A B S T R AC T This article addresses two concerns that are central to

much of the qualitative research currently ongoing in both the social

sciences and other fields of social research: the status awarded to
biographical knowledges and, associatively, how such knowledges are
dealt with in concrete research. The first section calls attention to the
unreliability of memory in order to cast doubt on the veracity of lay
actors accounts and thus question their position in social research.
The second section, taking up this challenge, addresses a number of
critical issues related to both the theoretical and the empirical status
of biographical knowledges in qualitative research. Foremost of these
are how both ignorance and the dynamic nature of memory are
integral to the construction and reconstruction of biographical
knowledge. The methodological considerations that arise from this
discussion are then considered more explicitly. The article seeks to
provoke, rather than foreclose, critical thought and debate.
K E Y WO R D S : biography, epistemology, memory, qualitative,
reflexivity
Introduction
Qualitative research has become an important, if not critical, element of
many fields of social research. The concerns discussed in this article have
arisen from research carried out under the banner of rural geography.
However, they are central also to aspects of qualitative research in the social
sciences more generally, as well as many of the other disciplines concerned
with exploring social (including cultural) life. These concerns are, broadly,
the status that researchers can attribute to actors knowledges that is,
biographical knowledges and how the status of such knowledges impacts
upon how they can be, and might most usefully be, utilized in social research.
The article first raises the problem of unreliable memories as a means to
problematizing the reliability and inter-subjective correspondence of lay
Unreliable memories and other
contingencies: problems with
biographical knowledge
GRAHAM GARDNE R
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Qualitative Research
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SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, ca
and New Delhi)
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ART I C L E
actors accounts. It goes on to provocatively address the empirical and
theoretical status attributed to actors knowledges, and discusses how
problems of ignorance and partial truth might be creatively addressed in
concrete research. The methodological considerations that arise out of this
discussion are then considered more explicitly.
The problematic status of biographical knowledge is, of course, hardly a
new or an unacknowledged issue in the social sciences and related
disciplines. In particular, feminist scholars, frequently from within the
disciplines of anthropology (Shostak, 1981), oral history (Gluck and Patai,
1991) and psychology (Gilligan, 1982, 1998) have emphasized both the role
of culture in structuring such knowledge and the (often unspoken)
assumptions that structure research methodologies and researchers
attitudes to those they study (see also Hutheesing, 1993; Nast, 1998;
Robinson, 1994; Targounwick, 1990: 411). Accordingly, the now vast
literature dealing with qualitative methods increasingly emphasizes
researcher reflexivity, openness and sensitivity to different ways of knowing,
along with a questioning sometimes leading to a wholesale rejection of
previously dominant positivist, reductionist and ethnocentric approaches to
researching the social world (Altheide and Johnson, 1994; Cook and Crang,
1995; Denzin, 1994; Evans, 1988; Katz, 1994; Oakley, 1981).
Such work is valuable, particularly in its removal of the idea of the
researcher as neutral observer in the field and its highlighting of the
interpretative tensions between systematic generalization and idiographic
particularism. At the same time, however, in certain respects much of this
work is limited in application. It tends to draw on, and stress, the importance
of immersion-type fieldwork, where researchers spend a considerable period
situated in the local culture they are studying; emphasis is on extended and
repeated contact with local actors, the establishment of relations of mutual
trust between researcher and researched, and reflexivity generated through
participant-observation. For the many researchers who, by choice or
necessity, spend far less time in the field, the questions it raises and the
suggestions it makes can therefore either appear far removed from their own
concerns, or desirable but wholly unattainable, given the manner in which
they work.
The material drawn on for this article comes from a number of semi-
structured interviews carried out under severe restraints in a highly
antagonistic research context.
1
An angry and bitter dispute over housing
development in a small English village had left residents suspicious of talking
to anyone, for fear that their comments would be leaked to the press and
misrepresented. Along with this difficulty, the community had nothing
resembling a public space where participant-observation could be carried
out; the use of discussion groups was out of the question because both sides
ostracized each other; and those who did agree to speak barely had time for
one interview, quite apart from multiple sessions. Thus, researcher
Qualitative Research 1(2)
186
researched interaction was fleeting, highly partial and non-repeatable:
snatched moments with no hope of return far from the anthropological
ideal.
While some, with good grounds, may be wary of the type of reflexivity
practised in this case carried out from the comfort of an office, cubicle,
home or library (Nast, 1998: 95) it nevertheless does correspond (albeit
perhaps in an exaggerated fashion) to many researchers experiences of
interpreting the initial outcomes of their fieldwork labours. It is thus intended
that this article offers an alternative, underplayed perspective on some
established problems, and extends and provokes current debate, rather than
makes claim to raising wholly original questions or providing definitive
answers.
