Yasuhito KINOSHITA, Ph.D.
Graduate School of Nursing Science St. Luke’s International University
Well, the title of this article should be “data may not necessarily get out of date” to be exact, but to emphasize the latter part, I will leave it this way for a while. Once the research is finished and a paper is completed, have the data and questions both served their purpose? That is usually the way we think. Although the data may be used for a secondary analysis, in reality there is not much of it because we value freshness of data reflecting ever changing actual phenomena, and the questions asked may be renewed or replaced in next study when a researcher conducts another literature review for generating another “original” questions. Thus, both the data and the questions may be gone with the submission of a paper, so an old story goes that I would like to argue against here.
When reviewing qualitative research papers, I often found interpretations shallow and insufficient . Although each research paper sets objectives, formulates questions, collects and analyzes data, and produces results, when reading them, the “person” does not come to mind, vague and/or too abstracted, indicating author’s interpretation is not sufficiently rooted in interactional contexts. So, as a reader/reviewer I has to reconstruct the whole analysis in an integrated manner from its partial contents, considering what the author intends to do. Is this a problem of questions or methods, before asking inadequacies of the author? Suppose the following two positions, “Methods surpass questions” or “Questions surpass methods”. Of course, we think the two are interwoven in our research and that it is nonsense to put separately. But by asking them, or by forcing oneself to answer in either-or way to emphasize my point stronger, one can realizes the ambiguity of one’s epistemological position, often unconscious or naively taken-for-granted. Here hidden the fundamental difference between quantitative and qualitative research, and qualitative researchers should be aware of and articulate own position.
Quantitative data are already an abstraction by virtue of being numerical. Whatever the analysis, we can start from that point. Conversely, qualitative data, such as interview transcripts, are “raw” content ad can encompass astonishingly large amounts of information. Thus, we need methods. Analysis is a process of abstraction, and qualitative research involves analyzing not only this large amount of data but also interpreting diverse concrete content for abstraction. It is a difficult task, to say the least. If you do not take on the challenge with a solid question and method, you will be bounced around, even without realizing that you are being bounced around. In much qualitative research, coding and categorization are performed and abstractions are verbalized. Although it may seem like something anyone can do, this linguistic work requires a healthy sense of questions rooted in problematic actual situations, that is, questions being not dependent on nor surpassed by methods. Narrowing abstractions to a single interpretation requires multifaceted considerations and only offers tentative results at best.
In dealing with such challenges, question formulation is more important than is generally believed, being sufficiently open but logically focused. Otherwise the rawness of content (qualitative data) easily overwhelms the analyst being like hit by a shotgun. Having well-considered questions is a methodological way to control this and this is the characteristics of qualitative research. Such questions are modestly concrete to guide analysis of qualitative data but at the same time open enough posing some kind of universal question. Therefore, questions never get old nor disappear even a given research is completed. Its contribution to our understanding facilitates our inquiry further into such universal questions. This is because the research concerns human beings and human beings are complex entity. Unlike hypothesis testing or fact-finding surveys, questions generated in qualitative research cannot be answered conclusively even in deep examination. So, we need asking continuously; in other words, questions in qualitative research cannot be exhausted after a single study. If the question is one that allows for endless exploration, the data will never get old either because the data may be shedded new light on in future.