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Critical Analysis – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

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Critical Analysis

Definition:

Critical analysis is a process of examining a piece of work or an idea in a systematic, objective, and analytical way. It involves breaking down complex ideas, concepts, or arguments into smaller, more manageable parts to understand them better.

Types of Critical Analysis

Types of Critical Analysis are as follows:

Literary Analysis

This type of analysis focuses on analyzing and interpreting works of literature , such as novels, poetry, plays, etc. The analysis involves examining the literary devices used in the work, such as symbolism, imagery, and metaphor, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

Film Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting films, including their themes, cinematography, editing, and sound. Film analysis can also include evaluating the director’s style and how it contributes to the overall message of the film.

Art Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting works of art , such as paintings, sculptures, and installations. The analysis involves examining the elements of the artwork, such as color, composition, and technique, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

Cultural Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting cultural artifacts , such as advertisements, popular music, and social media posts. The analysis involves examining the cultural context of the artifact and how it reflects and shapes cultural values, beliefs, and norms.

Historical Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting historical documents , such as diaries, letters, and government records. The analysis involves examining the historical context of the document and how it reflects the social, political, and cultural attitudes of the time.

Philosophical Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting philosophical texts and ideas, such as the works of philosophers and their arguments. The analysis involves evaluating the logical consistency of the arguments and assessing the validity and soundness of the conclusions.

Scientific Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting scientific research studies and their findings. The analysis involves evaluating the methods used in the study, the data collected, and the conclusions drawn, and assessing their reliability and validity.

Critical Discourse Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting language use in social and political contexts. The analysis involves evaluating the power dynamics and social relationships conveyed through language use and how they shape discourse and social reality.

Comparative Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting multiple texts or works of art and comparing them to each other. The analysis involves evaluating the similarities and differences between the texts and how they contribute to understanding the themes and meanings conveyed.

Critical Analysis Format

Critical Analysis Format is as follows:

I. Introduction

• Provide a brief overview of the text, object, or event being analyzed
• Explain the purpose of the analysis and its significance
• Provide background information on the context and relevant historical or cultural factors

II. Description

• Provide a detailed description of the text, object, or event being analyzed
• Identify key themes, ideas, and arguments presented
• Describe the author or creator’s style, tone, and use of language or visual elements

III. Analysis

• Analyze the text, object, or event using critical thinking skills
• Identify the main strengths and weaknesses of the argument or presentation
• Evaluate the reliability and validity of the evidence presented
• Assess any assumptions or biases that may be present in the text, object, or event
• Consider the implications of the argument or presentation for different audiences and contexts

IV. Evaluation

• Provide an overall evaluation of the text, object, or event based on the analysis
• Assess the effectiveness of the argument or presentation in achieving its intended purpose
• Identify any limitations or gaps in the argument or presentation
• Consider any alternative viewpoints or interpretations that could be presented
• Summarize the main points of the analysis and evaluation
• Reiterate the significance of the text, object, or event and its relevance to broader issues or debates
• Provide any recommendations for further research or future developments in the field.

VI. Example

• Provide an example or two to support your analysis and evaluation
• Use quotes or specific details from the text, object, or event to support your claims
• Analyze the example(s) using critical thinking skills and explain how they relate to your overall argument

VII. Conclusion

• Reiterate your thesis statement and summarize your main points
• Provide a final evaluation of the text, object, or event based on your analysis
• Offer recommendations for future research or further developments in the field
• End with a thought-provoking statement or question that encourages the reader to think more deeply about the topic

How to Write Critical Analysis

Writing a critical analysis involves evaluating and interpreting a text, such as a book, article, or film, and expressing your opinion about its quality and significance. Here are some steps you can follow to write a critical analysis:

• Read and re-read the text: Before you begin writing, make sure you have a good understanding of the text. Read it several times and take notes on the key points, themes, and arguments.
• Identify the author’s purpose and audience: Consider why the author wrote the text and who the intended audience is. This can help you evaluate whether the author achieved their goals and whether the text is effective in reaching its audience.
• Analyze the structure and style: Look at the organization of the text and the author’s writing style. Consider how these elements contribute to the overall meaning of the text.
• Evaluate the content : Analyze the author’s arguments, evidence, and conclusions. Consider whether they are logical, convincing, and supported by the evidence presented in the text.
• Consider the context: Think about the historical, cultural, and social context in which the text was written. This can help you understand the author’s perspective and the significance of the text.
• Develop your thesis statement : Based on your analysis, develop a clear and concise thesis statement that summarizes your overall evaluation of the text.
• Support your thesis: Use evidence from the text to support your thesis statement. This can include direct quotes, paraphrases, and examples from the text.
• Write the introduction, body, and conclusion : Organize your analysis into an introduction that provides context and presents your thesis, a body that presents your evidence and analysis, and a conclusion that summarizes your main points and restates your thesis.
• Revise and edit: After you have written your analysis, revise and edit it to ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and well-organized. Check for spelling and grammar errors, and make sure that your analysis is logically sound and supported by evidence.

