It seems to me that there is a tacit agreement between researcher and subjects or participants in research that an effort will be made to tell, not only a truthful story, but a complete one. What a difficult task! The reading I have done this week tells me that even skilled, experienced researchers struggle with finding a balance between artfully writing a study and telling the complete story, including every nuance and detail.
One falls in love with the subjects as well, and it is difficult to know when to stop the process, when to declare the interviews at an end. Once that end has been reached, it feels like a betrayal of the gift of Story that has been received for the researcher not to include every last statement, every possible theme. How does one consolidate the wide spectrum of experience in an exemplary educator, for instance, into three or four overarching themes? What does one do with the MANY lovely statements the subject has offered that do not make the final writeup of the research?
I believe that all researchers must face this dilemma to a degree. But it seems that a Christian must struggle that much more diligently because we seek to reveal Truth and want to honor God with a job well done.
In the end, while the discovery is exciting, and the writing fullfilling in a way that quantitative research can never match, the daunting task of capturing, yet not over-reaching, with regard to telling the Story makes qualitative research one of the hardest things I have ever done!
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Could I say "Amen Sistuh" to you? You are spot on about what scholars sometimes refer to as textual veracity. What's really mind blowing is that even in recall and memory, subjects often share their own versions of revisionist history in their retelling of a story of memory. So this introduces yet another layer of complication for the researchers, to help the story teller tell a consistent (internally reliable and trustworthy) account of events as s/he recals them. A difficult set of tasks indeed. But hey, to me, it beats running MANOVA's.
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