Imagination in Qualitative Research

Imagination and Understanding

Research consists of working to understand something better or accumulating evidence that supports and clarifies a prior insight. Both of these involve coming to perceive a kind of order in the world that was hidden previously. The mysterious quality of this gain in knowledge has occupied philosophers since the time of Plato, and imagination has been portrayed as an impediment to the process far more frequently than it has been seen as a key ingredient. Above all, it is the unreliability of the imagination—its capacity for fantasy and self-deception—that has marginalized it in the principal Western philosophical traditions. Only the Romantics and Existentialists have had much good to say about it, and that is because both traditions cast themselves in an oppositional role to the modern quest for certainty.

As positivism has gradually waned over the past half-century, the iconoclastic, boundary-crossing quality of the imagination has become much more central to the theory and practice of qualitative research. Imagination has rarely been singled out as an object or a means of inquiry, but a better understanding of the functioning and limits of the imagination provides another lens through which the process of research itself can be examined, critiqued, and refined. Arguably, the imagination is a fundamental mode of thought, as integral to Cartesian rationalism as it is to postmodern skepticism, although it is developed in different directions and deployed for very different purposes in each case. Understanding some of the underlying processes could be helpful to researchers from a wide range of disciplines and traditions.

Imagination is “possibility thinking”—thinking of things as possibly being other than they are or both what they are and something else simultaneously. It is clearly linked to the capacity for metaphor, in which we draw selectively on knowledge in one domain to illuminate our thinking about an apparently unrelated domain. Imagination can involve visual imagery, as its etymology implies, but it can equally well involve any other kind of feature from the worlds of direct bodily experience, including sound, taste, smell, touch, movement, effort, and change, and of socially mediated experience, including activities, narratives, personalities, and relationships. Because of this, the imagination is strongly influenced both by personal history and by culture—a point that was overlooked by many Western thinkers but that emerged strongly [Page 421]during the 20th century through work in psychology, anthropology, literary studies, education, and other fields.

Imagination is also clearly tied to the emotions in the same way as our sense of aesthetics. This strong affective quality seems to be implicated in our ability to choose relatively productive pathways through a huge range of possibilities. It also furnishes another reason that imagination has been distrusted by rationalist thinkers. Emotions muddle thought, and that has long been a central tenet of Western modernity. Ironically, behind this distrust, one can infer a particular imaginative—indeed, metaphoric—conception of reason invested with a strong emotional charge and rendered nearly invisible by its assimilation into habits of thought, speech, and action. Thus, imagination is to be sought not only in the unusual and desirable but also in the routine, unacknowledged, and unwanted—the shadow side of thought.

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