Small, Mario Luis and Jessica McCrory Calarco. 2022. Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. University of California Press.
This (short) book lays out clear standards by which outsiders can judge the quality of qualitative empirical research in the social sciences. It has in mind in particular ethnographic work, in which the researcher embeds themselves into a context, thoughtfully observes, takes lots of notes, and then attempts to construct meaning from the notes. It also discusses, and applies the same conceptual framework to, research based on in-depth semi-structured interviews. I am a sometimes consumer of ethnographies and have often wished for a book like this one, as I, not at all surprisingly, never received any formal training in ethnographic methods along the way, though I could certainly rank the many ethnographies I have read over the years on some implicit quality scale.
The authors organize their book around the notions of cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Cognitive empathy comes first, and has a special salience in polarized times when it seems deficient on all sides. But ethnographers really need it in a way that ordinary folk do not, for without it they can never hope to really understand their subjects. Heterogeneity basically means that if everyone in some group comes off as identical, then the ethnographer has done a bad job, in the sense that they have surely missed important features of those they purport to study. Palpability means sharing telling details rather than just offering generalities. Follow-up means investigating interesting bits as they come up during fieldwork (or in a long-form interview). Put differently, it means not rigidly adhering to some ex ante research plan. In qualitative work, as in quantitative work, the most interesting bits will sometimes be those that depart from the explicit or implicit "pre-analysis plan", which of course does not imply that the pre-analysis plan was not worth doing. And self-awareness means the researcher needs to thing about how they - their features and their words and their behavior - affect the content of their research.
Overall, a remarkably clear and concise guide. Nothing was super surprising to me, but I found the value-added from organizing the material into a clean conceptual framework and providing many examples both real and contrived quite large.
Recommended to consumers (and producers!) of qualitative research.
I ordered this book from the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago.
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