working between worlds: qualitative methods and social psychology

Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 53, No. 4, 1997, pp. 631644

Working Between Worlds: Qualitative Methods and Social Psychology

Jeanne Marecek* Swarthrnore College

Michelle Fine City Universiw of New York Graduate Center

Louise Kidder Temple University

We invite social psychologists in the United States to join with psychologists in other countries and with researchers in other disciplines to include qualitative approaches in their research repertory. Several classic studies in socialpsychology usedjeld-based qualitative approaches, yet in recent decades, these ways of working have been on the margins of American social psychology. We explore what a qualitative stance oflers and entails, giving examples from our own and others’ research. The relentless attention that qualitative workers have given to issues of bias, subjectivity, and research ethics prompts us to consider how such issues are always present in research, regardless of its methods.

Elsewhere in the world (the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, even as nearby as Canada), qualitative approaches to psychology are flowering. There, the scientific conversations center on how and when qualitative approaches should be used, and methods are being extended, refined, and newly

*Correspondence about this article can be sent to Jeanne Marecek at the Department of Psychology, Swarthrnore College, 500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA 1098 1 - I 397. The authors can also be contacted by electronic mail at the following addresses: jmarece 1 @swarthmore.edu; [email protected]; [email protected]. Jeanne Marecek was a Fellow at SCASSS (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences) in Uppsala while this article was being prepared; she gratefully acknowl- edges its support.

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developed (e.g., Bannister, Burman, Parker, Taylor, & Tindall, 1994; Henwood & Nicholson, 1995; Richardson, 1996). In our sister disciplines at home--sociology, education, anthropology, communications, and other social sciences, qualitative work is accepted and respected. In psychology departments in the United States, however, our scientific conversations do not usually pose the question of whether qualitative approaches can be used, let alone when such approaches might be pre- ferred. The rich vein of qualitative work in American social psychology is often waved aside. We write this piece to invite psychology departments in the United States to make room once again for qualitative approaches.

For us, the heart of a qualitative stance is the desire to make sense ofactual lived experience, to understand, as William James (1901/1994, p. 1 14) put it, “the varieties of mind in living action.” We three were originally trained in experimental, quantitative methods, which were known at that time as “the” scientific method. How did we come to a qualitative stance? Each of us worked in settings where cultural differences squarely confronted us: Jeanne, in Sri Lanka; Michelle, in urban schools and among poor and working class urban teenagers and young adults; Lou- ise, in India and Japan. In these settings, we had little choice but to operate induc- tively. The social rituals, lexicons, institutional arrangements-the very ways that people understood the world and moved about in it-were unnatural to us as outsid- ers. We learned to make use of perplexing encounters, awkward interactions, our unknowings and inevitable faux pas as peepholes into worlds different from our own. For us, then, it was our need to understand that which was different from us, which moved to music that we didn’t hear, that led to a qualitative stance.

From our vantage point, we see that many of the distinctions propped up between quantitative and qualitative methods are fictions. As we see it, all researchers-whether they work with numbers or words, in the laboratory or in the field-must grapple with issues of generalizability, validity, replicability, ethics, audience, and their own subjectivity or bias. Moreover, all researchers must engage questions of authority and interpretation. Whether numbers or words, data do not speak for themselves. They acquire meaning only within the framework(s) of theory and interpretation imposed by researchers. No matter what the method, no researcher can escape questions about selection and interpretation of data, about his or her responsibilities to participants, about the interests and commitments that spawned the project in the first place. A host of such practical, interpretive, and ethical questions have been discussed at length among qualitative workers. Although quantitative studies may seem to some to float free of such concerns, we believe they stretch across the entire domain of psychology.

