Communicating Qualitative Analytical Results Following Grice's Conversational Maxims

Conducting qualitative research can be seen as a developing communication act through which researchers engage in a variety of conversations. Initially researchers question scholarly communities to learn what gaps appear to exist in the published accounts regarding a certain phenomenon. As these discussions evolve investigators begin to articulate a focus to their study and a plan for carrying out the research. With a method in place, qualitative researchers then converse with research participants in the field to generate data for analysis or reflect upon their own observations of others. In the analytical steps of a project, researchers commit themselves to describing, interpreting, explaining, or criticizing the data, or more simply stated researchers attempt to say something about something. As researchers become more confident of what they are saying about the data, they may ask participants or peers to comment on the results of this communicative act. Researchers then report the results of these discussions to scholarly juries who pass judgment on the evidence. If the verdict is favorable, the results of these conversations become part of the ongoing discussion on the interrogated phenomenon and the cycle begins anew as the next researcher attempts to invigorate the talk via another line of inquiry. Mastering the communication competencies entailed in becoming an articulate qualitative researcher takes considerable training and effort. To assist in this endeavor commentators have suggested rules or guidelines for producing and judging the process and outcome of this flow of academic discourse (e.g., Drisko, 1997; Parker, 2004; Russell & Gregory, 2003). These attempts at articulating "best practices" such as the popular Critical Appraisal Skills Programme's (CASP) 10 Questions to Help You Make Sense of Qualitative Research (2006) have helped to bring a sense of continuity and standards to the world of qualitative research. But the rise of such checklists have not been without its critics (e.g., Barbour, 2001) who suggest that such guides can be taken too prescriptively by researcher and reviewer alike leading to a focusing on technicalities while missing the methodological context in which these procedural choices are understood and practiced. Others argue (e.g., Sandelowski, 1998) that due to the variety of approaches to qualitative research no one style guide would hold for qualitative research in general and as result researchers "must select from an array of representational styles and formats those that best fit their research purposes, methods, and data" (Sandelowski, 1998, p. 375). Keeping in mind qualitative research's diversity of style and offering an alternative to methodological checklists we suggest turning to the world of linguistics for some guidance to aid researchers and reviewers in managing these series of conversations especially when formulating and presenting findings as well as when judging the quality of result representations. To this end we offer Grice's Maxims of Conversation (1989) to serve as a rational approach to the conduct of qualitative research inquiry and to remind us that at its essence qualitative research is a conversation. Grice's Maxims of Conversation Paul Grice, a philosopher and linguist, believed that conversation is a cooperative activity in which both speaker and addressee (hearer) engaged each other using the same (understood) guidelines. According to Grice the speaker intends to communicate in an understandable fashion; the addressee intends to understand that communication. In other words, both agree to do what is needed for communication. Grice (1989) formulated these goals into one general principle and four underlying categories called maxims. Grice's Cooperative Principle is stated: "Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" (p. …