Denzin, Norman K.
Lincoln, Yvonna S.
2005
Introduction in Denzin, NK et al ~ The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research

2
“Qualitative research is a field of inquiry in its own right. It crosscuts disciplines, fields, and subject matters. A complex, interconnected family of terms, concepts, and assumptions surround the term qualitative research. These include the traditions associated with foundationalism, positivism, postfoundationalism, postpositivism, poststructuralism, and the many qualitative research perspectives, and/or methods connected to cultural and interpretive studies.”

3
“The researcher became a bricoleur, learning how to borrow from many different disciplines.”

3f
“Qualitative research means different things in each of these moments [of its historical evolution]. Nonetheless, an initial, generic definition can be offered: Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. At this level, qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.
Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials – case study; personal experience; introspection; life story; interview; artifacts; cultural texts and productions; observational, historical, international, and visual texts – that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ [page 4] lives. Accordingly, qualitative researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected interpretive practices, hoping always to get a better understanding of the subject matter at hand. It is understood, however, that each practice makes the world visible in a different way. Hence there is frequently a commitment to using more than one interpretive practice in any study.”

4
“The researcher, in turn, may be seen as a bricoleur, as a maker of quilts or, as in filmmaking, a person who assembles images into montages.”

“The bricoleur is a “Jack of all trades, a kind of professional do-it-yourself” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 17; The savage mind; 2nd ed.).

5
“Qualitative research is inherently multimethod in focus (Flick, 2002, pp. 226-227[; An introduction to qualitative research; 2nd ed.; London; Sage]). However, the use of multiple methods, or triangulation, reflects an attempt to secure an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in question. Objective reality can never be captured. We know a thing only through its representations. Triangulation is not a tool or a strategy of validation, but an alternative to validation (Flick, 2002, p. 227). The combination of multiple methodological practices, empirical materials, perspectives, and observers in a single study is best understood, then, as a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to any inquiry (see Flick, 2002, p. 229).”

5f
Chapter 38 explains that diamond may be a better metaphor: the picture bounces off the various edges, what you see depends on how you hold it.

6
“The methodological bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks, ranging from interviewing to intensive self-reflection and introspection. The theoretical bricoleur reads widely and is knowledgeable about the many interpretive paradigms (feminism, Marxism, cultural studies, constructivism, queer theory) that can be brought to any particular problem. He or she may not, however, feel that paradigms can be mingled or synthesized. That is, one cannot easily move between paradigms as overarching philosophical systems denoting particular ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. They represent belief systems that attach users to particular worldviews. Perspectives, in contrast, are less well developed systems, and one can move between them more easily. The researcher as bricoleur-theorist works between and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigms.
The interpretive bricoleur understand that research is an interactive process shaped by his or her own personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity, and by those of the people in the setting.” Blah Blah

“The product of the interpretive bricoleur‘s labor is a complex, quiltlike bricolage, a reflexive collage or montage – a set of fluid, interconnected images and representations. This interpretive structure is like a quilt, a performance text, a sequence of representations connecting the parts of the whole.”

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“The field sprawls between and cuts across all of the human disciplines, even including, in some cases, the physical sciences. Its practitioners are variously committed to modern, postmodern, and postexperimental sensibilities and the approaches to social research that these sensibilities imply.”

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“Qualitative researchers stress the socially constructed nature of reality, the intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the situational constraints that shape inquiry. Such researchers emphasize the value-laden nature of inquiry.”

11
“In the positivist version it is contended that there is a reality out there to be studied, captured, and understood, whereas the postpositivists argue that reality can never be fully apprehended, only approximated (Guba, 1990, p. 22 [The alternative paradigm dialog. In Guba (Ed.) The paradigm dialog (pp. 17-30)]).”

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“The gendered, multiculturally situated researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology) that he or she then examines in specific ways (methodology, analysis). That is, the researcher collects empirical materials bearing on the question and then analyzes and writes about those materials.”

22
“All qualitative researchers are philosophers in that “universal sense in which all human beings … are guided by highly abstract principles (Bateson, 1972, p. 320 [Steps to an ecology of mind; New York: Ballantine]). These principles combine beliefs about ontology (What kind of being is the human being? What is the nature of reality?), epistemology (What is the relationship between the inquirer and the known?), and methodology (How do we know the world, or gain knowledge of it?) (see Guba, 1990, p. 18 [The alternative paradigm dialog; in Guba (Ed.) The paradigm dialog (pp. 17-30); Sage]; Lincoln & Guba, 1985, pp. 14-15 [Naturalistic inquiry; Sage]; see also Guba & Lincoln, Chapter 8, this volume).”

“The researcher is “bound within a net of epistemological and ontological premises which – regardless of ultimate truth or falsity – become partially self-validating” (Bateson, 1972, p. 314 [see above]).”