Making Explicit the Implicit

Understanding of qualitative research methods over the course of this class has not for me been linear. Indeed, I have traveled through a cyclical pattern wherein I feel like I have a strong understanding of the materials one day, and the next day my perceived mastery over the content has all but disappeared. I suspect that the nonlinear trend is due, in part, to reading the texts. I often become caught in the ennui of inconsistency and get lost in micro-level descriptions, ignoring the forest for the trees.

In looking at the broader picture of qualitative research, however, I am often confused about the principal goals of the interpretation. Is explanation the prevailing objective or is it prediction? I, for long, thought that it was the former rather than the latter; I did not suspect, given the ontology and epistemology of qualitative research methods, that prediction or generalization was at all the goal of the research. Maxwell’s (2013) treatment of generalization in qualitative research therefore surprised me. Drawing his ideas largely from the work of Becker (1991), Maxwell contends that “this does not mean qualitative studies are never generalizable beyond the setting or informants studied. The most important reason for this is that the generalizability of qualitative studies is usually based not on explicit sampling of some defined population to which the results can be extended, but on the development of a theory of the processes operating in the case studied, one that may well operate in other cases, but that may produce different outcomes in different circumstances” (p. 138). What? How can this at all be true? Although I realize the far departure of qualitative methods from Karl Popper’s notion of falsifiability, can Maxwell’s proposition about operating parallel processes but producing different outcomes be unsupported? The answer seems to be emphatically no.

I can somehow construe abstractly that Action A and Action B have some conceptual processual overlap and with different outcomes, but this should not mean that the information I gather in research on Action A can be at all generalized to Action B. I think Maxwell and other methodologist like Becker need to acknowledge that nothing is ever generalizable in qualitative research because the results are bounded by time and context. I don't see this as being a limitation in any regard like Maxwell seems to believe as evidenced by his vehement "defense" of qualitative research (see p. 136-138). Instead, I see the lack of generalizability as consistent with the metatheoretical traditions underlying the qualitative research method. If indeed generalizability and attendant prediction were so important in qualitative research methods, then why are we not seeing an larger emphasis placed on replication of study findings that we see in postpositivist tradition?