I wrote this essay while I was planning my course in Qualitative Research. I share it with my students on Day 1 to introduce how messy research can be.

Good Qualitative Research: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Brenda Gambol

November 27, 2024

I have trouble retaining information – because of that, I struggled in the natural sciences. But I can tell you one thing that I remember: the scientific method.

I saw this what seemed to be ubiquitous poster: At the top, there’d be the title, “Scientific Method.” Immediately below: Purpose, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis, Conclusion.

The spirit of this poster followed me throughout my K-12 education.

When I started to do qualitative research, the linearity of how I learned the scientific process was no longer helpful. I took a course in graduate school, Qualitative Research in Sociology, taught by Robert Courtney Smith, a prominent immigration scholar. The first week we shared what our research interests were. The second week, we were reading course readings and turning in field notes. The third week, we were expected to begin interviewing. While doing all this, we started the IRB process. And by the end of the semester, we were required to produce a 25-30 page empirical paper. What this meant was that we had to go through the entire scientific method and coherently write up our findings within 15 weeks.

That’s a lot. Considering you can take a whole semester, a year for some, to develop a research proposal.

And it was a lot. But I sure did learn a lot.

I take Smith’s approach now in my research. And I believe, because of this approach, I’ve been able to produce rich, robust, engaging works because of it.

I argue that good qualitative research (and any kind of research really) is provocative, compelling, and complex. This is especially true for qualitative research when you’re trying your best to document and analyze the realities of human beings. Good qualitative research should be moving, should draw the reader in mind and spirit into the lives of the people that have shared willingly what their dreams, insecurities, and challenges are. Doing good work is the least researchers can do given how much people share with us. And, doing good work—if you want to think of it in a scientific way—makes the data more reliable. By doing your best to gather what people’s lives are like and capture them in your finished product makes what you wrote more trustworthy.

Some works that come to mind when I think of good qualitative research includes Anthony Ocampo’s Brown and Gay in L.A., Pallavi Banjerjee’s The Opportunity Trap, The Package Deal by Nicholas W. Townsend, and Annette Lareau’s seminal work, Unequal Childhoods. The three former books I love for how they impressively illustrate the emotional depth of their respondents. The latter for me is a model that demonstrates how to paint the contexts participants are embedded in.

I believe that to come even close to what these scholars have accomplished requires an “all-in” attitude. All-in means being in all the steps of the scientific process all the time. Perhaps one “step” will make more sense now. And in the near future, a different step. The point is that we should be open to being at any step while we collect data, analyze, and write.

When I talk about the qualitative research process, I often think of the film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. All the steps of the qualitative process are happening at one time, like in parallel universes. Doing the work is very confusing and often unwieldy but that’s ok. Because, as my good friend and colleague Dr. Rebecca Karam once told me, “meaning comes in the end.”

So when we do qualitative research, don’t be afraid. Be open to being confused, discombobulated, and off-balance. Because if you do all the things, everything, everywhere all at once, you’re doing good work. And if you do good work, meaning will come to you in the end.