14

Text-Based Approaches to
Qualitative Research
An Overview of Methods, Process, and Ethics
Sara McKinnon

ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of the research process of text-based quali-

tative research. The chapter not only explains what it means to work with texts
in a qualitative manner, but outlines the various options researchers have at
their disposal in trying to answer the research questions that most interest
them, including rhetorical methods, discourse analysis approaches, and ethno-
graphic methods. The chapter also provides readers with a step-by-step
overview of the process of doing text-based qualitative research, ending with
a discussion of ethical considerations in qualitatively analyzing texts.

One of my most vivid memories from graduate school was the answer that I received
from a professor when I asked, “How do you analyze a text?” He responded without
pause, “You ind an interesting text and look for what makes it interesting!” This
answer was unsatisfying at best. Only later in my qualitative research classes did I
begin to get a sense of what I should do with the primary sources that I had collected
and wanted to write about.
Now, as a teacher myself, I ind my students asking similar questions – “How do
you ind a text worthy of analysis?” “What makes a text interesting?” and “Once
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, First Edition.
General Editor Angharad N. Valdivia.
Volume VII: Research Methods in Media Studies. Edited by Fabienne Darling-Wolf.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems185
2 SARA MCKINNON

you have it, what do you do with it?” – only to ind those same unsatisfying answers
slipping of my tongue. In acknowledgment that these answers can confound more
than they clarify, this chapter aims to outline what it means to do text-based qualita-
tive research. The chapter will not only explain what it means to work with texts,
but it also outline the various options researchers have at their disposal in trying to
answer the research questions that most interest them. Furthermore, the chapter
will ofer a step-by-step overview of the process of doing text-based qualitative
research so that when you hear “You just analyze it!” again you know what that
means.

Text-Based Approaches to Qualitative Research

Broadly speaking, qualitative researchers seek to understand the communica-

tive actions of people in particular contexts and the meanings associated with those
actions. Communicative actions happen when people use symbols to express some-
thing in their life-worlds; these actions come in a range of forms – from the things
we do and say in interpersonal encounters, to performances and practices that dem-
onstrate our social, cultural, or political group ailiations, to the messages that media
assemble for our consumption. While many qualitative researchers assemble instances
of communicative action from people themselves, through methods of data collec-
tion such as interviews, focus groups, and observation, other qualitative researchers
examine texts as sites of people’s use of symbols. A text can be understood as any
instance where symbols are being used to convey meaning to an audience. In this
vein, texts may be written words in the strict sense of the term – such as books,
magazines, manifestos, or pamphlets – but they may also be verbally delivered
speeches, music, television sitcoms, photographs, or buildings.
While qualitative researchers may ind a text that is interesting to them and analyze
it, they do so recognizing that all texts are fragments of something larger. “Texts,”
as Michael Calvin McGee explains, “are understood to be larger than the apparently
inished discourse that presents itself as transparent. The apparently inished dis-
course is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which
it was made. It is fashioned from what we can call “fragments’” (McGee, 1990, p.
279). In other words, the texts that appear so complete on irst glance are incomplete
pieces, or representative parts of something larger that researchers call discourse. For
many qualitative researchers, discourse, or the available language that people have to
talk about some phenomenon or to express something, is what researchers are trying
to explain and interpret when they analyze particular texts. While discourses are
never complete, understanding their scope and the dominant modes of expression
within them helps researchers to illuminate the range of possibilities that are before
us when we communicate. To understand this range, scholars examine texts and the
discourses they participate in against the particular social, cultural, and political con-
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 3

texts in which they circulate. Contexts must be thought of not as one-dimensional

environments where communicative action happens, but as productive forces of the
discourses that we turn to in order to share and express meaning. In this way, a
component of our analytic attention as qualitative researchers of texts must be
toward the contextual factors that constitute the way people use language.
Finally, qualitative scholars work to understand what texts mean for the people
who use them. As Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor (2002, pp. 5–6) write,

For the qualitative researcher, humans infuse their actions – and the worlds that result
– with meaning. We are, at root, trying to make sense and get by. In this view, meaning
is not a mere accessory to behavior. Rather, it saturates the performance of social action
– from our imaginations of possibilities to our relection on accomplishments.

