Date/Time
Date(s) - 24/03/2025 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Audience:
LUBS Online Guest Lecture Series
‘Naturalistic or Manufactured Data’
With Professor David Silverman
Monday 24th March 2025
(14.00-15.30 GMT) – Online via Zoom
We are pleased to welcome David Silverman, an outstanding scholar specialising in qualitative research, to present ‘Naturalistic or Manufactured Data’ as part of the LUBS Guest Lecture Series.
Summary:
The vast majority of journal articles assume a consensus about the following aims of qualitative research [QR]:
- Understanding human experience
- Treating interviews and focus groups as providing direct access to the contents of people’s heads.
- Foregrounding 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’.
By contrast, in this talk I argue that:
- Qualitative research is a theoretically driven enterprise
- Qualitative research complements quantitative research in particular by entering into the ‘black box’ of how social phenomena [including interviews and focus groups] are constituted in real time
- Qualitative research is as much about social practices as about experience
- Hence, all things being equal, Qualitative researchers should have a bias in favour of naturalistic data including documents, digital data and recordings of interactions.
We hope that you can join us and please feel free to share this email with colleagues in your network.
David Silverman is Professor Emeritus in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College and Visiting Professor in the Business Schools of King’s College, University of London, Leeds University and University of Technology, Sydney as well as Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Education QUT. 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.