Methodology and social reality
The inspiration for this article stems from the authors ongoing research as a
geographer into the institution, reproduction and transformation of
topographies of power in rural spaces. Rural geographers, along with social
scientists more generally, increasingly recognize that the socially constructed
and discursive nature of social spaces makes these spaces ambiguous and
ambivalent (Cloke, 1997: 368). If this assessment is to be more than a
rhetorical claim tacked on to any piece of research, it demands a rigorous (i.e.
not self-indulgent) scepticism towards any ontology that attempts a priori to
reduce interpretation and explanation of social processes to a single factor.
Accordingly, the methodology for the above research is explicitly informed
and underpinned by recent empirical and theoretical works in the philosophy
and methodology of social science that demonstrate how social spaces are
stitched together (Lyotard, 1984; Murdoch and Pratt, 1994) out of multiple
and often conflicting discourses (broadly, knowledges), narratives and
materialities (Haraway, 1997). It also takes heed of commentary by Dyck
(1999) and Graham (1999), who point out that while there are wide bodies
of literature separately rich in empirical, theoretical and methodological
content, the entanglement of, and relationships between, the three remain
relatively less examined.
The research methodology aims towards treating social actors as
knowledgeable, intentional agents, active and reflective in the constitution of
their own identity(ies) and social worlds. The information they can provide
regarding both their own conduct and the conduct of other actors (both
individual and collective) is seen to be critical in terms of understanding the
processes bound up with the articulation of power or any social processes
in any particular locale (cf. Bourdieu, 1977, 1999a; Giddens, 1984; contra
Althusser, 1972). Further, the research is not only concerned with objective
accounts of physicalmaterial spacetime interactions. Rather, it also seeks
to discover the motivations that actors have in acting in particular ways, and
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
187
how they interpret the processes in which they are bound up, in order to
come to some understanding and appreciation of the interconnectedness and
complexities of action, awareness and concern (Sack, 1997).
This focus reflects a growing concern over the past 30 years amongst those
researching various aspects of social life to take fuller account of actors own,
situated knowledges; a concern driven in substantial part by historical and
ongoing critiques of a once dominant positivist research paradigm concerned
with a narrowly defined so-called objectivity and with measuring the
(in)validity of different knowledges in terms of pre-defined, conventional
scientific, modernist parameters (cf. Haraway, 1989; Staeheli and Lawson,
1995).
But some time after an initial confidence in the anticipated outcomes of
enabling the subjects of research to speak for themselves came . . . doubts.
A preliminary provocation: thinking about lies, lied, lying ...
untruth, falsehood, barefaced lie, fib, white lie, little white lie . . . fabrication,
made-up story, trumped up story, invention, piece of fiction . . . falsification,
falsity, fairy story, cock-and-bull story, dissimulation . . . prevarication,
departure from the truth, terminological inexactitude, tall tale . . . whopper . . .
(The Oxford Paperback Thesaurus: Kirkpatrick, 1994).
The truth, the whole truth ...
The ex-chairwoman of a parish council is interviewed on a variety of topics,
key amongst which are her past and present involvement with both formal
and informal local social and political institutions. On a number of occasions,
in response to direct questioning,
2
she asserts that she no longer occupies any
such positions and that she takes no part in the current political and public
life of the parish. For example:
Well, thats the Over Sixties would be about the only one that I do really much
to do with [sic]; I mean, [the] synod, which is church again, but I mean Ive
come off that and I just do the our own one, now. . . . No, no. No, no, no;
definitely not, no, no. Oh no, I was seventy last June, and theres no way Im
going back into anything like that [parish council business]! [laugh] Let
somebody else do it.
At a later stage in fieldwork, however, interviews with other residents, along
with some fortunate finds in the local library archives, conclusively
demonstrate that, in fact, the ex-chairwoman continues to occupy several
important local positions of influence including chair of the local charities
committee, chair of the local WI and chair of a nearby village hall trust; that
she is a founder member of a recent group set up to oppose social housing
development in the parish; and that she apparently exploits her position as
the largest landowner in the area to exert political pressure on those who
depend on her employment.
Qualitative Research 1(2)
188
Revelation: sometimes, respondents lie. Or do they? Perhaps this
respondent simply has a very poor memory. Lets try another.
. . . and nothing but the truth
A parish councillor (one who told the truth about the ex-chairwoman)
recounts how he came to be co-opted onto the parish council, after putting
himself forward as a neutral outsider in an attempt to peaceably settle a
dispute over who should represent the parish council on the local schools
board of governors.
I said, look, this is ridiculous, this is not doing anyone any good, can I put myself
forward as a compromise candidate? . . . Erm, and they said, no, get stuffed. . . .
But as a result of that, someone rang me up a couple of months later and said,
would you like to be on the council ...
