ABSTRACT
Anything we do in the name of seeking qualitative research data and making sense of it is in some way creative, because it requires us to dig into our imaginations to create the methods and processes most likely to unearth fresh, new insights into what it means to be human. Some forms of enquiry and analysis, however, are just that little bit more creative, because they step outside the boundaries of what have now, to some extent, they become conventional practices. For example, once upon a time unstructured, conversational interviewing was considered creative, because it dared to transgress the structural rules that standardized how we accessed participants’ experiential accounts. Now, in the light of many decades of experience, qualitative researchers are at ease with free-flowing interviewing styles and participants enjoy deeper connections to the research process as collaborators and co-researchers. As qualitative researchers move further away from needing to constantly defend their practices against the yardstick of the scientific research method, and relax into the postmodern freedoms of relativism, abstraction and multiple representations of knowledge, contemporary, creative data collection and analysis methods and processes have emerged, and will keep on emerging.
