(a seasonal note from a qualitative researcher)
It’s the time of year when everything and everyone is encouraged to be measurable.
Wrap-ups circulate. Urged to account for ourselves, we summarise and evidence. To show that our year has been productive.
I get it. These metrics can offer comfort. We can measure our value in numbers. Importantly others can then measure our value in numbers. The complexity of the world is made to feel manageable. Time has been well spent.
Most of the things I value don’t behave well under measurement. Most of the things I wish to be valued for don’t behave well under measurement.
I spend my time with things that resist counting (apart from the damn word counts – but that is another post), relationships, atmospheres, trust, care.
So much of my work involves sitting with uncertainty long enough for something else to emerge often slowly, often without a declaration of arrival, no fanfare, no big ta-da.
The work I care about doesn’t fit easily into a bullet point list; it doesn’t start or stop because the numbers on a calendar change. A conversation that drifts, people staying in a room when leaving would have been easier, pauses and silences all significant, all valuable, all necessary.
What would this look like?
Conversations that didn’t require an outcome
Silences that weren’t rushed to be filled
Instances of uncertainty tolerated
Projects allowed to remain unfinished
Moments when someone said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that before”
Times the work slowed down instead of speeding up
The irony is that qualitative work particularly research committed to complexity, care, and ambiguity is often asked to account for itself using tools designed to eliminate those very things. Even in academia, where we critique quantification fluently, we are still asked to perform progress on schedule, to narrate coherence, to demonstrate impact at regular intervals.
Yes, the clock is on a countdown to submission for my PhD. To misquote Cher, I can’t turn back time.
The accountability of qualitative research is different. It is attentive rather than extractive. It values depth over speed, context over comparability, presence over performance. It asks better questions than “How much?” or “How fast?” questions like “What shifted?”, “Who stayed?”, “What became possible, even briefly?”
Which brings me to New Year resolutions.
New year, new me belongs to the same logic as wrap-ups and dashboards: the fantasy that time resets cleanly, that continuity is failure, and that change only counts when it’s visible and measurable. This has never matched my lived experience, and it certainly doesn’t match the realities of my research.
Loss doesn’t reset in January.
Trust doesn’t accelerate on command.
Care doesn’t scale because we want it to.
So I’m opting out of the end-of-year accounting ritual. Not because reflection isn’t valuable, but because the things I care most about lose their meaning when forced into tidy summaries.
Some work only looks unproductive if you’re counting the wrong things.
This isn’t a wrap-up. It’s a continuation.
Unoptimised. Still unfolding.