To do this, qualitative researchers turn to the tools of research that allow them to
describe, understand, and interpret the signiicance of communicative messages
actions within a particular sociocultural and political-economic context. Speciically,
qualitative researchers ask questions about how and why texts circulate within a given
context in the ways that they do. Furthermore, qualitative researchers interpret what
these texts mean within particular contexts and for particular audiences.
What is so exciting, and sometimes daunting, about using texts to do qualitative
research, is that researchers have a diverse range of approaches that they can deploy
to examine the qualitative dimensions of particular texts. In the next section I will
summarize a few of the primary approaches that researcher have at their disposal.
Speciically, I will review rhetorical approaches, discourse analysis approaches, and
ethnographic approaches to studying texts.

Types of Text-Based Approaches

At the most general level, scholars who use qualitative methods to look at texts are
doing textual analysis. While there are other names for textual analysis, such as criti-
cism, critical analysis, or close reading, these approaches share similarities in their
methodological processes. As Barry Brummett (2010, p. 9) explains, textual analysis
involves “mindful, disciplined reading of an object with a view to deeper understand-
ing of its meaning.” In order to do the disciplined reading, scholars who use textual
analysis study existing theory, or attempts at describing and explaining what some-
thing is, the way it works, or what it means, in order to know what has been said
previously about a particular object or phenomenon. This existing theory gives the
analyst special insight into the symbolic actions, nuances in meaning, and textual
forms that are present in the text. Studying theory also provides analysts with ideas
about what their own text might say concerning culture, politics, society, or the world
around them more generally.
4 SARA MCKINNON

Once analysts have an object that they want to examine and a theory or set of
theories that inform their reading, the analyst then turns to particular methods
of reading, or analysis. As Brummett (2010, p. 37) explains, “the method is the plan
for thinking and action” which ofers us tools for implementing that plan. For schol-
ars working with texts, these tools should call our attention to nuances in both the
form and the content of the object. When we look at questions of form, we examine
how the object is arranged, how it is patterned, and the internal structure that organ-
izes the content. Some common elements of form include narrative structures in the
text, the genre that the text may fall within, and personas or groups of people who
are addressed (or not addressed) in the text.
Questions of content call our focus to what the text says, or does. Using theory
as the lens, we examine the text for key arguments, undergirding ideologies, and the
speciicities in the way language is used to convey meaning for a particular audience.
Importantly, the theory or theories we turn to will shape the elements of form and
content that we are drawn to see and write about. As we will see in the next section,
rhetorical approaches ofer a more speciic form of textual analysis that call us to pay
attention to the practical functions of language.

Rhetorical Approaches

At one point in recent history rhetorical criticism seemed to be moving in the direc-
tion of quantitative approaches to research in its goals of identifying the eicacy and
efects of particular rhetorical texts and rhetoricians. Today, however, rhetorical
critics largely see the work of analysis as a qualitative and interpretive project.
Broadly speaking, rhetorical criticism ofers tools to analyze what language does in
our lives. Scholars of rhetoric posit that language not only shapes how we know and
experience the world around us, but also how we use language in our social worlds
to inluence others, deliberate, make judgments, expand possibilities, and sometimes
reform social systems in need of repair (Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 2002). These functions
of language are of central concern to rhetoricians, for as Stephen Lucas (1981, p. 20)
writes, rhetorical critics “are concerned above all with what messages do rather than
what they are.” Examinations of such language deployments focus not only on the
particularities of symbol use, but also on how bodies, voices, emotion, images, and
objects serve as discursive vehicles of social inluence when paired with language. In
this way, rhetorical criticism is a method that provides the means to analyze not only
discourse itself, but also how messages are deployed through the body, voice, images,
and objects, and what such messages do.
One common point of confusion is where to ind messages that are signiicant to
our social worlds, and thus worthy of analysis. While early studies of rhetoric focused
primarily on rhetorical texts of the past – often in the form of the speeches or writ-
ings of well-known igures – contemporary rhetorical critics include a vast range of
rhetorical texts within their repertoire. Certainly texts such as governmental policies,
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 5

