Qualitative Research, Conceptual Skills,

and Social Justice

By Jane Gilgun

Qualitative research requires strong conceptual skills coupled with creativity and
imagination. Qualitative researchers require these skills because qualitative approaches represent
ways of thinking about what it means to be human beings. As Strauss (1991) wrote about
grounded theory, “This is a general way of thinking about analysis and we said so in the
discovery book (p. 2).” The “discovery book is The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies
for Qualitative Research (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Bogdan (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) said something similar about how Blanche Geer
(Becker & Geer, 1957; Becker, Geer, & Hughes, 1968; Becker, Geer, Hughes, & Strauss, 1961)
taught field research.

We were required to do an observation and a corresponding set of notes each

week. It was a lot of work. Part of the enjoyment was feeling my mind working in a way it
had never worked before. I liked what the process produced. I arranged my week so I
could do the work for the seminar.

Blanche modeled how to think conceptually. What I got out of her seminar was
not the content. She was teaching a way of thinking. I felt right at home….(Gilgun, 1992c,
p. 9).

Thinking conceptually means to be able understand the complex dimensions of human

experiences and to identify concepts that help organize the complexity.

The Significance of the Experiences of Others

What happened to Bogdan has happened to many qualitative researchers: we become less
self-referential and more drawn into the experiences of others. The change does not stop there.
We cannot lose our analytic stances even when we participate vicariously in other people’s
experiences. We make sense out of the experiences of others in their own terms and our own. We
often go through a prolonged period of not knowing as we attempt to understand others.
 We position ourselves to think deeply about other persons’ accounts of their experiences
if we are to come up with concepts that might organize those experiences and render them
communicable to others. Qualitative research is inherently theory-driven because researchers
require theoretical concepts in order to understand research material, organize it, and then
communicate findings.

Not Knowing

“Not knowing” means that we wait for evidence to come in before we draw conclusions
and, more practically, before we decide upon the concepts that we believe help organize the raw
materials of accounts of experience. In addition, we continually look for evidence that adds to,
contradicts, and undermines our evolving thinking. This is a multi-layered process that involves
shifts in perspectives that happens when try to understand the worlds of others as well as shifts in
thinking as we attempt to represent and then interpret our understandings, while all the time
being aware of the differences between our experiences and interpretations and those of research
participants.

As we conduct research in these ways, our worldviews may change. Mine did as I
interviewed perpetrators of family and community violence. While committed to social justice
and care before I began, I am even more deeply committed in response to what I experienced
through this research (Gilgun, 2008; 2010). Other researchers, such as LePlay in the nineteenth
century, Wax (1971) and Stack (1974) more than 100 years later reported similar experiences.
They were concerned about social injustice before they did their research and took on roles of
advocates in response to their research (Gilgun, 1999, in press).

An Informed Public

Some, while committed to social justice, believed an informed public would take on roles
of social change agents, and researchers should not. For instance, Park, an early developer of the
principles on which this present paper held this position during his years as a university
professor. He railed against women reformists, but he wanted research to contribute to the social
good (Bulmer, 1984; Deegan, 1990; 1996). Earlier in his life, he said he had been a muckraking
journalist intent on social reform (Park, 1974).

Qualitative research, therefore, appeals to researchers who have the conceptual skills that
enable them to do credible representations and interpretations of other people’s experiences, and
who want to contribute to the social good. Researchers who do other kinds of work may have
some of these qualities, but the combination of the four characterizes persons drawn to
qualitative research.

Ogburn, for example, a leader in moving early social research toward what he thought
was objective science, certainly had strong conceptual skills and believed in the power of
research, in particular technology and mathematics, to transform society, but his commitment to
what he defined as objective science contributed to his rejection of the principles of immersion,
vicarious participation in the lives of others, and understanding of complex experiences from
informants’ points of view (See Laslett, 1991).
 Many of today’s researchers share Ogburn’s ideas about science, objectivity, and
quantification, stemming back at least to the ideas Descartes explicated more than 300 years ago
(Christians, 2010; Hamilton, 1994).

Not For Everyone

Not everyone trained in qualitative methods, however, takes to them. O’Connor (2001),
in a brief written account of her experiences as a Ph.D. student of Bogdan’s and Biklen’s
research methods courses (Bogdan & Biklen, 2008), reported on the six weeks of qualitative
methods training in the required first-year methods sequence that Biklen taught at Syracuse
University

The most striking memory I have from that class was how we as students
separated ourselves out. There were those students who just didn’t connect with the
process. It was too unclear. Those unknowns, I began learning, was what I loved…I liked
and understood the ambiguity, the inquiry, the discovery. The handful of us who went on
with the qualitative process began to sit on the same side of the room talking among
ourselves and feeling very engaged in the process. Other classmates were frustrated.

O’Connor meant by “those of us who went on with the qualitative process” that these
were the students who took the optional one-year course of study on qualitative methods that
Bogdan taught the following year.

O’Connor’s account of her classmates and herself fit well with Dewey’s (1958)
observations of other philosophers who rejected the pragmatist emphasis on experience because
of its instability and precariousness and the difficulty of understanding it. Perhaps a bit crankily,
he wrote that some have abandoned the study of experience and substituted “theoretical security
and certainty” (p. xi) (emphasis in original). They prefer, said Dewey, to craft universals, laws of
nature, and systems that emphasize unity among entities. They back away from particulars,
pluralism, and processes of change.

Products of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is worth doing because of the amazing range of products that can
result. These products include theories and/or typologies grounded in personal, contextualized
interpretations of experience. In addition, qualitative methods yield rich descriptive material that
researchers sometimes let stand on its own because of its value in fostering deeper
understandings and its capacities to illuminate other similar situations. This descriptive material
can also be re-crafted to become items in various types of instruments such as surveys, clinical
rating scales, and practice guidelines.

Qualitative methods can also be used in concert with experiments and research on direct
practice, such as social work, nursing, therapy, counseling, and education, in order to understand
how participants experience the interventions. Some qualitative researchers create performances
and write songs and poetry that use the words of informants so that audience members can
understand other people’s experiences and participate in them imaginatively.
 Discussion

Over the many years that I have conducted qualitative research, I have been continually
taken up with the experience of listening and perhaps understanding how other people
experience their own lives. I have been enlightened, delighted, awestruck, and assaulted by the
meanings of the narratives they share with me. In the process, I have learned a great deal about
myself, my own limitations and possibilities.

Above all perhaps, the experience of participating in the lives of others has given to me
the desire to share what I have learned not only through scholarly articles and books, but also in
essays, poetry, children’s stories, and many other media. I began my career as a qualitative
research in the late 1970s because I wanted to understand. I had no idea what I was in for. It has
been  more  wonderful  than  I  could  have  imagined.  I  hope  that  the  numbers  of  qualitative  
researchers  continue  to  grow.    

Numbers  and  surveys  are  important  but  if  we  are  to  bring  about  the  ideals  of  
democracy  that  so  many  people  want  and  have  even  died  for,  then  qualitative  approaches  
that  focus  on  understanding  how  human  beings  actually  live  their  lives  have  important  
contributions  to  make.    

About  the  Author  

  Jane  F.  Gilgun,  Ph.D.,  LICSW,  is  a  professor,  School  of  Social  Work,  University  of  
Minnesota,  Twin  Cities,  USA.  See  Professor  Gilgun’s  other  articles,  books,  and  children’s  stories  
on  scribd.com,  Amazon  Kindle,  and  iBooks  for  a  variety  of  e-­readers  and  mobile  devices.  

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