Qualitative Inquiry and Social Issues: Reclaiming a History

We begin with a recollection of some classic studies of social psychology, rec- ognizing with pleasure and some astonishment how steeped the field has been in

Qualitative Methods and Social Psychology 633

qualitative work. In the 1930s, John Dollard conducted field-based, qualitative work on race and class relations in a Southern town (1 937). In the aftermath of the Second World War, Kurt Lewin (1948) studied group processes. In the 1950s, Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif and their coworkers immersed themselves in the rival- ries ofboys at a summer camp (Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961). Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter infiltrated a doomsday sect to observe what happens when prophecies fail (1 956). In the early 1970s, Philip Zim- bardo examined deindividuation in a mock prison (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1975). In these studies, the researchers entered participants’ lives without structured questionnaires, predetermined variables, or research designs. Yet no one doubted that they were doing psychological research. In their essays and books, the researchers explicated the nuances and textures of real life. They explored their biases and worried about ethics and relationships in the field. They typically regarded these aspects of qualitative work as limits on-indeed departures from- science.

In the early 1930s, John Dollard went south from the psychology department at Yale to learn how race operated within the social life of a town he called “Southern- town.” His stance was self-consciously that of a participant-observer and an outsider. He understood himself to be a Northern white psychologist naive about Southern race relations. He recognized that his naivete necessitated that he be educated by his data:

The basic method used in the study was that of participation in the social life of Southern- town. This social sharing was oftwo degrees and involved two roles: there was first the cas- ual participation possible as a “Yankee down here studying Negroes” and second the more intensive participation and the more specific role of the life history taker. . . . The primary research instrument would seem to be the observing human intelligence trying to make sense of the experience; and the experience was full ofproblems and uncertainty in fact. Perhaps it does not compare well with more objective-seeming instruments, such as a previously prepared set of questions but as to this question the reader can judge for himself. It has the value of offering to perception the actual, natural human contact with all of the real feelings present and unguarded. (1937, p. 18)

At the heart of Dollard’s work is his qualitative stance: His desire to make sense of “human contact with all of the real feelings present and unguarded.” Although Dol- lard headed south with an intellectual agenda, his field of variables was not entirely specified in advance. He could gather data that moved across a generous terrain. The racial, political, and economic hierarchies of the South in the 1930s could be connected with what he saw as Negro and White personalities.

A qualitative stance invites broad-based inquiry into spaces that are undocu- mented in other studies. Unlike a hypothetico-deductive stance, in which a fixed set of hypotheses constrains the field of investigation, a qualitative stance allows researchers to pry open territory about which they have only vague hunches. Instead of specifying at the outset the variables whose main effects and interactions will be tracked, qualitative workers begin with a period of exploration and immersion, and


then narrow their focus. Propelled by a desire to know what is unknown, to unravel mysteries, to be surprised and jostled by what turns up, qualitative researchers embark on an intellectual adventure without a map or even a clear destination. This way of working requires giving up control, going along for the ride, not always hav- ing hold of the steering wheel-and still taking good notes.

Qualitative Work and “Bias”

When we peer into the cubbyholes and crevices where qualitative work in psychology has been stuffed, we find researchers admitting and apologizing for their “biases.” David Rosenhan, a psychologist who entered a mental hospital under the guise ofa patient, wrote in Science about how stunned he was by the depths ofdeper- sonalization provoked by his short stay:

Neither anecdotal nor “hard” data can convey the overwhelming sense of powerlessness which invades the individual as he is continually exposed to the depersonalization ofthe psychiatric hospital. . . . I and the other pseudopatients in the psychiatric setting had distinctively negative reactions. We do not pretend to describe the subjective experiences of true patients. Theirs may be different from ours, particularly with the passage of time and the necessary process of adaptation to one’s environment. But we can and do speak to the relatively more objective indicators of treatment within the hospital. It would be a mistake and a very unfor- tunate one to consider that what happened to us derived from malice or stupidity on the part of the staff. Quite the contrary, our overwhelming impression of them was of people who really cared, who were committed, and who were uncommonly intelligent. Where they failed, as they sometimes did painfully, it would be more accurate to attribute those failures to the environment in which they, too, found themselves than to personal callousness. (1 973, pp. 265 and 268)

Rosenhan’s excerpt is written as a confession of an “overwhelming impression.” His personal experience dramatizes the power of institutional arrangements over both the good will of the staff and the sanity of the residents. Without his self-reflective experience as participant and observer inside the institution, Rosen- han’s work would have lacked the passion and much ofthe evidence that makes it so compelling.