congressional deliberations, and legal decisions are sites where language is used
practically and in important ways, but popular texts such as movies, sports broad-
casting, magazines, and participatory media also interest rhetoricians as texts of
investigation. For example, Dana Cloud (1996) examines biographical narratives
of Oprah Winfrey as her object of inquiry, arguing that Winfrey is rhetorically posi-
tioned as a token whose success proves that US American meritocracy exists without
barriers for women and people of color. Greg Dickinson (2002) takes the spatial
dimensions of Starbucks, the well-known cafeine-recharge watering hole for mil-
lions of consumers, as his text of investigation to argue that Starbucks rhetorically
constructs authenticity through its use of color, music, artwork, smell, and language
to make customers feel like they are getting the real deal when they spend $5 on
a cup of cofee. Darrel Enck-Wanzer (2006) argues that trash, literal garbage, is a
rhetorical construct for Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx in the 1960s to get city
oicials in New York City to begin to pay as much attention to the cleanliness of the
streets in the Bronx as they did to the streets of Upper West Side Manhattan. These
examples demonstrate the breadth of rhetoric’s purview; quite simply, rhetorical
messages worthy of analysis may be found anywhere. The task of the rhetorical critic
in choosing a text worthy of inquiry is to justify what makes these objects interesting,
or in need of analysis, and, second, to identify what the discourse is doing.
Another challenging part of doing rhetorical criticism is iguring out what method
of rhetorical analysis will best suit the critic’s objectives and the rhetorical object. As
Dilip Gaonkar (1990, p. 303) explains in assessing the state of rhetorical criticism,
rhetoric has witnessed not only what he calls “the globalization of the object” but
also a diversiication of methods for analyzing rhetorical objects. Just as there is no
longer merely one type of object that rhetoricians analyze, there are also a plethora
of methodological tools for rhetoricians to turn to in doing their analytic work. For
example, social movement criticism (Griin, 1952; Simons, 1970), genre criticism
(Campbell & Jamieson, 1995; Ware & Linkugel, 1973), and narrative criticism (Fisher,
1984) emerged early in the ield’s history as options for doing rhetorical analysis. A
particularly fruitful avenue for media scholars using rhetorical criticism has been the
methods of criticism that allow them to centrally investigate relations of power,
ideology, and modes of resistance present in texts or the way audiences engage with
text. These methods include critical rhetoric (McKerrow, 1989, 1991; Ono & Sloop,
1992), ideographic criticism (McGee, 1980), and feminist criticism (Campbell, 1973;
Davis, 1998; Dow, 1995, 1997) among others. Notably, they have enabled scholars to
examine the discursive and ideological underpinnings of mediated representations
of war (Crenshaw, 1997; Jordan, 2007), iconic imagery (Calafell and Delgado, 2004;
Taylor, 2003), and the way that the distinctions between popular, consumer-based
culture and political life become increasingly blurred and undeined (Anderson &
Stewart, 2005; Cobb, 2011).
While using a speciic type of method is a common approach of the rhetorical
critic, others argue that the critic himself or herself is the method and thus the
rhetorical analyst does not need a prescriptive a priori method (Black, 1965). In
6 SARA MCKINNON

conversation with qualitative researchers who see the researcher as the “human
instrument” of research, Edwin Black famously recognized that the rhetorical analyst
brings to the text a unique vantage point to see the text as a relection of the external
reality around the text. While this open approach to method is still used by many in
the ield, others have reined the idea that the critic is the method to focus on theory
as guiding the process of describing, explaining, and interpreting what language is
doing in a text. Michael Lef, a strong proponent of what he describes as “the emic
approach,” calls on rhetoricians to see rhetorical criticism as an interpretive process.
As he explains, the goal of rhetorical criticism

is explanation, and therefore the emic stance begins and ends with the particular
object of study. Theoretical principles enter at the intersection between the object and
the assignment of meaning to it, but such principles are so closely connected with the
object of study that they are not easily isolated in abstract form. (Lef, 1980, pp.
348–349)

More recently, James Jasinski (2001, p. 256) called this approach “conceptually
oriented criticism,” which he explains “proceeds more through a process of abduction
which might be thought of as a back and forth tacking movement between text and
the concept or concepts that are being investigated simultaneously.” This approach
recognizes that we enter the research process with particular views of the world, life
experiences, knowledge, and interests that inluence the questions, ideas, and issues
that we will be drawn to examine. This background also leads us to particular texts,
sets of texts, or even fragments of texts to analyze against and through our questions
and interests (McGee, 1990). Then we begin the process of analysis, or close reading
of the texts, for what language and discourse is doing and possibly turn to speciic
techniques of close reading explained above (Brummett, 2010), such as analyzing the
object for its use of narrative or metaphor. Importantly, neither our past experience,
theoretical inluences, nor the reading techniques we choose dictate the direction of
the theory generated from the analysis; instead, these things are tools that help us
do the work of interpretation.
Our experiences and past knowledge are important as they alert us to what is
interesting about the text in relation to its audience and the context, as well as to
what the text is doing with language and discourse. While social scientiic scholars
attempt to deploy research methods objectively, or as free as possible from researcher
bias, qualitative researchers embrace the subjectivity of the research process. This
means that, rather than seeing the researcher’s background and interests as a hin-
drance, qualitative researchers use these aspects of the researcher as a source of
insight and information about the text. Because qualitative researchers embrace the
subjectivity of the research process, no two analysts will read a text in the same way.
For example, a scholar whose intellectual inluences are gender theories may analyze
a speech by Abraham Lincoln and see a particular type of masculinity evoked or
forming (Zaeske, 2010), while a critic who inds photographs and images fascinating
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 7

