Qualitative_data_analysis

274 QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
whole. We want to consider data in context, but also to make comparisons. We want
to divide data into categories, but also to consider how these relate. We want to be
comprehensive, but also selective. We want to analyse singularities, but also to
generalize. We want our accounts to be accessible, but also acceptable. We want to
be rigorous, but also creative.
In response to these paradoxes, researchers have tended to emphasize one
approach at the expense of another, producing rigidities which can only impede the
creative process. Thus qualitative data is opposed to quantitative data, qualitative
analysis to quantitative analysis, thick description to thin description, grounded
theories to deductive theories, analysing data in context to comparison, analysing
correlations to identifying connections, narrative accounts to analytic ones, and so
on and on. Researchers opt for one side or the other of these dichotomies, and then
engage in a critical demolition of the alternative approach. Often this is
accompanied by a token acknowledgement of the latter, as though finally reluctant
to dispose of ‘the enemy’ which provides a foil for the favoured approach.
Where such paradoxes abound, it is not surprising to find researchers taking up
positions and converting methodology into an ideological battlefield:
…it is well known that, while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our
passions hurry us with rapid violence over the space which lies between
the most opposite extremes.
(Gibbon 1960:164)
While the heat generated by such ideological disputes may be warming in its way, it
does not aid a cool and dispassionate appraisal of methodological options.
To clear away the debris associated with these ideological clashes is beyond the
scope of this introduction. In any case, I believe such one-sided ideologies bear little
relation to what researchers do in practice. It is not practically possible, for example,
to adopt a tabula rasa approach to data analysis. It is not practically possible to
proceed as though meanings can be understood in context, without also making
comparisons—or vice versa. And even the most resolutely qualitative approach cannot
entirely ignore the quantitative aspects of analysis.
Throughout this book, I have preferred to stress the interdependence and mutual
enhancement of apparently opposing approaches. Numbers can be useful in
analysing meanings. Categorizing can contribute to identifying meaning-in-context.
Patterns can help to isolate and understand singularities. Linking and associating can
both contribute to analysing connections. Accounts can incorporate both narrative
and analytic elements. It makes little sense, in my view, to emphasize one approach
at the expense of the other. For example, an emphasis on grounding theory in an