When to Write Critical Analysis

You may want to write a critical analysis in the following situations:

• Academic Assignments: If you are a student, you may be assigned to write a critical analysis as a part of your coursework. This could include analyzing a piece of literature, a historical event, or a scientific paper.
• Journalism and Media: As a journalist or media person, you may need to write a critical analysis of current events, political speeches, or media coverage.
• Personal Interest: If you are interested in a particular topic, you may want to write a critical analysis to gain a deeper understanding of it. For example, you may want to analyze the themes and motifs in a novel or film that you enjoyed.
• Professional Development : Professionals such as writers, scholars, and researchers often write critical analyses to gain insights into their field of study or work.

Critical Analysis Example

An Example of Critical Analysis Could be as follow:

Research Topic:

The Impact of Online Learning on Student Performance

Introduction:

The introduction of the research topic is clear and provides an overview of the issue. However, it could benefit from providing more background information on the prevalence of online learning and its potential impact on student performance.

Literature Review:

The literature review is comprehensive and well-structured. It covers a broad range of studies that have examined the relationship between online learning and student performance. However, it could benefit from including more recent studies and providing a more critical analysis of the existing literature.

Research Methods:

The research methods are clearly described and appropriate for the research question. The study uses a quasi-experimental design to compare the performance of students who took an online course with those who took the same course in a traditional classroom setting. However, the study may benefit from using a randomized controlled trial design to reduce potential confounding factors.

The results are presented in a clear and concise manner. The study finds that students who took the online course performed similarly to those who took the traditional course. However, the study only measures performance on one course and may not be generalizable to other courses or contexts.

Discussion :

The discussion section provides a thorough analysis of the study’s findings. The authors acknowledge the limitations of the study and provide suggestions for future research. However, they could benefit from discussing potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between online learning and student performance.

Conclusion :

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the study and provides some implications for future research and practice. However, it could benefit from providing more specific recommendations for implementing online learning programs in educational settings.

Purpose of Critical Analysis

There are several purposes of critical analysis, including:

• To identify and evaluate arguments : Critical analysis helps to identify the main arguments in a piece of writing or speech and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. This enables the reader to form their own opinion and make informed decisions.
• To assess evidence : Critical analysis involves examining the evidence presented in a text or speech and evaluating its quality and relevance to the argument. This helps to determine the credibility of the claims being made.
• To recognize biases and assumptions : Critical analysis helps to identify any biases or assumptions that may be present in the argument, and evaluate how these affect the credibility of the argument.
• To develop critical thinking skills: Critical analysis helps to develop the ability to think critically, evaluate information objectively, and make reasoned judgments based on evidence.
• To improve communication skills: Critical analysis involves carefully reading and listening to information, evaluating it, and expressing one’s own opinion in a clear and concise manner. This helps to improve communication skills and the ability to express ideas effectively.

Importance of Critical Analysis

Here are some specific reasons why critical analysis is important:

• Helps to identify biases: Critical analysis helps individuals to recognize their own biases and assumptions, as well as the biases of others. By being aware of biases, individuals can better evaluate the credibility and reliability of information.
• Enhances problem-solving skills : Critical analysis encourages individuals to question assumptions and consider multiple perspectives, which can lead to creative problem-solving and innovation.
• Promotes better decision-making: By carefully evaluating evidence and arguments, critical analysis can help individuals make more informed and effective decisions.
• Facilitates understanding: Critical analysis helps individuals to understand complex issues and ideas by breaking them down into smaller parts and evaluating them separately.
• Fosters intellectual growth : Engaging in critical analysis challenges individuals to think deeply and critically, which can lead to intellectual growth and development.

Advantages of Critical Analysis

Some advantages of critical analysis include:

• Improved decision-making: Critical analysis helps individuals make informed decisions by evaluating all available information and considering various perspectives.
• Enhanced problem-solving skills : Critical analysis requires individuals to identify and analyze the root cause of a problem, which can help develop effective solutions.
• Increased creativity : Critical analysis encourages individuals to think outside the box and consider alternative solutions to problems, which can lead to more creative and innovative ideas.
• Improved communication : Critical analysis helps individuals communicate their ideas and opinions more effectively by providing logical and coherent arguments.
• Reduced bias: Critical analysis requires individuals to evaluate information objectively, which can help reduce personal biases and subjective opinions.
• Better understanding of complex issues : Critical analysis helps individuals to understand complex issues by breaking them down into smaller parts, examining each part and understanding how they fit together.
• Greater self-awareness: Critical analysis helps individuals to recognize their own biases, assumptions, and limitations, which can lead to personal growth and development.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Writing a Critical Analysis

What is in this guide, definitions, putting it together, tips and examples of critques.

