Qualitative Inquiry
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Validity, Responsibility, and Aporia Mirka Koro-Ljungberg Qualitative Inquiry 2010 16: 603 originally published online 11 June 2010 DOI: 10.1177/1077800410374034 The online version of this article can be found at: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/16/8/603
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Validity, Responsibility, and Aporia
Qualitative Inquiry 16(8) 603–610 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800410374034 http://qix.sagepub.com
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg1
Abstract In this article, the author problematizes external, objectified, oversimplified, and mechanical approaches to validity in qualitative research, which endorse simplistic and reductionist views of knowledge and data. Instead of promoting one generalizable definition or operational criteria for validity, the author’s “deconstructive validity work” addresses how validity can be framed in the context of researchers’ responsibility and decision making during the research process. More specifically, the author utilizes the concept of aporia to discuss researchers’ responsibilities in the face of impossible decisions when aiming for “valid” and trustworthy qualitative research practices. The author argues that qualitative researchers should reconsider the promotion of validity or validation practices that disable researchers’ responsibility. Alternatively, it could be illuminative to ask how impossible validity and ongoing puzzlement associated with the quality of qualitative research could influence current research practices and reporting. Keywords validity, responsibility, qualitative research, aporia
Validity in qualitative research literature has received considerable attention, and scholars have proposed a variety of conceptual and theoretical approaches to address it (e.g., Angen, 2000; Cho & Trent, 2006; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2004; Lather, 1993, 2007a; LeCompte, Millroy, & Preissle, 1992; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2010; Scheurich, 1997; Schwandt, 1997; Vagle, 2009). The existing literature has documented that validity can be defined in numerous ways and can function differently based on epistemological and theoretical variations. For the sake of the argument presented here, the concept of validity in qualitative research can encompass such terms as authenticity, credibility, confirmability, internal coherence, transferablity, reliability, and significance (see Lather, 2007a; Mayan, 2009). Furthermore, the question of whether research measures what it intended to measure could be posed to individual researchers, or the question could be answered by the communities in which research has taken place. It could be argued that the diversity associated with the validity question reflects various historical and conceptual movements in the field of qualitative inquiry (see, for example, Lather, 2007a). However, continuing discussions about research quality and validity among qualitative researchers are essential to avoid exclusions from current discourses and policy conversations that might significantly alter our work and influence the communities in which we conduct our research. I believe that, similar to the concept of paradigm proliferation, validity is a “good thing to think with” (see Lather, 2006), and I view
validity as a label that is “inaccurate yet necessary” (Spivak, 1997, p. xii). Despite the documented diversity associated with the validity question, validity in some introductory qualitative research textbooks and empirical research reports has become a standardized discourse that is often represented as one grand narrative circulated in doctoral programs and research training. Sometimes the postpositivist idea of validity is at the core of the constructed grand narrative, and validity is presented as a “cover of universality, its disingenuous naturalness, the ideological mask that convinces us of its own essential truth” (Watson, 2009, p. 527). Too often in qualitative research “the ideologeme of the valid research text is its materialization as ‘the world out there’, truthfully represented in the capture and display of the object of research” (p. 527). Externalized and objectified validity has turned into a signifier for good and valuable qualitative research, and audits (e.g., member checking, audit trail, and interrater reliability) can be used mechanically to guarantee and produce truthful representation of reality and “real” objects of research (see Mishler, 1990).
1
University of Florida
Corresponding Author: Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education, University of Florida, 119A Norman Hall, PO BOX 117047, Gainesville, FL 32611-0747 E-mail: [email protected]
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In this article, I take issue with external, objectified, oversimplified, and mechanical approaches to validity in qualitative research (see also Maxwell, 1992, 2010). Similar to Guba and Lincoln (1989) and Lincoln (2009) I call for the return of ethics in the context of validity. I worry that externalized notions and conceptualizations of validity promote simplistic and reductionist views of knowledge and data. Researchers’ desire for research “measures,” hypotheses, and verifiable factors that can be accurately implemented can reduce knowledge and data into controllable elements, fragments, and predetermined structures. Therefore, validity based on these premises tends to remove the researcher from the research context, providing external devices to manage and control validity. Popke (2004) argued that “the discourses of modernity, by attempting to legislate certainty [of validity], have in fact created the conditions of possibility for an abdication of our ethical responsibility” (p. 302). Validity in qualitative research could thus benefit from a continuous and radical reconceptualization—radical enough to create strong and compelling alternative arguments that move away from validity as a permanent and firm sign of normalization and dangerous indicator of ultimate external authority guarding research quality. Scheurich (1997) has also questioned the usefulness of dichotomies associated with validity (i.e., valid/invalid, acceptable/not acceptable) and calls for “subversive conversations on validity as the wild, uncontrollable play of difference” (p. 90). Lather (2007a, b) and Watson (2009) continued such reconstructive validity work. Lather (2007b), for example, has called for validity that reflects the “researcher’s ability to explore the resources of different contemporary inquiry problematics” (p. 120), which redirects the focus of the validity question toward the researcher. Similarly, in this article I discuss and reflect on what is lost when mechanical approaches to validity are implemented and how validity can be recontextualized in relation to individual responsibility. I am interested in exploring what can be gained by thinking outside the grand narrative of validity and by moving toward “nonpresent possibilities” and complexities of validity. More specifically, I advocate for (re)turning validity to ethics—not as an indication of duty but as a response toward the Other and unknown. I am interested in validity as unpredictable, uncertain, and undecidable yet immediate and urgent response to the call from the Other. I would also like to promote discussions on validity as a predicament for ethics in practice or situational ethics. For example, when urgently and in situ responding to the Other researchers are faced with the questions of social justice, privilege, and power. The right of researchers to impose their ideology on study participants, the right of oppressed individuals to take part in the study design and contribute to knowledge production, and the question of who benefits from research and how are not only questions of ethics but are also questions of credibility,
trustworthiness, and significance of qualitative research. In the following sections I elaborate how validity can be related to responsibility, then I discuss in more detail the aporic character of responsibility. Finally, I illustrate how responsibility as aporia can stimulate an alternative conceptualization of validity and validation.
