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Text-Based Approaches to Qualitative Research

An Overview of Methods, Process, and Ethics

Sara McKinnon

One of my most vivid memories from graduate school was the answer that I received from a professor when I asked, “How do you analyze a text?” He responded without pause, “You find an interesting text and look for what makes it interesting!” This answer was unsatisfying at best. Only later in my qualitative research classes did I begin to get a sense of what I should do with the primary sources that I had collected and wanted to write about.

Now, as a teacher myself, I find my students asking similar questions – “How do you find a text worthy of analysis?” “What makes a text interesting?” and “Once you have it, what do you do with it?” – only to find those same unsatisfying answers slipping off my tongue. In acknowledgment that these answers can confound more than they clarify, this chapter aims to outline what it means to do text-based qualitative research. The chapter will not only explain what it means to work with texts, but it also outline the various options researchers have at their disposal in trying to answer the research questions that most interest them. Furthermore, the chapter will offer a step-by-step overview of the process of doing text-based qualitative research so that when you hear “You just analyze it!” again you know what that means.

Text-Based Approaches to Qualitative Research

Broadly speaking, qualitative researchers seek to understand the communicative actions of people in particular contexts and the meanings associated with those actions. Communicative actions happen when people use symbols to express something in their life-worlds; these actions come in a range of forms – from the things we do and say in interpersonal encounters, to performances and practices that demonstrate our social, cultural, or political group affiliations, to the messages that media assemble for our consumption. While many qualitative researchers assemble instances of communicative action from people themselves, through methods of data collection such as interviews, focus groups, and observation, other qualitative researchers examine texts as sites of people's use of symbols. A text can be understood as any instance where symbols are being used to convey meaning to an audience. In this vein, texts may be written words in the strict sense of the term – such as books, magazines, manifestos, or pamphlets – but they may also be verbally delivered speeches, music, television sitcoms, photographs, or buildings.

While qualitative researchers may find a text that is interesting to them and analyze it, they do so recognizing that all texts are fragments of something larger. “Texts,” as Michael Calvin McGee explains, “are understood to be larger than the apparently finished discourse that presents itself as transparent. The apparently finished discourse is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it was made. It is fashioned from what we can call “fragments'” (McGee, 1990, p. 279). In other words, the texts that appear so complete on first glance are incomplete pieces, or representative parts of something larger that researchers call discourse. For many qualitative researchers, discourse, or the available language that people have to talk about some phenomenon or to express something, is what researchers are trying to explain and interpret when they analyze particular texts. While discourses are never complete, understanding their scope and the dominant modes of expression within them helps researchers to illuminate the range of possibilities that are before us when we communicate. To understand this range, scholars examine texts and the discourses they participate in against the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they circulate. Contexts must be thought of not as one-dimensional environments where communicative action happens, but as productive forces of the discourses that we turn to in order to share and express meaning. In this way, a component of our analytic attention as qualitative researchers of texts must be toward the contextual factors that constitute the way people use language.

Finally, qualitative scholars work to understand what texts mean for the people who use them. As Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor (2002, pp. 5–6) write,

To do this, qualitative researchers turn to the tools of research that allow them to describe, understand, and interpret the significance of communicative messages actions within a particular sociocultural and political-economic context. Specifically, qualitative researchers ask questions about how and why texts circulate within a given context in the ways that they do. Furthermore, qualitative researchers interpret what these texts mean within particular contexts and for particular audiences.

What is so exciting, and sometimes daunting, about using texts to do qualitative research, is that researchers have a diverse range of approaches that they can deploy to examine the qualitative dimensions of particular texts. In the next section I will summarize a few of the primary approaches that researcher have at their disposal. Specifically, I will review rhetorical approaches, discourse analysis approaches, and ethnographic approaches to studying texts.