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This guide is meant to help you understand the basics of writing a critical analysis. A critical analysis is an argument about a particular piece of media. There are typically two parts: (1) identify and explain the argument the author is making, and (2), provide your own argument about that argument. Your instructor may have very specific requirements on how you are to write your critical analysis, so make sure you read your assignment carefully.

Critical Analysis

A deep approach to your understanding of a piece of media by relating new knowledge to what you already know.

Part 1: Introduction

• Identify the work being criticized.
• Present thesis - argument about the work.
• Preview your argument - what are the steps you will take to prove your argument.

Part 2: Summarize

• Provide a short summary of the work.
• Present only what is needed to know to understand your argument.

Part 3: Your Argument

• This is the bulk of your paper.
• Provide "sub-arguments" to prove your main argument.
• Use scholarly articles to back up your argument(s).

Part 4: Conclusion

• Reflect on  how  you have proven your argument.
• Point out the  importance  of your argument.
• Comment on the potential for further research or analysis.
• Cornell University Library Tips for writing a critical appraisal and analysis of a scholarly article.
• Queen's University Library How to Critique an Article (Psychology)
• University of Illinois, Springfield An example of a summary and an evaluation of a research article. This extended example shows the different ways a student can critique and write about an article
• Next: Background Information >>
• Last Updated: Feb 14, 2024 4:33 PM
• URL: https://libguides.pittcc.edu/critical_analysis

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9 Critical Approaches to Qualitative Research

Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara

Peter Chua, Department of Sociology, San José State University

Dana Collins, Department of Sociology, California State University, Fullerton

• Published: 04 August 2014
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This chapter reflects on critical strategies in qualitative research. It examines the meanings and debates associated with the term “critical,” in particular, contrasting liberal and dialectical notions and practices in relation to social analysis and qualitative research. The chapter also explores how critical social research may be synonymous with critical ethnography in relation to issues of power, positionality, representation, and the production of situated knowledges. It uses Bhavnani’s framework to draw on Dana Collins’ research as a specific case to suggest how the notion of the “critical” relates to ethnographic research practices: ensuring feminist and queer accountability, resisting reinscription, and integrating lived experience.

Qualitative research is now ubiquitous and fairly well-respected throughout the human sciences. That Oxford University Press is producing this much-needed volume is further testament to that notion, and one which we applaud. However, although there are different approaches to conducting qualitative research, what is often not addressed are the philosophical notions underlying such research. And that is where the “critical” enters. Indeed, “critical,” used as an adjective and applied, within the academy, to methods of research is also a familiar phrase. The question is, therefore: what does “critical” mean, and how might it be translated such that present and future researchers could draw on some of its fundamentals as they plan their research studies in relation to progressive political activism?

The popularity of critical research is not predictable. Although the 1960s and early 1970s did offer a number of publications that engaged with critical research traditions (e.g., Gouldner, 1970 ), and the 1990s also led to a resurgence of interest in this area (e.g., Harvey, 1990 ; Thomas, 1993 ), it is now two decades since explicit discussions of critical research have been widely discussed within the social sciences (see Smith, 1999 ; Madison, 2012 , as exceptions).

In this chapter, we first outline meanings associated with “critical.” We then suggest that the narratives of critical ethnography are best suited for an overview chapter such as this. We consider critical ethnography to be virtually synonymous with critical social research as we discuss it in this chapter. In the final section of our chapter, we discuss Dana Collins’ specific research studies to suggest how her approach embraces the notion of “critical” ( Collins, 2005 ; 2007 ; 2009 ).

The “Critical” in Critical Approaches

“Critical” is used in many ways. In everyday use, the term can refer, among other definitions, to an assessment that points out flaws and mistakes (“a critical approach to the design”), or to being close to a crisis (“a critical illness”). On the positive side, it can refer to a close reading (“a critical assessment of Rosa Luxembourg’s writings”) or as being essential (“critical for effective educational strategies”). A final definition is that the word can be used to either denote considerable praise (“the playwright’s work was critically acclaimed”) or to indicate a particular turning point (“this is a critical time to vote”). It is this last definition that is closest to our approach as we reflect on “critical” in the context of qualitative research. That is, drawing from the writings of Marx, the Frankfurt School, and others (see Delanty, 2005 ; Marx, 1845/1976 ; Strydom, 2011 ), we suggest that critical approaches to qualitative methods do not signify only a particular way of thinking about the methods we use in our research studies, but that “critical approaches” also signify a turning point in how we think about the conduct of research across the human sciences, including its dialectical relations to the progressive and systematic transformation of social relations and social institutions.

