P x: (Series editor's introduction, by Michael W. Apple) Summarizing stereotypes of critical qualitative research. One is that "normal" research is "neutral" and "critical" research is "value laden," which is damaging both because it positions some methods as normal and others as not, but also because all research is value laden whether it says so or not.

P x: (Michael W. Apple summarizing Michelle Fine (1994) in his intro) Fine describes three researcher stances - ventriloquy (researcher transmits information, information and researcher are both neutral), voices (researcher represents voices, but says nothing about their own positionality), and activism (researcher has a specific political stance and aims, tries to disrupt)

P 3: Critical social researchers have not yet developed a shared methodological theory. So far, they share orientations and values regarding social inequality, power, and the role of research in creating social change rather than just describing social life. Others have tried (see citations on this page for more) but early efforts don't agree. This book tries to fill that gap and create a "tight methodological theory" that can be applied to studies on any topic.

N^: I am unsure if Carspecken is trying to synthesize, unify, put these pieces in conversation with each other, etc. or his position generally with respect to the prior work he notes on p. 3. My guess is that he's trying to successfully accomplish what they'd started but not quite completed.

Q 4: Critical theory has enormous implications for all the basic concepts employed in social research: concepts like "validity, "reliability," and "objectivity," among others.

N: What is the difference between (and relationships between) social constructivism, criticalism, and postmodernism?

Q 4: (Uses and unpacks the following excerpt from Kinchloe & McLaren, 1994, p. 139-40 - see that citation) We are defining a criticalist as a researcher or theorist who attempts to use her or his work as a form of social or cultural criticism and who accepts certain basic assumptions: that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations which are socially and historically constituted; that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription; that the relationship between concept and object and signifier and signified is never stable or fixed and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption; that language is central to the formation of subjectivity (conscious and unconscious awareness); that certain groups in any society are privileged over others and, although the reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression which characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary, or inevitable; that oppression has many faces and that focusing on only one at the expense of others (e.g. class oppression versus racism) often elides the interconnections between them; and finally, that mainstream research practices are generally, although most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race, and gender oppression.

P 11-13: Summarizes phenomenology (Husserl's version, not his student Schutz's) - one key concept is that we don't see objects, we see perspectives of objects (parts of one side at a time, often!) that we synthesize together. Then describes Derrida's "Speech and Phenomena" and how it deconstructs Husserl.

Q 13: He [Derrida] does this through a careful, rigorous discussion of Husserl's writings: agreeing to accept Husserl's basic language, framework, and logic in order to show that Husserl's arguments, if pushed fully in the direction they themselves point, will undermine themselves and implode the whole project established by Husserl. This is the now-famous deconstructive strategy. It amounts to inhabiting the work of another author, rather in the way that a virus enters its host cell, and imploding this author's work by following her logic right to its end, rather like the way a virus employs the genetic code DNA to a cell's own demise.

N^: I just really like this phrasing.

P 14: Derrida points out that it's not the idea (in your mind) of permanent objects that lead to signs/traces (words, etc.), but the other way around - those traces (glimpses you get of part of one perspective of an object) produce/lead-to the forming of your concepts of those objects (in your mind). This shakes theories of reality that depend on things staying "the same," because how do you know those signs remain "the same" every time you perceive them?

P 15: Derrida's deconstruction of reality can lead to nihilism that makes a critical value orientation pointless, because why help/change a world for the better if there is no reality/goodness/etc./? Kinchloe, McLaren, and Lather (in "Getting Smart") and others try to reconcile this in what they call "resistance postmodernism" - using insights from postmodernism but within an epistemology that is not nihilistic.

Q 20: Critical epistemology differentiates between "ontological categories" rather than between "realities." Ontologies are theories about _existence_ making it possible to formulate diverse truth claims.

P 20: Three kinds of truth claims / ontological categories:
- Subjective - only one actor has access. Ex: feelings, thoughts ("privileged access," on p. 84-85)
- Objective - any actor present could access/notice this directly ("multiple access," on p. 84-85)
- Normative-evaluative - what is right, good, appropriate; what "should" actors agree on ("position-taking," "our world, as it is or should be" on p. 84-85)

N^: Later, in a footnote on p. 86, Carspecken says that Habermas's (1981) theory of communicative action discussed these three kinds of ontological categories (along with two others) - maybe dig back and get them. (this is reiterated later in Carspecken's book on p. 84-85, so I've just merged those notes into the above.)