Types of Text-Based Approaches

At the most general level, scholars who use qualitative methods to look at texts are doing textual analysis. While there are other names for textual analysis, such as criticism, critical analysis, or close reading, these approaches share similarities in their methodological processes. As Barry Brummett (2010, p. 9) explains, textual analysis involves “mindful, disciplined reading of an object with a view to deeper understanding of its meaning.” In order to do the disciplined reading, scholars who use textual analysis study existing theory, or attempts at describing and explaining what something is, the way it works, or what it means, in order to know what has been said previously about a particular object or phenomenon. This existing theory gives the analyst special insight into the symbolic actions, nuances in meaning, and textual forms that are present in the text. Studying theory also provides analysts with ideas about what their own text might say concerning culture, politics, society, or the world around them more generally.

Once analysts have an object that they want to examine and a theory or set of theories that inform their reading, the analyst then turns to particular methods of reading, or analysis. As Brummett (2010, p. 37) explains, “the method is the plan for thinking and action” which offers us tools for implementing that plan. For scholars working with texts, these tools should call our attention to nuances in both the form and the content of the object. When we look at questions of form, we examine how the object is arranged, how it is patterned, and the internal structure that organizes the content. Some common elements of form include narrative structures in the text, the genre that the text may fall within, and personas or groups of people who are addressed (or not addressed) in the text.

Questions of content call our focus to what the text says, or does. Using theory as the lens, we examine the text for key arguments, undergirding ideologies, and the specificities in the way language is used to convey meaning for a particular audience. Importantly, the theory or theories we turn to will shape the elements of form and content that we are drawn to see and write about. As we will see in the next section, rhetorical approaches offer a more specific form of textual analysis that call us to pay attention to the practical functions of language.

Rhetorical Approaches

At one point in recent history rhetorical criticism seemed to be moving in the direction of quantitative approaches to research in its goals of identifying the efficacy and effects of particular rhetorical texts and rhetoricians. Today, however, rhetorical critics largely see the work of analysis as a qualitative and interpretive project. Broadly speaking, rhetorical criticism offers tools to analyze what language does in our lives. Scholars of rhetoric posit that language not only shapes how we know and experience the world around us, but also how we use language in our social worlds to influence others, deliberate, make judgments, expand possibilities, and sometimes reform social systems in need of repair (Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 2002). These functions of language are of central concern to rhetoricians, for as Stephen Lucas (1981, p. 20) writes, rhetorical critics “are concerned above all with what messages do rather than what they are.” Examinations of such language deployments focus not only on the particularities of symbol use, but also on how bodies, voices, emotion, images, and objects serve as discursive vehicles of social influence when paired with language. In this way, rhetorical criticism is a method that provides the means to analyze not only discourse itself, but also how messages are deployed through the body, voice, images, and objects, and what such messages do.

One common point of confusion is where to find messages that are significant to our social worlds, and thus worthy of analysis. While early studies of rhetoric focused primarily on rhetorical texts of the past – often in the form of the speeches or writings of well-known figures – contemporary rhetorical critics include a vast range of rhetorical texts within their repertoire. Certainly texts such as governmental policies, congressional deliberations, and legal decisions are sites where language is used practically and in important ways, but popular texts such as movies, sports broadcasting, magazines, and participatory media also interest rhetoricians as texts of investigation. For example, Dana Cloud (1996) examines biographical narratives of Oprah Winfrey as her object of inquiry, arguing that Winfrey is rhetorically positioned as a token whose success proves that US American meritocracy exists without barriers for women and people of color. Greg Dickinson (2002) takes the spatial dimensions of Starbucks, the well-known caffeine-recharge watering hole for millions of consumers, as his text of investigation to argue that Starbucks rhetorically constructs authenticity through its use of color, music, artwork, smell, and language to make customers feel like they are getting the real deal when they spend $5 on a cup of coffee. Darrel Enck-Wanzer (2006) argues that trash, literal garbage, is a rhetorical construct for Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx in the 1960s to get city officials in New York City to begin to pay as much attention to the cleanliness of the streets in the Bronx as they did to the streets of Upper West Side Manhattan. These examples demonstrate the breadth of rhetoric's purview; quite simply, rhetorical messages worthy of analysis may be found anywhere. The task of the rhetorical critic in choosing a text worthy of inquiry is to justify what makes these objects interesting, or in need of analysis, and, second, to identify what the discourse is doing.

