Qualitative Research by Avilasa Sengupta

My earliest and the most basic understanding of qualitative research, developed on this statement by one of my professors at the university, who said that:

“Every man is a story. Some are told, some are heard. And some get lost in it forever.”

The mind is always operating around stories. What is our history? Isn’t it just a story we have? I have a story, you have a story. So when we claim something to be evidence, it is also to be storied by my mind to be understood, which shows that our search to be objective, is also one of the invaded formations in our story telling approach.

My understanding of qualitative methods emerged based on the assumption that human interaction is nothing but stories. The study of intentionality, and the inferences of it can be understood only in terms of human interactions. The inferences that why someone is quiet or why someone spoke, is because we have the ability to see both the visible and the invisible.

We as humans are not satisfied by the visible, rather intrigued and enamoured by the invisible. This oscillation or composition between the visible and the invisible is what differentiates us from each other. Each one of us has different proportions, different assertions, and thrusts of visibility and invisibility. When we have an understanding of this composition, anything cannot be linear, because linearity is only one understanding. For example, we buy a flower from a store. The person, who sold the flower, will have a meaning a reason for selling the flower. He/she brought the flower, kept it at the store, and sold it. The one, who bought it, would have a reason a meaning of buying it. The person the flower was gifted to, would have a meaning and understanding of it. Here, the persistence of both the person having the flower in her room and the person who gifted it can be explored. In looking at the flower every now and then, the person thinks about the latter. The seller might not have thought that the flower would last for x-number of days, the giver did not expect the receiver to react a certain way, the receiver would not have expected to receive it.

What I attempt to explain here is that there is a possibility to see things at a variety of levels, including a literal level, a symbolic level, and a metaphorical level. The sensibility of a method is not necessarily a learning that we have on encountering the participant; rather our ways of looking at the world and understanding it builds our sensibilities. We are too focused on deriving conclusions and giving summaries to things around us. And it is this very desire which makes us feel incomplete, impoverished with our own sense of communication. There is a constant anxiety to conclude ‘appropriately’ and to put our understanding ‘rightly’ to the audience. For e.g. when we use ‘basically’ in our conversations, we use it to denote that this xyz is the crux of the point in question. This limits the expansion of the meaning and understanding around that point. We often fail to see how the point is related or unrelated to the most private part of us. What it evokes in me, what is my positionality while understanding it a certain way, what am I missing out in order to fit it into a framework? Every act, symbol or language, communicates us the composition of the visible and the invisible.

Everything cannot be told. Telling and listening is based on a semantic structure. The qualitative method therefore counter argues that communication is not only through the said patterns. The ‘said’ is not only what is told, but ‘said’ is also that which needs to be told. The ‘said’ is also what ought to be told. The ‘said’ is also what only can be told. The ‘said’ is what is expected to be told. So if all these are the primers in determining the ‘said’ part, the narrator alone cannot be responsible for the ‘said’. The listener too has to have a broader sensibility and sense making.

Understanding is invariably embedded in a way that the mind receives a story and qualitative methods emphasise on the temporal beauty of these stories. Qualitative methods focus on this positioning where the boundaries which we take between the past, present and future is not very linear and we give the speaker and the listener a space to oscillate back and forth and make a sense to both the lived and unlived, the told and the untold story. It gives us the space to witness and ease with our differences and have a healing capacity. The ability to revisit the past time and again and resolve our knots and to discover within ourselves the unknown parts of us is only one of the healing ability that qualitative methods have to offer. It helps us understand and listen to the other because we are able to listen to our selves. The claim we make as a researcher that ‘I have listened’, is a false assumption because listening is not that easy and qualitative method helps us look into this difficulty.

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Avilasa Sengupta is a post-graduate student at the Department of Psychology, University of Delhi. She is working on ‘Ecofeminist organisation and earth democracy in food production’.