Implicit informal qualitative research processes embedded in legal proceedings: a case example

To make manifest, through a qualitative research process, the competing meanings constructed by the various parties in a legal case based on their own phenomenological perspective and/or experience of the events that gave rise to the legal complaint.

Representative quotes from the documentary court filings of various parties in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, involving a highly emotional issue-strip search of a child at school by school officials -provide the data source. These texts are analyzed conceptually to discover themes which help summarize the parties' diverse phenomenological perspectives on the 'facts'.

The sample texts from the court filings in the case were readily organized by themes and the competing parties' conflicting perspectives located on opposite ends of various continuums described in terms of those themes.

Making sense of conflicting legal positions can be considered, in part, as an informal qualitative research process. The use of textual analysis, a qualitative research process, can greatly assist in making more explicit the conflicting phenomenological perspectives of the various parties latent in the hundreds of documents typically filed with the courts in any major case. This may be helpful in mediation.