Another challenging part of doing rhetorical criticism is figuring out what method of rhetorical analysis will best suit the critic's objectives and the rhetorical object. As Dilip Gaonkar (1990, p. 303) explains in assessing the state of rhetorical criticism, rhetoric has witnessed not only what he calls “the globalization of the object” but also a diversification of methods for analyzing rhetorical objects. Just as there is no longer merely one type of object that rhetoricians analyze, there are also a plethora of methodological tools for rhetoricians to turn to in doing their analytic work. For example, social movement criticism (Griffin, 1952; Simons, 1970), genre criticism (Campbell & Jamieson, 1995; Ware & Linkugel, 1973), and narrative criticism (Fisher, 1984) emerged early in the field's history as options for doing rhetorical analysis. A particularly fruitful avenue for media scholars using rhetorical criticism has been the methods of criticism that allow them to centrally investigate relations of power, ideology, and modes of resistance present in texts or the way audiences engage with text. These methods include critical rhetoric (McKerrow, 1989, 1991; Ono & Sloop, 1992), ideographic criticism (McGee, 1980), and feminist criticism (Campbell, 1973; Davis, 1998; Dow, 1995, 1997) among others. Notably, they have enabled scholars to examine the discursive and ideological underpinnings of mediated representations of war (Crenshaw, 1997; Jordan, 2007), iconic imagery (Calafell and Delgado, 2004; Taylor, 2003), and the way that the distinctions between popular, consumer-based culture and political life become increasingly blurred and undefined (Anderson & Stewart, 2005; Cobb, 2011).

While using a specific type of method is a common approach of the rhetorical critic, others argue that the critic himself or herself is the method and thus the rhetorical analyst does not need a prescriptive a priori method (Black, 1965). In conversation with qualitative researchers who see the researcher as the “human instrument” of research, Edwin Black famously recognized that the rhetorical analyst brings to the text a unique vantage point to see the text as a reflection of the external reality around the text. While this open approach to method is still used by many in the field, others have refined the idea that the critic is the method to focus on theory as guiding the process of describing, explaining, and interpreting what language is doing in a text. Michael Leff, a strong proponent of what he describes as “the emic approach,” calls on rhetoricians to see rhetorical criticism as an interpretive process. As he explains, the goal of rhetorical criticism

More recently, James Jasinski (2001, p. 256) called this approach “conceptually oriented criticism,” which he explains “proceeds more through a process of abduction which might be thought of as a back and forth tacking movement between text and the concept or concepts that are being investigated simultaneously.” This approach recognizes that we enter the research process with particular views of the world, life experiences, knowledge, and interests that influence the questions, ideas, and issues that we will be drawn to examine. This background also leads us to particular texts, sets of texts, or even fragments of texts to analyze against and through our questions and interests (McGee, 1990). Then we begin the process of analysis, or close reading of the texts, for what language and discourse is doing and possibly turn to specific techniques of close reading explained above (Brummett, 2010), such as analyzing the object for its use of narrative or metaphor. Importantly, neither our past experience, theoretical influences, nor the reading techniques we choose dictate the direction of the theory generated from the analysis; instead, these things are tools that help us do the work of interpretation.

