Qualitative_data_analysis

228 QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
Did the pressure for punishment persuade them to override the requirements of
justice? (Empire Magazine 1991, Trow 1992).
What happened? What was said? What was meant? These are the same questions
we have to address in weighing the evidence produced through qualitative analysis.
If the sociologist or the biographer is like a detective, and collecting data is like
detection, then analysing data is akin to the culminating stages of the criminal
justice process. It has the same potential for abuse, and therefore requires similar
safeguards. Unfortunately, whereas in criminal justice the adversarial roles of
prosecution and defence can be allocated to different people, in qualitative analysis
the analyst often has to play both roles.
To pursue our analogy, let us consider the potential for abuse in qualitative
analysis, and then consider some of the safeguards we can build into the process. We
can identify several potential abuses in our account of the Derek Bentley case. These
are:
• Fabricating evidence
• Discounting evidence
• Misinterpreting evidence
Let us consider each in turn.
Fabricating evidence is not a fault which we normally associate with qualitative
analysis. We tend to proceed on the presumption that we can rely on the good faith
and honourable conduct of those responsible. However, a similar presumption until
recently pervaded public attitudes in Britain to the police and the criminal justice
system, only to take a fearful battering following a series of cases of corruption and
miscarriages of justice. We might be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt
to scientists rather than policemen, but in the scientific world, unfortunately, the
falsification of evidence is also not unknown.
The reason is that the supposedly ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ observer is a myth.
Scientists, like policemen and public prosecutors, have their own agendas and their
own interests to consider. They have careers to foster, prejudices to protect,
deadlines to meet, prestigious prizes to pursue. Fame and fortune for one scientist
can mean tragic failure for another, sometimes even with fatal consequences. For
example, Max Theiler won the Nobel Prize for medicine for developing a vaccine
against yellow fever; his rival, the eminent scientist Hideyo Noguchi, died of the
disease in his attempt to prove Theiler wrong. Noguchi did not fabricate evidence,
but some suspected him of committing a micro-biologists’s equivalent of hara-kiri
when he could not find the evidence he needed to support his own views (Dixon
1991). With so much at stake, to some scientists a little falsification may seem a
small price to pay for ensuring a more satisfactory outcome!