Virtual methodology and connectibility in qualitative research

• In Event: The Virtual in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Objective and significance: Many qualitative researchers use hermeneutical, critical, feminist, postmodern, postcolonial, poststructural theories among others to situate their epistemologies and to illustrate their philosophical connections. However, more writings and reflections are needed that address how these theories change the notions of research processes and actualizations of methodology. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to discuss knowing, data, connectibility, and relatedness in v/irtual mode of reality. What happens to knowing, data, connectibility [of various methodological processes], and relatedness [to data, participants, research contexts] when these concepts multiply and these multiplications cannot be easily captured by words, audit trails, observations, or member checks? What becomes methodologically (im)possible if the potential of the situation is prioritized over the situation’s actuality?

Perspective: In this paper I will draw from Massumi’s (1998; 2002) and Deleuze’s (1991) writings on virtual to situate my arguments. For Massumi (2002) virtual is real but abstract. The same problem, same critical condition is replayed in multiplying variation. Massumi (2002) discussed dimensions of the virtual as “multiple levels that have different logics and temporal organizations, but are locked in resonance with each other and recapitulate the same event in divergent ways, recalls the fractal ontology and nonlinear causality underlying theories of complexity” (p.33). Deleuze (1991) proposed that the virtual does not have to be realized but actualized. Following Massumi and Deleuze the virtual is inaccessible to the sense but it can be figured and images of it can be constructed. Thus, in the context of research the virtual methodology can include multiplication of images created and recreated throughout the research process. Research processes can be felt in its effects and they could be actualized through movement from one sample to another, through infoldings and outfoldings, methodological parts folding on each other, redoubling and reductions, examples of methodological past projecting ahead to futures. Virtual methodology is the re-process; a methodology that is being actualized by being differentiated and to differentiate itself. Data collection and analysis happen in a single time forming the potential parts of a Whole that is itself virtual. Methodological lines of actualization coexists but separate from each other at the same time being unaware what happens methodologically at different time and place. Only by inventing connections between these different methodological points and events lines of differentiation become actualized. The Whole of methodology is always virtual dividing itself by being acted out.

Conclusion: Methodological, analytical, and interpretive potential of research situations can be better actualized once qualitative researchers focus on cracks, infoldings and outfoldings rather than the linearity and simplicity of methodological processes. However, this call for representation of variations in virtual methodology is not a call for unqualified relativism. Instead, according to Massumi variation is punctual; it is realized at structurally spaced intervals often through predictable moves and positions. The virtual gives form but it does not have a form itself. Qualitative researchers do not have virtual but virtual has them through its transformability, it keeps researcher running, in move, it is researchers’ and research’s becoming.

Authors

• Mirka E. Koro-Ljungberg, University of Florida

• Ela Kaye Eley, University of Florida