Approaching, contacting, and grasping: an annotated methodology

Matthews, CR ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8561-2863, 2025. Approaching, contacting, and grasping: an annotated methodology. Qualitative Inquiry. ISSN 1077-8004

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Abstract

Social scientific methods are not as they should be. In this extended essay, I offer a way of framing and writing about methodological discussions that can tackle some of the problems I have been butting my head up against for some time. Building on a twin paper recently published in Qualitative Inquiry and extracts from an unpublished, pre-peer-reviewed manuscript, I offer commentary and explanatory annotations. The main thrust of the work is to demonstrate the utility of reconsidering the ways we think and write about methods using the interconnected notions of approaching, contacting, and grasping. Doing so should encourage us to deliver what I think are the most important features of a methodological discussion—that is, we should say what we did, why we did it and how. When scholars do this well, a methods section can “sing” with an intentional and, at times, intense focus on the practical, precise, and descriptive rather than the abstract, vague, and intangible. Stated differently, it puts the onus on us, our processes, and our understanding of them, while also addressing the central features that sit at the core of sound research. And this, to me at least, is how we can focus on clearly communicating what we did when we did our social science.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Qualitative Inquiry
Creators:	Matthews, C.R.
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Date:	28 July 2025
ISSN:	1077-8004
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/10778004251355909 DOI 2478627 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	05 Aug 2025 12:33
Last Modified:	05 Aug 2025 12:33
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54116

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