The most straightforward notion of “critical” in this context is that it refers to (at the least) or insists (at its strongest) that research—and all ways by which knowledge is created—is firmly grounded within an understanding of social structures (social inequalities), power relationships (power inequalities), and the agency of human beings (an engagement with the fact that human beings actively think about their worlds). Critical approaches are most frequently associated with Marxist, feminist, and antiracist, indigenous, and Third World perspectives. At its most succinct, therefore, we argue that “critical” in this context refers to issues of epistemology, power, micropolitics, and resistance.

What does this mean, both theoretically and for how we conduct our research? Most would agree that whereas qualitative research does not, by definition, insist on a nonpositivist way of examining the social world, for critical approaches to be truly critical, an antipositivist approach is the sine qua non of critical research. Furthermore, it is evident as we survey critical empirical research that issues of reflexive and subjective techniques in data collection and the researcher’s relationship with research subjects also frame both the practices and the theories associated with research.

The following section begins by drawing attention to developments and debates involving the more restricted use the term critical as related to Marxism and then explores the ramifications for varying attempts to conduct critical qualitative research.

The Critical Debates

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and their contemporaries (see Engels, 1877/1969 ; Harvey, 1996 ; Lenin, 1915/1977 ; Mao, 1990 ; Ollman, 2003 ) developed dialectical materialist notions of critique and “critical” that were substantively different from prior notions. They incorporated these dialectical materialist notions to develop Marxist theories and politics.

Dialectical materialism refers to an outlook on reality that emphasizes the importance of process and change that are inherent to things (such as objects, phenomena, and situations), as well as of the importance of human practices in making change. Significantly, human struggle over existing conditions and contradictions in things creates not only new conditions, but also new contradictions. This outlook serves as an analytical tool over idealist and old-fashioned materialist worldviews and as a source of strength for exploited peoples in their struggle against ruling elites and classes. It emphasizes that correct ideas, knowledge, and theoretical abstractions are established initially, and perhaps inevitably, through practice.

Dialectical materialism may be used to examine two aspects of the research process and the production of academic knowledge. The first aspect involves the writing process as it is carried out among multiple authors. At the drafting phase, the authors craft their distinct ideas into textual form. Contradictions in ideas are bound to exist in the draft. In doing revisions, some contradictions may become intensified and remain unresolved, yet, most frequently (and hopefully!), many are addressed in the form of clearer, more solid, and coherent arguments, thus resolving the earlier contradictions in the text. Yet, new struggles and contradictions emerge. The synthesis of ideas and argument in the final manuscript may again, however, engage in new struggles with the prevailing arguments being discussed.

The second aspect involves the relationship and interaction between the researcher and the interviewee. As their relationship begins, contradictions and differences usually exist between them, for instance, in terms of their prior experiences and knowledge, their material interests in the research project, and their communication skills in being persuasive and forging consent. The struggle of these initial contradictions could result in new conditions and contradictions. For example, this could lead to

the establishment of quality rapport between them, allowing the interview to be completed while the researcher maintains control over the situation;

the abrupt end of the interview due to the interviewee refusing and asserting her or his right to comply with the interview process; or

an explicit set of negotiations that address the unevenness in power relations between them, along with an invitation for both to be part of the research team and to collaborate in the collection and analysis of data and in the forging of new theories and knowledges.

In the first possibility, the prevailing power relations in interviews remain but shift to beneath the surface of the relationship, under the guise of “rapport.” In the second possibility, power relations in the interview process and initial contradictions are heightened, resulting in new conditions and contradictions that the researcher and research participant have to address, jointly and singly. In the third possibility, the research subject is transformed into a researcher as well, and the relationship between the two is transformed into a more active co-learning and co-teaching relationship. Still, new conflicts and contradictions may emerge as the research process continues to unfold. 1 In short, dialectical materialism stresses the analysis of change in the essence (1), practice (2), and struggle (3). Such analyses are at the root of how change may be imagined within the practices of social research.

Dialectical materialism, which forms the basis of the concept of “critical,” emphasizes the need to engage with power, inequality, and social relations in the arenas of the social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological. Based on this status, it is argued that an analysis of societies and ways of life demands a more comprehensive approach, one that does not view society and social institutions merely as a singular unit of analysis but rather as ones that are replete with history. Dialectical materialism directs its criticism against prevailing views or hegemonies, and, within the context of academic endeavors, engages in debates against positivism and neo-Kantian forms of social inquiry. It is this basis of “critical” that defines it in the context of research as a deep questioning of science, objectivity, and rationality. Thus, the meaning of the term “critical,” based on the idea of “critique,” emerges from the practice and application of dialectical materialism.

