Page 87 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Notes on method*

Paul Willis

If the ‘naturalist’ revolt was directed against positivism’s inability to understand
and record human subjectivity, mainstream sociology has nevertheless found it
possible to assign participant observation (PO) and case study work a legitimate
place in the social sciences. 1
I shall be arguing that positivism’s unwilling acceptance of ‘qualitative’
methodology sees more clearly than its own admissions that the emphasis on
methodological variety may leave the heartland of the positivist terrain
untouched. In its recognition of a technical inability to record all that is relevant
—and its yielding of this zone to another technique—positivism may actually
preserve its deepest loyalty: to its object of inquiry truly as an ‘object’. The
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duality and mutual exclusivity of the over-neatly opposed categories, ‘qualitative’
methods and ‘quantitative’ methods, suggest already that the ‘object’ is viewed
in the same unitary and distanced way even if the mode is changed—now you
measure it, now you feel it.
Still, there is much that is valuable in the ‘naturalist’ revolt. It has certainly
dissociated itself from simplistic causal thinking, and it has developed a set of
rules and research procedures which do offer an alternative concrete starting-
point to the positivist methods. This article aims to identify the really central
principles of the ‘qualitative’ method and to suggest what is worth preserving
and what is worth firmly rejecting in a preliminary attempt to outline a method
genuinely adapted to the study of human meanings.
The tradition which has most clearly used the ‘qualitative’ methods under
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discussion here was outlined in the last issues of WPCS. The ‘Chicago School’
of the 1920s and 1930s originated this tradition. W.F.Whyte’s work in the
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1940s marks a continuance of the tradition into a second phase. The major
expansion came in the 1950s and 1960s, with the work of Becker, Geer, Strauss,
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Polsky and others. The tradition crossed to Britain most clearly when the work
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of this ‘third wave’ was taken up by D.Downes, S.Cohen and particularly those
associated with the ‘sceptical revolution’ institutionalized by the National
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Deviancy Conference. There has been a sporadic but noticeable interest in, and
use of, PO in Britain which is not specifically in this Chicago-derived tradition. 9
The method itself has been systematized and presented as a ‘respectable’
methodology in two recent readers.
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