Our experiences and past knowledge are important as they alert us to what is interesting about the text in relation to its audience and the context, as well as to what the text is doing with language and discourse. While social scientific scholars attempt to deploy research methods objectively, or as free as possible from researcher bias, qualitative researchers embrace the subjectivity of the research process. This means that, rather than seeing the researcher's background and interests as a hindrance, qualitative researchers use these aspects of the researcher as a source of insight and information about the text. Because qualitative researchers embrace the subjectivity of the research process, no two analysts will read a text in the same way. For example, a scholar whose intellectual influences are gender theories may analyze a speech by Abraham Lincoln and see a particular type of masculinity evoked or forming (Zaeske, 2010), while a critic who finds photographs and images fascinating may be drawn to analyze texts that are rich in imagistic descriptions of Lincoln's character (Finnegan, 2005). These different analyses add to what the interested communities know, or how they think about Lincoln as a rhetorical figure. In this way, neither analysis is biased or more right than the other; instead they are different pieces of the puzzle. With a sense of how qualitative scholars use rhetorical approaches, I will now turn to discuss a qualitative approach that analyzes texts against their broader discursive and social contexts.

Discourse Analysis

While rhetorical analysis emerges out of the discipline of communication studies, linguistics offers yet another set of text-based approaches to do qualitative research – under the umbrella term of “discourse analysis.” This method allows scholars to analyze discourses alongside their discursive and social practices. Discourse, in this approach, primarily refers to any text, spoken or written, that deploys language, although increasingly discourse analysts are looking to non-language-based symbols, such as objects or artifacts, for meaning alongside the language-based discourse. As Norman Fairclough (1995, p. 4) explains, discourses rarely manifest in isolation. Rather, “texts in contemporary society are increasingly multi-semiotic; texts whose primary semiotic form is language increasingly combine language with other semiotic forms.” This means that discourse is polysemic, or that the same discourse might emerge in numerous forms. For example, a number of analysts have recently taken up the post-September 11 “terrorism” discourse as it emerges in a range of texts including presidential and political speeches (Bartolucci, 2012), policy and law (de Beaugrande, 2004; MacDonald & Hunter, 2013; Simone, 2009), documentaries (Mylonas, 2012), and news media (Featherstone, Holohan, & Poole, 2010; Roy & Ross, 2011). What is interesting about this discourse, as Valentina Bartolucci (2012, p. 563) writes, “is its extraordinary level of consistency within different genres, spaces and times. The same set of words and linguistic constructions are used, reproduced and finally naturalized, eventually coming to be seen as common sense.” Despite being polyvocal in form, the terrorism discourse in President Bush's speeches bears striking resemblance to the way it is deployed by the news media, in law and policy, and as David Machin and Theo Van Leeuwen (2009) demonstrate, even to the way this discourse appears in children's toys. Furthermore, these scholars demonstrate that the meaning of terrorism is surprisingly similar in different national contexts. Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volčič (2007) illuminate this point, showing that terrorism discourse is taken up by Serbians after September 11 to rearticulate Serbian violence against Muslims during the 1990s as understandable and justifiable. Importantly, their language is hauntingly similar to the words of President George W. Bush.

A second focal point for discourse analysts is the discourse practice, which concentrates attention on the circuit of culture through which the text circulates, from its production to its interpretation and consumption. Analysis at this level involves attentiveness to how people produce and interpret texts. This may include, for example,

Focus on the practice allows scholars to understand how specific discursive moments participate in broader conventions, genres, and patterns of interaction (Wood & Kroger, 2000). For example, Fairclough (1993) investigates the way universities deploy market-based discourse practices, through encouraging employees to “self-promote” their research, “sell” candidates, and “play the game.” These particular instances of discourse, he explains, are generated through market logics and function to constitute universities – places that were once designated for knowledge production and critical engagement – into contexts for consumption.