Historical materialism emerges from and is based on dialectical materialism. That is, any application of the dialectic to material realities is historical materialism. For example, any study of human society, its history, its development, and its process of change demands a dialectical approach rooted in historical materialism. This involves delving deeper into past and present social phenomena to thereby determine how people change the essence of social phenomena, and, simultaneously, transform their contradictions.

Dialectical materialism regards positivism as a crude and naïve endeavor to seek knowledge and explain phenomena and as one that assumes it is the task of social researchers to determine the laws of social relationships by relying solely on observations (i.e., by assuming there is a primacy of external conditions and actions). In addition, positivism separates the subject (the seemingly unbiased, detached observer) and object (the phenomenon/a under consideration) of study. Dialectical materialism overcomes the shortcomings of positivism by offering a holistic understanding of (a) the essence of phenomena; (b) the processes of internal changes, the handling of contradictions, and the development of knowledge; (c) the unity of the subject and object in the making of correct ideas; and (d) the role of practice and politics in knowledge creation.

Dialectical materialism directs its criticism against dominant standpoints. These standpoints can offer a simplistic form of idealism and philosophical materialism. Within the context of academic endeavors, the methods of dialectical materialism engage in debates against positivism and neo-Kantian forms of social inquiry. This approach challenges assertions that science, objectivity, and rationality are the sine qua non of research and that skepticism and liberalism are the only appropriate analytical positionings by which a research project can be defined as “critical.”

For instance, Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, in developing sociological positivism, argued for a new science to study society, one that adopted the methods of the natural sciences, such as skeptical empiricism and the practices of induction. In adopting these methods, approaches relying on early positivism sought to craft knowledge based on seemingly affirmative verification rather than being based on judgmental evaluation and transformative distinctions.

Positivism and dialectical materialism were both developed in response to Kantian and idealist philosophy. In the context of the European Enlightenment, in the late 1700s, Immanuel Kant inaugurated the philosophy of critique. Positivism challenged Kant’s philosophy of critique as the basis for the theory of knowledge.

Kant developed his notion of critique to highlight the workings of human reason and judgment, to illuminate its limitations, and to consolidate its application in order to secure a stable foundation for morality, religion, and metaphysical concerns. Politically, Kantian philosophy provided justification for both a traditionalism derived from earlier periods and a liberalism developed during the ascendance of the Enlightenment.

Kant sought to settle philosophical disputes between a narrow notion of empiricism (that relies on pure observation, perception, and experience as the basis for knowledge) and a narrow notion of rationalism (that relies on pure reason and concepts as the basis for knowledge). He argued that the essence (termed “thing-in-itself”) is unknowable, countering David Hume’s skeptical empiricism, and he was convinced that there is no knowledge outside of innate conceptual categories. For Kant, “concepts without perceptions are empty; perceptions without concepts are blind” (1781/1965, pp. A 51/B 75).

The method of dialectical materialism challenges Kant’s idealism for (what is claimed to be) its faulty assertion that correct ideas and knowing about the “thing-in-itself” can only emerge from innate conceptual categories, ones that are universal and transcendental. In Kantian philosophy, there is no reality (out there) to be known. Rather, it is the experience of reality itself that provides for human reason and consciousness.

Dialectical materialism overcomes Kant’s idealism with its recognition of the existence of concrete phenomena, outside and independent of human reason. Dialectical materialism stresses that social reality and concrete phenomena reflect on and determine the content of human consciousness (and also, we would argue, vice versa). Dialectical materialism also emphasizes the role of practice and politics in knowledge development, instead of merely centering the primacy of ideas and the meanings of objects.

In sum, the core debate against positivism centers on the practices of science. Dialectical materialism regards positivist approaches as crude and naïve endeavors that seek to determine unchangeable laws of nature, rely solely on observations and “sense experience” of phenomena as the basis for knowledge, highlight the primacy of external conditions and actions to explain phenomena, and separate the subject from the object of study. That is, dialectical materialism views positivism as a form of mechanical, as distinct from historical, materialism.

