Review Essay: On Transparency, Epistemologies, and Positioning in Writing Introductory Qualitative Research Texts

Abstract

Building on Günter MEY's (2000, para. 2) argument that "reviews should help to promote additional perspectives … and to open up new scientific discourses," in this essay review of Carol GRBICH's (2007) "Qualitative Data Analysis," we present an approach to reading texts ethnographically that enabled us to uncover how the choices GRBICH makes in positioning readers and in choosing particular ways of representing select qualitative approaches inscribes particular worlds and possibilities for qualitative research. In her text GRBICH argues that authors position readers through the ways in which they report and write about their work. In this review essay we use this argument as a basis to uncover how GRBICH positions readers, researchers, those researched, different qualitative traditions and perspectives as well as herself as an author of the text, to lay a foundation for engaging readers of FQS in a hermeneutic dialogue (KELLY, 2006) about the authoring and reviewing processes and their inter-relationships. Through this dialogue, we seek to develop with readers of FQS a new discourse about the necessity of transparency in the position that authors and reviewers take in reporting/reviewing of research, and in representing the traditions that differ from the author's/reviewer's own tradition(s). Our goal in framing this essay review as a hermeneutical dialogue is to identify previously unexamined issues of how the writing of introductory texts is shaped by the often invisible perspectives of authors, which in turn leads to a particular inscription of what counts as qualitative research.

URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1201233