ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the politics of evidence, the politics of ignorance, stigma, and conflicting agendas are impediments to health research and perhaps also educational research and constrict qualitative inquiry. At the Qualitative Health Research Conference, Linda Connell described the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which collects reports on aviation safety events and incidents, and the role of qualitative inquiry. Evidence and evidence-based practice have become the new mantras for medical care; they have spawned meta-analyses and the Cochrane Library: a depository of these reviews assessing evidence by evaluating series of trials or replications. Federal organizations and private foundations that fund research are excellent mirrors of the state of the science. Their health-care priorities and the grants that they fund reveal what research is perceived to be necessary and of outstanding design. Forensic designs are used by many disciplines obviously by police at crime scenes, in cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, missing persons, fraud investigations, and audit procedures.