This abridged account of dialectical materialism and the critiques it offers of Kantian idealism and sociological positivism can allow for the formation of a preliminary set of criteria for what may constitute the “critical.” We argue that qualitative research may be critical if it makes clear conceptually and analytically:

The essence and root cause of any social phenomena (e.g., youth and politics);

The relationship between the essence of the social phenomena under consideration to the general social totality (such as how youth and their views of politics are related to wider systems within society, such as education, age, exploitation);

The contradictions within this social phenomenon (such as how young people are expressing their discontent),

and, therefore,

How to conduct more reflexive practices that interrelate data generation, data analysis, and political engagement that challenge existing relations of power.

Contemporary debates between neo-Kantian idealists and dialectical materialists have often been friendly regarding the direction for carving out what is meant by a critical project in qualitative social research. These debates bring to the fore issues of politics, ethics, research design, and the collection and analysis of data. They have also prompted a variety of ways in which “critical” may be used in relation to qualitative research. For the purposes of this chapter, we suggest four substantial ways in which “critical” is used in the context of qualitative research: (a) critical as a form of liberalism, (b) critical as a counterdisciplinary perspective, (c) critical as an expansion of politics, and (d) critical as a professionalized research endeavor and perspective.

Critical as a form of Kantian liberalism is one of the more conventional uses of the term in qualitative research. This use of critical is generally contrasted against the dogmatism of positivist approaches within social scientific research. Yet, to use critical in this way means that we embrace a liberalism that ends up promoting idealism in outlook and pluralism in practice. That is, Kantian liberalism presents itself as a “critical” and novel analysis by combining eclectic ideas and theories while not making known its political stand and its material interests. As a result, it supports prevailing modes of thinking that emphasize abstraction over concrete reality, and it succumbs to relativistist and pragmatist practices in research, such as “anything goes” in collecting data. In terms of methods, this use of “critical” promotes looseness and leniency in ethics and data collection and analysis, often without a structured accountability to the many constituencies that underlie all social research. Furthermore, the use of, for example, phrases such as “critical spaces,” when applied to social research, may be better understood as a celebration of method above theory and meta-theory and an engagement with some (of the often rather) excessive approaches to reflexivity and meta-reflexivity. In sum, this understanding of “critical” lacks appropriate structures of ethics and accountability and often tends to reject dialectic materialism.

The second use of “critical” in regards to qualitative research proposes a more analytical disagreement with conventional scholarly disciplines and, in so doing, seeks to take up counterdisciplinary positions ( Burawoy, 1998 ; 2003 ; Carroll, 2004 ; Smith, 2007 ). There are two main strands in this use of “critical.” One strand argues that “critical” is a means of exposing the weaknesses of conventional academic disciplines such as anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. At the same time, this strand maintains the viability of these core social science disciplines. For instance, academic feminists have continually highlighted the masculinist and heterosexist bias in what is considered top-tier scholarship and the need for these disciplines to be more inclusive in terms of perspectives and methodological techniques (e.g., Fonow & Cook, 1991 ; Harding, 1991 ; Ray, 2006 ). Yet such an approach may not inevitably focus on the fundamental problems, such as a neglect of the study of power inequalities (e.g., Boserup 1970 ; and see examples in Reinharz & Davidman, 1992 ). This second strand seeks to carve out interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields such as women studies, cultural studies, and area studies to overcome the paradigmatic and fundamental crises within core disciplines ( Bhavnani, Foran, & Kurian, 2003 ; March, 1995 ; Mohanty, 2003 ). Many of these interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields have often been more historical and qualitative in their approaches, seeking to go beyond positivist limitations and present a more nuanced and thorough analysis. However, even these multi-, inter-, and antidisciplinary fields have an uneven impact on dominant and conventional knowledge.

Moreover, both strands have not been able to overcome the increasing corporatization and neoliberalization of academic institutions. This issue addresses the increasing restructuring of public education into a private domain, one that relies on privatized practices and funding of both teaching and research. The neoliberalization of the academy is found in the ties of academic research to corporate grants, individualized career advancement, excessive publishing demands and citation indices, and the use of outsourcing for transcription, interviewing, online education, and private research spaces that are “rented” by public institutions, to name a few. These neoliberal conditions of research usually push out those critical researchers who attempt to avoid such exploitative avenues for research, writing, and collaboration. This use of “critical,” however, does expose that critical research is taking shape within contemporary processes of neoliberalism and the increasing privatization of the academy ( Giroux, 2009 ; Greenwood, 2012 ; Pavlidis, 2012 ).

The third and less familiar approach is to view “critical” as invigorating politics through the practices of feminist, antiracist, and participatory action research. This approach, for example, highlights the importance of analyzing power in research, as in terms of the conduct of inquiry, in political usefulness, and in affecting relations of power and material relations. Yet this view of “critical” is dogmatic because this approach demands that every research study meet all criteria of criticality comprehensively and perfectly.

