Understanding the Elephant

I just read through ‘J. Kirk and M. L. Miller(1986) Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research’, Sage.

Any researcher would have come across the story of ‘the blind men and the elephant’. I thought these two paragraphs below succinctly explains the characteristics and the issues of quantitative research approach when studying social phenomena.

“The familiar parable of the blind men and the elephant illustrates the problem of reliability. According to that story, several blind men encountered an elephant, investigated its various parts, and quarrelled over their mutually irreconcilable reports.

The thesis/punch line, or chiste, of the parable is not to poke fun at the visually impaired but to dramatize the imperfection of the various epistemic positions that can be taken with regard to such stories. A vulgar positivist might be imagined to take some sort of statistical average of the data (“compensating for error in measurement”), and conclude that the elephant is a formless blob covered with elephant skin” (P49).

However, now the problem is as a qualitative researcher, how we can produce the understanding of the Elephant which is objective (used in the qualitative research sense), reliable and valid.