may be drawn to analyze texts that are rich in imagistic descriptions of Lincoln’s
character (Finnegan, 2005). These diferent analyses add to what the interested com-
munities know, or how they think about Lincoln as a rhetorical igure. In this way,
neither analysis is biased or more right than the other; instead they are diferent
pieces of the puzzle. With a sense of how qualitative scholars use rhetorical
approaches, I will now turn to discuss a qualitative approach that analyzes texts
against their broader discursive and social contexts.

Discourse Analysis

While rhetorical analysis emerges out of the discipline of communication studies,

linguistics ofers yet another set of text-based approaches to do qualitative research
– under the umbrella term of “discourse analysis.” This method allows scholars to
analyze discourses alongside their discursive and social practices. Discourse, in this
approach, primarily refers to any text, spoken or written, that deploys language,
although increasingly discourse analysts are looking to non-language-based symbols,
such as objects or artifacts, for meaning alongside the language-based discourse.
As Norman Fairclough (1995, p. 4) explains, discourses rarely manifest in isolation.
Rather, “texts in contemporary society are increasingly multi-semiotic; texts whose
primary semiotic form is language increasingly combine language with other semi-
otic forms.” This means that discourse is polysemic, or that the same discourse
might emerge in numerous forms. For example, a number of analysts have recently
taken up the post-September 11 “terrorism” discourse as it emerges in a range of
texts including presidential and political speeches (Bartolucci, 2012), policy and law
(de Beaugrande, 2004; MacDonald & Hunter, 2013; Simone, 2009), documentaries
(Mylonas, 2012), and news media (Featherstone, Holohan, & Poole, 2010; Roy &
Ross, 2011). What is interesting about this discourse, as Valentina Bartolucci (2012,
p. 563) writes, “is its extraordinary level of consistency within diferent genres,
spaces and times. The same set of words and linguistic constructions are used,
reproduced and inally naturalized, eventually coming to be seen as common sense.”
Despite being polyvocal in form, the terrorism discourse in President Bush’s
speeches bears striking resemblance to the way it is deployed by the news media,
in law and policy, and as David Machin and Theo Van Leeuwen (2009) demonstrate,
even to the way this discourse appears in children’s toys. Furthermore, these scholars
demonstrate that the meaning of terrorism is surprisingly similar in diferent
national contexts. Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volčič (2007) illuminate this point,
showing that terrorism discourse is taken up by Serbians after September 11 to
rearticulate Serbian violence against Muslims during the 1990s as understandable
and justiiable. Importantly, their language is hauntingly similar to the words of
President George W. Bush.
A second focal point for discourse analysts is the discourse practice, which con-
centrates attention on the circuit of culture through which the text circulates, from
8 SARA MCKINNON

its production to its interpretation and consumption. Analysis at this level involves
attentiveness to how people produce and interpret texts. This may include, for
example,

detailed moment-by-moment explication of how participants produce and interpret

texts, which conversation analysis and pragmatics excel at, and analysis which focuses
upon the relationship of the discursive event to the order of discourse, and upon the
question of which discursive practices are being drawn upon and in what combinations.
(Fairclough, 1995, p. 134)

