Two very important preoccupations of quality researchers are focus on details and focus on context. These are good practices. Focus on details is very important and qualitative researchers pride themselves for their focus on details, because through these details, they can infer something on a higher level, on an abstract level like we saw in the lecture on thick description. We see details, we describe those details thickly. So in detail, in order to relate it to larger concepts or larger society. So we focus on details. Here you see a nice party and people chatting nicely and maybe flirting a bit and waving to someone, oh, I'm here. I'm with my party in there, they're doing a little dance or something with both hands up. But if we really focus on the details, we can see this. Well, this man is not really looking nicely to this man. Maybe they're arguing or giving him a scolding or something. Now in qualitative research, we describe not only the general feeling of a group, we also describe specifics and we try to describe the specifics, but there might be some issue with that and the issue is that. We emphasize this data description a lot, thick description and all the rhetoric around that, but we have to be aware for descriptive access as Lofland and Lofland suggest. Because we can describe every single detail, very detailed and very specific and very, but do we really need that? So every time we should sit and ponder, do we need all these details everywhere and where do we need it? So where is navel gazing starting or nitty-gritty detailed analysis, whereas a little bit more abstracted analysis would be probably better. So there is an issue, there is a flip side to this good practice. It's not good per se, so you do not need to write a thousand page thesis in order to write a good thesis, because a lot of detail doesn't mean A lot of quality. So you have to be where? More or less the same accounts for context, let's look at an image without any context. What do we see here? Well, we see a handshake between two man or probably two women. But if we look closer, if we look a bit more into context, we see that these are men and they're carrying helmets and having some kind of suit. Maybe they're formula one drivers or motorcyclists or they're astronauts and cosmonauts. Wait, this is the Apollo-Soyuz, because this is USSR and this is USA. This was the height of the Cold War, 1975. And in 1975, there was a famous handshake in space. USSR's space project, USA space project. They came together and they shook hands. It was really an important issue, an important thing during this Cold War. And there you see that context is important, because it's not just the handshake. It's not just a handshake between two men. It's handshake between two nations at the height of Cold War. And a part of the Cold War, big part of the Cold War was obviously, the space race. So you need context in order to interpret these kinds of images, but the question is comparable to the issue on details, because too much context is an issue is problem. Where does context begin and where does context end? In the late 1990s, there have been a huge discussion between disco analyst and conversation analyst about what is context? Where does context end and where does context start? Does context start at the beginning of a conversation, as conversation analysts would say? So forget about everything that happens outside that specific conversation or does it start somewhere before? Conversation analysts would say, it's all in the text, all the context is in the fragment. Discourse analysis or quite some discourse analysts would say, well, no, it is very important whether someone is a doctor speaking to a patient or a lecturer talking to a student or two students talking among each other and we use that context in order to understand what is going on? So there's always more context, but the question again is where does context end then? Because this lecturer might be very tall. Is that important contextual information? I guess it is, but maybe it's not. This lecturer comes from a certain background. Is that important context? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. The lecturer is migrant. Is that important context? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. It depends on the research. So again, this good practice has a flip side. We don't know exactly when to stop and when to start.