N^: How does disability call into question these three categories, especially the objective/subjective truth claim boundaries? For instance, as a deaf person, I cannot hear bird calls that a hearing colleague notices and tells me about.

P 21: Critical epistemology claims that power relationships are central to the resolution of differing truth claims. The power an actor holds (physical strength, political position, respect in the community, etc.) influences whether/how people consent to their truth claims, and how they consent to the truth claims of others.

Q 22: You should understand that one does not need this [critical] value orientation to use critical methodology. Critical methodology is based on critical epistemology, not on value orientations... critical epistemology has rejected perception models of truth and all sophisticated modifications of them. Instead, we work our theory up from holistic, predifferentiated human experience and its relationship to the structures of communication. Communication structures go to the heart of every human experience capable of becoming knowledge imparting, even solitary ones.

Q 24: [Uses a formal definition of "ontology" from (Flew, 1979 p. 256)] "The assumptions about existence underlying any conceptual scheme or any theory or system of ideas."

P 24: Critical methodology requires tight linking between epistemology and ontology. There are multiple types of validity claims, and each type requires different procedures/ontological categories to support it.

P 24: Social ontologies are required for social research, and must be "presupposed before any social research can begin." They are "secondary to fully thought-out philosophical ontologies" and are ultimately derivative from them.

Q 25: Operational definitions are nothing but the construction of inference relations -- "mapping rules," between objective/measurable phenomena and nonobjective social factors. An attitude survey, for example, operationalizes values and beliefs (subjective items) through a self-report instrument.

N^: See also Q from p. 74 on a definition of "operational definition"

Q 26: ...a sound social ontology rules out deterministic terminology... [and] conceives of action in a way that absolutely prohibits causes. Actions are conditioned by many things, but they are not determined.

N^: Free will, basically. And humans as agents.

Q 26: To even formulate a question for empirical investigation is to make assumptions about basic features of social life. Social theory supplies us with a social ontology, a set of models that makes research possible but that can always be refined and altered in light of empirical findings.

Q 27: In fact, good critical research results in refined ontological models. Part of the research findings are improved concepts of social structure, power, culture, subjectivity, and other matters begged at the start by every research project.

P 37: Draws on some work by Giddens to discuss the difference between conditions that resource (operating externally to actors - ex: laws, money, physical environment) and influence (operating internally to actors - ex: values, identity). They don't determine an actor's actions, but they constrain or shape them. The difference between resourcing and influencing conditions is that resourcing conditions need to be dealt with regardless of an actor's internal state/beliefs/values.

N^: For instance, even if I believe I should have more money, that belief does not change the number of dollars in my bank account, nor does it lower the price of the item I want to buy (in and of itself - I have to act to negotiate the price down, for instance).

P 41: Carspecken interviews his grad students on what they expect to find, etc. before they do fieldwork on their projects, to explore value orientations before entering the field.

N^: this is fucking brilliant

P 40: Five stages of critical qualitative research come from (Carspecken & Apple, 1992) and are not neccessarily linear / strictly ordered (you cycle through them, return to earlier steps, etc. in the process.)

P 41-43: Five stages of critical qualitative research (but also, see Carspecken & Apple, 1992)
1) Compiling the primary record - through the collection of monological data
2) Preliminary reconstructive analysis - look at primary record and articulate things that are not observable / typically left unarticulated by actors; inherently uncertain (you don't know for sure if you're "right")
3) Dialogical data generation - interviewing, discussion groups, "generates data with people"
4) Discovering/describing system relations - looking at other "social sites bearing relation to" the "social site of focused interest" (i.e. tie what you're looking at to other things)
5) System relations as explanations of findings - explain stages 1-4 through "the broadest systems features"

N^: In stage 1, "monological" refers to the researcher "speaking alone" as an observer who is not participating - my intersubjective narrative interviews are NOT THIS. I actually think the intersubjective narrative interviews start at stage 3, then go to stage 2.

P 42: Stage 3 (dialogical data generation) "democratizes the research process" if "used properly"

N^: But does it, given the influence of power on truth claims/ontological resolution discussed on p. 21? I would say it _can contribute to_ that (as Carspecken alludes to himself by the phrase "if used properly") but we have got to be careful about those kind of claims.

P 42: On Stage 3 (dialogical data generation), Carspecken says there are good reasons to delay stage 3 until stage 1 and 2 are (at least partially) complete

N^: Make sure I address this; I could frame my method as starting at stage 3, but does it?