Qualitative researchers acknowledge the values, passions, and preoccupations they bring to their work. A revealing and dramatic example of both self-reflection and self-revelation comes from Gayla Frank’s account of the life history of Diane Fields, a congenital quadriamputee (1981). In a chapter entitled “Emptying My Head,” Frank, an anthropologist, writes:

From the start of my research with Diane, I felt compelled to ask why I had undertaken this particular task. . . . Diane was a student in [my] class. . . . She took notes hunched over her notebook, writing actively with a pen held between her cheek and stump. During the lecture, I found myself watching Diane. I thought to myself such things as, “This poor woman. She probably still lives with her family and always will.” Given her appearance, including such things as racial type and style of dress, I decided that her family was Christian and that they were working class. I felt concern about those people. . . . I doubted that Diane had ever made love. Perhaps, I thought, she never had a boyfriend. Since her arms were so short, I doubted


that she could even masturbate. At the time, I didn’t even know Diane’s name. . . . I called Di- ane at home. Her boyfriend answered. I wondered what was wrong with him. When I met Jim, I was surprised to see a good-looking, able-bodied man no older than myself. . . . Al- though my expectations about Diane Fields and her life were not always correct, 1 could have chalked up these sometimes jarring discrepancies to sheer ignorance. But I chose to examine my presuppositions instead. Despite my errors, something marked my approach to Diane’s life as different from that ofmany people. . . . Over time it became clear to me that the selection of Diane Fields as the subject of my research might reflect something about me. . . . One may reasonably ask, “Why Diane Fields?” I felt i had to ask, “Why me?” (I98 I , pp. 118-122).

Frank recognizes and shares some of the expectations and fantasies that gave shape to her research encounter with Diane. Her self-revelations pose a sharp contrast to psychology’s disciplinary norms of neutrality and objectivity, not to mention our norms of scientific writing. Can we let ourselves recognize and then share how it feels to study what we know or imagine to be unjust? To explore how the terrors, pains, reliefs, and pleasures ofthe work might shape what we think and say about it?

Psychologists who study social issues are often self-consciously invested in value positions, committed to social change. Although self-reflection and acknowledgment of subjectivity are now intrinsic to scholarship in many intellectual domains, they have not yet become so in psychology. Perhaps among those psychologists who are conscious of their values and unashamed of them, a trend can be set. Critical self-reflection, after all, is not a new idea in social psychology. Forty- five years ago, Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif had this to say:

The research man has his own group identifications. We have noted that every group repre- sents a point of view as it stands in relation to other groups. Every group has its own explicit or implicit premises as to the nature of human relations, as to the directions that the values and goals of group relations should take. From the outset, research and generalizations are doomed to be deflections or mere justifications of the point of view and premises of the group or groups with which one identifies himself, ifone does not start his work by clear, deliberate recognition and neutralizing of his personal involvement in these issues. If this pain- ful process of deliberate recognition and neutralizing of one’s own personal involvements is not achieved, his autism will greatly influence his design ofthe study and his collection and treatment of data. (1953, p. 11)

This acknowledgment of personal involvements was forgotten in the decades after the Sherifs wrote, as was the injunction that researchers reflect on their positions and allegiances. Instead, we psychologists came to trust in proper scientific methods to confer protection from researchers’ “autism.” Further, we came to believe that such methods yielded what Donna Haraway (1988, p. 587) has called the “god’s-eye view of reality,” a view uninfluenced by the vantage point of onlooker. However, to deny the biases inherent in the privileged position of a researcher does not negate them.


Qualitative Work: On Listening and Words

As we see it, a psychology concerned with social life should attend to language, not turn away from people’s words and their meaning (Billig, 1994). It is through language that social relations, whether in families, civil society, or the state, are con- stituted and managed. Language is the medium of social negotiations about truth and reality and thus determines what we see and know. When psychologists restrict research participants to speaking only in our own terms, we impose our reality on them. When researchers measure people with the scales, inventories, and tests that are emblematic of psychology, their standpoints are forcibly relocated onto dimen- sions of the researchers’ making. In contrast, a qualitative stance involves listening to and theorizing about the layers of contradiction and uncertainty that emerge when people try to make sense oftheir lived experience. It demands paying attention to the lexicon participants use, to the ways that categories of language contour experience (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). It means listening to and interpreting silencesrefusals to speak, gaps in a narrative, or the absence of a language for speaking about certain things (Skura, 1984; Visweswaran, 1994). Are they retreats into safety? Reasser- tions of agency? Signposts pointing to the speaker’s blind spots? By working with people’s own words, we hope to bring into social psychology’s purview full and rich stories of their relationships, struggles, despair, and engagements.