Finally, discourse analysis calls scholars to examine the way that discourses and discourse practices participate in broader sociocultural systems and structures of meaning (Fairclough, 1995). This level of analysis focuses the analyst's eye on the function of discourse, or what it is doing within the organizations, institutions, and societies where they circulate. This level of analysis is the broadest level used by discourse analysts, and also perhaps the most important as discourse analysis cannot be discourse analysis without an examination of the sociocultural practice of the discourse. Analysts interested in the sociocultural implications of discourse have looked, for example, at the discursive conflations of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers with gangs, criminals, and thieves, which often comes to justify policies of amplified exclusion and surveillance against these communities (Baker, Gabrielatos, Khosravinik, Krzyanowski, McEnery, & Wodak, 2008; Hernández & Romero, 2013; Khosravinik, 2010; Teo, 2000; Van Der Valk, 2003; van Dijk, 2000; Van Leewen & Wodak, 1999). They have also examined the ways in which the repetitiveness of gendered norms in institutions such as sports (Mean & Kassing, 2008) and education (Sauntson, 2007; Wharton, 2005) function to constrain the range of gender expressions possible to a limited few. Finally, scholars have examined the emergence of nationalistic discourses across a diverse set of locales, working to understand how a nation's history, relationships with other nations, and aspirations for the future matter to the way it constructs a sense of itself (Crawford, 2012; Han, 2011; Mosheer, 2012; Ruiseco & Sluneko, 2006).

Discour se analysis resonates with some of the other text-based qualitative methods summarized thus far, but methodologists claim that the approach offers unique tools to the scholar and student of texts. As Fairclough (1995, p. 97) explains, according to this approach, “the link between the sociocultural practice and text is mediated by discourse practice.” He continues:

In other words, each level of analysis – discourse, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice – builds upon the next, such that each level offers a potentially unique purview into the way language functions to construct people's sense of what is within particular institutions, organizations, and societies.

Importantly, this embedded process of analysis has led to new approaches to studying texts, or what we might understand as offshoots of a broader discursive approach to doing qualitative research. These include, among others, critical discourse analysis, which narrows the process of analysis in on the way power, domination, and ideology circulate through discourse (Fairclough, 1995); the discourse historical approach, which emphasizes analysis of fields of action (Reisigi & Wodak, 2009), and social semiotics, which calls our attention to the semiotic action involved in each message, discourse, or image (Aiello, 2006; Van Leewen, 2005). The final approach discussed here takes text-based qualitative approaches full circle, back to qualitative methodology's anthropological roots in the form of ethnography.

Ethnographic Approaches

Ethnography can be thought of, literally, as a writing up of culture. Historically this was the work of anthropologists who would go into the field, often somewhere far away from where the researcher lived and worked, to examine the ways of life, rituals, and patterns of a particular group of people and then write up an account of this community's “culture.” In 1973 noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz ruptured this framework of doing ethnography by suggesting that culture was all about communication, and that culture should be studied via semiotic analysis, or in the way that a particular community uses language. Geertz (1973, p. 5) explained this as an analysis of the “webs of significance” that undergird what a community says and does:

Later in the essay, Geertz would elaborate on the process of unearthing meaning:

This approach to researching culture profoundly impacted the way communication scholars examined symbol use in particular communities. We not only see this early on with scholars using an ethnography of communication approach to understand the types of communication that were unique to particular groups (Hayes, 1976; Katriel & Philipsen, 1981; Philipsen, 1975), but there were also early calls to combine ethnographic methods with text-based methods. Dwight Conquergood was in the vanguard in drawing scholars' attention to the relationship between ethnographic and text-based methods. In particular, Conquergood made connections between the work of ethnographers and that of scholars interpreting meaning from text, explaining that those who analyze culture and those who analyze texts similarly use methods that are “characterized by a crucial sense of timing and improvisation, an ability to seize the opportunity and play the moment” (Conquergood, 1992, p. 82). Additionally, we can say that ethnographers and text-based scholars alike are interested in symbolic action, the context from which the text emerges, and the meanings that flow through these actions.