It later transpires, again through speaking to other local residents, that this
someone was the chairman of the parish council and that the two already
knew each other. Further, his coming forward was (apparently) part of a
scheme worked out in advance with the chairman to ease his co-option onto
the parish council, and at no point did he genuinely intend to become a
governor.
Was this respondent lying? Did he have a poor memory? Did he get
confused? All three? Or is what is going on in both these cases more
complex, more subtle, than that?
As yet, the research has produced no easy or definitive answers to
the questions raised by the inconsistencies between the above actors
accounts, accounts given by others and (where it exists) accounts in archival
material. Nor is it anticipated that it will do so in the future. This therefore
raises the question, with regard to both this particular research and social
research more generally, of to what extent lay actors accounts can be relied
on in research that is not only, or primarily, concerned with language as
dominant representation or discourse (cf. Fairclough, 1989). This, in turn,
then raises a host of other issues, related to the theoretical and empirical
status and validity of interview data in qualitative research. Rather than lay
out a tick list of the veritable embarrassment of rich topics that could be
drawn out for discussion, two themes are selected here as particularly
pertinent, given recent calls within the social sciences to more fully recognize
lay voices (Cook and Crang, 1995; Philo, 1992; Robinson, 1994) as well as
challenges to objectivist theories of knowledge (Best and Kellner, 1991;
Lyotard, 1984). These themes are the problematic status of lay actors
biographical knowledge and how that problematic status impacts upon the
research process.
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
189
(Re)presenting a life: the problematic status of biographical
knowledge
A significant proportion (87% in a recent review, Baxter and Eyles, 1997) of
qualitative research utilizes some form of interview, whether structured,
semi-structured or unstructured. According to the research topic, particular
disciplinary constraints and the personal attitudes of the researcher
(Robinson, 1994: 217), interviews may be aimed at a variety of ends in terms
of the accounts generated from them: from ostensibly objective reports of
events to intentionally highly subjective accounts of autobiography.
Whatever the specific aims of any particular process of interviewing,
however, it has become increasingly recognized that interviews can generally
provide multiple points of access into the processes bound up with the
production and reproduction of social relations (Herod, 1993). Moreover,
and associatively, when carefully set up and sensitively interpreted
3
they can,
in principle, provide opportunities for respondents to articulate their own
experiences in their own voice that is, they can relatively empower those
being researched (Bourdieu, 1999a; Hale, 1991; Miles and Crush, 1993; Pels
and Nencel, 1991).
Accordingly, the increasing use of interviews (both structured and semi-
structured) in the social sciences has been accompanied by recent calls to
take advantage of this opportunity to listen to the plurality of voices that
occupy different spaces (e.g. Janesick, 1994; Philo, 1992; Valentine, 1993).
Researchers will then, it is argued, be better informed in speaking about,
for example (and highly pertinent in the context of the authors research),
how actors become included or excluded from particular networks of
power, or from formal and informal arenas of decision-making and
representation. Further, researchers will be encouraged to recognize how
social spaces cannot be reduced to or conceptualized as homogenous arenas,
but are bound up with multiple and sometimes conflicting uses and
interpretations that are interconnected with questions of meaning, power
and authority.
Such attitudes and approaches attribute and rightly so a high degree of
veracity to the accounts of lay actors. At the same time, however, it has to be
accepted that some of this confidence in the high status of such accounts
may be misplaced. As a starting point as illustrated above, and as many
other researchers have discovered (Crapanzano, 1980; Evans-Pritchard, 1940;
Kuper, 1961; Robinson, 1994; Stoller, 1986) quite simply, interviewees
may lie, telling the researcher only part of the truth or nothing like the
truth. They may lie for many reasons (just as anyone does): because they
wish to conceal the existence of particular mechanisms and institutions (in
order to protect them) (cf. Thomas, 1993); because they do not think it is any
business of the researcher to be asking a particular question but do not wish
to directly tell her or him so; because they are getting close to an
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190
embarrassing or painful issue and they do not want to be reminded of it
(Anderson and Jack, 1991); and so on.
4
Thus, in an interview and in an interview transcript, more often than not
the researcher is faced by what Goffman (1971) calls the actors frontstage
presentation. That is, she or he is being given the identity, the persona, which
a particular respondent is presenting or staging for conduct in this particular
timespace (pp. 92122). What the researcher rarely gets a chance to see is
the backstage of this frontstage; all the work, the strategies and the
negotiations that have gone on out of their sight and hearing in order to
manage that frontstage presentation (cf. Giddens, 1984; Ward and Jones,
1999; Woods, 1998). Therefore, quite simply, the researcher cannot get to
see certain activities and events, and associatively may not become aware of
certain other actors, that might be critical in terms of the outcomes they
witness on the ground. In the context of the authors research, for example, it
is highly likely that a great many of the actors associations, both past and
present, will remain out of sight, with the result that any interpretation of
what is going on will be based on highly partial data.
