On Method in the Humanities

Rinse and Repeat: Understanding the Value of Replication across Different Ways of Knowing

“…In the same report (on quality, standards and rigour), Comaroff [35] dives into social anthropology to conclude that ethnographers and participant-observers can and should devote a lot more attention to explicate their procedures fully, not because it would create replicability but because it would allow scrutiny. This is in line with Wythoff [36], who writes "[M]ethod is interesting in the humanities not because it makes possible replicability and corroboration as it does in the sciences, but because it allows us to produce useful portraits of the work we do: our assumptions, our tools, and the assumptions behind our tools." (p. 295) Similarly, and in disagreement with Collins, Strübing argues that replication is valuable where it can be achieved, but that this is not the case in qualitative interpretive research [37].…”