ABSTRACT
Human behavior is inherently multimodal and human experience is inherently multisensory. Driving a car is not a purely tactile experience, eating a meal involves
more than tasting flavors, and having a conversation is not simply about listening. Through the process of synesthesia we are sometimes able to more or less successfully perceive an experience in one sensory mode via another sensory mode. For example, when we hear the phrase “red rose,” we may be able to visualize and perhaps even imagine the feel and smell of the flower this phrase denotes. Even in this case, however, we lose something in the decontextualized verbal description. We must fall back on the generic assumption that a rose is a rose. This assumption is challenged in Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s (1943) enduring story The Little Prince. Having lovingly cared for the single rose on his asteroid, the Little Prince is devastated when he visits another asteroid and finds a garden filled with five thousand roses. His rose suddenly seems quite ordinary and common. But he is befriended by a fox who helps him realize that his rose is unique in all the world. It is unique because of the Little Prince’s loyalty to it and because of the time and effort he has devoted to caring for it. Our informants and research sites in qualitative research are similarly unique, and part of what we ideally seek to preserve and convey about them is their uniqueness. This is a key difference from quantitative research which presents only faceless and placeless numbers.
