Qualitative Research and Our Digital Futures

Abstract

Those who lived through the 1960s recall a time of rapid social change and political turmoil. Commentators discern parallels with present times, citing the Arab Spring, the West’s fiscal crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Social science saw its own upheavals in the 1960s—the emergence of Grounded Theory, postmodernism, and perspectives based on the counter-culture, feminism, and minorities. This article sees contemporary equivalents in the growth of “citizen research” and indigenous methods, and consequent struggles over what research is for. We should not see these developments as a crisis in the hegemony of social science but as its coming of age, and qualitative research as its principal arena.