This article documents the first stage of the qualitative research process: "entering the field." In it, the author, a young graduate student, uses portraiture to describe her journey to find a "research site" and then establish a "research relationship" with this community, a town in rural Arkansas. This portrait…

This article is a focused response to the call for a "conscious use of crystallization," in qualitative research. To this end, the author brings into play a full-bodied textual metaphor, the "palimpsest," to stimulate the expansion of an integrated crystallization typology--comprised of woven and patched approaches.…

This article brackets assumptions embedded in the framing of this special issue on "problematizing methodological simplicity in qualitative research" in a effort to understand why policymakers put pressure on all types of researchers, including those who use qualitative methods, to provide relatively simple, even somewhat mechanistic portrayals of…

In this article, the author revisits an interview with Ava Montalvo--a mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico--which initially confounded her interpretive resources. This reflexive, performative article examines the role of excess as an analytical lens through which to understand maternal subjectivity and elaborates the methodological…

The aim of the present article is to consider the research interview as a dialogical context for the production of social life and personal narratives. It is emphasized that interviews are inevitable, dialogical social events based on repertoires of socially and culturally embedded and constantly changing words and discourses. Rather than viewing…

As co-chairs of a tribute panel for their academic mentors, Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, the authors knew what the traditional responsibilities would require, but as a performer and a poet, they were inspired to do something more creative. Something poetic. Something performative. Something different. In this article, the authors present a…

From her experience as an instructor, the author finds that it is valuable to engage graduate students in conducting a study within their qualitative methods course. In this article, the author discusses how she used a collaborative autobiographical research approach. Class members generate autobiographical writing to be shared with the group, and…

This article describes a struggle and a journey. It shows a struggle between the need to be scholarly and the desire to be evocative; it travels carefully along a path toward less certainty. The article discusses how the author, as a doctoral student, was aware of the need to address her innate resistance to "use" theory and how she struggled to…

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled "Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research," which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their…

In this article, the authors use their personal narratives and collaborative portraits as methods to shed light on the complexities of developing a research identity while journeying through a doctoral program. Using the metaphors of a wanderer, a chameleon, and a warrior, their narratives represent portraits of experiences faced by doctoral…