In the first chapter Learning from Strangers, Weiss points out that most accounts of events are not documented. There may be evidence of an event happening that can be collected, but that doesn’t really help to make sense of something that you didn’t experience for yourself. This reminds me about a recent exploration I took into my family’s ancestry (bear with me, it’ll come back around to design research).

Having not known much about my extended family, I researched using various websites designed for the task, like ancestry.com. I also was able to find a couple amateur sites made by my members of my extended family, which gave even more information. What I ended up with was a spreadsheet version of a family tree containing names/dates/places. I was also able to make a  Google map which shows the movement of each of my parents families across the United States. I managed to capture a lot of data about my family, but it didn’t help me really understand my family history.

There were too many unanswered questions. Like “Why did my mother’s family move to the West Coast?” or “Why did my dad live in Virginia for just 2 years, before moving back to California?” That’s where the qualitative interview comes into play. By hearing about the events from the people that experienced them, you can get an understanding of the situation that no one would have bothered to write down.

After asking my parents about the tree and map I made, I was able to get a more rich understanding of my family’s history than I ever would have gotten collecting data points. I learned that to my mom’s side of the family, it was viewed as a no-brainer that if you could afford to get yourself out of the Mid West and come to sunny California, you should do it. And that for at least a generation they had struggled to uproot themselves from Missouri because it was a terribly boring and drab place to live.

Having connected my research to the chapter’s examples, I really feel that qualitative research cannot be overlooked. Hard data can only show you so much, and if you gather that data by using a formal survey before really understanding the views of the people you are surveying; you will have framed every question with your own biases and excluded opportunities to gain a better understanding of the people you’re researching.