Focus on the practice allows scholars to understand how speciic discursive moments
participate in broader conventions, genres, and patterns of interaction (Wood &
Kroger, 2000). For example, Fairclough (1993) investigates the way universities deploy
market-based discourse practices, through encouraging employees to “self-promote”
their research, “sell” candidates, and “play the game.” These particular instances of
discourse, he explains, are generated through market logics and function to consti-
tute universities – places that were once designated for knowledge production and
critical engagement – into contexts for consumption.
Finally, discourse analysis calls scholars to examine the way that discourses and
discourse practices participate in broader sociocultural systems and structures of
meaning (Fairclough, 1995). This level of analysis focuses the analyst’s eye on the
function of discourse, or what it is doing within the organizations, institutions, and
societies where they circulate. This level of analysis is the broadest level used by
discourse analysts, and also perhaps the most important as discourse analysis cannot
be discourse analysis without an examination of the sociocultural practice of the
discourse. Analysts interested in the sociocultural implications of discourse have
looked, for example, at the discursive conlations of immigrants, refugees, and
asylum seekers with gangs, criminals, and thieves, which often comes to justify
policies of ampliied exclusion and surveillance against these communities (Baker,
Gabrielatos, Khosravinik, Krzyanowski, McEnery, & Wodak, 2008; Hernández &
Romero, 2013; Khosravinik, 2010; Teo, 2000; Van Der Valk, 2003; van Dijk, 2000; Van
Leewen & Wodak, 1999). They have also examined the ways in which the repetitive-
ness of gendered norms in institutions such as sports (Mean & Kassing, 2008) and
education (Sauntson, 2007; Wharton, 2005) function to constrain the range of gender
expressions possible to a limited few. Finally, scholars have examined the emergence
of nationalistic discourses across a diverse set of locales, working to understand how
a nation’s history, relationships with other nations, and aspirations for the future
matter to the way it constructs a sense of itself (Crawford, 2012; Han, 2011; Mosheer,
2012; Ruiseco & Sluneko, 2006).
Discourse analysis resonates with some of the other text-based qualitative methods
summarized thus far, but methodologists claim that the approach ofers unique tools
to the scholar and student of texts. As Fairclough (1995, p. 97) explains, according to
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 9

this approach, “the link between the sociocultural practice and text is mediated by
discourse practice.” He continues:
How a text is produced or interpreted, in the sense of what discursive practices and
conventions are drawn from what order(s) of discourse and how they are articulated
together, depends upon the nature of the sociocultural practice which the discourse is
a part of (including the relationship to existing hegemonies); the nature of the discourse
practice of text production shapes the text, and leaves “traces” in surface features
of the text; and the nature of the discourse practice of text interpretation determines
how the surface features of a text will be interpreted.
In other words, each level of analysis – discourse, discourse practice, and sociocul-
tural practice – builds upon the next, such that each level ofers a potentially unique
purview into the way language functions to construct people’s sense of what is
within particular institutions, organizations, and societies.
Importantly, this embedded process of analysis has led to new approaches to study-
ing texts, or what we might understand as ofshoots of a broader discursive approach
to doing qualitative research. These include, among others, critical discourse analysis,
which narrows the process of analysis in on the way power, domination, and ideol-
ogy circulate through discourse (Fairclough, 1995); the discourse historical approach,
which emphasizes analysis of ields of action (Reisigi & Wodak, 2009), and social
semiotics, which calls our attention to the semiotic action involved in each message,
discourse, or image (Aiello, 2006; Van Leewen, 2005). The inal approach discussed
here takes text-based qualitative approaches full circle, back to qualitative methodol-
ogy’s anthropological roots in the form of ethnography.

Ethnographic Approaches

Ethnography can be thought of, literally, as a writing up of culture. Historically this

was the work of anthropologists who would go into the ield, often somewhere far
away from where the researcher lived and worked, to examine the ways of life,
rituals, and patterns of a particular group of people and then write up an account
of this community’s “culture.” In 1973 noted anthropologist Cliford Geertz ruptured
this framework of doing ethnography by suggesting that culture was all about com-
munication, and that culture should be studied via semiotic analysis, or in the way
that a particular community uses language. Geertz (1973, p. 5) explained this as an
analysis of the “webs of signiicance” that undergird what a community says and
does:
The concept of culture . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber,
that man is an animal suspended in webs of signiicance he himself has spun, I take
culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication
I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.
10 SARA MCKINNON

Later in the essay, Geertz would elaborate on the process of unearthing meaning:

Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts,
the “setting” of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms
what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they
are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnography
the oice of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to
say about itself – that is, about the role of culture in human life – can be expressed.
(1973, p. 27)