This raises a quandary. The researcher wishes to respect the voices of lay
actors; but, at the same time, she or he risks using data that are in some
senses unreliable. In terms of a Critical or Transcendental Realism an
ontological assumption that certain social processes operate to some extent
independent of their recognition (cf. Bhaskar, 1978)
5
such qualitative data
sometimes just do fail to deliver the goods.
There are, of course, established methods for avoiding the pitfalls of
respondents unreliability it would be a nave or desperate researcher who
accepted one persons account as the definitive definition of a situation. The
most common, and probably most reliable, method of ensuring that reality is
(re)constructed with some correspondence to what actually took place is
triangulation. Here, where possible, multiple accounts, and perhaps multiple
types of data and methods of data collection, are used to either corroborate
or refute particular findings (see Baxter and Eyles, 1997: 506, 514).
Such attempts to establish the social reality of processes and events, in
terms of actual, concrete, timespace intersections and co-presences are, and
should remain, a vital and an integral part of the researchers work. At
the same time, however, the problem of apparent lying overlaps with
another problem: that of respondents apparent unawareness of particular
aspects of their social world(s) aspects that the researcher may well
consider to be of prime importance in defining just what is going on at a
particular site. In turn, this problem of ignorance is part of a far larger
problematic: the epistemological status (or lack of it) awarded by researchers
to biographical knowledge.
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
191
Partial truths: the problem of ignorance
The administration of interviews and subsequent interpretation of interview
transcripts is often highly frustrating. The outcome of, for example, an hour-
long interview and seven hours laborious transcription of that interview is,
frequently, an account miserably bereft of the concrete, nitty-gritty nuggets
of information that would make the researchers life easy. Interviewees are
fond of alluding to events and processes that could prove to be important in
terms of the context of the research, but even when pressed will not or
cannot provide detailed specificities. Or, they fail to mention, or display
apparent utter lack of knowledge about, an issue or a domain that is
prominent in the researchers mind as absolutely essential to what is going
on. On other occasions, interviewees make allegations concerning
themselves and/or others that turn out to be entirely contradictory to what
appears to have actually taken place. Or, and this is perhaps the most
common scenario, information is provided that the researcher has no means
of corroborating or refuting (e.g. through triangulation). It would be cynical
and misleading, however, to assume that on all, or even most, occasions
interviewees actually lie that is, deliberately attempt to mislead the
researcher although there are numerous examples of where this has been
the case (see the extract quoted previously).
Rather, on one level, actors researchers included may be entirely
unaware of the operation of particular social processes, even ones that are
highly pertinent to their own life strategies. On another level, they may be
enabled and constrained by mechanisms and institutions that they very
much take for granted, and therefore do not see as a matter for inclusion in
an interview. On another level, they may be partially (and perhaps uneasily)
aware of certain influences in their life, in a variety of domains, but are
unwilling or unable to articulate them to the researcher. At the same time,
while actors are aware of what they do and why they do it, they may very
well be unaware of some of the consequences of their actions that is, they
know what they do and why they do it, but they may well not know what
what they do does (Foucault, 1981: 95; Brown and Capdevila, 1999). That
is, as an increasing number of researchers emphasize, accounts are always
partial truths (Clifford, 1986).
The problems of remembering and forgetting
Further, actors may have forgotten something that took place. Respondents
are not conveniently fitted with the biological equivalent of a write-once CD-
ROM that enables them to dispense portions of memory at will and in specific
detail. Both neurological and psychological processes mean that memory of
many events and experiences, particularly if they are not considered to be
particularly salient, decays with time (cf. Foddy, 1993: 90100). Moreover,
Qualitative Research 1(2)
192
the very processes of remembering and recalling are highly complex in them-
selves. Individuals rarely remember, store and recall information and life-events
in the form of a text which remains inert and unchanged. Rather, memory is
a living field, the form and content of which exhibit a continual and mutually
informing dynamic (or process of structuration) both internally and in their
relations to ongoing engagements in social worlds (cf. Fentress and Wickham,
1992). Thus, remembering is more akin to a state of mind than a mechanical
trawl through an archive by an independently conscious I (Rorty, 1980).
Accordingly, memory cannot be thought of as providing anything like
complete and accurate accounts of events and processes.