N 43: stage 5 sounds like "develop/revise theory" to me, I should check if that's correct when I read the later chapter

P 51-52: Why start with passive observation (stage 1)? You want to reduce the effect of your presence, or at least be aware of it - you need to know what they look like without you, so you can see how they change in stage 3 when you engage in dialogue with them.

N^: Ok, this solves some problems for me! I was already there / my participants knew me / I was already in some ways part of those conversations. These statements by Carspecken need to be revised if you're talking about autoethnographic or participatory/insider work.

P 56: Habermas (1981, 1987b) borrowed from American pragmatist philosophy (truth is about consensus to truth claims) to formulate the critical epistemology that Carspecken draws upon (including the three ontological categories Carspecken uses of objective, subjective, and normative-evaluative - though Habermas called the third one the "social.")

Q 57: Thus, a rule of thumb in critical epistemology could be phrased like this: whenever considering a truth claim, examine the validity conditions associated with it. What procedures have to be followed to try to win the consensus of any cultural group to the claim?

P 57: If a truth claim meets validity conditions appropriate to its (truth claim) type and the cultural group it is addressed to, it is true and valid (to that cultural group). Critical social research "immediately translate[s] truth claims into validity claims" - they "never claim to have the final 'truth'" but that following validity requirements will "give us research findings that point towards truth"...

N^: Points to a process-oriented notion of validity (tie to Walthers and the Q^3 framework, although I should distinguish between / relate "validity" and "quality" there).

Q 74: An _operational definition_... is a rigorous way of mapping a concept involving multiple ontological references onto the objective realm alone. This is done by defining a term popularly conceived in reference to subjectivity solely in terms of objective measurement procedures.

N^: also see quote from p. 25 for a definition of "operational definition"

P 93: Stage 2 "reconstructs" previously tacit things into explicit ones; it is where coding begins and speculation on meanings.

N^: I don't think coding and meaning-making actually begin here; indigenous coding is a thing, and meaning-making happens in any communicative act.

P 95: Meaning reconstruction starts by noting possible meanings for items in the primary record.

Q 95: After reading through the primary record and beginning the coding process, you should next select several segments for explicit, initial meaning reconstruction; the selections must be made in light of your progress with low-level coding. The segments selected ought to be representative of action patterns; some selections should be made of anomalies in the patterns, as these will be quite revealing of the norms underlying more routine events.

N^: Regarding the last two items - I do this naturally, long before reading Carspecken.

P 95: Don't edit the primary record - instead, transfer the selected segments elsewhere and work with them there, clearly marking what is/isn't the primary record.

N^: I treat all of this as simultaneously data and analysis, BUT I do distinguish which sections each portion of the "primary record" come from (i.e. "Mel said this during Mark's 2nd interview" even if what Mel said was an "analysis" of Jon's first interview... it's all both data and analysis here.)

P 96: Definition of a "meaning field" - a range of possibilities for meanings that other actors might infer from an act (my paraphrase). Not guaranteed to be "correct" - it's explicitly a field of possibilities!

Q 98: You are trying to articulate the meaning fields of the action as the actors themselves would articulate them and as others present to the acts (as second or third persons) would articulate them.

N^: Ties into standpoint epistemology - who do we consider as those possible "others," both implicitly and explicitly?

P 102: Why do meaning reconstruction? Four answers:
- clarify/articulate your own tacit realms as a researcher; what are you missing, what are you biases, etc.
- gives you something you can/should have a peer review so they can check and challenge you
- might end up in the final report
- "lay the groundwork for validity reconstructions and horizon analysis"

P 103: Carspecken coins the phrase "pragmatic horizon analysis" - "pragmatic" from the pragmatic stuff Habermas drew from, "horizon analysis" from phenomenology

N^: And then does not really explain what the hell he means by it, so I'm going to have to read other stuff to get this... but I don't think this lack of understanding is a blocker for my current writing.

Q 110: One can get much insight into a culture by paying attention to the validity claims routinely employed in the construction of meaningful action.

P 110-111: Validity reconstruction is a way to analyze and make-explicit meaning-making. It consists of horizontal dimensions of analysis (sorting between objective, subjective, and normative-evaluative truth claims / ontological categories) and vertical ones (level of foregrounding/backgrounding)

P 119: There is no one "correct" validity reconstruction/analysis (procedure and outcome) of an item because validity reconstruction inherently involves non-objective features.