Our own projects illustrate how people use words to connect to, reproduce, resist, and transform the contexts in which they live. With Diane Kravetz, I (Jeanne) have been studying feminist therapists. One of our questions has been how feminist therapists’ identities and ideas about their work take form within the current anti- feminist backlash (Marecek & Kravetz, 1998). We noted that only 2 therapists (of 89) could publicly label themselves feminists; some tookpains to conceal that identity even from clients in ongoing therapy. Nonetheless feminism remained the cen- tral point of departure for their work. Some managed this tension by discursively erasing the boundary between feminist therapy and therapy in general, equating feminist ideology with norms of“good health” and feminist therapy with “just good therapy” (Marecek & Kravetz, in press). Some demarcated themselves as feminists who were different from the objectionable stereotypes: “I don’t stuff it down people’s throats,” “Z’m pretty gentle,” and “I like men.” This latter strategy, of course, has its political downside: It implicitly lends credence to the very stereotypes that it challenges.

Susan Condor (1 986) wrote about the power of words when she described her discontent with work in which feminist social psychologists surveyed nonfeminist or right-wing women merely to reaffirm the obvious: that “they” were not “us.” She implored feminist researchers to engage in qualitative methods, to listen to the words ofparticipants. She challenged colleagues to dare to learn how it is that such women make sense of the world. We extend and broaden Condor’s challenge: Dare we learn how those who are not “us”-who are from the working class, or mentally


ill, or urban teenagers, or even just nonpsychologistsmake sense of the world? And further, do we dare learn the ways in which they are us?

Working as a rape crisis volunteer in the early 1980s, I (Michelle) met a young woman I will call Altamese (Fine, 1983). In the hospital, I learned Altamese hadjust been gang-raped. We spent hours talking. In retrospect, I realize that I was trying to talk her into ways of coping. I doused her with all that 1 4 s a feminist counselor, social psychologist, White woman academic-knew would be good for her. Report them. Tell your social worker. Let your family know. Don’t keep it in. . . .

At some point, Altamese had had enough ofmy advice and let me know that she had her own strategies. She would not press charges, nor let her family know. In her community (an African American neighborhood in North Philadelphia), a woman was rarely believed by the police. If she told her brothers about the rape, they might go out and kill the accused. If she told a therapist, it might help for a moment, but the pain would still be within. Once I stopped talking and listened to her story, I could hear her way of making sense of, that is, surviving in, a world where neither the justice system nor the streets were trustworthy; where protecting her mother, brothers, and children was more important than abstract notions ofjustice. I could have kept persuading. I could have measured her degree of learned helplessness or her exter- nal locus of control. Instead, I listened, and by listening, I was able to begin to hear how race and racism, poverty and classism, personal and cultural circumstances made a profound difference in our responses to a gang rape.

When researchers listen to participants, we learn new things. Participants become more than transmitters of raw data to be refined by statistical procedures. They come to be active agents, the creators of the worlds they inhabit and the inter- preters of their experiences. At the same time, researchers come to be witnesses, a word whose root means knowledge. In bringing their knowledgc+of theory, of interpretive methods, and of their own intellectual, political, and personal commitments-to participants’ stories, researchers become active agents as well.

Qualitative Work: From the Ground Up

Qualitative approaches are less prescriptive and more flexible than orthodox psychology methods. Indeed, some workers argue that they are better termed ways ofworking, not methods (Weedon, 1987). There are no set formulas for applying a method to a problem, and the researcher may alter the approach upon discovering something else works better. For instance, when Louise began interviewing Japa- nese students who were “returnees,” she asked students who had lived outside of Japan for at least 9 months if they would be willing to talk about what it was like to live abroad and to return to Japan. She began with a series of open-ended questions in a structured interview schedule. No sooner had she begun than she discovered that it was much more effective to let the students talk without interruption, to tell their stories. The stories invariably centered on what it was like to return to Japan


and find that they were singled out as no longer fully Japanese. They were marked, by their body language and attitudes in particular. From their stones, Louise could begin to discern the grammar of “being Japanese” (Kidder, 1992).