With these similarities in mind, a number of scholars have recently begun conceptualizing what it might mean to do text-based ethnographies. These formulations have come in the form of virtual, online, or digital ethnographies (Boellstorff, Nardi, & Pearce, 2012; Fullerton & Rarey, 2012; Howard, 2011; Kozinets, 2010; Lindlof & Shatzer, 1998) and rhetorical ethnographies (Chávez, 2011; Hess, 2011; Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011; Pezzullo, 2001; Salazar, 2009). What these approaches offer is a way of combining a focus on the way culture is constructed through language and attentiveness to context with the tools of close reading offered in textual analysis.

While these works differ in focus – some looking at the organizing strategies of activists, others analyzing the ways that people make community through texts – they share two important characteristics that are unique to text-based ethnographies. First, the blending offers text-based scholars dynamic and dialogic ways of examining how discourse happens in the moment. As Middleton et al. (2011, p. 401) explain, this happens because field methods give text-based scholars a sense of what discourse looks like “live”: “By analyzing ‘live’ rhetorics, critics are able to bring to the fore and capture rhetorics whose everyday nature renders them fleeting at best.” Additionally, it allows scholars intimate insight into how people come to settle on the discourse they use in the public. Chávez's research (2011) concerning the coalitional strategies of US immigration and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists demonstrates this point nicely, as she argues that rhetorical scholars must look at the internal, away-from-the-spotlight workings of activists and organizers to gain insight into the rhetorical resources at their disposal, as well as the contextual and relational constraints that impact what discourse they can use in the public.

Another strength of this blended approach is that it allows us to see nuances of context – including space and place, but also the historical political-economic relations that bear down on the communicative actions we examine. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki (2006) rhetorically examine the Plains Indian Museum in Wyoming as a cultural text that constitutes White audiences through what they call a rhetoric of reverence. Specifically, they explain that “the museum creates a space of memory in which distant Plains Indian history and culture are placed on view, honored, and valued,” but White museum goers are never faced with interrogating their involvement in historical and present-day racism (Dickinson et al., 2006, p. 41). Ethnographic observation of the museum and White audiences' engagement with the museum enabled these researchers to ask questions, and to come up with interpretations that reflected on the museum's constitutive powers. In this way, space and place are rhetorical in that they compel our imaginations of ourselves. Were Dickinson et al. to have merely read about the museum – or even analyzed its web-based features – they most likely would not have been able to consider such contextual elements of rhetoric.

A final strength of the ethnographic text-based approach is that it allows the symbol users to speak back, and in part define what the communicative actions mean to them. As Middleton et al. (2011, p. 389) explain, rhetorical field methods are useful for “attempting to create more equitable representations of marginalized voices” and for identifying how those voices might enter public discourse toward transformative change. Additionally, these methods give participants a chance to speak back and fill in the gaps. Robert Glenn Howard's (2011) research provides a great example of this as he examines community making among Protestant fundamentalists in online environments. Combining ethnographic methods of interviewing and observation with the rhetorical tools of close textual analysis, Howard's work demonstrates the ways in which rhetoricians can gain insight into communicators' motivation, intention, and inventional process by observing their message choices and then asking them to reflect on the choices through interview questions. In Howard's analysis, for example, participants' actions and explanations serve as the discursive material that demonstrates not only what an evangelical social movement looks like, but also what it means to them. These moments show that one of the strengths of using ethnographic methods in rhetorical research is that such methods allow the voices we represent to speak with, and sometimes speak back to, scholarly interpretations and analyses of the data.

Having provided a description of different types of text-based qualitative research, I turn now to address the step-by-step process of using these methods. This explanation is certainly one approach among many possibilities, but it should give the reader a sense of what researching with texts looks like.

Doing Text-Based Qualitative Research

As noted above, there are definite differences in the foci of the approaches discussed so far, in the questions they ask, and in the specific methodological tools they use but the process of using these approaches is roughly the same. For each approach there are basically two places where the researcher might begin: with the object or with the question. Those who begin with an object are usually drawn to it because of its political, social, or cultural import, or because it is just plain puzzling. If you begin with a text, the next step is to try to delineate what the text might be saying or doing. It is at this point that scholars draw upon their existing knowledge, worldviews, and experiences to understand what sorts of questions might best be explored and explained through an examination of this object.

