In Qualitative Research, listening is a more important verb than thinking. We have to make several choices regarding methodology, but the act of listening dominates the environment, especially when looking for depth in the chosen topic.
The biggest challenge of qualitative research is to learn the rare ability to listen theoretically, adding epistemologies and ontologies.
Listening to a person is allowing yourself to know the vision of the world they inhabit.
Yes, the world has countless visions, warm, hopeful, adventurous, optimistic, defeatist and a thousand others, which parade unscathed through the passage of time.
By interviewing various worlds, I look for what they have in common, the pattern of the weaves that intertwine in events shaped by society, and that become the embroidery in which humanity navigates in unison.
People tend to like to talk, but under their own rules. Our challenge is to discover and appropriate these codes, in such a way that knowledge about the countless possibilities can be catalogued, explained and used to generate knowledge.
Listening means considering the context, the interviewee’s current reality, their depth. I am afraid of this expression that is placed repeatedly in technical books on research: in depth. Who am I to enter a foreign reign and delve into the depths of various realities? There are so many obstacles that the temptation remains to limit such options and seek a customized depth, relativized as we do nowadays.
Only with practice, and I confess that with the natural difficulty of someone who thinks and talks too fast for this generation, I realized the importance of leaving a comfortable place, where statistics shape reality in confidence intervals and throwing myself into a sea of perspectives.
This expectation of depth showed me how much I was unaware of my own worldview, and this exercise, more than a research duty, transformed my vision of existence, where I find symphonies in words.
I proceed towards the target, as in a strenuous marathon, discovering unexplored worlds, adding layers and new dimensions to my own reality, thus acquiring the skill of an interpreter, translating worlds to compose several universes.
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