For conventionally trained psychologists, switching into qualitative methods can induce a kind of vertigo; many of the usual methodological props are pulled away. Instead of orderly data sets, researchers search through transcripts or field notes for the glimmer of a pattern. They pore over what conventional psychological researchers might see as “error variance” and “uncodable” responses, awaiting inspiration and serendipitous realizations. We contrast these research practices to those we learned as graduate students. We were taught to defer data collection until our hypotheses were clearly worked out, causal arrows in place, the details of the design locked in, variables operationalized, measures pilot-tested, and coding and analytic strategies fully specified. Like stage performances, our research projects were scripted from start to finish. There was little that participants could do to throw a study off its course, apart from boycotting a study entirely (and even then they merely raised the “subject mortality” rate). To further ward off the unexpected, we seldom studied people whom the professional lore declared to be uncooperative, hard to locate, untruthful, or unforthcoming. This, of course, meant that our research centered on people much like ourselves: middle-class, college-educated, White, young, and students.

We also learned to maintain tight control over research outcomes, carefully limiting what participants could do or say. Structured interviews and questionnaires provided only a few predetermined options for responding, typically phrased in an abstracted idiom stripped of local meaning and nuance (e.g., agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree . . . ). In short, our participants could not register experiences that we researchers were not ready to hear. Ifthey tried-by scribbling in the margins of a questionnaire, by amending questions before answering them, or even by using the option marked “Other: ,” we unceremoniously ignored them. The American Psychological Association’s current Publication Manual (1994) directs psychologists to call those who take part in studies “participants” instead of “subjects,” but in such research designs, they still are “subjected” to the researchers’ rules.

We were taught that researchers should stand at a safe distance from those we study, “running” them through procedures designed to extract information from them. We learned that data were like low-hanging fruits, waiting to be gathered; research was not a shared, intersubjective activity. Moreover, the burden ofexplana- tion rested exclusively on the researcher. This stance of distanced inquiry is akin to what Robert Stolorow has called the theory of the isolated mind (Atwood & Stolo- row, 1984). Such a stance makes it hard to live with surprise and confusion unwel- come, hard to learn the participants’ point ofview. It was only after graduate school that we came upon what Joyce Ladner had written:


The relationship between researcher and his subjects, by definition, resembles that of the oppressor and the oppressed, because it is the oppressor who defines the problem, the nature of theresearch, and to some extent, the quality of interaction between him and his subjects. This inability to understand and research the hndamental proble-eocolonialism-prevents most social researchers from being able accurately to observe and analyze Black life and culture and the impact that racism and oppression have upon Blacks. (1971, p. 6)

Qualitative Research: Social Life and Power

Bertrand Russell once remarked that “the fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics” (1938, p. 9). Despite the centrality of power in social life, psychology has for the most part been woefully reluctant to address it (Kitzinger, 1991). Seri- ously engaging the dialectics of power and social structure could be a key contri- bution of psychologists concerned with social issues. As Michel Foucault (1980) observed, modern societies regulate their citizens without brute force, relying instead on self-discipline and self-surveillance. Power is diffuse; it operates “from below,” flowing through social relations, knowledge structures, and regimes of truth that justify existing hierarchies. To grasp how power from below operates, we need to listen to the negotiated narratives of power that flow through streets and gutters; to situate our research in mundane conversations, interactions, habits, and practices ofpersonal relations; to see how people are situated in and by institutional contexts and how they maneuver to resituate themselves (Guinier, Fine, & Balin, 1997; Smith, 1987).

