Researcher as Instrument

Noted qualitative methodologist Norman Denzin described the social sciences as resulting largely from the “art of interpretation.” Perhaps the most important tool in the practice of this art is the researcher herself or himself. Qualitative methods rely much less than quantitative methods on “standardized” instruments and methods. Thus, the researcher is positioned quite closely to raw words and real life, and the researcher as “person” plays a more obvious, if not more profound, role in all stages of research. This does not mean that researcher characteristics are not also central to every stage of quantitative research, but whereas quantitative research attempts to minimize or even obscure these issues through standardized protocols and “objective” numerical outcomes, qualitative research is more forthright concerning the ways in which all of research is a human endeavor.

Feminist standpoint theory explores and acknowledges that research is affected by researcher and other worldviews. Both the researcher and research participants are seen as present, and meaning is constructed and interpreted in the interaction between these two positionalities. Different qualitative researchers may look for, see, experience, and interpret data differently based on their experiences, skills, interests, and so on. As important as, if not more important than, researcher differences are the differences between the insider (emic) and outsider (etic) perspectives. This is not a question of competing truths but rather a question of the multiple stories and truths that exist simultaneously and are co-created by research itself.

The researcher also becomes an instrument through the relationships she or he builds with research participants. Rather than attempting to minimize these, feminist work (among others) stresses the importance of these relationships. Patricia Adler and Peter Adler examined how three sociological traditions also define different roles, and thus different researcher instrumentalities, and how each of these in turn produces potentially unique, but equally authentic, findings. Prolific ethnographer Michael Agar also wrote of the ways in which the ethnographer's personality matters in ethnography—another example of how the researcher is an instrument of qualitative research.

The researcher is also an instrument in the collection and analysis of data. In nonlaboratory research, one cannot attend to all of the data present in even the smallest interaction; thus, narrowing the field of concentration is a function of who the researcher is. As David Fetterman wrote, “perception is selective,” and the researcher, steeped in personal background as well as theoretical background, makes this selection. The final stages of research are also a highly individual human enterprise. Qualitative research has no data-crunching software to impart an equation representing results. Rather, analysis, interpretation, and meaning-making come from the researcher, using all of her or his personal and professional skills, training, knowledge, and experience as an instrument to produce a coherent authentic picture of the research as the researcher saw and experienced it.