Knowledge in crystallization

crystallization

Qualitative methods illuminate both the ordinary within the worlds of fabulous people and events and also the fabulous elements of ordinary, mundane lives. How to represent the truths we generate remains an open question. The interpretive turn in social sciences, education, and allied health fields inspired a wide variety of creative forms of representation of qualitative findings, including narratives, poetry, personal essays, performances, and mixed-genre/ multimedia texts as alternatives to the hegemony of traditional social scientific research reporting strategies that pervaded the academy (e.g., Denzin, 1997). At the same time, scholars updated traditionally positivist or postpositivist approaches to grounded theory (inductive, constant comparative) analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) by bringing them around the interpretive turn and situating them in social constructivist (Charmaz, 2000),  ONE 1 01-Ellingson-45623:01-Ellingson-45623 7/2/2008 2:50 PM Page 1 postmodern (Clarke, 2005), and social justice/activist (Charmaz, 2005) frameworks. In both inductive analytic (e.g., grounded theory) and more artistic approaches to qualitative research, researchers abandoned claims of objectivity in favor of focusing on the situated researcher and the social construction of meaning