Another route in doing qualitative research is to begin with a question, a concern, or an issue that sparks your interest. Scholars who begin with a question move quickly to think about what sorts of texts, people, and contexts might best help them examine the issues at hand and come up with answers. As stated earlier, this might be a single text, an assemblage of texts, or even a combination of different types of data that the researcher examines in order to come up with answers to the questions they are asking.

Once the researcher has a sense of the text and the theoretical focus of her or his analysis, she or he can then move to the actual analysis of the object. At this stage the research process is most similar to conducting qualitative research using methods that involve human interaction. The researcher is looking for codes, themes, patterns, and dynamics that exist in the texts' form and content much like a researcher would do when analyzing field notes or an interview transcript. The objective of this process of analysis is to derive explanations of what the text is doing, or how the text operates, in accordance with the parameters given through the researcher's theoretical and methodological choices. As David Altheide (1996, p. 16) explains, at this point, the data process should be

What this systematic yet flexible process of analysis should look like is often where scholars and students interested in qualitative research get most confused. The truth is that there are a plethora of analytic tools available to the qualitative researcher. David Altheide (1996) recommends beginning with the protocol, which is a series of questions, themes, and categories that the researcher believes might be present in the data, or at the very least might be interesting to ask of the data. A more inductive process, however, might begin with coding and categorization.

An inductive process begins with coding the data, or making shorthand notes to label what the data says, organizing the data into themes, and generally beginning to look for the patterns, sense making, and structure that is theoretically and culturally significant. As Lindlof and Taylor (2002, p. 219) explain, during the coding process the “analyst usually goes through the texts (fieldnotes, transcriptions, documents) line by line and marks those chunks of text that suggest a category.” The general purpose of this process is to link the sections of data that fit within a broader category with a shorthand code to help you remember to consider the significance of that data for the overall category. Quite often, researchers who are coding start with the questions “What's going on here?” or “What's happening in this text?” as they try to make sense of the text. As they read the text over and over, looking for cultural or theoretical meaning, they begin to see patterns emerge, themes that are indeed meaningful, which become significant categories that bring the researcher one step closer to identifying what the text is saying and doing.

Categorization happens when we assign meaning to particular components of our data by identifying it as representative of some general or specific phenomenon of interest, and put that data alongside other data we have that do the same thing. These categories sometimes emerge from existing literature, but they can also emerge because we see patterns, or themes of interest, in the data set. Importantly, merely having categories does not mean that the researcher is ready to write up the study. The researcher still needs to interpret the significance of those categories toward making an argument.

Interpretation is the next phase in the research process. At this point the researcher has a good sense of the data. She or he has coded and categorized the data, and reached the point of what qualitative researchers call saturation, or the moment when the researcher no longer finds anything surprising when coding and categorizing. Reaching the point of saturation indicates to the researcher that it is time to move to the next phase of research. Interpretation then moves researchers to build theory, in the form of arguments, that provide partial answers to the questions and problems that first inspired them to analyze the texts. At this point it is often necessary to turn back to the scholarship on the topic in order to read and ascertain what is already known in the scholarly community. Researchers work to build interpretations that add to that body of scholarship rather than replicate existing knowledge. Once the researcher has a strong grasp of the extant and relevant literature, as well as an argument that contributes to the literature, the next step in the research process is to write up the research.

While researchers go about this step in different ways, the writing phase involves three processes: developing a setup, accounting for one's methods, and writing the analysis. The setup in this instance refers to the rationale, which demonstrates the importance of the research, a justification for the particular research question and/or argument, and finally an explanation of how the research fits within and contributes to the extant body of scholarship. This setup may be found in the introduction and in the review of literature, its purpose being to create a platform that contextualizes the analysis and its contributions.

