Qualitative health research
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Two issues have been central to ongoing disputes about judgments of quality in qualitative inquiry: (a) the ways in which paradigmatic orientations are understood to guide procedural decisions and (b) the meaning and intelligibility of paradigmatic incommensurability. In this article, we address these two key issues through an exploration of the debates between hermeneutics and critical social theory, including the exchanges between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas, and between Richard Rorty and Thomas McCarthy. We suggest that the key epistemological issue addressed in these debates is the nature of interpretation, separating the two philosophical camps based on beliefs about whether foundational knowledge is possible to achieve. We conclude the article by discussing the implications of these different positions for beliefs about quality in qualitative inquiry, and comment on the role of judgment in assessments of the value and quality of different approaches to qualitative research.
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While analyzing the narratives of children receiving pediatric oncology treatment and their parents, we encountered three ways to look at their narratives: what was narrated, nonnarrated, and disnarrated. The narrated refers to the actors (characters) and events (scenes) individuals decided to include in the narration of their experiences, the nonnarrated are everything not included in narration, and the disnarrated are elements that are narrated in the story but did not actually take place. We use our reflection to illustrate how an integrative analysis of these different forms of narration can allow us to produce a holistic interpretation of people's experiences of illness. This approach is still in the early stages of development, but we hope this article can promote a debate in the field and lead to the refinement of an important tool for narrative analysis.