Even more troubling, the distinction between deliberate (i.e. intended to be
misleading) lies and the act of creative, retrospective self-invention may not
be at all distinct. The author of an autobiography subtitled A Memoir With
Lies (Slater, 2000) recounts her adolescent experiences of epilepsy. Frequent
fits resulted in multiple gaps in her memory, leaving her sense of life-story
punctuated by discontinuities. In order to overcome this sense of
incompleteness, she invented happenings to fill the gaps and, out of
ingrained habit, continued to do so even after neuro-surgery cured her
epilepsy. Thus, her autobiography has been constructed in the same way she
filled her memory lapses with lies (endcover). More radically, and
provocatively, Slater suggests that everyone to a greater or lesser extent
(re)constructs their life in this way that everyone has gaps in their life, or
episodes which they wish to forget, or reconstruct in terms favourable to
them so that (auto)biography is replete with must-have-beens, could-have-
beens, might-as-well-have-beens, should-have-beens, and consequently is
always a dynamic hybrid of fact and fiction. (For other exemplars of
unreliable memoirs, see Golden, 1998 and Hotchner, 1993.)
Problematizing biographical knowledge
So, given this problematization, what status is the researcher to attribute to
biographical knowledge? Does it prove that the quantifiers were right all
along: that qualitative research is another word for lazy scholarship, and that
mathematics is the only true metaphysics? Or, perhaps even worse, does the
spectre of structuralistdeterminist Marxism return (if it ever went away), to
whisper in the researchers ear, false consciousness, false consciousness . . .;
that power imposes itself on the vast majority . . . via a process that escapes
them (Althusser, 1972: 233).
The problem of ignorance is thus part of a far larger question that
fundamentally problematizes the status (or lack of it) that researchers
attribute (and feel able to attribute) to biographical knowledge. This,
inescapably, then problematizes the status that researchers award to the
subjects of their research, and therefore challenges the primacy increasingly
accorded to them in the construction of research methodology. It has been
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
193
asserted (see earlier) that actors may be more or less ignorant of social
processes. At the same time, at the beginning of this article it was stated that
the authors research takes as its starting point the notion that actors are
knowledgeable agents. Thus, social processes are dependent on the strategies
and practices of concrete individuals, and their interpretations of the
institutionalized forms of power that enable and constrain them in particular
situations. How are these two, apparently contradictory, stances to be
reconciled?
Reality and pragmatic knowledge
The answer is: easily. To say that social processes are dependent on the actions
of knowledgeable agents is not equivalent to asserting that they are reducible
to the actions of knowledgeable agents. Further, and more precisely, it is not
to say that biographical knowledge is identical to institutionalized knowledge
(cf. Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1972) which is not to give
either moral or epistemological primacy over the other. Associatively, reality
does not equate only to what actors say about it.
Thus, ignorance and knowledgeability are not necessarily opposed. Rather,
on the contrary, the former can be an integral part of the latter. Actors rarely
go around with full and precise knowledge of every aspect of the social (and
material) world in large part, because they have no need to: boiling an egg
does not require an intimate familiarity with the principles of combustion
and particle physics and the social history of cooking; writing an academic
paper does not demand any affinity with the binary code of the computer, or
the history and social consequences of the development of the printing press,
or recognition that by doing so the author is contributing to the reproduction
of a bourgeois, elitist institution which exists only to keep the masses
enslaved . . . .
Moreover, actors knowledges are not simply akin to a list of objective facts
about particular issues, a list that may be incomplete to different degrees.
Rather, they are constructed and re-constructed in large part to assist in
personal practical dealings with [experienced] reality (Lloyd, 1993: 99).
Consequently, interests are formed, frequently, as necessarily highly
pragmatic responses to personally affecting circumstances and events;
solidarities are constructed around specific contingencies and necessities;
motivations are informed by multiple and more or less explicitly recognized
factors (cf. Rorty, 1989). The associations and bonds through which
knowledges are formed are thick, heterogeneous and complex; informed by
and articulating multiple psycho-personal, social, political, economic, social,
cultural and fundamentally materialvisceral elements. Accordingly,
biographical knowledge is (and is frequently reflexively recognized by actors
as) fundamentally fuzzy: ambiguous, ambivalent, ironic, self-contradictory,
multiple and contingent. Biographical knowledges are thus practical or
Qualitative Research 1(2)
194
pragmatic knowledges (cf. Bourdieu, 1977, 1999a; Giddens, 1979, 1984;
Rorty, 1980, 1998); they are contingent ways of interpreting the world,
constructed and re-constructed through multiple and ongoing timespace
specific encounters with other (single and collective) actors and bodies of
knowledge.
It is vital, however, that such an assessment in no way romanticizes or
fetishizes biographical knowledges, by representing them as quaint folk, or
native, or local narratives that should be afforded a priori empirical, moral
and epistemological primacy. Rather, it should represent an important,
necessary step towards recognizing that the problematic status of
biographical knowledge is more than just a technical problem to be overcome
and this is the case for almost all types of social research, not only
anthropological attempts to produce thick descriptions of local cultures.
