Comments on Causality in Qualitative Inquiry

For some time I’ve been persuaded by the writing and speaking of Joe Maxwell and by the writing of the philosophers of science that he quotes, as they assert that causal relationships can indeed be identified through direct observation in certain circumstances, thus contradicting Hume. And this is not cause in general but the specification of causal mechanisms whose very identification and description helps explain the causal processes that are being claimed—how and why the causes work as they do. I think Maxwell succeeds in the arguments he makes. The remaining papers in this collection all provide compelling examples of the clarification of causal relationships in social life and in educational settings that comes from information gained by firsthand participant observation and interviewing. By these means of information collection “preponderance of evidence” is amassed—usually at molecular rather than molar levels of social process—which makes it possible to warrant causal claims plausibly and show what the specific mechanisms of cause are that are at work in the particular setting that was studied. Let me make just two more points. The first concerns the interpretive purposes of qualitative inquiry and their relation to causal analysis. A qualitative study does not simply report observed behavior accurately. Rather it describes social action—what people do with one another in the light of the meanings they attribute to each other’s actions. Qualitative description is thus necessarily interpretive—and the aim is to produce descriptions and analyses that have “hermeneutic validity”—describing what people in a local setting do in terms that make contact with the meaning perspectives within their actions make sense, from their points of view. In one of my early essays on qualitative research in education (Erickson, 1986, p. 127). I pointed out that a hermeneutically valid description and analysis points to meaning perspectives as causal in social life. I used the example of Joan of Arc. What “caused” her death? We could say that the most proximal cause of her death was the heat generated through the combustion of oxygen and hydrocarbons, which in turn was caused by an English soldier placing a burning torch beneath the bundles of faggots on which Joan was standing while tied to a stake. There is a valid biochemical explanation of cause that can be made. But why was Joan tied to the stake in the first place? Explaining that is not a matter of chemistry or physics but of history—and of local social action. Without the meaning perspectives within which her execution took place (a) the political interests of the English invaders in discrediting a charismatic leader of French military resistance to their invasion, and (b) the general beliefs in witchcraft and its appropriate penalties that provided a medium for discrediting the charismatic leader, something other than burning Joan at the stake might have happened—her decapitation (a merciful death), or her incarceration, or her release on the payment of ransom. Oxygen and hydrogen molecules were involved in Joan’s death, but they don’t explain her execution in terms of social action. Rather, the causal explanations that are appropriate in Joan’s case lie in the realm of human meanings and interests. (Here I can’t resist a pun in saying that in her situation there were human “interests at stake,” quite literally. The personal was indeed very political.) And hermeneutically valid identification of those meaning perspectives is in itself a causal explanation, as it elucidates specific meaning mechanisms that influence social action to proceed in certain directions rather than others. My second point concerns our reasons for wanting to make causal claims. If we grant that qualitative inquiry can identify cause, why would qualitative researchers want to do that? Not for the reasons that some other social researchers do. Another way to say this is to say that the basic issue isn’t causal claims in themselves, but generalization of those claims from a local setting to others. In two recent essays (Erickson, 2009, 2011) I’ve repeated a line of argument I made in earlier writing (e.g., Erickson, 1986) that qualitative inquiry is not simply a first descriptive phase in a generalizing social science that basically involves the same procedures and aims of generalizing physical science. Rather qualitative inquiry has a different aim—the close description and analysis of a particular case at hand (including the discovery of causal processes at work within the case) rather than treating the case primarily as an instance of a general class of similar cases. The aim of the case study is not generalization beyond the case but the discovery of 454834QIX18810.1177/1077800 412454834Qualitative InquiryErickson © The Author(s) 2012