Validity in Relation to Responsibility It is not my intention to review conceptualizations and definitions of validity that could be applied to qualitative research because many authors have already done that (e.g., Angen, 2000; Cho & Trent, 2006; Creswell, 2007; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2004; Lather, 1993, 2007a; LeCompte et al., 1992; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2010; Scheurich, 1997; Whittemore, Chase, & Mandle, 2001). Nevertheless, I briefly refer to my previous work on validity because this article continues the validity work I began some years ago. In my previous work I refer to two views of validity, namely, reductionist and (e)pistemological (for more about (e)pistemology, see Thayer-Bacon, 2003). For example, reductionist views of validity promote singularity based on a priori selection criteria. Furthermore, they imply that a particular criterion— for example, expert external evaluation or methodological specificity—produces trustworthiness and legitimacy to research. However, a single, realistic truth and a transcendental criterion for validity can become problematic because it limits how truth can be conceptualized. (E)pistemological validation alternatively suggests that validity and validation involve “knowers build[ing] assertions warranted by their individual, collective, and spiritual experiences within social worlds, as well as the ways in which they engage in dialogue about their assertions with their environment” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2008, p. 986). Moreover, the interconnectedness between reality and subjects, viewing knowledge as a process, and the perspective of pluralism characterize this perspective. Such conceptualizations of validity in qualitative research could be responsive to complex, situated, fragmented, and changing knowledge that characterizes the broad and multilayered field of qualitative inquiry. The documentation, reflection, or evaluation of researchers’ actions in regard to validity cannot take place outside the researchers themselves. However, evaluation of researchers’ actions becomes challenging if conducted only externally without investigating and reflecting on researchers’ responsibilities and how they have been carried out. Researchers are ultimately responsible for their decisions and doing “good,” meaningful, trustworthy, and valid research—they cannot escape their responsibilities or leave the rigor or trustworthiness of their research for others to create, inspect, or evaluate. Instead, it could be beneficial for qualitative researchers to face the impossibilities of unified and strictly
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Koro-Ljungberg bound validity or validation processes (e.g., label, epistemologies, functions, implementation, and correspondence criteria), which can expose tensions that might activate, enable, and foster researchers’ responsibility. Wang proposed that a Derridian sense of responsibility responds to the “call from the Other,” opening up oneself to ruptures that are shaped by difference and things to come. In the context of research, responding to the call from the Other implies theoretically and methodologically unlimited and ongoing movement toward the unknown and beyond one’s established knowledge. Engagement with the edge, or the borderline, is a precondition for responsibility (Wang, 2005). Derrida (2005) explained that “to be responsible is both to answer for oneself and for the legacy, before that which precedes us, and to answer, before the others, before that which is coming and remains to come” (p. 139). In the context of qualitative inquiry, “responsible” researchers could possibly be seen as methodologically uncertain and responsive by revising and reconceptualizing the research purposes, processes, techniques, and approaches, as well as interactions with participants and data based on changing social circumstances and rapid shifts in power. Responsibility of a researcher includes but at the same times moves beyond duty, reflectivity, IRB guidelines, or protection of human subjects. I argue that “responsible” researcher takes into consideration historical conditions and persisting forms of inequity and oppression while acknowledging the limits of her or his knowledge. In addition, responsible scholars in the context of contemporary qualitative research are committed to change, (de)centering the margins, and meeting the unknown. Cannella and Perez (2009) referred to egalitarian activism as one way to promote researchers’ responsibilities and social justice. I agree with Cannella and Perez who ask how our skills as researchers can be most beneficial to groups struggling to resist oppression, but I would also further inquire how researchers’ skills could be adjusted, modified, or reconceptualized to help communities to stay informed when power is rapidly shifting or exploitation seems likely. In addition, “responsible” researchers are faced with dilemmas without prescribed answers. This space of uncertainty and indecision requires scholars to be present and open to other ways of knowing and doing. In other words, scholars operate in the passage between valid and invalid research without knowing where to go and without ever completing valid research projects. In this state of uncertainty, validity can show itself. Furthermore, for validity to take place, researchers ought to free themselves from calculative techniques and processes of validation and face the ultimate responsibility: the unknown. When validity is predetermined and presented as mechanical or technical, it releases scholars from many, if not all, responsibilities and decisions. Unexpected events during the
research process or unforeseen interactions with participants require scholars to react immediately. However, these reactions could be preprogrammed, and decisions could have been made ahead of time. Possible preprogrammed decisions could include the collection of additional information about negative cases when data appear conflicting and overly diversified, ethical procedures required by institutional review boards to guarantee the protection of participants, step-bystep data analysis, or reliance on senior scholars for advice. In these preprogrammed situations, researchers are not risking the possibility of doing research “wrong.” Rather, when they count on doing research “right,” they do not respond to genuine responsibility or affirm a new identity (see Derrida, 1997). Moreover, responsibility in this context does not mean that researchers need to choose between two options, right or wrong. From this perspective, responsibility is not about choices; rather, it is beyond being. Responsibility is a priori to knowledge and changes who we are as researchers; it asks researchers to welcome the Other, to continuously stay sensitized to data and unexpected interactions with participants and communities. According to Derrida (1995), responsibility will not be accomplished, and it is precisely the impossibility of the decision making related to the research process that can make qualitative researchers responsible. Responsibility is always escaping, and individuals are responsible for other things to come. In other words, if the Other is always coming, scholars and researchers are always responsible. Even after presentations, publications, and completed study summary reports, responsibility is not over; knowledge projects are continually changing, and more data and new knowledge are being constructed beyond our intentions and efforts as researchers. Responsibility can also be associated with urgency in decision making. Derrida (1995) encouraged us to not only make decisions here and now but at the same time question our decisions to deny closure. Similarly, in the context of research, qualitative researchers are also often faced with urgent and in situ decisions related to different aspects of research process, such as how to deal with no-show participants, handle data that were partially erased by an accident, account for changes in a research team and primary investigators, or prioritize when funding becomes limited. Often the circular nature of qualitative inquiry also fosters indefinite, contextual, and temporal decision making. Furthermore, aporia related to responsibility cannot be logically described but must be felt, lived, and experienced. Only when researchers become aware of the limitations of (mechanical) validity can they respond responsibly and begin to negotiate the limits of validity. It is also important to emphasize that discussions about researchers’ responsibilities in this context do not promote methodological randomness. Rather, it could be argued that
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responsibility is often preceded by epistemological and methodological awareness, including knowledge of traditions, research approaches, and methodologies. Nevertheless, even though methodological and epistemological awareness could assist researchers faced with impossible decisions, awareness does not necessarily promote responsibility. For example, awareness could lead to oversimplified and direct applications of knowledge, and therefore, representing “methodological banking,” in which literature, course work, other scholars, and textbooks solutions are used in decontextualized ways to inform research design and other research-related decisions. Methodological banking might also become researchers’ only way to prepare for uncertainty in research processes. This limited preparedness from an ethical and Derridian standpoint enables researchers to escape responsibility and ultimately avoid decision making.
