Thick Description

The term thick description was introduced into qualitative research by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who borrowed it from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. It has often been misinterpreted to mean rich, thickly detailed description, but neither Geertz nor Ryle used it in this way. Ryle developed this concept as part of an attempt to banish from philosophy the idea of “mind” as a separate entity from behavior. He argued that mental terms refer not to unobservable “ghostly” processes located in a “secret grotto” in the skull, but to aspects of people's public behavior—not their bodily movements per se, but their dispositions, powers, and propensities to behave in particular ways in specific contexts. Mental terms thus describe behavior thickly, incorporating these propensities and contexts in the description as opposed to describing “thin” behavioral accounts—for example, describing someone as playing golf rather than as hitting a small white ball with a metal stick. Geertz added to this the idea that thick description incorporates the cultural framework and meanings of the actors, their codes of signification, providing an emic account grounded in the actors' cultural context; thick description is thus the essential activity of ethnographic research.

Ironically, considering the importance of this concept for qualitative research, Ryle's strategy of identifying mental terms with behavioral dispositions was an essentially positivist approach of attempting to eliminate theoretical terms referring to unobservable entities from philosophical and scientific discourse. It can be seen as a variant of what earlier positivist philosophers had called logical behaviorism. Geertz was not endorsing this position—his essay “Thick Description” is subtitled “Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”—but one of his goals in using the concept of thick description was to argue that ethnography did not require access to the inner thoughts and feelings of those studied and to assert the public, observable nature of the phenomena that anthropologists sought to interpret.

Logical behaviorism eventually foundered under a barrage of philosophical criticisms, but the term thick description has outlived its philosophical origins and taken on new meanings. More recent uses of this concept have tended to see thick description as inherently interpretive rather than descriptive, linking the term to the position that all observation is theory-laden and that descriptions are social constructions rather than reflections of some external reality. Thomas Schwandt (2007), for example, states that “to thickly describe social action is actually to begin to interpret it by recording the circumstances, meanings, intentions, strategies, motivations, and so on that characterize a particular episode. It is this interpretive characteristic of description rather than detail per se that makes it thick.” (2007, p. 296) Norman Denzin coined the phrase “thick interpretation” to emphasize the interpretive nature of this activity and has drawn on Geertz's later work to support the inseparability of description and interpretation.