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Chapter Three – Research methods and their use - Page 94
Stewart surveys a number of systems to address methodological concerns and values in
qualitative study, and settles on the values of veracity, objectivity and perspicacity.
Stewart then moves to describe a series of tactics to use in the pursuit of each of the
values. Finally, he analyses a series of three notable ethnographies, 2 and provides a
checklist for a funding application for an ethnographic study.
Veracity and objectivity are largely as expected, and link to the notions of validity and
reliability in quantitative studies. Perspicacity is interesting, linking profound awareness
of context and attention to it. This is so both in the recognition of phenomena, as well as
in applying the results of the research, looking widely (or perspicaciously) in both cases.
The tactics that Stewart suggests to pursue perspicacity include intense consideration of
the data, and exploration. The former, intense consideration of the data, is achieved
through inspiration and perspiration; decontextualising, memoing and recontextualising;
theoretical candour, and comparisons with other ethnographies (emphasising both credit
to other scholars as well as the constitutive role of literature-based comparison in
ethnographic enquiry). The latter tactic, exploration, is pursued by site selection and the
search for contingencies, as well as by the search for theories and ethnographic writings
that are invoked for consideration.
The above ideas on method represent formulations of much of my approach to
transformation of my data. In particular, intense consideration of the data is achieved by
much of what I have outlined, and particular I am adding capability with Matte Blanco’s
2 This is a very important contribution to the characterization of the field. As illustrated above in Chapter
Two Part One, when considering ethnography, it is a key feature of anthropological scholarship that
fieldwork accounts are available for re-analysis by others.