Rigor and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: An Argument for Relentlessly Returning to Reading

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
St. Pierre began writing her theories about post qualitative inquiry in the 2000’s, positioning her work as an interrogation of the normative qualitative method that had been undergoing a positivistic turn (2013, 2014, 2016, 2017) using poststructural philosophy. This new turn generated an entirely new genre, with hundreds of articles being published in the vein of post qualitative inquiry within a decade. With so much writing being produced in this new tradition, it seems many of the core axioms of the traditions are being lost because of a lack of rigorous engagement in post philosophies.

Post qualitative inquiry is a derivative tradition of poststructural philosophy, thus we can conceive of rigor in post qualitative inquiry through the way in which rigor was enacted in poststructuralism; sustained readings and rereading of philosophy prove as evidence of rigor in such traditions: “To read, in fact, is the labor of language (Barthes, 1970/1974, p. 11).
Problematically, scholarship that contains the identifier of “post qualitative inquiry” in its abstract, title, or keywords, largely all use the same few philosophers, suggesting that some feel the tradition is based on who is cited, rather than how a philosophical concept is engaged. This paper identifies the most popularly cited philosophers in this tradition through macroanalysis (a Digital Humanities methodology), using a sample of 50 journal articles that self-identify as post qualitative inquiry. Then this data is analyzed alongside closer readings of some of the articles to see if the axioms of poststructural philosophy are engaged, or if the “glamor of high theory” (Lather, 1989) has overwhelmed the genre.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks
Poststructural philosophy

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Methodological/theoretical and Digital Humanities macro-analysis

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Poststructural philosophy, and the reference pages of 50 post qualitative inquiry journal articles

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants
This data shows that the reservoir from which post qualitative inquiry pulls from is very small. Upon going into the post qualitative papers themselves, the spectrum of engagement is vast: some scholars spend pages laboring with a philosophical text or concept, and others cite a single word. Given this, interpretation of the data is extremely significant. I find that “the glamour of high theory” (Lather, 1980, p. 246) is at work in many of the papers because of the lack of engagement with the citations being used.

Scientific or scholarly significance
There are no macro-analysis/citational analysis studies of post qualitative inquiry currently. Poststructural philosophy proposes that one must tend to the pluralities and difference a text contains within itself, thus this paper seeks to bring out the ways in which rigor in post qualitative inquiry would produce more difference, ensuring the tradition maintains rigor and quality.

Author

• Elliott Kuecker, University of Georgia - Athens