Innovations in qualitative methods

Virginia Braun

VICTORIA Clarke

Debra Gray

pp. 243-266

in: Brendan Gough (ed), The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore four particular ways in which innovation has pushed qualitative data collection beyond the familiar focus on face-to-face interviews. We have chosen these methods both for their practicality and because they are tools and techniques we have used ourselves; as committed qualitative researchers, we can attest to their value. First, we identify the way innovation has occurred in response to rapidly changing socio-technological contexts: adaptations and expansions of traditional modes of researching, such as interviewing and focus groups, to utilise the potential of the connected, online worlds we increasingly live in. Second, concurrent with, but not synonymous with, theoretical shifts that have argued against a focus just on "the text', we discuss the blossoming of pluralistic or multi-modal forms of interviewing and focus group research. These two offer examples of how traditionally qualitative methods have expanded beyond their origins; the next two offer examples of techniques which have been released from their quantitative moorings: qualitative surveys offer researchers access to familiar forms of data—personal accounts, perspectives and so on—often conceptualised as "representing the self', somehow; story completion tasks, in contrast, provide something radically different: a window into the social meaning worlds of our participants. Read on—we hope you are inspired!