Q Methodology

Phenomena

Central to Q methodology is the concept of concourse, a term denoting the volume of common communicability with regard to any topic. During the Iraq War, for instance, assertions similar to the following were made and were collected from sources such as the media, interviews, and the internet: “The focus should be on Afghanistan rather than on Iraq,” “Saddam Hussein knew how to make weapons of mass destruction and could have passed this information on to terrorists,” “The war in Iraq was the right thing to do,” and so forth repeatedly and all in ordinary language. Or to take another example, consider comments similar to the following made by Koreans in reference to their own national identity and abstracted mainly from English-language books, chapters, and articles: “We are a sentimental and lyrical people,” “Our goal is to establish stability and happiness by first establishing proper relationships in all aspects of life,” the corpus of communicability comprising an ongoing cultural dialogue. Or, consider comments similar to the ones taken from interviews with Uruguayan farmers concerning their participation [Page 700]in a dairy herd improvement program: “I don't believe milk prices are likely to increase, so I don't think I will participate to keep records,” “If we want the producers to participate, we have to help them to become more efficient,” and so on. Or consider possible rumi-nations of a single authoritarian personality in the course of prolonged in-depth interviews: “Some of the old rules help keep us in line,” “It's stuck in my head that homosexuality is wrong,” “There's not enough kindness,” and so forth. Or consider the concourse of communicability attending the quantitative-qualitative debate itself, drawn from the professional literature: “Research is influenced to a great extent by the values of the researcher,” “Quantitative and qualitative paradigms operate under different ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions,” “Students should be pragmatic and use both kinds of techniques,” and so forth, each proposition a pristine element in the grand debate and a matter of shared communicability understandable to all attending to it.

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