During a sojourn in India, Louise studied expatriates’ conversations with one another about their domestic servants. She noted that expatriates enjoyed a status and benefits that exceeded what they experienced back home. They occupied the elevated status 0f“masters” and instead ofbecoming acquainted with Indian fnends and ways of living, they became part of an expatriate subculture and found their friends among others like themselves. As White, wealthy foreigners, they occupied the outsider’s position of privilege and power. But being relatively unacquainted with Indian culture and society, they were also dependents. They depended on domestic servants for cultural knowledge and daily living skills (Kidder, in press). Thus, the relationship of master to servant was not simply hierarchical; power and dependency were intertwined. As Albert Memmi says, “(t)he dominant person isn’t always the least dependent one” (1984, p. 8). An American woman’s story illustrates her family’s dependence on their Indian cook:

We discovered that we were poisoning [my husband] right in our own kitchen. I wasn’t getting sick at all, but he had something all the time. . . . Finally, we realized that he was eating sandwiches and I wasn’t-and it must have been the mayonnaise that [the cook] was making -1 don’t know if it was a batch of bad eggs or what, but that was doing it-He was getting poisoned in our own house! (Kidder, 1997, p. 164)


Jeanne’s work in Sri Lanka has concerned the social meanings of suicide, The events leading up to suicidal acts typically involve injustices, insults, dishonor, or loss of face. Suicidal acts often seem to be efforts to reestablish one’s rightful position in the status hierarchy or to restore the moral order by fixing blame on those who are at fault (Marecek, 1997). In one project, Jeanne studied news reports ofoffi- cia1 inquiries into suicide deaths, asking how these reports reasserted interpretive authority over the death (Marecek, 1995). Among other things, she noted that if suicide victims were in subordinate positions, the news reports emphasized their emotional state, especially socially sanctioned emotions of anger and revenge. The instigating actions ofhigher status individuals (e.g., beatings by husbands, coercion or extortion by petty government officers) were mentioned perfunctorily and put aside. In contrast, ifthe victim was higher in status, the news reports emphasized the instigating actions of their subordinates (e.g., a daughter who eloped, a wife who nagged or disobeyed) or collective societal forces (e.g., poverty, unemployment); the victim’s emotional state was not a focus of attention. Thus, the news reports worked to concentrate moral opprobrium on lower status parties and deflect it from higher status ones.

Back in the United States, Louise studied the negotiation ofmeaning between a hypnotist and her subjects (Kidder, 1972). As part of a sociology course on field- work methods, she enrolled as a participant in a hypnosis workshop. She tape- recorded not only the hypnotic inductions but also the arguments that ensued when participants said such things as “I don’t think I was really in a trance.” Her analyses focused on how the hypnotist and doubting participants negotiated what hypnosis is and what makes someone a good or bad hypnotic subject. The frameworks for Louise’s analysisattribution and social learning theory-were straight from the heart of social psychology. She explored the process by which the hypnotist and the workshop participants allocated blame for those who failed to go into a trance. She also documented how the hypnotist meted out praise to compliant participants and punishment to the doubters. Her work illustrates both the power of language to define participants’ reality and how such discursive power was not evenly distrib- uted in that social situation.

Rigorous qualitative research involves attention to context, meanings, and power relations in data collection and analysis. Qualitative researchers situate words, discourses, persons, relations, and groups within local, societal, and sometimes global contexts. Such an approach enables a study of power relations that more conventional psychological methods of study, such as individual-difference testing or laboratory experimentation, disallow.

Qualitative Work and Ethical Shadows

In conversations that swirl around qualitative work, issues of ethics and respon- sibility surface that go far beyond the formal APA ethical guidelines. Why is it only

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qualitative work that is a lightning rod for such concerns? We contend that it is time for all psychologists to talk seriously about why we do the work we do, about whom, and for which constituencies. Are we willing to engage the variety of standpoints that exist in any single context? How much do our standpoints shape which stories we are told, which ones we are able to hear, which ones we take to be data, and which ones we don’t? What are the ethics of studying “down” and thus, deliberately or not, replicating a focus on people too often held responsible for social-structural decay? Whether we study “down” or “up,” what are the ethics of telling or not telling our respondents what we are really up to? To what extent do we anticipate the political and ethical implications of our work? Do we have an obligation to do so? Listen to the words ofKenneth Clark, reflecting on ethical concerns he and Mamie Clark had about their research on Black children’s self-images:

“We were really disturbed by our findings,” Kenneth Clark recalls, “and we sat on them for a number of years. What was surprising was the degree to which the children suffered from self-rejection, with its truncating effect on their personalities, and the earliness of the COITO-

sive awareness of color. I don’t think we quite realized the extent of the cruelty of racism and how hard it hit. . . . Some of these children, particularly in the North, were reduced to crying when presented with the [black] dolls and asked to identify with them. They looked at me as if1 were the devil for putting them in this predicament. Let me tell you. it was a traumatic experience for me as well.” (Kluger, quoted in Cross, I99 I , p. 29)

Clark worried about the impact of his research on the children and on the community in general. His research methods were not qualitative, but his ethical concerns +xpressed in an interview, not in his research text-reflect the kinds of ethical concerns that often emerge in qualitative work.

The ethical dilemmas that often surface in qualitative research are not put to rest by scrupulous adherence to the standard procedures for informed consent, anonym- ity, and confidentiality. “Who owns the data?” is an ethical question that participants in laboratory studies do not think to ask. Whose interpretation counts? Who has veto power? What will happen to the relationships that were formed in the field? What are the researcher’s obligations after the data are collected? Can the data be used against the participants? Will the data be used on their behalf? Do researchers have an obligation to protect the communities and social groups they study orjust to guard the rights of individuals? These kind ofquestions reveal how much ethical terrain is uncharted by APA guidelines, IRB reviews, and the like. It is qualitative researchers who are wrestling with such ethical dilemmas, but these dilemmas are present in much psychological research, regardless of its methodological commitments.

Conclusion

Our enthusiasm for qualitative work notwithstanding, we sometimes have had crises of identity and loyalty: Are we still psychologists? What is at stake in that


identity? Apart from its methods, what is psychology? Why is the disciplinary boundary now drawn where it is? Should one be drawn at all? We take heed of the words of William James, written nearly 100 years ago, urging American psychology to accommodate a qualitative stance:

Behind the minute anatomists and the physiologists, with their metallic instruments, there have always stood the outdoor naturalists with their eyes and love of concrete nature. . . . In psychology, there is a similar distinction. Some are fascinated by the varieties ofmind in living action, others by dissecting out, whether by logical analysis or by brass instruments, whatever elementary processes may be there. ( I90 I / 1961, p. 244)

We have a sense ofurgency in asking why American psychologists have lagged so far behind our international and interdisciplinary colleagues in developing qualitative methods. For psychologists who study social issues, this question takes on a particular significance. We have created a substantial space in psychology for talking about social justice, but only a small comer for methodological innovation and disciplinary transformation. We do not claim that qualitative methods are new or radical or necessarily progressive. We do not claim that qualitative work is the only emancipatory approach or that such work always yields emancipatory results. Any research strategy can be used for either emancipatory ends or repressive ones. We write this piece because psychologists in other parts of the world have drawn so far ahead of American psychologists. As John Richardson notes, “There is a great deal of scope for psychologists in North America to catch up with their counterparts in the UK and with their compatriots in the other social sciences in terms of their understanding and appreciation of qualitative research methods” (1996, p. 8). By giving evidence of a rich history and vibrant future of qualitative work, we hope we have laid a strong bridge on which psychologists can walk between worlds.

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JEANNE MARECEK is Professor of Psychology and Coordinator of Women's Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the coauthor (with Rachel Hare-Mustin) of Making a Diference: Psychology and the Construction of Gender (Yale University Press, 1990). She works on theory and metatheory in psychology, especially the intersections of feminst theory, postmodem thought, and discursive psychology. She and Diane Kravetz have been collaborating on a large study of feminist- identified therapists. She also studies suicide and indigenous helping systems in Sri Lanka.

MICHELLE FINE is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her recent publications include Chartering Urban School Reform: Reflections on Public High Schools in the Midst of Change (1 994), Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in American Schools (1 992), and Disrup- tive Voices: The Transgressive Possibilities of Feminist Research ( 1 992). She uses both quantitative and qualitative methods in her research.

LOUISE KIDDER is Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at Temple University. She coauthored the text Research Methods in Social Relations and coedited New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science: Forms of Validity. Her interests in qualitative methods were formed more than 25 years ago during her graduate studies when she combined participant obser- vations with quasi-experimental research.

working between worlds: qualitative methods and social psychology

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