Unfurling Rigor: On Continuity and Change in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

This article urges qualitative researchers to understand the work they do as inspired by practical concerns rather than by its ontological and/or cognitive status as science. It is time to let go and move on from the inherited vocabulary of scientific rigor. Excessive focus on rigor impedes and distracts from talking about other, more important, problems such as the ethical commitments, moral importance, and artfulness of qualitative inquiry. Calls for greater scientific rigor mistake the abstract for the concrete and may mask the covert intention to delegitimate experiential, performative, autoethnographic, and evocative approaches to inquiry that understand qualitative inquiry as a moral, ethical, and political venture. The rule of rigor, if there is to be one, should be pragmatic and literary not scientific, and qualitative researchers and should feel obliged to turn life inside out and upside down, investigating what it means to be alive and to produce just societies.