Validity in Qualitative Research

Schneider, J. (1999). "I said that on purpose": Using Paranoid Validity to Examine the Researcher and Researcher Effects. Journal of Research in Education, vol. 9, no. 1.

Lather, P. (2007). (Post) Critical Feminist Methodology: Getting Lost. Paper presented at AERA, Chicago, 2007.

Golafshani, N. (2003). Understanding Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. The Qualitative Report, vol. 8, no. 4, December 2003, 597-607.

What does validity mean in a qualitative study? What happens when the researcher begins to see herself reflected in the data?

There's a bias of hard science that says that data should be pure, that the researcher must be unbiased. It's a kind of mysophobia that wants to wall off data from infection.

But is that really possible in qualitative research? Is objectivity really possible whenever humans are involved?

Schneider posits paranoid validity.

Schneider conducted a qualitative study of the relationships between writing instruction and writing practice in an elementary classroom. This paper does not present the results of that study. This paper examines the interaction between the researcher and the researched and questions the many ways the researcher can become the data. She conducted long-term observations in the classroom and attempted to become invisible, or at least well camouflaged. She does not succeed. The reader is led through her initial discomfort with the realization of her own effect on the classroom to a deeper understanding of the challenges of field studies for qualitative research in education. Her observations are frank and honest and immediately ring true. This is a wonderful article. Every qualitative researcher should write an article like this after finishing a study. If Sondheim did educational research, he might write something like this.

I'm going to need to read Patti Lather again, as well as a good amount of other background reading in order to discuss her paper. I like it, but a lot of the language went over my head. I need some time to unpack those terms. I'm intrigued by Lather's description of Pam Bettis' and Natalie Adams 2003 feminist deconstruction, Cheerleading! An American Icon. That's going on my Christmas list for a friend. Lather describes a move toward less definite knowledge, more tentative, "the ambiguity of constancy and variation as a sustainable orientation".