For those struggling with qualitative analysis

Today I stumbled upon a (relatively old) article that was published in Administrative Science Quarterly (Miles, 1979, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 590-601) about the "problems" that scholars encounter when digging into qualitative data. A few of the pros and cons of working with qualitative data were listed. As you will notice, most of them feel really familiar:

Pros of qualitative data (p. 590):

1. Rich, full, earthy, holistic, "real"
   
2. Strong face validity
3. Preserve chronological flow
4. Suffer minimally from retrospective distortion
5. More precise way to assess causality in organizational affairs
6. Minimal front end instrumentation
   

Cons of qualitative data (p. 590):

1. Collecting and analyzing data is a highly labor-intensive operation
   
2. Difficulty to make data "comparable" when working with several people on the same dataset
   
3. Methods of analysis not well formulated
   

Of particular interest to me was a fragment found on pages 594-595:

"We also learned that much analysis was going on in the mind of the fieldworker. Each one developed a fairly rich set of working hypotheses about what was going on in his or her site, along with a fairly retrievable store of specific anecdotes and incidents supporting the hypotheses. But without interaction with colleagues, the hypotheses went unchallenged and usually untested, and the anecdotes remembered were only those in support of the hypotheses."

Notice the words "anecdotes", "hypotheses" and the claim that qualitative researchers have a tendency to remember those fragments of data that support the hypotheses. A proposed solution is member checking although we cannot establish how strongly this protects us against "self-delusion".