Aporia of Responsibility and Decision Making Aporia, Greek for difficulty, puzzle, or impassable, plays a significant role in Derrida’s conceptualization of ethical responsibility and decision making. Also viewed as “a momentary paralysis in the face of the impasse, it is the ‘testing out of the undecidable; only in this testing can a decision come about’” (Derrida, 2005, p. 154). According to Derrida (1993), without experiencing aporia, there is no responsibility; he asks: “Who would call a decision that is without rule, without norm, without determinable or determined law, a decision? . . . Who will dare call duty a duty that owes nothing, or better (or, worse) that must owe nothing?” (p. 17). Responsible decision can thus resolve paradoxical and impossible situations. Raffoul (2008) also states that for Derrida ethics of responsibility relate to a problematic of decision: ethical decision or responsible decision. Similarly, I am proposing here that some forms and conceptualizations of validity in qualitative research must take place outside technicalities, predetermined conditions, and rules. Responsibility is not an act of duty, nor is it following a rule or calculation (see Evink, 2009). Derrida (1995) illustrated the aporia of responsibility as follows: Saying that a responsible decision must be taken on the basis of knowledge seems to define the condition of possibility of responsibility (one can’t make a responsible decision without science or conscience, without knowing what one is doing, for what reasons, in view of what and under what conditions), at the same time as it defines the condition of impossibility of this same responsibility (if decision-making is relegated to a knowledge that it is content to follow or to develop, then it is no more a responsible decision, it is technical deployment of a cognitive
apparatus, the simple mechanistic deployment of a theorem). (p. 24) Derrida (1995) also explains that “the activating of responsibility (decision, act, praxis) will always take place before and beyond any theoretical or thematic determination” (p. 26). Furthermore, “It is in the very event of exceeding borderlines—an impossible passage—that aporia is experienced” (Wang, 2005, p. 46). In the process of exceeding borderlines and impossible passages, the aporias of suspension, undecidability, and urgency both enable and disable researchers’ responsibility (see Edgoose, 2001). Situating aporia and responsibility in the qualitative research context, Lather’s (as cited in Moss et al., 2009) conceptualization of rigor or reflective competence can be seen as a pretext to my aporic notions of validity presented in this paper. Lather (as cited in Moss et al., 2009) proposed that validity is associated with how scientific credibility is created—she looks for research that has some sense of the history, sociology, philosophy, ethics of inquiry, and what might be called a rigor of reflective competence. . . . Validity is far more about deep theoretical and political issues than about a technical issue or an issue of allegiance to correct procedure. (p. 506) In addition, Lather’s (2001, 2007b) views on aporia and her examples of aporic “stuck places” in ethnography, ethics, representation, and interpretation provide me a plateau from which to read aporia in the validity context highlighted in this article. I use both Derrida’s and Lather’s perspectives on aporia as entryways to my reflections on validity and as connections to unfoldings of my own stuck places within validity. More specifically, I apply Derrida’s aporia of responsibility to validity and assume within/against location similar to Lather (2001) by building on the existing knowledge (historicity of validity in qualitative research) and at the same time acknowledging the uncertainty of my intentions, knowings, and these reflections on validity. In this way, validity as proposed here is both becoming and passing by thus marking its own limits. The exploration of the possibilities of validity marks a return to validity’s aporias, to stuck places, and to leaps of faith. Raffoul (2008) argued that it is in the impossible that the “ethicality of ethics” (p. 273) should be situated. Similarly, thinking about the validity of validity signifies the limits of validity. Limits and the impossibility of validity does not mean that validity cannot be, but it complicates the notions and understandings about validity, alluding to the conceptualizations of validity that take place outside expected and anticipated conditions. “The attempt to recognize the aporia requires us to be actively engaged with
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Koro-Ljungberg contradictions in order not only to respond responsibly in the present but also to open up nonpresent possibilities” (Wang, 2005, p. 51). The credibility of research or findings might have more to do with choices researchers make rather than established and documented procedures. Reflecting Raffoul’s view of ethical responsibility as a matter of invention rather than an application of rule or procedure, new research processes require inventions—inventions of theories, designs, methods, and validity. Invention, in turn, is fraught with impossibility. This impossibility and indecision that researchers encounter when inventing and constructing a research design is a condition of responsibility. “Including when a decision is made, it remains confronted with the undecidable that makes it possible as decision” (Raffoul, 2008, p. 284). Similar to being able to face indecision, the position of not knowing or methodological uncertainty could accompany decision making as visualized by Derrida. For decision to be, initially researchers must not know what to do next. The introduction of Derrida’s conceptualization of responsibility moves beyond many existing perspectives. For example, to draw trustworthy conclusions and implications from data that Eisenhart and Howe (1992) associate with validity, qualitative researchers go through complex decisionmaking processes. Rather than focusing on the outcomes, such as trustworthy findings or representative conclusions, I argue that it could be illuminating to reflect on how scholars attain trustworthy conclusions. In addition, I am also less interested in emphasizing the role of such “validation strategies” as triangulation, peer review, or member checking (see, for example, Creswell, 2007; Marshall & Rossman, 2006; Maxwell, 2010 for more about validation strategies). Instead, my interest lies in the events, points, and spaces of (im)possible and aporetic decision making and how they can activate responsibility and possibly lead to increased value of research. Validity as a term can imply that trustworthy conclusions are a result of well-executed and completed analysis that can “capture,” identify, locate, or represent participants’ positions and perspectives. The completion of analysis, in turn, involves the decision between closure and infinity of perspectives, interpretations, and findings. However, I argue that this decision is uncertain and possible impossible. I wonder when a qualitative study becomes complete. When does a researcher decide that analysis has been finished, triangulation has been successful, interpretations have been saturated, and interactions with data have come to an end? Sometimes instructors, including me, teach in the introductory methods courses about the mechanical completion of “analytical steps,” such as constant comparison, thematic analysis, lexicalization, and textural-structural synthesis and how completion of these steps indicates the conclusion of data analysis. However, textbook data analysis descriptions do not stipulate exact time and place when and where analysis
begins or ends. Therefore, even the most rigorous implementation or direct application of textbook analysis approaches does not guarantee increased value of research, trustworthy conclusions, representativeness, or validity. Mechanical application of analytical steps and decontextualized implementation of analysis processes might still avoid the question of responsibility and decision making, even though situatedness and complexity of analysis processes ask researchers to decide when, how, and why to begin and conclude analysis or other interactions with the data. From this perspective, the completion of the data-analysis process might not be accurately captured by arbitrary decision related to timing. Rather, the ending could be prompted by successful, illuminative, and productive processes of discovery. The decision to conclude data analysis is, therefore, always arbitrary and uncertain. There exists no exact way to know or illustrate when analytical processes are finished, saturated, and explanatory of the entire data set. Similarly, it is impossible to say when new themes, linguistic elements, discourses, or insights will no longer emerge or cannot be further identified. At the same time, there exists urgency to report the findings, publish, and write summary reports to funding agencies. It is with uncertainty that researchers decide analysis does not need to be continued or no more analytical insights might emerge at the moment. This decision becomes even more challenging if researchers continue to interact with data and study participants after systematic or “official” data collection has ended. The matter of a general versus specific focus in research can also affect credibility and internal coherence. For example, at the time of developing research questions, and later during data collection and analysis phases, researchers face decisions related to the focus of their research design and direction of analytical attention. Decisions need to be made regarding the level of specificity of research questions. In the context of qualitative research, questions should be general enough to provide flexibility and allow possible adjustments due to fieldwork (e.g., Hatch, 2002; Marshall & Rossman, 2006). In addition, research questions that have more general focus can have wider applicability and impact. However, at the same time, too-general questions can generate too much data, data that are not directly relevant to the research questions, or they can lead to designs that are difficult to apply in specific study frames (e.g., Mason, 2002; Schram, 2003). One example research question could ask, “How do science teachers handle topics with ethical implications and expressions of their own values in their classrooms?” This question enables researchers to investigate diverse ethical topics and teachers’ value-specific expressions. However, at the same time, the question of ethics and values becomes impossible to answer due to the infinite number of answers constructed within different schools of ethics (e.g., normative ethics, metaethics, and
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moral psychology). Therefore, the types of questions posed in qualitative research without clear variables to be tested are both answerable (situated, partial answer) and unanswerable (there is no “right” or singular answer to a research question). Another problematic decision involves difference and sameness in data. For example, Creswell (2007), Miles and Huberman (1994), and Patton (2002) refer to negative case analysis as a “validation strategy” and one way to solve possible conflicts between differences encountered in data and researchers’ desire to highlight sameness and internal generalizability. According to Creswell, “The researcher revises initial hypotheses until all cases fit, completing this process late in the data analysis and eliminating all outliers and exceptions” (p. 208). It is assumed that during this bidirectional move, the researcher will first identify similarities and later test them to exclude data that does not assimilate sameness. However, this validation strategy can create an impossible situation that might immobilize researchers and data—attempts to separate and eliminate the difference can erase the sameness. When the Other is characterized as a (non)category of the sameness, which is now eliminated, both the Other and sameness cease to exist. What previously characterized sameness no longer holds true when Otherness has been eliminated. Todd (2003) described this (non)identity, articulating that “the Other becomes an object of my comprehension, my world, my narrative, reducing the Other to me” (p. 15). In other words, researchers’ decision to eliminate the Other is not a decision at all, as Trifonas (2003) explains: A decision here without the possibility of choice, in this sense of achieving an informed claim to truth spurring the application of research, can be no decision at all because it denies responsibility for the Other and therefore denies the Other” (p. 293) Thus, it can be argued that when researchers attempt to create a border between themselves and the Other, or between sameness and difference in data, they are likely to fail because attempts to understand or to know the Other in terms of codes, principles, and rules related to sameness might ultimately result in a (non)category. Instead, unpredictable attentiveness and unexpected relationship with the Other could activate researchers’ responsibility and thus enable open and humble data interpretations, as well as study conclusions that avoid definite closure.
