Qualitative Research: A View from the Bridge

     What I am viewing from the bridge is a fuzzy picture of my mind attempting to comprehend and my mouth attempting to drink from a hose the extensive new material, including a vast and unfamiliar nomenclature, provided this week for our perusal and digestion (or lack of).  It has not been an unpleasant experience, since I am excited and challenged by the series of worldviews presented.  It has been an experience not unlike my high school reading of Encyclopedia Brittannica, when I sat with a newly purchased unabridged dictionary by my side at all times. Should I have done so more often during my academic career?  Probably.  But I relied on the tried and true technique of coming to grips with a word in context or online lookup.  That practice has remained unsuccessful from the beginning of this course.
     The whole thing rather reminds me of my own research into the nature of reality.  My opinion:  it really is not possible to understand anyway, so why trouble your mind with it?  I have a lingering hope that I can understand a bit of what it being said in our week's readings of Denzin, Lincoln, and Creswell. Surely they did not just make it up just for fun.  Then I came upon Critical Realism.  I thought, "This is for me!  I am all for a rejection of a particular definition of reality.  Obviously, there as many realities as there are peceivers of reality."  However, my own thought runs more like:  there is universal consciousness out there that includes all realities, rather than the author's statement that "there are worlds out there that are observable and independent of human consciousness (Denzen et al., 2004)."  I believe that consciousness is consciousness.  What the devil does it matter if one is independent of the other?  Just as  was reconciling myself to the annoyance of that statement, I come upon he author's demand that we have a social science that address all the social justice issues.  What about reporting what is there?  I became confused.
     Toward the end of our reading, it became apparent that the present state of qualitative research is really a combination of and always a nod to, even in passing, all that has gone before.  I was relieved to discover the author say as much.  Also a relief was that thought that the materials is as always, filtered through a lens that involves "language, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity" (Denzin et al., 2008).  During the reading about the early studies and the Lone Ethnographer, I recalled reading two particular studies years ago that I am no longer able to site.  The first involved an Englishman (eighteenth century, I believe) who chose to assume the disguise of a Moslem so as to infiltrate Mecca.  It was a dangerous thing to do, because death was the sentence for approaching the holy of holies as an infidel.  The brave fellow made it through, and delivered what I believed to be an unbiased and adventure-laden account of the whole affair.  The other study was by an early observer of the Natchez Indian tribe, a particularly dangerous group of indigenous folk.  He lived to tell the tale of what seemed to be a realistic, if somewhat gory, account of Natchez Indian life.  I remember thinking at the time that If this was field study,I wanted to do it.
    The researcher's viewpoint still seems valid, and indeed must be taken into account.  Since we are human, of course he speaks from his experiential point of reference, unavoidably.  The passage about interpretive paradigms rather brought the whole reading to a good conclusion for me.  I liked that he did not try to analyze each paradigm and perspective at the beginning, but gave enough history about the whole business to give me a fighting chance of understanding.  I will read page 30, part Theoretical paradigm and Perspectives, and the explanation on page 31 over and over.  Some of it all is beginning to soak in.  Relief came when I read that there were lots of methods to use in all the reading, analysis, interviewing, and observation that comes into play.  What I find so exciting is that, yes, the field involves a huge amount of creativity.  The research rather does remind me of a painting.  One has a viewpoint, one takes all the pieces of experience and winds them into a brilliant montage, as a skilled bricoleur should.