The Bits on the Cutting Room Floor: Erasures and Denials Within the Qualitative Research Trajectory: (606572013-001)

While positivistic researchers follow the objectivity model where affect and relationships are seen as contaminating variables that can and should be excised, qualitative researchers value emotion and relationships as central to both the purpose of the research and the conduct of it. How we live these values in our work is through a rigorous set of methodological guidelines including memoing, reflexivity, using a different gauge of validity, and explicitly acknowledging emotion and relationships in our reports. Despite these guidelines, however, many qualitative researchers also engage in erasures of our research processes at three levels. What is off the record are the aspects of the qualitative research trajectory that the researcher is aware of but which never makes it outside of the researcher’s mind. What is off the books are all the parts of the process that were part of the initial record, but were erased in the publication process. What is off the charts are all the parts that are integral to the qualitative research process, but which fail to puncture even the consciousness of the researcher, or which are so alien to what is supposed to be happening, they remain unacknowledged. While the first two layers of erasure – what is off the record and off the books – are influenced by the academic reality of publishing in mainstream journals, I suggest that the third level of erasure – that which is off the charts – is something that we as qualitative researchers are uniquely responsible for thinking about and addressing in our work.