Fuller consideration of it can be an integral part of considering the
motivations and capacities of actors, and the outcomes that emerge from
particular circumstances and intersections of those actors. Consequently,
this consideration should also become an integral part of evaluating not only
research methodology, but also the theories of the social world (bound up
with ontology and epistemology) that should both inform and be informed by
that methodology.
Consideration of biographical knowledge involves, amongst other things,
interpreting specific statements against the context of the whole of an actors
account(s). It requires understanding how it is that certain knowledges attain
truth value become a matter of relatively uncritical belief and are relied on
to inform action through unpacking and associatively reconstructing,
however tentatively and partially, the process of their formation over and
through time and space. In essence, it requires thorough consideration of, or
at the very least being able to bear in mind, what episodes and situations in
the world cause an agent to prefer that one [belief] rather than another be
true (Davidson, 1990: 322).
Fuller consideration of the contingencies of the production and
articulation of biographical knowledge can therefore be a means to exploring
concretely how highly differential knowledges are produced and reproduced
through local and wider social processes; and how those knowledge
differentials can then have political outcomes in terms of individuals
differential abilities to engage with the institutionalized forms of power in
both local and wider contexts.
6
Further, it can be a means to more
thoroughly yet also more critically embracing qualitative research methods,
as the remainder of this article outlines.
Methodological considerations
Despite the claim laid at the beginning of this article to a practically
orientated discussion of some of the problems with biographical knowledge,
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
195
the preceding section has ended up with a prescription that falls little short of
a utopian vision for social research. In methodological practice it will rarely
be possible (or desirable) for the researcher to adhere faithfully to all its tenets,
and this article in no way attempts to hold up its assertions as a benchmark
against which concrete research should be measured. Rather, it has raised,
then deliberately and inescapably left unanswered and open, a number of
questions, in an attempt to provoke thought and debate. In this sense, it is a
partial, contingent and contestable account just like those of the actors it
(re)presents.
However, out of the issues raised, two methodological principles can be
drawn out and unequivocally privileged. First, that obtaining an adequate
understanding of any of the processes bound up with the articulation and
consequences of power in a locale involves affording adequate recognition
of the importance of actors accounts. Social processes are dependent on
the practices and interpretations of concrete individuals, and therefore the
accounts they give of themselves and others should heavily inform the
researchers account of those processes.
Second, and more contentiously, that the affording of this recognition is
necessary but insufficient to obtaining that understanding. Respondents
accounts are valid perspectives on the positionality and intentions of their
authors and the self-witnessed outcomes of their actions. However, they
cannot, alone, fully inform any adequate conceptualization (i.e. theoretical
understanding) of the processes bound up with the constitution and re-
constitution of social life. Respondents accounts are just that: accounts.
They are knowledges generated in, partially constituting and constituted by,
particular contexts those contexts being the power/knowledge complexes of
different and multiple timespaces. At the same time, they are not nave
attempts to describe the world, but are actively constructed through the
negotiation between researcher and respondent in the attempt to manage a
particular social identity.
Utilizing biographical knowledges in concrete research
An account can thus be utilized in (very broadly) two ways. First, as a mode
of access to the lived experience of the actor the meaningfulness of which
that actor has privileged access to and understanding of. This lived experience
is critical to the researcher being able to at least partially understand the
personal understandings and meanings that actors generate in their
engagements with particular worlds; and in turn assess how those meanings
and understandings impact upon those engagements.
Second, as an account that partially informs and is informed by, through its
positioning in multiple networks of agents (cf. Haraway, 1997) and wider,
fuller empirical and theoretical frames of reference (Bourdieu, 1999b:
12863). This then critically foregrounds the relational aspect of social
Qualitative Research 1(2)
196
processes: that they are bound up with actors associations and intersections
with manifold social actors, institutions and bodies of knowledge.
In short, emphasis is placed on the emergence through the formulation of
methodology and the research process as the whole of an intersubjectively
produced final account: an account which ensures that the others voice is
heard alongside that of the researcher (Baxter and Eyles, 1997: 510), but
that does not afford empirical, moral or ontological primacy to either voice
over the other (Rorty, 1991: 200).
Interpretation and rigour in qualitative research
There is an ongoing dispute in the philosophy of the social sciences a
dispute which periodically breaks out into fully fledged intellectual warfare
over the relative merits of quantitative and qualitative research methods. This
debate goes well beyond the surface question of whether numbers mean
more than words. It is a debate, fundamentally, over the differing legitimacies
of different intellectual world views of differing opinions as to how
researchers can most accurately know the social world.
