Vigor, Not Rigor: Possibilities for Generative, Evaluative Constraints in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: Rigor and Validity in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

The purpose of this paper is to contextualize the symposium by presenting in some detail the problem to which the remaining papers have been invited to respond—that is, what is one to do with the concepts of rigor and validity after the post-qualitative turn? Specifically, the paper will present a brief archaeological analysis (Foucault, 1970/1994) of how the concepts of rigor and validity have become intelligible to the human sciences—with a particular focus on educational research—before describing the challenges posed to rigor and validity by post-qualitative inquiry’s philosophically oriented approach.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks

This paper draws primarily on Foucault’s archaeological approach (1970/1994) to the development and legitimation of knowledge, with a particular focus on how validity and rigor have come to be used within qualitative educational research. Archeological analysis enables one to examine both how concepts have come to be situated in a given domain as well as how they form superstructures of knowledge and theories, or savoir, as Foucault termed it. In the context of the human sciences, then, an archaeological account of rigor and validity would emphasize how such concepts are formed by various rituals which, taken together, produce modes of truth rather than uncover them.

Results, conclusions, or warrants

Because the earliest strains of qualitative inquiry drew on positivist assumptions about the nature of reality (e.g., Campbell & Cook, 1979), scientific approaches to rigor (e.g., sample selection) provided the ostensible basis for discovering immutable laws of human nature. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, qualitative inquiry philosophical orientations had evolved such that scholars began to make fundamentally different kinds of knowledge claims, avoiding altogether claims that a given qualitative study’s findings could, for example, be generalized to a population. Simultaneously, qualitative researchers developed a new set of rituals—including triangulation, member checks, and subjectivity statements (Merriam, 1995)—which together functioned as very different superstructure for knowledge production, one that eschewed generalizability in favor of situatedness. At its most basic level, post qualitative inquiry represents the kind of radical departure from qualitative inquiry as qualitative inquiry was from the hard sciences. Whereas qualitative inquiry decentered generalizability and quantification, however, post qualitative inquiry decenters the human being itself to ask difficult questions about the purposes and limitations of the human sciences writ large.

Scholarly Significance

Since the post-structural philosophies influencing post qualitative inquiry are incommensurable to traditional conceptions of rigor and validity, post qualitative inquiry must, I argue, aspire to forms of generative, evaluative constraints that can support the kind of ontologically informed work necessary and urgent for educational research in the Anthropocene. Post qualitative need not mean post quality. If conventional notions of rigor are too stiff and rigid for post qualitive inquiry, scholars might instead think of vigor—that is to say, they might produce scholarship that courses with activity and force across contexts and communities, through the human and the nonhuman alike.

Author

• T. Bradley Robinson, Texas State University