Not all text-based qualitative researchers include an accounting of their method in the write-up of their project, but they should be able to articulate how and why they did what they did during the research process. When a method section is present it typically includes a discussion of how and why particular texts were chosen, the specific research questions that guided the analysis, the process of analysis including the development of codes and categories, as well as any additional context that might be needed to understand the analysis.

The analysis section is where the researcher finally reports on the original research conducted. One of the key challenges in this period of the research is figuring out how to use the data appropriately. Researchers should allow the data to guide the evidencing of their arguments, but they also must not lose their analytic voice in the process. Quite often, analysis sections foreground the data so much that the author's argument ends up being more descriptive than analytical. Instead of merely describing what's happening, researchers should use data in the analysis section to further their argument, which means deploying it to illustrate their interpretation of the particular situation.

Ethical Considerations

In this chapter I have provided a broad overview of text-based qualitative research methods with a specific focus on the numerous approaches that scholars have at their disposal and the specific steps involved in the process of doing qualitative research using texts. To conclude, I would like to address the ethical considerations of conducting qualitative research using texts.

Qualitative researchers who work with humans have a long history of debating what should be the proper ethical standards in research. Scholars who examine texts, in contrast, rarely question what ethics should guide the practice of collecting, analyzing, and writing up research. This, I believe, is a mistake and I would like to offer a set of questions text-based qualitative researchers might consider in developing ethics to guide the research process. First, we might ask ourselves “Why am I doing this research?” or “Why is this research necessary and useful?” These questions, if seriously considered, can help researchers to understand the motivations that guide the research practice. Many feminist and critical scholars, for example, take the motivation of opening space for marginalized voices, perspectives, and knowledge as the central purpose of their work (Davis, 1998; Flores, 1996). Additionally, many scholars are guided by utilitarian assumptions of the greater good or pragmatic goals of making applied change in the social worlds around them (Madison, 2005). No matter the motivation, researchers should be able to explain how that motivation guides what texts they choose and how they analyze them.

Additionally, we should ask ourselves “How am I connected to this research topic?” or “What is my positionality, or social location, in relation to this research topic?” These questions necessitate that researchers remain reflexive, or mindful of their relationship to the research topic, so that they can account for how their own experiences, knowledge, identities, and worldviews shape not only what they see in the data, but also how they interpret it. In examining the politics behind naming practices for Chinese women, Wen Shu Lee (1998, p. 297) provides an excellent example of how text-based researchers might integrate reflexive practices into their work:

Lee proceeds to address the politics involved not only in how she came to have her name, but in what happens to her name when she moves from Taiwan to the United States. This reflection helps the reader to understand her social location as an analyst of the rhetorical dimensions of naming practices, and also why naming practices matter.

Next, researchers might ask themselves, “Am I letting the text or data speak?” in order to address the ethic of representativeness, or how completely the analysis reflects the data. This question helps researchers pay attention to the ways in which they may be strategically choosing parts of the data that support their view, while ignoring data that contradict their interpretation. Additionally, this allows researchers to evaluate whether they have analyzed enough of the text to know that the most complete picture of the data is being represented in the analysis.

Finally, text-based qualitative researchers should seek to develop a deeper and more complex understanding of the subject matter they address by asking the following questions: “Does this analysis provide a more complex picture of the issue, text, person, or event than was previously available?” “Have I engaged in any problematic constructions of the people and communities I talk about in this research?” and “Does this analysis reflect and honor the cultural values and experiences of the people and communities I talk about?” These questions guide the researcher to evaluate whether the research enhances and illuminates the way we think about and understand people's lives, but it also calls us to question whether our own representations rely on discourses, beliefs, and stereotypes about groups that may objectify, exoticize, silence, or disempower the people we represent in our work.

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