Coda My intention in this article was to (re)turn validity discussions to the responsibilities of a researcher. No matter how we conceptualize validity, I believe that scholars and authors should not promote practices that disable researchers’
responsibility. It can be dangerous for a field as diverse as qualitative inquiry to promote externalized and (semi) standardized discourses of validity because they tend to decontextualize and unnecessarily neutralize research practices. Although such “textbook” validity strategies as member checking, audit trail, negative case analysis, or triangulation can assist many qualitative researchers, it can be also illuminative to question these dogmas when in service for simplification and technicality. This complication of widely distributed “mechanics of validity” will work against discourses of standardization and generalization that leave no space for the collective power of diversity: Whenever, as educators or students, we try to do justice to the move between the particularities of our experiences and the universality of language we do so in the face of the impossibility of our task. Moreover, in this impossibility—this aporia—we are exposed in our responsibility for each other. (Edgoose, 2001, p. 130) We cannot and I believe should not settle diverse, conflicting, situated, and paradoxical discourses constructing validity in the name of efficiency or increased value of qualitative research. In fact, Derrida (1995) suggested that the exercise of responsibility seems to leave no choice but this one, however uncomfortable it may be, of paradox, heresy, and secrecy. More serious still, it must always run the risk of conversion and apostasy: there is not responsibility without a dissident and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine. (p. 27) Evink (2009) explained that responsibility is always infinite, because the other withdraws again and again and will never be in my grasp. There will not be a moment that I have fulfilled all my tasks and duties and that my responsibilities will have come to an end. (p. 475) Researchers’ ethical responsibilities to conduct meaningful and trustworthy research extend beyond duty, mechanical approaches, and predescribed solutions. From the perspective of situational ethics “responsible” researchers avoid constructing the colonized Other, describing Other in “neutral” and distant ways or dismissing the Other due to disempowering structures and practices. Instead, “responsible” researchers could strive for ongoing and disruptive dialogues with study participants and collaborative communities thus opening spaces for themselves and others to challenge the authorities of oppressors, to allow margins to speak, and to dislocate decolonizing privilege. Ethicality of
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Koro-Ljungberg researcher does not exist in vacuum; rather, it is accompanied by other virtues such as care, shared commitments to work for the good of others, belief in particularity, respect of practices and beliefs of others, agreement, consensus, and concerns for welfare and fairness. It should be noted that many of these virtues are highlighted, for example, in the feminist, indigenous, communitarian, and covenantal ethical practices (see, for example, Brabeck & Brabeck, 2009; Brydon-Miller, 2009; Chilisa, 2009; Denzin, 2003; Noddings, 1984; Tong, 1993) I do not know how to define or capture validity, but I believe that validity is in doing, as well as its (un)making, and it exhibits itself in the present paradox of knowing and unknowing, indecision, and border crossing. Validity can become possible in doing the impossible, allowing possibilities to develop. The urgency to make decisions and establish credible research practices without directives, guidelines, or precharacterized technicalities does not guarantee or produce validity, but it can activate the formation of validity without researchers’ intentional declaration of achieved or demonstrated practices. In the aporia of responsibility, “one always risks not managing to accede to the concept of responsibility in the process of forming it” (Derrida, 1995, p. 61). Finally, validity cannot be completed or concluded (see also Vagle, 2009)—it is precisely the “impossibility, impracticability, or nonpassage” (Derrida, 1993, p. 73) that characterizes validity and validation in qualitative research processes. The measuring and the measure itself change once the researcher allows interactions with data and participants to guide interpretations processes and when the researcher acknowledges how her or his subjectivity is likely to influence interpretations and conclusions. I advocate constructing validity as diverse and possible yet temporal and revisable—erasing it simultaneously creates both promises and compromises. What can the possibility of impossible validity in qualitative research be? Our responsibilities to make decisions and engage in “valid” research practices do not come to an end; rather, they emerge at the least unexpected times, at the times of theoretical confusion, loss of power, privilege, and logic, and at the times of methodological uncertainty. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
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Lather, P. (1993). Fertile obsession: Validity after poststructuralism. Sociological Quarterly, 34, 673-693. Lather, P. (2001). Postmodernism, post-structuralism and post (critical) ethnography: Of ruins, aporias and angels. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, & L. Lofland (Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 477-492). London: Sage. Lather, P. (2006). Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: Teaching research in education as a wild profusion. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(1), 35-57. Lather, P. (2007a). Validity, qualitative. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (pp. 5161-5165). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Lather, P. (2007b). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany: State University of New York Press. LeCompte, M., Millroy, W., & Preissle, J. (Ed.). (1992). The handbook of qualitative research in education. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Lincoln, Y. (2009). Ethical practices in qualitative research. In D. Mertens & P. Ginsberg (Eds.), The handbook of social research ethics (pp. 150-169). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lincoln, Y., & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Marshall, C., & Rossman, G. (2006). Designing qualitative research (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mason, J. (2002). Qualitative researching (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Maxwell, J. (1992). Understanding and validity in qualitative research. Harvard Educational Review, 62, 279-300. Maxwell, J. (2010). Validity: How might you be wrong? In W. Luttrell (Ed.), Qualitative educational research: Readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice (pp. 279-287). New York: Routledge. Mayan, M. (2009). Essentials of qualitative inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Miles, M., & Huberman, M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mishler, E. (1990). Validation in inquiry-guided research: The role of exemplars in narrative studies. Harvard Educational Review, 60, 415-442. Moss, P., Phillips, D., Erickson, F., Floden, R., Lather, P., & Schneider, B. (2009). Learning from our differences: A dialogue across perspectives on quality in educational research. Educational Researcher, 38, 501-517. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics & moral education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Patton, M. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Popke, J. (2004). The face of the other: Zapatismo, responsibility and the ethics of deconstruction. Social & Cultural Geography, 5, 301-317. Raffoul, F. (2008). Derrida and the ethics of the im-possible. Research in Phenomenology, 38, 270-290. Scheurich, J. (1997). Research method in the postmodern. London: Falmer. Schram, T. (2003). Conceptualizing qualitative inquiry: Mindwork for fieldwork in education and the social sciences. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Schwandt, T. (1997). Qualitative inquiry: A dictionary of terms. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. Spivak, G. (1997). Translator’s preface. In J. Derrida (Ed.), Of Grammatology (Corrected ed., pp. ix–lxxxvii). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thayer-Bacon, B. (2003). Relational “(e)pistemologies.” New York: Peter Lang. Todd, S. (2003). Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis, and ethical possibilities in education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tong, R. (1993). Feminine and feminist ethics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Trifonas, P. (2003). The ethics of science and/as research: Deconstruction and the orientations of a new academic responsibility. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35, 285-295. Vagle, M. (2009). Validity as intended: “Bursting forth toward” bridling in phenomenological research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22, 585-605. Wang, H. (2005). Aporias, responsibility, and the im/possibility of teaching multicultural education. Educational Theory, 55(1), 45-59. Watson, C. (2009). Picturing validity: Autoethnography and the representation of self? Qualitative Inquiry, 15, 526-544. Whittemore, R., Chase, S., & Mandle, C. (2001). Validity in qualitative research. Qualitative Health Research, 11, 522-537.
