One of the most important features of qualitative research is flexibility, and it's also one of the most important good practices in qualitative research, and for me, it's where the beauty of qualitative research actually starts. And for me there are two aspects of qualitative research that I really, really, really like, and that is the participatory aspect. You are using, in qualitative research, very often, very participative methods such as participant observation but obviously, also, open interviews. And it means that you're involved in the field and you're actually with the people you are researching. So that's a beautiful aspect of research, but there's also another one that I really, really like and that's the relationship between data and theory. Whereas in qualitative research this is rather strict, boring, stable, but in qualitative research it's much more flexible. It means you need a lot of interpretation. You need creativity. You need imagination, the famous sociological imagination and it's very often also an embodied way of knowing. So in qualitative research, for me the beauty lies very much with its flexibility. But the difficulty with the flexibility is how to teach it to you. Because well, it's what you actually do in the field. It's what you actually engage in when dealing with data and theory. But I have to make a short, personal reflection. I'm a research methodologist, and I teach research methods at this University of Amsterdam, and for that I focus on methods, and I focus on teaching. And when you focus on teaching, you cut up things and you try to explain it. You create dichotomies where actually we are talking about more nuance differences. So being a research methodologist and being a lecturer, I focus very much on formalisation of methods. So while I think this flexibility is tremendously important and one of the coolest aspects of qualitative research, when teaching it, I focus very often on rigour. So sorry about that. Now, let's teach about flexibility in a rigorous way. And I want to focus first on a distinction made by Blumer in 1954. A very important distinction. It's the distinction between two types of concepts. First, the concepts as they're used in Quantitive research, and these concepts, he calls them, definitive, definitive concepts. And these concepts, they impose a theory on the social world. So from theory, you derive a concept, let's say poverty. Then, what is poverty in theory? And then, we are going to look at common features of poverty, and then work with indicators and variables. It's the standard way of using concepts in quantitative research. And it deals with a kind of operationalization that is theory led. You have a research question first, you divide that research question in different sub-questions, and obviously you have sub-answers, and those are your hypotheses, at first. And in these research questions you have these different concepts. For instance, again, poverty. And then, in your armchair, you devise different dimensions. Or based on theory, you devise these different dimensions of poverty, and then you start measuring them by using indicators and variables. And probably you are well-aware of this way of dealing with theory and data. Now, Blumer says, what's the key difference between qualitative research, concept in qualitative research, and quantitative concepts. And qualitative research is this. We have sensitizing concepts in qualitative research, and what does it mean? Well, sensitizing means, that you have a general sense and reference and guidance, but it's not completely fixed as it is in quantity of research. You'll have ideas about poverty, but you go out and find out yourself how it works in a specific situation. How you have to use these concept. So it doesn't mean you do not read the literature. Of course, you do! But you also are open for changes to the concept. We might define poverty in a different way. And what you're trying to do is look at different forms and you try to discover different forms of these phenomena and probably, gradually, you're narrowing down and coming to more clear-cut definitions of your concept. A sensitizing concept is also temporary. What does this mean? This means this, the sensitizing concept means that you deal with theory, you deal with data, you go back to theory, you go back to data again. Theory and data and theory and data. And this is what we call iterative knowledge production, going back and forth. It's not a one-way direction, no, it's going back and forth. And this is one consequence of the focus on flexibility. A second consequence of focusing on flexibility is this. And this is what I find one of the most beautiful concepts in social science. It's a beautiful word, serendipity. And what is serendipity? Well, a serendipitous finding is an accidental finding, something you weren't really looking for, but you found it out. It's often unanticipated. It's anomalous. It doesn't fit in with standard theories. And it's strategic, it helps you out in your research. Now, this term is a classic term, but it was revived by the famous Robert Merton, and he used an example of his research on Craftown. In Craftown, a suburban housing community, about 700 families live. And what was very intriguing was that a large proportion of residents were very active in voluntary organization, and it was kinda weird because it was a suburban housing community with many children and usually people with children aren't that active in voluntary organizations because they have their families to run. So what was going on there? And people, when they asked it to people, they said, well, we have plenty of teenagers who can babysit here. So we can ask them to babysit, and then go out and do the voluntary organization thingies. And Merton didn't really believe it at first sight. So what he did, and his team did, was looking into it. Are there actually more teenagers there than there are in other areas, in other suburban housing projects? And no, there weren't. And the serendipity lies in going about and thinking about, this is surprisingly large. What's happening here? And then, go after it. Try to find out what is happening there. And what they found out in the end by discussing with people, again, through interviews, and in looking very specifically and at specific details, they found out that it's not so much about more teenagers, it's much more about more social cohesion. People simply knew more teenagers, there weren't really more teenagers but they had more intimate knowledge of teenagers around. So it had to do much more with social cohesion. So they weren't looking at social organization and voluntary organization that much. They accidentally stumbled upon all these young parents working in these voluntary organizations. Trying to find out how it was possible, they got one reason, didn't really fit. They went looking on and on and on, and found out what the reason was. Now, this is a serendipitous finding. It's anomalous. It wasn't accounted for in research before. It's strategic because it's utilitarian, you can use it, and yeah. So what is this serendipity pattern? A serendipity pattern is an unexpected and anomalous finding elicited the investigator's curiosity, and conducted him along an unpremeditated by-path, which led to a fresh hypothesis. And what they did was check out this hypothesis. Serendipity is really a cool feature of qualitative research. Because of this flexibility, we can simply delve into new issues that pop up, strange things that happen, weird gossips. And then, you dive into it and you can find out more. And it's a bit being like Sherlock Holmes, using new information for better results.