A final use of “critical” emerges from the many scholarly and professionalized approaches that engage with the politics of academic knowledge construction while making visible the limits of positivism. “Critical” is used here as a means to focus primarily on revitalizing scholarship and research endeavors. However, we argue that even this use of “critical” ossifies the separation of the making of specialized knowledge from an active engagement to transform social life. Such a separation is antithetical to dialectical materialism. Often, this fourth form of the term “critical” is based on the logics of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (such as that of Adorno [1973] , Habermas [1985] , and Marcuse [1968] ) and other Western neo-Marxisms (from Lukacs [1971] and Gramsci [1971] to Negri [1999] ). Critical ethnographers and other critical social researchers, drawing from this tradition, often develop public intellectual persona by writing and talking about politics through scholarly and popular forms of publishing and speaking presentations and are even seen to take part in political mobilizations. Yet they can also shy away from infusing their research with a deep engagement in political processes outside the academy.

Later in this chapter, we discuss how to avoid some of the pitfalls of these four types of “critical,” but suffice it to say, in short, that it is the politics and the explicit situatedness of research projects that can permit research to remain “critical.”

Is Critical Ethnography the Same as Critical Research?

George Marcus (1998) argues that the ethnographer is a midwife who, through words, gives birth to what is happening in the lives of the oppressed. Beverley Skeggs (1994) has proposed that ethnography is, in itself, “a theory of the research process,” and Asad (1973) offered the now-classic critique of anthropology as the colonial encounter. However, although many approaches to and definitions of ethnography abound, it is the case that they all agree on one aspect: namely, that ethnographies offer an “insider’s” perspective on the social phenomena under consideration. It is often suggested that the best ethnographies, whether defined as critical or not, offer detailed descriptions of how people see, and inhabit, their social worlds and cultures (e.g., Behar, 1993 ; Ho, 2009 ; Kondo, 1990 ; Zinn, 1979 ).

It is evident from our argument so far that we do not think of ethnographic approaches to knowledge construction as being, in and of themselves, critical. This is because an ethnographic study, although not in opposition to critical ethnography or to critical research in general, has practices rooted in social anthropology. Therefore, its assumptions are often in line with anthropological assumptions (see Harvey [1990] for a recounting of some of these assumptions). Concepts such as “insider” versus “outsider,” “going native,” “gaining access,” and even conceptualizations of a homogenized and/or exoticized “field” that is out there ready to be examined by research remain as significant lenses of methodological conceptualization in much ethnographic research.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the move to reflexivity in ethnographic research, there remain enduring assumptions about best practices. As a result, a certain fetishization of research methods transpires, one that is often epitomized as reflexivity. In this instance, ethnographic and qualitative research become an ideal set of practices for extracting information. In sum, “best research practices,” as ways to extract information, reproduce core power dynamics of racism, gender, class, imperialism, and heteronormativity, which, in turn, reproduce the oppressive dynamics of noncritical qualitative research.

Furthermore, when presenting research merely as reflexive research, it is the case that the researcher can lose sight of the broader social structural and historical materialist context. In addition, a static notion of reflexivity can lead to the researcher not looking outward to assess the wider interconnections among the micropolitics of the research. That is, reflexivity is a dialectic among the researcher, the research process, and the analysis ( Jordan & Yeomans, 1995 ), but it is often presented simply as a series of apparently unchangeable/essential facets of the researcher. Our final point is that for theory to be critical in the development of research paradigms, it has to explicitly engage with lived experiences and cultures for, without that engagement, it remains as formalism (see, e.g., the work of Guenther [2009] and Kang [2010] as examples of critical qualitative research). We are very much in tune with Hesse-Biber and Leavy, who have suggested that (grounded) theory building is a “dynamic dance routine” in which “there is no one right dance, no set routine to follow. One must be open to discovery” (2006, p. 76).

An example of the limitation of conventionally reflexive research is in the area of lesbian and gay research methods that focus on the experiences of gay men and lesbians conducting qualitative research. It also offers a commentary on the role that non-normative sexuality plays in social research. By looking inward (see the earlier comment on “reflexivity”), these methodological frameworks focus on the researcher’s and participants’ lesbian/gay identifications. In so doing, this can fabricate a shared social structural positionality with research participants who have been labeled “gay” or “lesbian.” Such an approach to reflexivity overlooks the fabricated nature of positionalities and ignores the sometimes more significant divisions between researchers and participants that are expressed along the lines of race, class, gender, and nationality. Reflexivity is used only as a way to forge a connection for the exchange of information. A grave mistake is made in this rush to force similarity along the lines of how people practice non-normative sexualities ( Lewin & Leap, 1996 ; for a more successful engagement with queer intersectionality in research, see Browne & Nash, 2010 ).