This approach to researching culture profoundly impacted the way communica-

tion scholars examined symbol use in particular communities. We not only see this
early on with scholars using an ethnography of communication approach to under-
stand the types of communication that were unique to particular groups (Hayes,
1976; Katriel & Philipsen, 1981; Philipsen, 1975), but there were also early calls to
combine ethnographic methods with text-based methods. Dwight Conquergood was
in the vanguard in drawing scholars’ attention to the relationship between ethno-
graphic and text-based methods. In particular, Conquergood made connections
between the work of ethnographers and that of scholars interpreting meaning from
text, explaining that those who analyze culture and those who analyze texts similarly
use methods that are “characterized by a crucial sense of timing and improvisation,
an ability to seize the opportunity and play the moment” (Conquergood, 1992,
p. 82). Additionally, we can say that ethnographers and text-based scholars alike are
interested in symbolic action, the context from which the text emerges, and the
meanings that low through these actions.
With these similarities in mind, a number of scholars have recently begun concep-
tualizing what it might mean to do text-based ethnographies. These formulations
have come in the form of virtual, online, or digital ethnographies (Boellstorf, Nardi,
& Pearce, 2012; Fullerton & Rarey, 2012; Howard, 2011; Kozinets, 2010; Lindlof &
Shatzer, 1998) and rhetorical ethnographies (Chávez, 2011; Hess, 2011; Middleton,
Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011; Pezzullo, 2001; Salazar, 2009). What these approaches
ofer is a way of combining a focus on the way culture is constructed through lan-
guage and attentiveness to context with the tools of close reading ofered in textual
analysis.
While these works difer in focus – some looking at the organizing strategies of
activists, others analyzing the ways that people make community through texts –
they share two important characteristics that are unique to text-based ethnographies.
First, the blending ofers text-based scholars dynamic and dialogic ways of examining
how discourse happens in the moment. As Middleton et al. (2011, p. 401) explain,
this happens because ield methods give text-based scholars a sense of what discourse
looks like “live”: “By analyzing ‘live’ rhetorics, critics are able to bring to the fore and
capture rhetorics whose everyday nature renders them leeting at best.” Additionally,
it allows scholars intimate insight into how people come to settle on the discourse
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 11

they use in the public. Chávez’s research (2011) concerning the coalitional strategies
of US immigration and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists dem-
onstrates this point nicely, as she argues that rhetorical scholars must look at the
internal, away-from-the-spotlight workings of activists and organizers to gain insight
into the rhetorical resources at their disposal, as well as the contextual and relational
constraints that impact what discourse they can use in the public.
Another strength of this blended approach is that it allows us to see nuances of
context – including space and place, but also the historical political-economic rela-
tions that bear down on the communicative actions we examine. Dickinson, Ott,
and Aoki (2006) rhetorically examine the Plains Indian Museum in Wyoming as a
cultural text that constitutes White audiences through what they call a rhetoric of
reverence. Speciically, they explain that “the museum creates a space of memory
in which distant Plains Indian history and culture are placed on view, honored,
and valued,” but White museum goers are never faced with interrogating their
involvement in historical and present-day racism (Dickinson et al., 2006, p. 41).
Ethnographic observation of the museum and White audiences’ engagement with
the museum enabled these researchers to ask questions, and to come up with inter-
pretations that relected on the museum’s constitutive powers. In this way, space
and place are rhetorical in that they compel our imaginations of ourselves. Were
Dickinson et al. to have merely read about the museum – or even analyzed its
web-based features – they most likely would not have been able to consider such
contextual elements of rhetoric.
A inal strength of the ethnographic text-based approach is that it allows the
symbol users to speak back, and in part deine what the communicative actions
mean to them. As Middleton et al. (2011, p. 389) explain, rhetorical ield methods are
useful for “attempting to create more equitable representations of marginalized
voices” and for identifying how those voices might enter public discourse toward
transformative change. Additionally, these methods give participants a chance to
speak back and ill in the gaps. Robert Glenn Howard’s (2011) research provides a
great example of this as he examines community making among Protestant
fundamentalists in online environments. Combining ethnographic methods of inter-
viewing and observation with the rhetorical tools of close textual analysis, Howard’s
work demonstrates the ways in which rhetoricians can gain insight into communica-
tors’ motivation, intention, and inventional process by observing their message
choices and then asking them to relect on the choices through interview questions.
In Howard’s analysis, for example, participants’ actions and explanations serve as the
discursive material that demonstrates not only what an evangelical social movement
looks like, but also what it means to them. These moments show that one of the
strengths of using ethnographic methods in rhetorical research is that such methods
allow the voices we represent to speak with, and sometimes speak back to, scholarly
interpretations and analyses of the data.
Having provided a description of diferent types of text-based qualitative
research, I turn now to address the step-by-step process of using these methods. This
12 SARA MCKINNON

explanation is certainly one approach among many possibilities, but it should give
the reader a sense of what researching with texts looks like.

