Duquesne University has a unique resource. Within the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts and in many of the other Schools, a greater percentage of scholars are devoted to interpretive and qualitative methods than at any other university in North America.1 In most universities, only English, Philosophy and the other disciplines in the humanities have a large number of faculty that use these approaches. At Duquesne, however, the social and behavioral sciences as well as the humanities rely heavily on interpretive and qualitative methods. In particular, the Psychology Department is a recognized national leader in qualitative research; the Sociology department is developing a national reputation on the basis of expertise in qualitative as well as in quantitative methods; the Communication department is becoming known for interpretive and qualitative research; and Duquesne's School of Nursing is attracting graduate students and faculty who wish an alternative to the standard, quantitative forms of research in their field. Moreover, the emphasis on interpretation and qualitative methods is part of a growing national tendency as more and more scholars in the social and behavioral sciences join humanities scholars in recognizing the indispensability of these methods for investigating the subject matter of their disciplines. Because interpretive studies and qualitative research emphasize holistic understanding rather than reductive or mechanistic explanations of human phenomena, they also lend support to the values -- for example, creativity, diversity, and community -- included in Duquesne's Mission Statement.
These three considerations -- the number of scholars at Duquesne who are devoted to interpretive studies and qualitative research, the growing national importance of these approaches, and their compatibility with humanistic values -- suggest the desirability of establishing a center for interpretive and qualitative methods within the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts at Duquesne. Although the Center would be based in the College, it would welcome, indeed encourage, the full participation of the other Schools of the University in the Center. Moreover, the Center would not be a separate department in the University. Instead, it would consist of scholars who are already, and would continue to be, members of departments in the College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts or in the other Schools of the University. The Center would also invite visiting scholars to complement its faculty.
The Center would provide the University with the following structures and services:
1) An interdisciplinary and intellectual community in which
a) Duquesne scholars (faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate
students) could
1) more readily identify one another, and formally and informally share, and
thereby develop and enrich, their different styles of interpretive and qualitative
approaches to the humanities and social and behavioral sciences;
2) contribute to understanding the depth and variety of these approaches and also explore the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research;
b) visiting scholars could both augment and benefit from the expertise which Duquesne scholars already enjoy concerning interpretive and qualitative forms of research.
2) Greater visibility for the College within the University, and, via the global network of similar centers, for the University at the national and international levels.
3) Cross-listed courses that emphasize interpretive and qualitative methods and which could be team-taught and interdisciplinary.
a) This arrangement would permit courses and faculty to be cross-listed via the Center; besides providing more resources for students, the cross-listing of these courses and faculty would augment the faculty and courses that each department could include in its own listings and thus assist these departments in attracting graduate students and new faculty.
b) Such courses would also provide faculty in undergraduate departments with an opportunity to teach their area of expertise at the graduate level.
4) Expertise for undertaking interpretive or qualitative research (such as focus groups of community members) requested by the University or by Pittsburgh communities (such as Duquesne's neighboring Hill District).
5) A base for seeking external funding for activities related to the Center's goals.
6) Sponsorship of conferences and lectures.
7) A web-site and other means (perhaps a future journal) to disseminate the
Center's work.
1. Interpretive studies and qualitative research typically use qualitative rather than statistical or other quantitative methods to support their conclusions. Some of the more well-know examples of these methods are phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, grounded theory, discourse analysis, ideology critique, genealogy, and deconstruction. Interpretive and qualitative methods can also be used in conjunction with quantitative procedures.
Appendix: Characterization of Interpretive Studies and Qualitative Research
In the natural sciences, one typically characterizes dependent variables in terms of quantitative measures, for example, frequency of occurrence or mass. The results of these measurements are then explained in terms of independent variables or "causes" that are specifiable independently of the dependent variables. The results of these measurements count as evidence for an explanatory hypothesis when they are predicted or retrodicted on the basis of conditions related to the presumed or observed presence of the independent variables. In the case of interpretive studies and qualitative research, however, evidence does not point to a cause that explains and is independent of the evidence: the evidence is simultaneously our understanding of the phenomenon in question. Rather than dividing a situation into dependent and independent variables and then explaining the former in terms of the latter, each aspect of a situation is always understood in terms of the whole situation that the aspect reflects or modulates. The evidential side of this understanding consists in either the evidence's direct presence or obviousness to the researchers, its internal coherence, its direct transformation of the researchers' existence, or all three of these together.
For example, a practitioner of the natural science approach to anxiety will typically take the latter as a dependent variable, find a quantitative way of measuring it, e.g., galvanic skin response, and seek a physiological or environmental explanation of the changes that take place in the dependent variable during an experiment. Evidence consists in observing relevant quantifiable changes in the dependent variable under experimental conditions. From the changes that occur under these conditions, the researcher can infer the causal efficacy of the independent or "theoretical" variable, e.g., the physiological or environmental factors. In contrast, a qualitative researcher would look for the meaning of anxiety (or of a text, an historical event, or some other phenomenon connected to our existence) insofar as its meaning can be made directly present or coherent to us. For example, a novelist's (or an interpretive or qualitative researcher's) description of his or her character's (subject's) experience of anxiety -- the slowing of time, the constriction of a room, the judge-like demeanor of other people, and the unsteadiness of one's body -- provides us with an understanding of being anxious, anxiety's meaning or structure, that is at the same time evidence for that understanding. Moreover, this evidence is intersubjective -- novelists (or interpretive and qualitative researchers) know that most of their readers will immediately understand the situations they have presented as ones of anxiety without the novelist (or researcher) even needing to use the word.
Most interpretive and qualitative researchers will -- and should -- claim that the understanding arrived at through their methods is comprehensive or "in depth" and therefore is not in turn explainable by or reducible to natural science hypotheses. However, they will also allow that their research can be of benefit to those engaged in quantitative research. That is, the qualitative understanding of phenomena may allow quantitative researchers to specify their dependent variables more fully and thereby permit them to have more confidence that they are actually explaining the phenomena they set out to study rather than just some secondary aspect of them. Quantitative research results can also direct the attention of interpretive and qualitative researchers to new phenomena that they must seek to understand in qualitative terms, for example, the strange (to us) behavior -- or "world" -- of people suffering from extensive brain damage. An institute of interpretive studies and qualitative research, therefore, is not divorced from quantitative research and those who specialize in it.
Interpretive and qualitative researchers are especially sensitive to the way in which historical and cultural contexts determine the meaning of the subject matter under investigation and the way in which these contexts also must be taken into account in evaluating the findings of their inquiries. Recently, for example, cultural theorists have been demonstrating that the meanings of "race" and "gender" are inseparable from the historical and cultural contexts in which these terms have been used and in which their desiderata have been scientifically studied and subject to social institutionalization (e.g., segregation and the denial of suffrage). This perspective increases our understanding of both the (at least partial) social construction of these groups and the historical and cultural periods -- including our own -- in which these constructions have taken place. This perspective also provides the theoretical basis for the growing number of cultural, race, women and gender, and science studies programs as well as humanities institutes across the nation's universities.