Date/Time
Date(s) - 16/10/2026 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Audience:
Faculty of Business Guest Lecture Series
Naturalistic or Manufactured Data?
With Professor David Silverman
Friday 16th October 2026 (10.00-11.30 UK time)
Online via Zoom
Summary:
The vast majority of journal articles assume a consensus about three features of qualitative research [QR]: QR seeks to understand human experience; it treats interviews and focus groups as providing direct access to the contents of people’s heads and it foregrounds the empathetic skills of the researcher to achieve this.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many researchers should follow this model. In the qualitative research workshops I have been running for researchers in universities around the world, I find that at least 90% are using interviews with the aim of seeking to understand the experiences of some group. In this sense, they manufacture data instead of working with data that is already ‘out there’ i.e. naturalistic data [‘naturalistic’ because there cannot be purely ‘natural’ data, unmediated by human action].
In this talk, I review the reasons for this preference and suggest why they are often faulty. Using some interview data, I also demonstrate that far more is going on there than accessing ‘experiences’. To proceed on the basis that interviewees have “states of mind” able to be revealed by the skilful interviewer derives from the “psy” disciplines and also survey research. Both depend upon the everyday assumption that each of our actions is linked to a mental process (e.g., a “perception,” an “intention,” or a “motive”).
By contrast, I argue that QR is a theoretically driven enterprise which is as much about social practices as about experiences. As such, QR complements quantitative research in particular by entering into the ‘black box’ of how social phenomena are constituted in real time. I demonstrate this through a brief analysis of three kinds of naturalistic data: tweets, audio and video data. All things being equal, QR’s greatest strength is demonstrated in working with naturalistic data including documents, digital data and recordings of interactions. Following this path, we can establish a more fruitful division of labour between qualitative and quantitative work.
Biography:
Prof David Silverman is Visiting Emeritus Professor at Leeds University Business School, Professor Emeritus in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, London Visiting Professor in the King’s College Business School, University of London and the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney as well as Adjunct Professor at QUT, Faculty of Education. He has authored 15 books and over 60 journal articles on qualitative research, ethnography and conversation analysis. Thirty of his students have successfully completed their PhD and three are now full Professors.
His bestselling textbook Doing Qualitative Research [now in its 7th edition] is a manual for writing a qualitative PhD. Uniquely, it is based on conversations he has had with hundreds of social science researchers in five continents.
If you would like to join the lecture, please register via the link at the top of this page.