Representational Forms of Dissemination

Evolution of Qualitative Research

During earlier times of qualitative research, the ways in which researchers represented their work took the form of expository distanced texts where the researchers' stances, biases, and assumptions were masked in an authorial voice that presented “findings” posited as an unrefuted reality. This is typically no longer the case. The influences of postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory, among others, have dramatically changed qualitative research beliefs, values, and practices that evolved through what Denzin and Lincoln described as the eight moments of qualitative research. Although these phases are not totally discrete or absolute in terms of time, they do provide a useful context for thinking about how our notions of representation have expanded and changed over the years.

The first of these moments is known as the traditional phase (1900–1942), when ethnographies about others from distant lands were presented as objective depictions of reality. James Smith and Phil Hodkinson suggested that this kind of research was predicated on a “spectator theory” of knowledge that resulted in a colonizing kind of research that presented a largely Western, and often misguided, understanding of other peoples and cultures. The modernist phase (1947–1970s) followed. During this time, qualitative researchers experimented with new interpretive approaches and attempted to formalize their methods so that qualitative work could match the rigor and legitimacy of quantitative methods. The phase that Denzin and Lincoln referred to as blurred genres (1970–1986) occurred as qualitative research was burgeoning and gaining in stature and acceptability. According to Jerome Bruner, narrative forms of doing, knowing, and representing were acknowledged as the natural way in which humans make sense of their lives and, therefore, as the most appropriate for describing human activity. These approaches took hold, and the relational aspects involved in this type of research brought questions of ethics to the forefront.

From the mid-1980s until 1990, a “rupture” occurred in the fabric of qualitative research. Known as the crisis of representation, a term that emerged from the work of George Marcus and Michael Fischer, it marked the realization that all aspects of the research process—from the inception of a study, through the creation of field texts, research texts, and interpretive working documents, to the creation of a public text—are a series of constructions made by the researcher and do not represent the actual lived experiences of the participants.

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