Editorial

Citation

Austin, J. (2015), "Editorial", Qualitative Research Journal, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-06-2015-0039

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Qualitative Research Journal, Volume 15, Issue 3

Welcome to the third issue of Qualitative Research Journal for 2015. This issue reflects a stronger methodological focus than perhaps has been the case in the previous issues for this year, and this is important for the overall development of critical qualitative research methods, methodologies and strategies that are so crucial to the interrogation of the nexus between Power and Method (Gitlin, 1994). This journal has been at the forefront of the showcasing of the types of issues, approaches, aspirations and outcomes of research that are often overlooked or discounted entirely in other places. As such, QRJ continues to promulgate critical scholarly and activist work.

While discussing the specific papers in preparation for the publishing of this issue, the editors found something of a thread running through and connecting many of the individual submissions in the form of working with vulnerable groups or participants. Researchers encounter notions of the vulnerable most explicitly through various institutional processes aimed at ensuring ethical conduct in and of the research process. Variously termed “special groups,” “groups at risk,” “groups requiring special consideration,” or quite explicitly, “vulnerable groups,” ethics approval processes position certain nominated groups of participants as being in such precarious positions of exposure to (further) harm as to require special treatment in any research project. While not wishing to deny the imperative of carefully compassionate conduct in our work, unstated questions of what constitutes “sufficient” vulnerability to warrant such special consideration or of the effect on such identified groups of being constructed as vulnerable typically remain unasked.

Such a narrow view of the experience of vulnerability in the research process, confined as it is to a group of others, fails to acknowledge the personal/subjective/emotional aspects of the researcher and of the audience of reports on the research project.

Vulnerability and the tensions created and experienced within a position of being vulnerable have been explicitly present in the vista of the research arena since at the very least the publication of Ruth Behar’s (1996) The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Lather and Smithies’ (1997) Troubling the Angels is a powerful example of just such tensions, and further underscores the intense imperative of Lather’s later question: what does it mean to use other people’s lives as data? (Lather, 2007, p. 52). Vulnerability, while more typically used to describe and construct certain groups of possible research participants, is a concept which swings in many directions, including the impact of contemporary forces positioning qualitative researchers – and in particular, critical qualitative researchers – as themselves being highly vulnerable to a range of expectations, constraints and questions of validity and worth in the academy and elsewhere.

In her book, Behar explores the personal vulnerability that attaches to inserting subjectivity into what might otherwise be seen as a detached or quasi-objective enterprise: writing ethnography. While her work here is almost 20 years old, there are still more than sufficient resonances with a number of contemporary research dilemmas in her exploration of her self-doubt and wondering to make a (re-)reading of this work an essential task for contemporary qualitative researchers. As she says, “There are risks in exposing oneself in an academy that continues to feel ambivalent about observers who forsake the mantle of omniscience” (Behar, 1996, p. 12).

In their paper in this volume, Benjamin Milbourne, Beverley McNamara and Angus J. Buchanan describe what they call the “vulnerability of the hard-to-reach and the ethics of research.” Most of the other papers in this issue contain some direct focus on participant groups who would in all likelihood fall into the category of people requiring “special” or “extra” ethical care and treatment in the research process by virtue of their “vulnerable” status. Anna Vassadis, Ameera Karimshah, Anita Harris and Youssef Youssef write of insider-outsider research with young Australia Muslims; Faustine Williams’ work focusses on breast cancer survivors; and Yvette DeBeer researched aspects of special education policy in Canada. Ann Lord’s paper on the use of image in her research exposes other ways in which aspects of the research process such as vulnerability might be captured and conveyed. In taking us further into arts-based practice, Barbara Probst and John Bucholtz touch on the importance of capturing and re-presenting the “non-linguistic data” that flow from a broader consideration of what it is that constitutes the substance of research. The multi-layering of narratives, particularly through the use of image and photo-elicitation as explored by Hannah Covert and Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, presents a way into more trustworthy intercultural research, and Kirsten Martinus and David Hedgcock address a number of “linguistic, cultural, professional and philosophical differences” they encountered as they worked on an international (and presumably intercultural) project in Australian and Japan.

This issue of the Qualitative Research Journal opens the door for significant conversations regarding the function of notions of the vulnerable and various methodological possibilities for genuinely embracing such vulnerability in the pursuit of increasingly humane research.

Jon Austin

References

Behar, R. (1996), The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Gitlin, A. (Ed.) (1994), Power and Method: Political Activism and Educational Research, Routledge, New York, NY

Lather, P. (2007), Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science, SUNY Press, Albany, CA

Lather, P. and Smithies, C. (1997), Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS, Westview Press, Boulder, CO