How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

66 QUaLItatIVe ReSeaRCH
3.4. MultiPle Realities
When you look at an apple up close, each eye sees something different.
The left eye sees more of the apple’s left side and the right eye sees more
of the right side. You are not confused by the discrepancy. Your mind
tells you that you are seeing the apple in three dimensions. Psychologists
call this message from the brain “binocular resolution.” It gives you the
perception of depth.
When you and your friend go to a concert, you do not each hear the
same thing. She says the music makes her think of her childhood, and
you say the saxophone was garish. We do not expect people to hear the
same thing; in fact, we feel enriched by the different perceptions, the different
experiences people have, in the same place at the same time. We
sometimes call it “multiple realities,” and we feel a deeper hearing than
we would with just one of us listening.
In qualitative research, many of us take a constructivist view that
there is no true meaning of an event; there is only the event as experienced
or interpreted by people. People will interpret the event differently,
and often multiple interpretations provide a depth of understanding that
the most authoritative or popular interpretation does not. There are
multiple interpretations also, of course, of groups, motivations, accomplishments,
and many of the phenomena we study. Readers sometimes
can see more depth in our reports when we portray more than a single
reality. Consider Box 3.3.
Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1951) visualized an ambush of
two travelers and four highly different versions told by the man and his
wife, as well as by the bandit and a witness—a classic example of multiple
realities.
3.5. BRiNGiNG iN the eXPeRieNce OF OtheRs
The new researcher sometimes makes the mistake of thinking that,
although he or she is building upon the findings of other researchers, all
the new thinking has to be his or her own. Actually, much good qualitative
research greatly involves the thinking of others as data and interpretation.
Thus the researcher is a listener, an interviewer, and a finder of the
observations others are making. Long after formally reviewing the literature,
he or she is finding relevant understandings from other research-