It could be argued that this debate is unimportant, since the principle of
using qualitative methods in social research is now relatively comfortably
established, at least in the UK academic context. This would, however, be a
politically dangerous argument. Although in academia the texts produced
utilizing such methods may sit largely unchallenged alongside and
sometimes complementing texts relying on numerical analyses, in the
harsh world of political decision-making it is all too evident that it is
numerical knowledge which holds dominance (Boyle, 2001). In terms of its
consumption by non-academics (journalists being a notable case in point),
knowledge that cannot be summarized in statistical form, or at least neatly
categorized and slotted into pre-defined boxes, is the poor relation. Critically,
this discursive disparity is more than merely academic; it reflects a
politically affective favouring of one world-view over another (cf. Gilligan,
1998; Rorty, 1998). Which of those worlds is made more discursively real
has considerable implications for public policy across a range of fields.
This brings to the fore an issue that has been immanent in the discussion in
the bulk of this article: that of rigour or its apparent lack in qualitative
analysis. It is frequently made to appear (and this is perhaps the established
and popular view amongst those outside looking in on the social sciences)
that qualitative research is soft analysis, at best producing illustrations of
issues already recognized, defined and solved through enumeration,
tabulation and calculation, at worst serving to cloud and draw attention from
those same issues. Problematizing biographical knowledge could be seen as
further proof of this status as the poor relation. Is this, after all, the case? In
the final instance, is qualitative research no more than the easy alternative
for those who cannot manage good, hard statistics?
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
197
The immediate, simple answer must be a resounding no. Recognizing that
knowledge is both personally and socially constructed, and therefore bound
up with issues of contingency, uncertainty, ideology, discourse and
legitimation, makes qualitative interpretation anything but the soft option.
On the contrary, it means that the qualitative interpretation of data, in many
ways, can be more demanding than the quantitative interpretation of data,
since it is all the more critical that researchers are thorough, rigorous and
honest in their interpretation of these data. The inherent fuzziness of much
data derived from semi-structured or unstructured interviews, for example,
should not be used as an excuse for lack of rigour in interrogating these data.
That was the simple answer. But the assertion that qualitative
interpretation is, or should be, rigorous requires some unpacking and
elaboration if it is to more than superficially defend such academic labour
whilst accepting the discursive ground (positivistic science) that rigour is
usually invoked to defend. The notion of rigour should not be automatically
identified and allied with only those interpretative strategies that seek to
produce knowledge constituted primarily in terms of causeeffect
explanatory relations rather than those that are more concerned with
understanding how people think about and experience their lives (cf. Cloke et
al., forthcoming). While rigour can be invoked in order to obliterate difference
and ambiguity, and to force Other knowledges into rigid conceptual
frameworks and modes of understanding, it can also, alternatively, be a
measure of the reflexivity and sensitivity with which the contextualized and
partial knowledges (Staeheli and Lawson, 1995: 329) produced by both
researcher and researched are connected in the generation of academic texts.
Rigour in this scenario would eschew the idea of there being only one
legitimate reading of biographical (and other) knowledges, and favour
interpretative strategies that made space for the multiple stories out of which
any account is woven.
Similarly, the hard/soft dualism, deliberately problematized (see earlier) by
scare quotes, can be, and often is, read as a highly gendered construct.
Hardness is taken to correspond to a masculinist desire to enter (penetrate)
the world in order to find its Truth (Rorty, 2000: 25) whilst softness
corresponds to a feminine sensitivity to and tolerance of the multiple truths,
subtleties and ambiguities of this same world (Atack, 1998: 35). But this is
only one, limited, reading. Invoking such a dualism does not necessarily give
privilege to hard over soft as, unfortunately, much modern science does.
7
Hardness can be associated with a phallagocentric idea of thrusting strength;
but it can also mean brittleness, inflexibility, stasis and deadness. Conversely,
while softness might be seen by some as weakness, it can also be read as
malleability, flexibility, suppleness and fluidity: as resistance to being
congealed, and always having the potential to flow in unexpected directions.
8
Thus, the uncertainties and ambiguities of biographical knowledge are
not problems to be solved according to benchmarks set out by positivist
Qualitative Research 1(2)
198
science. Rather, they are both difficulties to be creatively coped with and,
strengths to be exploited, according to what ends the researcher hopes to use
that knowledge.
Conclusion
In discussing the problematic status of biographical knowledge, this article
has sought, by encompassing many disciplines of social research, to
contribute to and extend the ongoing debate over the connections between
theories of knowledge, the constitution of the social world and empirical
research into that world. In particular, it has attempted to draw out and make
more explicit some of the tensions between methodology, epistemology and
ontology, and to suggest how those tensions might be fruitfully negotiated.
In doing so, it has echoed the emphasis of the majority of the burgeoning
literature on qualitative research: that a thorough but also critical embrace of
the idea and practice of qualitative research necessitates recognition of the
contingency and uncertainty of the social world. Simultaneously, however,
rather than calling for a wholesale disavowal of established theoretical
conceptual orientations in the encounter with the Other, it has in some ways
(re)asserted the importance of researcher authority over the (re)presentation
of the texts resulting from social research. That is to say, although
interpretative strategies need to be open so that fruitful avenues of enquiry
are not prematurely foreclosed and in order to make space for the
unexpected, they also need to operate a degree of closure.
