How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

192 QUaLItatIVe ReSeaRCH
••
Single and multiple realities.
••
Analysis and synthesis.
Both sides of each duality can be found in our dialectics. The
research question pathway and Outline 1 will probably get more macrointerpretation,
possibly some emphasis on the general and scientific
knowledge, and will attend more to collective and aggregative data. The
fieldwork patches will probably get more microinterpretation, clearly an
emphasis on the particular and on individual and interpretive data, possibly
some attention to professional knowledge. (It will seldom help to
sort the patches and topics into these categories, but it can help to think,
“Are my Outlines 1 and 2 drawing from these dualities as much as I
would like them to?”)
Let me say again that using these graphic forms can be a long “work
in progress.” You sketch them early and revise them as the fieldwork
continues. Yes, there is likely to be a particular time when you sit at the
keyboard saying, “Now I have to write it up.” But, hopefully, you have a
lot of patches already drafted. Of course, there still are lots of decisions
to be made about format, illustrations, style, bibliography, and so forth,
but you want to make it most clear to the reader what you were looking
for, what you did, what you found, and what you make of it. In other
words, how the thing worked.
Organization theorist John van Maanan (1988) spoke of seven
choices of presentation: realistic, impressionistic, confessional, critical,
formal, literary, and jointly told—lots of choices. But the choices are
limited by funding agencies, prospective readers, rhetorical convention,
prospects of publication, hospitality received, the researcher’s colleagues
and career pattern, and more. Some criteria for how to write a report
are set by notions of what will best answer the research question. Some
commitments are made when the study is designed, and some are made
while the last spelling check is spinning along.
11.4. PaRticulaR aND GeNeRal asseRtiONs
One of the dualities, the particular and the general, should help us think
through how we want to state our assertions. Do we want an assertion
to refer to the specific phenomena studied or to be asserted more gener-