focusing on human behavior? Proposing that naturalistic inquiry better serves the social/ behavioral sciences, the authors define the differences between the two paradigms and suggest criteria for ensuring the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiry.

Judging the quality of case study reports

In this paper, the authors outline how quality can be judged in “the typical product of alternative paradigm inquiry,” the case report. Their earlier work has focused on judging the quality of the inquiry process; this paper focuses on the product. They propose and discuss four criteria: resonance, rhetoric, empowerment, and applicability.

Disciplining Qualitative Research.

Qualitative research exists in a time of global uncertainty. Around the world, governments are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what counts as ‘good’ science. These regulatory activities raise fundamental, philosophical epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. This essay contests this methodological fundamentalism, and interrogates the politics of re‐emergent scientism, the place of qualitative research in mixed‐methods experimentalism, and the pragmatic criticisms of anti‐foundationalism. Furthermore, it outlines three models of scientifically based research (SBR), and discusses how each is operative within the current historical conjuncture. In the process, it advocates for a qualitative research paradigm that is committed to social justice and the promise of radical, progressive democracy.

Qualitative Research and Institutional Review Boards

Although it is not their intention, institutional review boards (IRBs) often impede the conduct of studies that are not conventional and/or experimental designs. As a consequence, studies that are qualitative, participatory action research, action research, postmodern, and/or critical theorist in orientation often undergo endless revisions as IRBs seek to make them appear more conventional. Among the reasons for this are lack of training in alternative epistemologies and/or paradigms for conducting research, lack of understanding the kinds of data that will be generated by these studies, and occasionally, prejudice on the part of members of the boards regarding what constitutes sound research. Several actual case studies are reported, and a variety of strategies for addressing IRBs’ concerns are proposed.

“What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been…”: Twenty-Five Years of Qualitative and New Paradigm Research:

Tracking the history of qualitative research is to some extent a personal journey, reflective of the individuals own experience in the field. Many scholars participated in the ongoing dialogue around the shift from a solely positivist model of research to a multiple-models context. There still remain some philosophical and practical problems, around which the field will be in dialogue for some time to come. Those problems include the issue of rapport, especially in the face of an increasingly critical turn in the social sciences, and the stances adopted for mixed-methods models. Conversations around these and other issues have never been more urgent, in light of the National Research Councils press for a return to conventional scientific inquiry.

Ethics: The Failure of Positivist Science.

Abstract: The authors argue that the metaphysical assumptions undergirding conventional (positivist) approaches to research provide a warrant both for deceptive research and for objectifying human research participants. They review the present status of ethical guidelines for inquiry and demonstrate how the realist ontological and objectivist epistemological assumptions of positivism systematically abet the circumvention of those guidelines. These difficulties, however, may be resolved by a shift to naturalistic inquiry with its relativist ontology and subjectivist epistemology. The authors then outline the special ethical problems typical of naturalistic inquiry. They conclude that a shift in paradigm eliminates the need for deceiving and/or objectifying research participants.

Sympathetic Connections between Qualitative Methods and Health Research

This article argues that shifting paradigms for health promotion research would result in a better fit between research intents and social and behavioral phenomena. Further, it argues that the constructivist paradigm exhibits great utility, power, and synergism with emerging concepts in health research. Such inquiry also provides for grounded theory and more stakeholder-based policy analyses and evaluation studies. For the purposes of health promotion, qualitative and constructivist research provides a model superior to conventional research.

Predatory vs. Dialogic Ethics: Constructing an Illusion or Ethical Practice as the Core of Research Methods.

The ethical conduct of research is addressed from two perspectives, as a regulatory enterprise that creates an illusion of ethical practice and as a philosophical concern for equity and the imposition of power within the conceptualization and practice of research itself. The authors discuss various contemporary positions that influence conceptualizations of ethical practices that include imperialist market imperatives for research that marginalize ethical concerns, positions held by peoples who have themselves been traditionally placed in the margins of societal power, academic positions and the selves of individual researchers, and locations created for the specific regulation of research. The final section of the paper introduces the articles in this special issue; these articles illustrate the complexity and cultural embeddedness of research regulation as well as the need for reflexive critical discourses that recognize the moral and ethical dimensions of everything but especially as related to the construction and practice of research.

Talking and thinking about qualitative research

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled “Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research,” which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or changed their perspectives within the qualitative tradition, ethical crises, exemplary qualitative studies, the current state of qualitative methods, and challenges and goals for the next decade. Panelists included Arthur Bochner (communication), Norman Denzin (sociology/communication/critical studies), Yvonna Lincoln (education), Janice Morse (nursing/anthropology), Ronald Pelias (performance studies/ communication), and Laurel Richardson (sociology/gender studies). Carolyn Ellis (communication/sociology) served as organizer and moderator.