‘Bias Binding’: Re-Calling Creativity in Qualitative Research

This chapter reflects on the methods, tools and experience that make up the practice of qualitative research to consider what data are and what data do. Referring to a range of different research projects I have undertaken or been involved with, I ask what counts as data, and where and how they intersect with experience, and in doing so I question a distinction now increasingly being made between the personal and impersonal qualities of data/experience. Noting another distinction, between methodology and methods, I explore, in particular, the relationship between methods and the idea of ‘bias’ that increasingly seems to worry students that I encounter. And, as I go on to argue, the notion of bias has revived, for me, ideas about both the necessarily embodied nature of the research process and about the ways in which creativity has to be seen as a critical part of the experience of doing qualitative research (see James, this volume).