While the intersubjective nature of social research involves or should
involve the researcher renegotiating their own position(s) in terms of how
they think about the social world, ultimately they can still only ever interpret
that world by occupying, and exercising, the power stemming from a
particular position, and through their own (embodied) subjectivity, which
includes all the unquestioned assumptions that necessarily entails (Blunt and
Rose, 1994: 58). To research at all is to place and create order(s) on the
world. It is never a question of whether or not to have order; the question is
which order to choose.
9
But the idea of order does not have to place the researcher in the mould of
the stereotyped, 19th-century, modernist social scientist eager to impose a
discipline on an untamed world in order to make it tame, productive and
amenable to subsequent re-ordering. Rather, operating around what might
be called a post-modernist idea of order, it is possible to envision researchers
as modest witnesses and participants (cf. Haraway, 1997), critically aware of
and passionately seeking to understand both their and others positionings
(Janesick, 1994). From this basis, they would seek to create a plurality of
knowledges: knowledges that complement, contradict and seek to undermine
one another, or come together in unexpected ways to create new events and
modes of understanding. It is from such encounters between researcher and
Gardner: Unreliable memories and other contingencies
199
data and, before this, between researcher and researched that the most
critical and exciting accounts of social life can emerge.
NOTE S
1. This is not, of course, to suggest that immersion-type fieldwork is anything like
an easy or unproblematic process in terms of access or interviewee dissimulation
(see Crang, 1994; Ostrander, 1993; Robinson, 1994; Rose, 1997; Stoller, 1986).
2. For example: Since leaving the parish council, have you remained active or
become newly involved in other areas of village life? Prompt: Could you give me
any details?
3. What constitutes sensitivity is highly problematic in itself (cf. Gilligan, 1998),
and it is recognized that the gathering and interpretation of accounts is bound up
with questions of researcher authority, the construction of interview schedules,
ideology and academic conventions that are largely passed over here (see
especially Foddy, 1993; Herod, 1993; McDowell, 1988; 1992; Robinson, 1994).
4. The issue of lying is closely allied to the matter of silence. Silences within accounts
may, as Hale (1991) points out, be bound up with and thus indicate self-
subjugation; but they may also be part of an exercise of power: a means of
denying the researcher access to certain aspects of social relations or particular
knowledge. More complexly, self-subjugation and the exercise of power may co-
exist: silence is then a way of keeping safe the perhaps minimal and precious
agency a person experiences (cf. Spivak, 1990: 19).
5. This is a crude glossing of the many arguments contained within the field of
Critical or Transcendental realism a field which is both externally contested (i.e.
by other ontologies) and internally conflict-ridden (cf. Sayer, 1992). Moreover,
there are many problems with Critical Realism, such as its account(s) of language
and languages relation to the world. It can, however, serve as a useful peg on
which to hang research, insofar as it assumes that the social world is not
reducible to what can be said about it.
6. At the same time, it should be made clear that none of the discussion above is
intended to suggest that interrogation of the wider-scale and/or more politically
intended circumstances of the formulation of different discourses (cf. Fairclough,
1989; Foucault, 1972) should become any less of a priority in social research.
7. For a prime historical example, see Nagel (1961) and, for a critique of this
discourse, Haraway (1989).
8. At the same time, as McDowell (1988) and Herod (1993) note, the belief that
certain research methodologies are intrinsically and inevitably gendered can be
misleading and unhelpful in itself. Relatedly, it is also interesting, and a point
worthy of further study, that industrial modernity is now associated with
hardness and inflexibility, while post-industrial modernity, or post-modernity, has
become associated with metaphors of flexibility and fluidity (cf. Bauman, 2000).
9. Contrary to popular belief, even notions of chaos and complexity now
fashionable in contemporary natural science are shot through with deep
ontological notions of an underlying, generative order (see Kauffman, 1995).
ACKNOWL E DGE ME NTS
This article draws on material from a research project into power, identity and social
change in rural spaces funded by the ESRC, award no. R00429834416. I am very
grateful to Bill Edwards, Mike Woods, Deborah Dixon, Mark Goodwin, Verity Jones,
Helen Twidle and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.
Qualitative Research 1(2)
200
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GRAHAM GARDNE R is a postgraduate research student in the Institute of Geography
and Earth Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His research interests are
power, identity and social change in contemporary rural spaces, and the methodology
and philosophy of the social sciences, and he is currently completing his PhD on these
topics.
Address: Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
SY23 3DB, UK. [email: gsg95@aber.ac.uk]
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