Bio Mirka Koro-Ljungberg is an associate professor of qualitative research methodology at the University of Florida, in the School of human development and organizational studies in education. She received her doctorate from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Florida she was a visiting scholar at the University of Georgia. Her research interests focus on the conceptual aspects and empirical applications of qualitative, experimental methods, and participant-driven methodologies.
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Validity, Responsibility, and Aporia Mirka Koro-Ljungberg Qualitative Inquiry 2010 16: 603 originally published online 11 June 2010 DOI: 10.1177/1077800410374034 The online version of this article can be found at: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/16/8/603
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Validity, Responsibility, and Aporia
Qualitative Inquiry 16(8) 603–610 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800410374034 http://qix.sagepub.com
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg1
Abstract In this article, the author problematizes external, objectified, oversimplified, and mechanical approaches to validity in qualitative research, which endorse simplistic and reductionist views of knowledge and data. Instead of promoting one generalizable definition or operational criteria for validity, the author’s “deconstructive validity work” addresses how validity can be framed in the context of researchers’ responsibility and decision making during the research process. More specifically, the author utilizes the concept of aporia to discuss researchers’ responsibilities in the face of impossible decisions when aiming for “valid” and trustworthy qualitative research practices. The author argues that qualitative researchers should reconsider the promotion of validity or validation practices that disable researchers’ responsibility. Alternatively, it could be illuminative to ask how impossible validity and ongoing puzzlement associated with the quality of qualitative research could influence current research practices and reporting. Keywords validity, responsibility, qualitative research, aporia
Validity in qualitative research literature has received considerable attention, and scholars have proposed a variety of conceptual and theoretical approaches to address it (e.g., Angen, 2000; Cho & Trent, 2006; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2004; Lather, 1993, 2007a; LeCompte, Millroy, & Preissle, 1992; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2010; Scheurich, 1997; Schwandt, 1997; Vagle, 2009). The existing literature has documented that validity can be defined in numerous ways and can function differently based on epistemological and theoretical variations. For the sake of the argument presented here, the concept of validity in qualitative research can encompass such terms as authenticity, credibility, confirmability, internal coherence, transferablity, reliability, and significance (see Lather, 2007a; Mayan, 2009). Furthermore, the question of whether research measures what it intended to measure could be posed to individual researchers, or the question could be answered by the communities in which research has taken place. It could be argued that the diversity associated with the validity question reflects various historical and conceptual movements in the field of qualitative inquiry (see, for example, Lather, 2007a). However, continuing discussions about research quality and validity among qualitative researchers are essential to avoid exclusions from current discourses and policy conversations that might significantly alter our work and influence the communities in which we conduct our research. I believe that, similar to the concept of paradigm proliferation, validity is a “good thing to think with” (see Lather, 2006), and I view
validity as a label that is “inaccurate yet necessary” (Spivak, 1997, p. xii). Despite the documented diversity associated with the validity question, validity in some introductory qualitative research textbooks and empirical research reports has become a standardized discourse that is often represented as one grand narrative circulated in doctoral programs and research training. Sometimes the postpositivist idea of validity is at the core of the constructed grand narrative, and validity is presented as a “cover of universality, its disingenuous naturalness, the ideological mask that convinces us of its own essential truth” (Watson, 2009, p. 527). Too often in qualitative research “the ideologeme of the valid research text is its materialization as ‘the world out there’, truthfully represented in the capture and display of the object of research” (p. 527). Externalized and objectified validity has turned into a signifier for good and valuable qualitative research, and audits (e.g., member checking, audit trail, and interrater reliability) can be used mechanically to guarantee and produce truthful representation of reality and “real” objects of research (see Mishler, 1990).
1
University of Florida
Corresponding Author: Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education, University of Florida, 119A Norman Hall, PO BOX 117047, Gainesville, FL 32611-0747 E-mail: [email protected]
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In this article, I take issue with external, objectified, oversimplified, and mechanical approaches to validity in qualitative research (see also Maxwell, 1992, 2010). Similar to Guba and Lincoln (1989) and Lincoln (2009) I call for the return of ethics in the context of validity. I worry that externalized notions and conceptualizations of validity promote simplistic and reductionist views of knowledge and data. Researchers’ desire for research “measures,” hypotheses, and verifiable factors that can be accurately implemented can reduce knowledge and data into controllable elements, fragments, and predetermined structures. Therefore, validity based on these premises tends to remove the researcher from the research context, providing external devices to manage and control validity. Popke (2004) argued that “the discourses of modernity, by attempting to legislate certainty [of validity], have in fact created the conditions of possibility for an abdication of our ethical responsibility” (p. 302). Validity in qualitative research could thus benefit from a continuous and radical reconceptualization—radical enough to create strong and compelling alternative arguments that move away from validity as a permanent and firm sign of normalization and dangerous indicator of ultimate external authority guarding research quality. Scheurich (1997) has also questioned the usefulness of dichotomies associated with validity (i.e., valid/invalid, acceptable/not acceptable) and calls for “subversive conversations on validity as the wild, uncontrollable play of difference” (p. 90). Lather (2007a, b) and Watson (2009) continued such reconstructive validity work. Lather (2007b), for example, has called for validity that reflects the “researcher’s ability to explore the resources of different contemporary inquiry problematics” (p. 120), which redirects the focus of the validity question toward the researcher. Similarly, in this article I discuss and reflect on what is lost when mechanical approaches to validity are implemented and how validity can be recontextualized in relation to individual responsibility. I am interested in exploring what can be gained by thinking outside the grand narrative of validity and by moving toward “nonpresent possibilities” and complexities of validity. More specifically, I advocate for (re)turning validity to ethics—not as an indication of duty but as a response toward the Other and unknown. I am interested in validity as unpredictable, uncertain, and undecidable yet immediate and urgent response to the call from the Other. I would also like to promote discussions on validity as a predicament for ethics in practice or situational ethics. For example, when urgently and in situ responding to the Other researchers are faced with the questions of social justice, privilege, and power. The right of researchers to impose their ideology on study participants, the right of oppressed individuals to take part in the study design and contribute to knowledge production, and the question of who benefits from research and how are not only questions of ethics but are also questions of credibility,
trustworthiness, and significance of qualitative research. In the following sections I elaborate how validity can be related to responsibility, then I discuss in more detail the aporic character of responsibility. Finally, I illustrate how responsibility as aporia can stimulate an alternative conceptualization of validity and validation.