Doing Text-Based Qualitative Research

As noted above, there are deinite diferences in the foci of the approaches discussed
so far, in the questions they ask, and in the speciic methodological tools they use
but the process of using these approaches is roughly the same. For each approach
there are basically two places where the researcher might begin: with the object or
with the question. Those who begin with an object are usually drawn to it because
of its political, social, or cultural import, or because it is just plain puzzling. If you
begin with a text, the next step is to try to delineate what the text might be saying
or doing. It is at this point that scholars draw upon their existing knowledge, world-
views, and experiences to understand what sorts of questions might best be explored
and explained through an examination of this object.
Another route in doing qualitative research is to begin with a question, a concern,
or an issue that sparks your interest. Scholars who begin with a question move
quickly to think about what sorts of texts, people, and contexts might best help them
examine the issues at hand and come up with answers. As stated earlier, this might
be a single text, an assemblage of texts, or even a combination of diferent types of
data that the researcher examines in order to come up with answers to the questions
they are asking.
Once the researcher has a sense of the text and the theoretical focus of her or his
analysis, she or he can then move to the actual analysis of the object. At this stage
the research process is most similar to conducting qualitative research using methods
that involve human interaction. The researcher is looking for codes, themes, patterns,
and dynamics that exist in the texts’ form and content much like a researcher would
do when analyzing ield notes or an interview transcript. The objective of this process
of analysis is to derive explanations of what the text is doing, or how the text oper-
ates, in accordance with the parameters given through the researcher’s theoretical
and methodological choices. As David Altheide (1996, p. 16) explains, at this point,
the data process should be

systematic and analytic but not rigid .  .  . Categories and variables initially guide the
study, but others are allowed and expected to emerge throughout the study, including
an orientation to constant discovery and constant comparison of relevant situations, set-
tings, styles, images, meaning, and nuances.

What this systematic yet lexible process of analysis should look like is often where
scholars and students interested in qualitative research get most confused. The truth
is that there are a plethora of analytic tools available to the qualitative researcher.
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 13

David Altheide (1996) recommends beginning with the protocol, which is a series of
questions, themes, and categories that the researcher believes might be present in the
data, or at the very least might be interesting to ask of the data. A more inductive
process, however, might begin with coding and categorization.
An inductive process begins with coding the data, or making shorthand notes to
label what the data says, organizing the data into themes, and generally beginning
to look for the patterns, sense making, and structure that is theoretically and cultur-
ally signiicant. As Lindlof and Taylor (2002, p. 219) explain, during the coding process
the “analyst usually goes through the texts (ieldnotes, transcriptions, documents)
line by line and marks those chunks of text that suggest a category.” The general
purpose of this process is to link the sections of data that it within a broader category
with a shorthand code to help you remember to consider the signiicance of that
data for the overall category. Quite often, researchers who are coding start with the
questions “What’s going on here?” or “What’s happening in this text?” as they try to
make sense of the text. As they read the text over and over, looking for cultural or
theoretical meaning, they begin to see patterns emerge, themes that are indeed
meaningful, which become signiicant categories that bring the researcher one step
closer to identifying what the text is saying and doing.
Categorization happens when we assign meaning to particular components of our
data by identifying it as representative of some general or speciic phenomenon of
interest, and put that data alongside other data we have that do the same thing. These
categories sometimes emerge from existing literature, but they can also emerge
because we see patterns, or themes of interest, in the data set. Importantly, merely
having categories does not mean that the researcher is ready to write up the study.
The researcher still needs to interpret the signiicance of those categories toward
making an argument.
Interpretation is the next phase in the research process. At this point the researcher
has a good sense of the data. She or he has coded and categorized the data, and
reached the point of what qualitative researchers call saturation, or the moment when
the researcher no longer inds anything surprising when coding and categorizing.
Reaching the point of saturation indicates to the researcher that it is time to move
to the next phase of research. Interpretation then moves researchers to build theory,
in the form of arguments, that provide partial answers to the questions and problems
that irst inspired them to analyze the texts. At this point it is often necessary to turn
back to the scholarship on the topic in order to read and ascertain what is already
known in the scholarly community. Researchers work to build interpretations that
add to that body of scholarship rather than replicate existing knowledge. Once the
researcher has a strong grasp of the extant and relevant literature, as well as an argu-
ment that contributes to the literature, the next step in the research process is to
write up the research.
While researchers go about this step in diferent ways, the writing phase involves
three processes: developing a setup, accounting for one’s methods, and writing the
analysis. The setup in this instance refers to the rationale, which demonstrates
14 SARA MCKINNON

