normative commitments/personal motivations or disclosure about one’s expert knowledge and
personal impact on the case.
Interpretive scholars more adequately deal with the issue of objectivity, because they
accept a lack of it and have research tools that convey personal commitments. Interpretivists
believe that they should explain the relevance of the self in research, because the self inevitably
interacts with data to create specific research conclusions. Because a researcher brings her own
perspectives to texts and data (Strathern 1987), she should explain how her own opinions, life
experiences, and intellectual assumptions affect data and research conclusions (Michrina and
Richards 1996; Briggs 1999). This process is called reflexivity, and while it admits bias, it
makes a research product more honest and understandable. Reflexivity does not lead to
replication, but it is a tool with which the researcher can express how research was conducted.
The researcher can explain how normative commitments actually turn the research findings into
a data rich account.
Another advantage of ethnography is that the researcher can incorporate theory and data
during the entire research process (Michrina and Richards 1996). This mitigates some problems
feminist researchers encounter when defining variables. If theories and variables guiding
research do not adequately explain a case, the researcher can go back and look at other variables
in an in-depth and interconnected fashion. Whereas positivists test a theory with data and then
later comment on the theory at hand, interpretivists can reevaluate theory throughout the entire
data collection process (Michrina and Richards 1996). Because of this flexibility, the researcher
is less likely to miss the “big picture” because of a case design oversight. Researchers instead
find the most compelling stories to tell because they are free to incorporate more variables and
theories as they become essential to the inquiry.
9
Convention