Validity in Relation to Responsibility It is not my intention to review conceptualizations and definitions of validity that could be applied to qualitative research because many authors have already done that (e.g., Angen, 2000; Cho & Trent, 2006; Creswell, 2007; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2004; Lather, 1993, 2007a; LeCompte et al., 1992; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2010; Scheurich, 1997; Whittemore, Chase, & Mandle, 2001). Nevertheless, I briefly refer to my previous work on validity because this article continues the validity work I began some years ago. In my previous work I refer to two views of validity, namely, reductionist and (e)pistemological (for more about (e)pistemology, see Thayer-Bacon, 2003). For example, reductionist views of validity promote singularity based on a priori selection criteria. Furthermore, they imply that a particular criterion— for example, expert external evaluation or methodological specificity—produces trustworthiness and legitimacy to research. However, a single, realistic truth and a transcendental criterion for validity can become problematic because it limits how truth can be conceptualized. (E)pistemological validation alternatively suggests that validity and validation involve “knowers build[ing] assertions warranted by their individual, collective, and spiritual experiences within social worlds, as well as the ways in which they engage in dialogue about their assertions with their environment” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2008, p. 986). Moreover, the interconnectedness between reality and subjects, viewing knowledge as a process, and the perspective of pluralism characterize this perspective. Such conceptualizations of validity in qualitative research could be responsive to complex, situated, fragmented, and changing knowledge that characterizes the broad and multilayered field of qualitative inquiry. The documentation, reflection, or evaluation of researchers’ actions in regard to validity cannot take place outside the researchers themselves. However, evaluation of researchers’ actions becomes challenging if conducted only externally without investigating and reflecting on researchers’ responsibilities and how they have been carried out. Researchers are ultimately responsible for their decisions and doing “good,” meaningful, trustworthy, and valid research—they cannot escape their responsibilities or leave the rigor or trustworthiness of their research for others to create, inspect, or evaluate. Instead, it could be beneficial for qualitative researchers to face the impossibilities of unified and strictly
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Koro-Ljungberg bound validity or validation processes (e.g., label, epistemologies, functions, implementation, and correspondence criteria), which can expose tensions that might activate, enable, and foster researchers’ responsibility. Wang proposed that a Derridian sense of responsibility responds to the “call from the Other,” opening up oneself to ruptures that are shaped by difference and things to come. In the context of research, responding to the call from the Other implies theoretically and methodologically unlimited and ongoing movement toward the unknown and beyond one’s established knowledge. Engagement with the edge, or the borderline, is a precondition for responsibility (Wang, 2005). Derrida (2005) explained that “to be responsible is both to answer for oneself and for the legacy, before that which precedes us, and to answer, before the others, before that which is coming and remains to come” (p. 139). In the context of qualitative inquiry, “responsible” researchers could possibly be seen as methodologically uncertain and responsive by revising and reconceptualizing the research purposes, processes, techniques, and approaches, as well as interactions with participants and data based on changing social circumstances and rapid shifts in power. Responsibility of a researcher includes but at the same times moves beyond duty, reflectivity, IRB guidelines, or protection of human subjects. I argue that “responsible” researcher takes into consideration historical conditions and persisting forms of inequity and oppression while acknowledging the limits of her or his knowledge. In addition, responsible scholars in the context of contemporary qualitative research are committed to change, (de)centering the margins, and meeting the unknown. Cannella and Perez (2009) referred to egalitarian activism as one way to promote researchers’ responsibilities and social justice. I agree with Cannella and Perez who ask how our skills as researchers can be most beneficial to groups struggling to resist oppression, but I would also further inquire how researchers’ skills could be adjusted, modified, or reconceptualized to help communities to stay informed when power is rapidly shifting or exploitation seems likely. In addition, “responsible” researchers are faced with dilemmas without prescribed answers. This space of uncertainty and indecision requires scholars to be present and open to other ways of knowing and doing. In other words, scholars operate in the passage between valid and invalid research without knowing where to go and without ever completing valid research projects. In this state of uncertainty, validity can show itself. Furthermore, for validity to take place, researchers ought to free themselves from calculative techniques and processes of validation and face the ultimate responsibility: the unknown. When validity is predetermined and presented as mechanical or technical, it releases scholars from many, if not all, responsibilities and decisions. Unexpected events during the
research process or unforeseen interactions with participants require scholars to react immediately. However, these reactions could be preprogrammed, and decisions could have been made ahead of time. Possible preprogrammed decisions could include the collection of additional information about negative cases when data appear conflicting and overly diversified, ethical procedures required by institutional review boards to guarantee the protection of participants, step-bystep data analysis, or reliance on senior scholars for advice. In these preprogrammed situations, researchers are not risking the possibility of doing research “wrong.” Rather, when they count on doing research “right,” they do not respond to genuine responsibility or affirm a new identity (see Derrida, 1997). Moreover, responsibility in this context does not mean that researchers need to choose between two options, right or wrong. From this perspective, responsibility is not about choices; rather, it is beyond being. Responsibility is a priori to knowledge and changes who we are as researchers; it asks researchers to welcome the Other, to continuously stay sensitized to data and unexpected interactions with participants and communities. According to Derrida (1995), responsibility will not be accomplished, and it is precisely the impossibility of the decision making related to the research process that can make qualitative researchers responsible. Responsibility is always escaping, and individuals are responsible for other things to come. In other words, if the Other is always coming, scholars and researchers are always responsible. Even after presentations, publications, and completed study summary reports, responsibility is not over; knowledge projects are continually changing, and more data and new knowledge are being constructed beyond our intentions and efforts as researchers. Responsibility can also be associated with urgency in decision making. Derrida (1995) encouraged us to not only make decisions here and now but at the same time question our decisions to deny closure. Similarly, in the context of research, qualitative researchers are also often faced with urgent and in situ decisions related to different aspects of research process, such as how to deal with no-show participants, handle data that were partially erased by an accident, account for changes in a research team and primary investigators, or prioritize when funding becomes limited. Often the circular nature of qualitative inquiry also fosters indefinite, contextual, and temporal decision making. Furthermore, aporia related to responsibility cannot be logically described but must be felt, lived, and experienced. Only when researchers become aware of the limitations of (mechanical) validity can they respond responsibly and begin to negotiate the limits of validity. It is also important to emphasize that discussions about researchers’ responsibilities in this context do not promote methodological randomness. Rather, it could be argued that
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responsibility is often preceded by epistemological and methodological awareness, including knowledge of traditions, research approaches, and methodologies. Nevertheless, even though methodological and epistemological awareness could assist researchers faced with impossible decisions, awareness does not necessarily promote responsibility. For example, awareness could lead to oversimplified and direct applications of knowledge, and therefore, representing “methodological banking,” in which literature, course work, other scholars, and textbooks solutions are used in decontextualized ways to inform research design and other research-related decisions. Methodological banking might also become researchers’ only way to prepare for uncertainty in research processes. This limited preparedness from an ethical and Derridian standpoint enables researchers to escape responsibility and ultimately avoid decision making.
