17 Mar 97
Clark Quinn

While I am greatly sympathetic to the overall thrust expressed in Ian's message, taking a rather "action-oriented" approach myself, the following I find to somewhat trouble me:

[quoting Hart's paper] According to Richards (1992), the test of the ultimate conclusion is to see how elegantly and methodically the evidence was shaped into the conclusion, how the conclusion was coaxed (never forced) to "emerge" from the data, "how evidence and grand account form a well-connected, seamless web of belief that illuminates and enriches our perceptions and understanding of phenomena we see every day. To be credible, the report must show these processes in action, and demonstrate how the conclusions were reached."

I realize it's couched in careful terms, but it still feels like massaging the data rather than reading from it. I do recognize times when you do more exploratory work and do not have a particular hypothesis you are trying to support, but I also believe you can use qualitative research to support more explicit hypotheses. Then you use converging evidence from several forms of data. You do make an argument, but it's not coaxing an argument from the data, but making a compelling argument about the data. Perhaps I'm niggling, but I would worry that the above might undermine an otherwise compelling discussion.

Dr Clark N. Quinn
Director of Development
Access Australia Cooperative Multimedia Centre
Adjunct Senior Lecturer
School of Computer Science and Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA

Phone: +61-2-9385-3985
Fax: +61-2-9385-5995
E-mail: C.Quinn@unsw.edu.au