Current Issues in Qualitative Research

An Occasional Publication for Field Researchers from a Variety of Disciplines

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Volume 1, Number 7 August 2010
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Qualitative  Researchers  Aren’t  the  Only  Ones  

Who  Struggle  to  Make  Sense  of  Data    
Jane  F.  Gilgun  
University  of  Minnesota,  Twin  Cities,  USA  
 

Q ualitative researchers sometimes have no idea what their findings mean. Educated,
smart, and theoretically sensitive, researchers’ findings may be outside of their
experience. So, we can describe it. We can make typologies with clever names, but we
don’t get it. If the purpose of our research is to advance the social good, we may be hampered in
our efforts when we can’t explain the events we’ve studied.
The same has happened with educated, smart, and theoretically sensitive financial
analysts who have all the data they could ever want about the five-minute 600-point plunge of
the stock market in May. They’ve made charts, graphs, and typologies. They’ve read economic
theory and the history of economics. They’ve interviewed experts. They’ve talked among
themselves. They’ve coined a clever term to describe the drop: “flash crash.” But they don’t
know what happened. If they are to prevent such crashes again, they have to know what
happened.
Combinations of Induction and Deduction
In trying to figure out what happened, financial analysts do the same kinds of thinking
that qualitative researchers do. They have studied the data and theorized from it. They have come
up with theories, such as sabotage, cyber warfare, fraud, and the mindless coming together of
multiple influences. No one theory or combinations of theories appear to fit the situation.
Financial analysts can theorize because they have a lot of knowledge about financial
markets. The type of theorizing they are doing is neither inductive nor deductive. It is both. They
are inspecting data that have some familiar characteristics, but that also have much they don’t
understand. They call upon their storehouses of knowledge to see if their ideas fit and help
explain, organize, and make sense of their data. They are doing pattern matching. So far, they
have not developed a pattern that matches.
Qualitative researchers do the same thing. There is no such thing as pure induction. We
do induction and deduction. We come to each data set with a storehouse of ideas. If there are
several researchers, there are several storehouses of ideas. We try all kinds of ideas to see how
they help us organize and understand.
About the Author
Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is a professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota,
Twin Cities, USA. Her articles, books, & children’s stories are available on Amazon Kindle, the
Apple store, & scribd.com/professorjane for a variety of mobile devices.

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 We know the dangers of seeing what we expect to see. We seek exceptions to our
emerging ideas. Like financial analysts, we do pattern matching. We include outliers and study
them. Outliers may be key, much like the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Salta, South America, that
eventually culminates in thunderstorms in Waterloo, Canada.
Sometimes We Just Don’t Know
Sometimes despite our best thinking and despite following the most trustworthy
procedures, we still don’t know what is going on in our data—or what is going on in the real
world in which we are interested. We are left with mysteries.
In the case of the stock market, players now fear that another flash crash can happen.
They fear the loss of money and status. Uncertainty in the market can become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Our ailing economy in combination with fear of flash crashes could combine with
other events to create a perfect storm—in this case, a prolonged crash.
Conclusion
How market analysts try to understand market phenomena is similar to how qualitative
researchers try to understand social phenomena. Combinations of deduction and induction are
what we do as we analyze and try to understand data.
The more complex the issues we study, the more complex our explanations have to be.
When we are able to explain complex phenomena, we have called upon many bodies of
knowledge using a combination of induction and deduction. Along the way, we may also have
had the good luck to stumble upon some illuminating ideas that fit.
References & Further Reading
Blumer, Herbert (1986), Symbolic interactionism. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Bowley, Graham (2010). Stock swing still baffles, ominously. New York Times, August
23, p. B1, B2.
  Campbell,  Donald  T.  (1979).  “Degrees  of  freedom”  and  the  case  study.  In  Thomas  D.  
Cook   &   Charles   S.   Reichardt   (Eds.),   Qualitative   and   quantitative   methods   in   evaluation  
research.  (pp.  49-­‐67).  Beverly  Hills,  CA:  Sage.  
Gilgun, Jane F. (in press). Qualitative research: Enduring themes and contemporary
variations. In Gary F. Peterson & Kevin Bush (Eds.). Handbook of Marriage and the Family (3rd
ed.). New York: Plenum.
Gilgun, Jane F. (2010). A primer  on  deductive  qualitative  analysis  as  theory  testing  &  theory  
development.  Current  Issues  in  Qualitative  Research,1(3).  
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35886233/A-­‐Primer-­‐on-­‐Deductive-­‐Qualitative-­‐Analysis-­‐as-­‐
Theory-­‐Testing-­‐Theory-­‐Development  
Gilgun,  Jane  F.  (2010).  Dilemmas  in  qualitative  research:  Finding  the  framework.  
Current  Issues  in  Qualitative  Research,  1(1).  
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35667697/Dilemmas-­‐in-­‐Qualitative-­‐Research-­‐Finding-­‐the-­‐
Organizing-­‐Framework  
Gilgun, Jane F. (2005). Qualitative research and family psychology. Journal of Family
Psychology,19(1), 40-50. (invited and peer blind reviewed)

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About This Publication
Current Issues in Qualitative Research is an occasional publication for field researchers in a
variety of disciplines. Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is the editor and publisher. To submit
articles to this publication, Professor Gilgun cordially invites researchers to email brief articles of
three to five pages to her at jgilgun@umn.edu. Field researchers are individuals who do in-depth
work with informants in the settings in which informants live their lives. If they do interviews,
the interviews are in-depth and seek to understand individuals within their particular situations.

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