Aporia of Responsibility and Decision Making Aporia, Greek for difficulty, puzzle, or impassable, plays a significant role in Derrida’s conceptualization of ethical responsibility and decision making. Also viewed as “a momentary paralysis in the face of the impasse, it is the ‘testing out of the undecidable; only in this testing can a decision come about’” (Derrida, 2005, p. 154). According to Derrida (1993), without experiencing aporia, there is no responsibility; he asks: “Who would call a decision that is without rule, without norm, without determinable or determined law, a decision? . . . Who will dare call duty a duty that owes nothing, or better (or, worse) that must owe nothing?” (p. 17). Responsible decision can thus resolve paradoxical and impossible situations. Raffoul (2008) also states that for Derrida ethics of responsibility relate to a problematic of decision: ethical decision or responsible decision. Similarly, I am proposing here that some forms and conceptualizations of validity in qualitative research must take place outside technicalities, predetermined conditions, and rules. Responsibility is not an act of duty, nor is it following a rule or calculation (see Evink, 2009). Derrida (1995) illustrated the aporia of responsibility as follows: Saying that a responsible decision must be taken on the basis of knowledge seems to define the condition of possibility of responsibility (one can’t make a responsible decision without science or conscience, without knowing what one is doing, for what reasons, in view of what and under what conditions), at the same time as it defines the condition of impossibility of this same responsibility (if decision-making is relegated to a knowledge that it is content to follow or to develop, then it is no more a responsible decision, it is technical deployment of a cognitive
apparatus, the simple mechanistic deployment of a theorem). (p. 24) Derrida (1995) also explains that “the activating of responsibility (decision, act, praxis) will always take place before and beyond any theoretical or thematic determination” (p. 26). Furthermore, “It is in the very event of exceeding borderlines—an impossible passage—that aporia is experienced” (Wang, 2005, p. 46). In the process of exceeding borderlines and impossible passages, the aporias of suspension, undecidability, and urgency both enable and disable researchers’ responsibility (see Edgoose, 2001). Situating aporia and responsibility in the qualitative research context, Lather’s (as cited in Moss et al., 2009) conceptualization of rigor or reflective competence can be seen as a pretext to my aporic notions of validity presented in this paper. Lather (as cited in Moss et al., 2009) proposed that validity is associated with how scientific credibility is created—she looks for research that has some sense of the history, sociology, philosophy, ethics of inquiry, and what might be called a rigor of reflective competence. . . . Validity is far more about deep theoretical and political issues than about a technical issue or an issue of allegiance to correct procedure. (p. 506) In addition, Lather’s (2001, 2007b) views on aporia and her examples of aporic “stuck places” in ethnography, ethics, representation, and interpretation provide me a plateau from which to read aporia in the validity context highlighted in this article. I use both Derrida’s and Lather’s perspectives on aporia as entryways to my reflections on validity and as connections to unfoldings of my own stuck places within validity. More specifically, I apply Derrida’s aporia of responsibility to validity and assume within/against location similar to Lather (2001) by building on the existing knowledge (historicity of validity in qualitative research) and at the same time acknowledging the uncertainty of my intentions, knowings, and these reflections on validity. In this way, validity as proposed here is both becoming and passing by thus marking its own limits. The exploration of the possibilities of validity marks a return to validity’s aporias, to stuck places, and to leaps of faith. Raffoul (2008) argued that it is in the impossible that the “ethicality of ethics” (p. 273) should be situated. Similarly, thinking about the validity of validity signifies the limits of validity. Limits and the impossibility of validity does not mean that validity cannot be, but it complicates the notions and understandings about validity, alluding to the conceptualizations of validity that take place outside expected and anticipated conditions. “The attempt to recognize the aporia requires us to be actively engaged with
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Koro-Ljungberg contradictions in order not only to respond responsibly in the present but also to open up nonpresent possibilities” (Wang, 2005, p. 51). The credibility of research or findings might have more to do with choices researchers make rather than established and documented procedures. Reflecting Raffoul’s view of ethical responsibility as a matter of invention rather than an application of rule or procedure, new research processes require inventions—inventions of theories, designs, methods, and validity. Invention, in turn, is fraught with impossibility. This impossibility and indecision that researchers encounter when inventing and constructing a research design is a condition of responsibility. “Including when a decision is made, it remains confronted with the undecidable that makes it possible as decision” (Raffoul, 2008, p. 284). Similar to being able to face indecision, the position of not knowing or methodological uncertainty could accompany decision making as visualized by Derrida. For decision to be, initially researchers must not know what to do next. The introduction of Derrida’s conceptualization of responsibility moves beyond many existing perspectives. For example, to draw trustworthy conclusions and implications from data that Eisenhart and Howe (1992) associate with validity, qualitative researchers go through complex decisionmaking processes. Rather than focusing on the outcomes, such as trustworthy findings or representative conclusions, I argue that it could be illuminating to reflect on how scholars attain trustworthy conclusions. In addition, I am also less interested in emphasizing the role of such “validation strategies” as triangulation, peer review, or member checking (see, for example, Creswell, 2007; Marshall & Rossman, 2006; Maxwell, 2010 for more about validation strategies). Instead, my interest lies in the events, points, and spaces of (im)possible and aporetic decision making and how they can activate responsibility and possibly lead to increased value of research. Validity as a term can imply that trustworthy conclusions are a result of well-executed and completed analysis that can “capture,” identify, locate, or represent participants’ positions and perspectives. The completion of analysis, in turn, involves the decision between closure and infinity of perspectives, interpretations, and findings. However, I argue that this decision is uncertain and possible impossible. I wonder when a qualitative study becomes complete. When does a researcher decide that analysis has been finished, triangulation has been successful, interpretations have been saturated, and interactions with data have come to an end? Sometimes instructors, including me, teach in the introductory methods courses about the mechanical completion of “analytical steps,” such as constant comparison, thematic analysis, lexicalization, and textural-structural synthesis and how completion of these steps indicates the conclusion of data analysis. However, textbook data analysis descriptions do not stipulate exact time and place when and where analysis
begins or ends. Therefore, even the most rigorous implementation or direct application of textbook analysis approaches does not guarantee increased value of research, trustworthy conclusions, representativeness, or validity. Mechanical application of analytical steps and decontextualized implementation of analysis processes might still avoid the question of responsibility and decision making, even though situatedness and complexity of analysis processes ask researchers to decide when, how, and why to begin and conclude analysis or other interactions with the data. From this perspective, the completion of the data-analysis process might not be accurately captured by arbitrary decision related to timing. Rather, the ending could be prompted by successful, illuminative, and productive processes of discovery. The decision to conclude data analysis is, therefore, always arbitrary and uncertain. There exists no exact way to know or illustrate when analytical processes are finished, saturated, and explanatory of the entire data set. Similarly, it is impossible to say when new themes, linguistic elements, discourses, or insights will no longer emerge or cannot be further identified. At the same time, there exists urgency to report the findings, publish, and write summary reports to funding agencies. It is with uncertainty that researchers decide analysis does not need to be continued or no more analytical insights might emerge at the moment. This decision becomes even more challenging if researchers continue to interact with data and study participants after systematic or “official” data collection has ended. The matter of a general versus specific focus in research can also affect credibility and internal coherence. For example, at the time of developing research questions, and later during data collection and analysis phases, researchers face decisions related to the focus of their research design and direction of analytical attention. Decisions need to be made regarding the level of specificity of research questions. In the context of qualitative research, questions should be general enough to provide flexibility and allow possible adjustments due to fieldwork (e.g., Hatch, 2002; Marshall & Rossman, 2006). In addition, research questions that have more general focus can have wider applicability and impact. However, at the same time, too-general questions can generate too much data, data that are not directly relevant to the research questions, or they can lead to designs that are difficult to apply in specific study frames (e.g., Mason, 2002; Schram, 2003). One example research question could ask, “How do science teachers handle topics with ethical implications and expressions of their own values in their classrooms?” This question enables researchers to investigate diverse ethical topics and teachers’ value-specific expressions. However, at the same time, the question of ethics and values becomes impossible to answer due to the infinite number of answers constructed within different schools of ethics (e.g., normative ethics, metaethics, and