the importance of the research, a justiication for the particular research question
and/or argument, and inally an explanation of how the research its within and
contributes to the extant body of scholarship. This setup may be found in the intro-
duction and in the review of literature, its purpose being to create a platform that
contextualizes the analysis and its contributions.
Not all text-based qualitative researchers include an accounting of their method
in the write-up of their project, but they should be able to articulate how and why
they did what they did during the research process. When a method section is present
it typically includes a discussion of how and why particular texts were chosen, the
speciic research questions that guided the analysis, the process of analysis including
the development of codes and categories, as well as any additional context that might
be needed to understand the analysis.
The analysis section is where the researcher inally reports on the original research
conducted. One of the key challenges in this period of the research is iguring out
how to use the data appropriately. Researchers should allow the data to guide the
evidencing of their arguments, but they also must not lose their analytic voice in
the process. Quite often, analysis sections foreground the data so much that the
author’s argument ends up being more descriptive than analytical. Instead of merely
describing what’s happening, researchers should use data in the analysis section to
further their argument, which means deploying it to illustrate their interpretation of
the particular situation.

Ethical Considerations

In this chapter I have provided a broad overview of text-based qualitative research

methods with a speciic focus on the numerous approaches that scholars have at their
disposal and the speciic steps involved in the process of doing qualitative research
using texts. To conclude, I would like to address the ethical considerations of con-
ducting qualitative research using texts.
Qualitative researchers who work with humans have a long history of debating
what should be the proper ethical standards in research. Scholars who examine texts,
in contrast, rarely question what ethics should guide the practice of collecting, ana-
lyzing, and writing up research. This, I believe, is a mistake and I would like to ofer
a set of questions text-based qualitative researchers might consider in developing
ethics to guide the research process. First, we might ask ourselves “Why am I doing
this research?” or “Why is this research necessary and useful?” These questions, if
seriously considered, can help researchers to understand the motivations that guide
the research practice. Many feminist and critical scholars, for example, take the moti-
vation of opening space for marginalized voices, perspectives, and knowledge as the
central purpose of their work (Davis, 1998; Flores, 1996). Additionally, many scholars
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: METHODS, PROCESS, AND ETHICS 15

are guided by utilitarian assumptions of the greater good or pragmatic goals of

making applied change in the social worlds around them (Madison, 2005). No matter
the motivation, researchers should be able to explain how that motivation guides
what texts they choose and how they analyze them.
Additionally, we should ask ourselves “How am I connected to this research topic?”
or “What is my positionality, or social location, in relation to this research topic?”
These questions necessitate that researchers remain relexive, or mindful of their
relationship to the research topic, so that they can account for how their own experi-
ences, knowledge, identities, and worldviews shape not only what they see in the
data, but also how they interpret it. In examining the politics behind naming practices
for Chinese women, Wen Shu Lee (1998, p. 297) provides an excellent example of
how text-based researchers might integrate relexive practices into their work:

Who am I and who am I not? I was born into the Lee family in Taipei, Taiwan. My
name, Wen Shu was given by a paternal great great uncle, who was venerated as a
scholar of high moral standards and as a patriarch who made major decisions for the
extended family. I don’t think my mother was consulted about my name.

Lee proceeds to address the politics involved not only in how she came to have her
name, but in what happens to her name when she moves from Taiwan to the United
States. This relection helps the reader to understand her social location as an analyst
of the rhetorical dimensions of naming practices, and also why naming practices
matter.
Next, researchers might ask themselves, “Am I letting the text or data speak?” in
order to address the ethic of representativeness, or how completely the analysis relects
the data. This question helps researchers pay attention to the ways in which they
may be strategically choosing parts of the data that support their view, while ignoring
data that contradict their interpretation. Additionally, this allows researchers to evalu-
ate whether they have analyzed enough of the text to know that the most complete
picture of the data is being represented in the analysis.
Finally, text-based qualitative researchers should seek to develop a deeper and
more complex understanding of the subject matter they address by asking the
following questions: “Does this analysis provide a more complex picture of the issue,
text, person, or event than was previously available?” “Have I engaged in any
problematic constructions of the people and communities I talk about in this
research?” and “Does this analysis relect and honor the cultural values and experi-
ences of the people and communities I talk about?” These questions guide the
researcher to evaluate whether the research enhances and illuminates the way we
think about and understand people’s lives, but it also calls us to question whether
our own representations rely on discourses, beliefs, and stereotypes about groups
that may objectify, exoticize, silence, or disempower the people we represent in
our work.
16 SARA MCKINNON

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