Styles of Collaboration in Qualitative Inquiry

With funding agencies demanding interdisciplinary proposals, team research is fast becoming the key to successful grant applications. This trend is supported in universities, where there is a push toward transdisciplinarity. Facilitated by the establishment of institutes and centers, the traditional college boundaries are breaking down. What are the implications of this trend for qualitative research? Traditionally, qualitative inquiry was conducted by lone researchers or, at most, within long-established research partnerships. In the early days, the closest we came to team research was probably the way Glaser and Strauss worked with their cadre of doctoral students. It is the nature of qualitative analysis, and the significance of interpretation, that demands that qualitative research be conducted by a single investigator or by a few investigators working closely together. The “researcher as the (analytic) tool” necessitates that to do qualitative inquiry, the researcher must get inside the data—a feat that requires the researcher to conduct the interviews himself or herself, do the majority of the coding, and lead the theoretical development of the project. Such a commitment—and it is a commitment—is timeconsuming. In the terms of the National Institutes of Health, a commitment of 100% summers and at least 50% during the school year is barely adequate to allow for the necessary time for theoretical development and completion of a project. Unfortunately, the development of computer-assisted qualitative analysis does not increase the efficiency of interpretative inquiry immeasurably; it takes time for ideas to mature and for comprehension to be attained. Furthermore, the time commitment such work entails is a luxury only dissertation students may enjoy. The pressure to publish on a regular basis and the competing demands of teaching and faculty meetings do not support this type of research and scholarship. If one is to do excellent qualitative research, qualitative analysis has two major difficulties to surmount. First is the “making” of excellent data. Our interviews are not tightly scripted, and the obtaining of good interview data depends on the interviewer’s skill in establishing rapport and guiding the interview according to a deep knowledge of theory, the project’s agenda, and what has been learned thus far in the project from previous interviews. Observational data are also difficult to focus and record, and gathering them is a skill that is not easily learned. The second difficulty in analysis is how does the principal investigator (PI) “get inside the head” of a research assistant (RA) who may have conducted the interview? How does the PI gain adequate knowledge of the interview, the interviewee, and the context to be able to comprehend these data to their fullest? There are “tricks”: One way, suggested long ago by Katharyn May, is to interview the interviewer. She explained that when her RAs came back from the interview, she waited in her office to “hear all about it.” Clearly, this does not save very much time, but it is a reasonable compromise.