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moral psychology). Therefore, the types of questions posed in qualitative research without clear variables to be tested are both answerable (situated, partial answer) and unanswerable (there is no “right” or singular answer to a research question). Another problematic decision involves difference and sameness in data. For example, Creswell (2007), Miles and Huberman (1994), and Patton (2002) refer to negative case analysis as a “validation strategy” and one way to solve possible conflicts between differences encountered in data and researchers’ desire to highlight sameness and internal generalizability. According to Creswell, “The researcher revises initial hypotheses until all cases fit, completing this process late in the data analysis and eliminating all outliers and exceptions” (p. 208). It is assumed that during this bidirectional move, the researcher will first identify similarities and later test them to exclude data that does not assimilate sameness. However, this validation strategy can create an impossible situation that might immobilize researchers and data—attempts to separate and eliminate the difference can erase the sameness. When the Other is characterized as a (non)category of the sameness, which is now eliminated, both the Other and sameness cease to exist. What previously characterized sameness no longer holds true when Otherness has been eliminated. Todd (2003) described this (non)identity, articulating that “the Other becomes an object of my comprehension, my world, my narrative, reducing the Other to me” (p. 15). In other words, researchers’ decision to eliminate the Other is not a decision at all, as Trifonas (2003) explains: A decision here without the possibility of choice, in this sense of achieving an informed claim to truth spurring the application of research, can be no decision at all because it denies responsibility for the Other and therefore denies the Other” (p. 293) Thus, it can be argued that when researchers attempt to create a border between themselves and the Other, or between sameness and difference in data, they are likely to fail because attempts to understand or to know the Other in terms of codes, principles, and rules related to sameness might ultimately result in a (non)category. Instead, unpredictable attentiveness and unexpected relationship with the Other could activate researchers’ responsibility and thus enable open and humble data interpretations, as well as study conclusions that avoid definite closure.
Coda My intention in this article was to (re)turn validity discussions to the responsibilities of a researcher. No matter how we conceptualize validity, I believe that scholars and authors should not promote practices that disable researchers’
responsibility. It can be dangerous for a field as diverse as qualitative inquiry to promote externalized and (semi) standardized discourses of validity because they tend to decontextualize and unnecessarily neutralize research practices. Although such “textbook” validity strategies as member checking, audit trail, negative case analysis, or triangulation can assist many qualitative researchers, it can be also illuminative to question these dogmas when in service for simplification and technicality. This complication of widely distributed “mechanics of validity” will work against discourses of standardization and generalization that leave no space for the collective power of diversity: Whenever, as educators or students, we try to do justice to the move between the particularities of our experiences and the universality of language we do so in the face of the impossibility of our task. Moreover, in this impossibility—this aporia—we are exposed in our responsibility for each other. (Edgoose, 2001, p. 130) We cannot and I believe should not settle diverse, conflicting, situated, and paradoxical discourses constructing validity in the name of efficiency or increased value of qualitative research. In fact, Derrida (1995) suggested that the exercise of responsibility seems to leave no choice but this one, however uncomfortable it may be, of paradox, heresy, and secrecy. More serious still, it must always run the risk of conversion and apostasy: there is not responsibility without a dissident and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine. (p. 27) Evink (2009) explained that responsibility is always infinite, because the other withdraws again and again and will never be in my grasp. There will not be a moment that I have fulfilled all my tasks and duties and that my responsibilities will have come to an end. (p. 475) Researchers’ ethical responsibilities to conduct meaningful and trustworthy research extend beyond duty, mechanical approaches, and predescribed solutions. From the perspective of situational ethics “responsible” researchers avoid constructing the colonized Other, describing Other in “neutral” and distant ways or dismissing the Other due to disempowering structures and practices. Instead, “responsible” researchers could strive for ongoing and disruptive dialogues with study participants and collaborative communities thus opening spaces for themselves and others to challenge the authorities of oppressors, to allow margins to speak, and to dislocate decolonizing privilege. Ethicality of
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Koro-Ljungberg researcher does not exist in vacuum; rather, it is accompanied by other virtues such as care, shared commitments to work for the good of others, belief in particularity, respect of practices and beliefs of others, agreement, consensus, and concerns for welfare and fairness. It should be noted that many of these virtues are highlighted, for example, in the feminist, indigenous, communitarian, and covenantal ethical practices (see, for example, Brabeck & Brabeck, 2009; Brydon-Miller, 2009; Chilisa, 2009; Denzin, 2003; Noddings, 1984; Tong, 1993) I do not know how to define or capture validity, but I believe that validity is in doing, as well as its (un)making, and it exhibits itself in the present paradox of knowing and unknowing, indecision, and border crossing. Validity can become possible in doing the impossible, allowing possibilities to develop. The urgency to make decisions and establish credible research practices without directives, guidelines, or precharacterized technicalities does not guarantee or produce validity, but it can activate the formation of validity without researchers’ intentional declaration of achieved or demonstrated practices. In the aporia of responsibility, “one always risks not managing to accede to the concept of responsibility in the process of forming it” (Derrida, 1995, p. 61). Finally, validity cannot be completed or concluded (see also Vagle, 2009)—it is precisely the “impossibility, impracticability, or nonpassage” (Derrida, 1993, p. 73) that characterizes validity and validation in qualitative research processes. The measuring and the measure itself change once the researcher allows interactions with data and participants to guide interpretations processes and when the researcher acknowledges how her or his subjectivity is likely to influence interpretations and conclusions. I advocate constructing validity as diverse and possible yet temporal and revisable—erasing it simultaneously creates both promises and compromises. What can the possibility of impossible validity in qualitative research be? Our responsibilities to make decisions and engage in “valid” research practices do not come to an end; rather, they emerge at the least unexpected times, at the times of theoretical confusion, loss of power, privilege, and logic, and at the times of methodological uncertainty. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
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Bio Mirka Koro-Ljungberg is an associate professor of qualitative research methodology at the University of Florida, in the School of human development and organizational studies in education. She received her doctorate from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Florida she was a visiting scholar at the University of Georgia. Her research interests focus on the conceptual aspects and empirical applications of qualitative, experimental methods, and participant-driven methodologies.
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