The Science of Qualitative Research

Martin Packer is Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. He received his BA at Cambridge University and his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan. His research has explored interactions between neonates and their mothers, early childhood–peer relations, conflict among adolescents and the way schools change the kind of person a child becomes. Packer is co-editor of Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigation in Psychology (with Ritch Addison) and Cultural and Critical Perspectives on Human Development (with Mark Tappan) and author of The Structure of Moral Action and Changing Classes: School Reform and the New Economy. He is one of the founding co-editors of the journal Qualitative Research in Psychology and has published articles in American Psychologist, Educational Psychology, and Mind, Culture & Activity.

Introduction; Part I. The Objective Study of Subjectivity: 1. Paradigms of inquiry; 2. The qualitative research interview; 3. The analysis of qualitative research interviews; 4. Hermeneutics and the project for a human science; 5. Qualitative analysis reconsidered; Part II. Ethnographic Fieldwork – the Focus on Constitution: 6. Calls for a new interpretive social science; 7. The social construction of reality; 8. Constitution as ontological; 9. The crisis in ethnography; 10. Studying ontological work; Part III. Inquiry with an Emancipatory Interest: 11. Qualitative research as critical inquiry; 12. Emancipatory inquiry as rational reconstruction; 13. Social science as participant objectification; 14. Archaeology, genealogy, ethics; 15. A historical ontology of ourselves.