The point to be made is that critical researchers should not merely ask “how does this knowledge engage with social structure?” Critical researchers, when contemplating the question “What is this?” as they set up and analyze their research, could also ask, “What could this be?” ( Carspecken, 1996 ; Degiuli, 2007 ; Denzin, 2001 ; Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004 , all cited in Degiuli, 2007 ). Perhaps, borrowing from Karen O’Reilly’s thoughts on critical ethnography, one may think of critical research as “an approach that is overtly political and critical, exposing inequalities in an effort to effect change” ( Reilly, 2009 , p. 51). That is, in order for qualitative research to be critical, it must be grounded in the material relationships of history, as may be seen in the work of Carruyo (2011) , Chua (2001 ; 2006 ; 2007 ; 2012 ), Collins (2005 ; 2007 ; 2009 ), Lodhia (2010) , and Talcott (2010) .

Quantz (1992) , in his discussion of critical ethnography, suggests that five aspects are central to the discussion of critical research/ethnography: knowledge, values, society, history, and culture. So far in this chapter, we have discussed knowledge and its production, values/reflexivity and qualitative research/ethnography, society and unequal social relationships, and history as a method of historical and dialectical materialism in order to better understand social and institutional structures. What we have not discussed, however, is the notion of culture, nor, indeed, the predicament of culture ( Clifford, 1998 ): “Culture is an ongoing political struggle around the meaning given to actions of people located within unbounded asymmetrical power relations” ( Quantz, 1992 , p. 483).

Quantz elaborates by stating that culture develops as people struggle together to name their experiences (see Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012 , for a sophisticated and elegant discussion of this thinking). For example, one key task of critical research is to tease out how disempowerment is achieved, undermined, or resisted. That is, the job of the researcher is to see how the disempowerment—economic, political, cultural—of subordinated groups manifests itself within culture, and, indeed, whether the subordinated groups even recognize their disempowerment. For example, “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” is one example of how the material disempowerment of many groups of women is presented, in fact, as a strength of women, and yet it takes the gaze away from seeing the subordination of women by ostensibly emphasizing women’s hidden social power.

It is critical qualitative research that has to simultaneously analyze how our research can identify processes and expressions of disempowerment and can then lead to a restructuring of these relationships of disempowerment. At times, critical social researchers engage in long-term projects that involve policy advocacy and community solidarity to link community-driven research with social empowerment and community change (see Bonacich, 1998 ; Bonacich & Wilson, 2008 ; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007 ; Stoecker, 2012 ).

The key point is that critical qualitative research parts company with positivistic approaches because it is argued that positivism is only able to offer a superficial set of findings. Critical qualitative research hones research concepts, practices, and analyses into finer points of reference so that societal relationships may be not only understood, but also so that social power inequalities can be undermined. In short, critical social research has a Foucauldian notion of power at its very core and may thus be thought of as offering insights into people’s lived experiences ( Williams, 1976 ) as they negotiate asymmetrical societal power relations (see e.g., Novelli, 2006 ).

The Practices of Critical Qualitative Research

Within our current era of enduring global inequalities, what could constitute a truly critical approach to qualitative research? More than twenty years ago, in “Tracing the Contours” ( Bhavnani, 1993 ), it was argued that if all knowledge is historically contingent and, therefore, that the processes of knowledge production are situated, then this must apply to all research practices as well. 2 This argument was based on Haraway’s (1988) idea that the particularities of knowledge production do not lie in the characteristics of individuals. Rather, knowledge production is “about communities, not about isolated individuals” (p. 590). Building on this, Haraway discussed the significance of partiality and its relationship to objectivity. She suggested that it is the researcher’s knowledge of her own “limited location” that creates objectivity. In other words, knowing the limitations of one’s structural position as a researcher contributes to objective research because there is no objectivity that is omniscient, one from which all can be revealed (Haraway discusses this as the “god trick,” which is like “seeing everything from nowhere,” p. 582).

It is from Haraway’s insights that we develop our argument that situated knowledges are not synonymous with the static reflexivity we describe earlier. This is because, in this latter scenario, the researcher implies that all research knowledge is based on and derives from an individual’s personal historical and biographical perspectives. That is, researchers note their racial/ethnic identity, sex/gender, sexuality, age, class, and ability (i.e., biographical aspects of themselves), which are presented as essential and unchanging factors and that determine the knowledge created by the research. This has also been called “absolute relativism” ( Bhavnani, 1993 ) or “extreme relativism” ( Alcoff & Potter, 1993 ).

We suggest that the three elements central to research being “critical” are partiality, positionality, and accountability. Partiality leads to critical research interrogating prevailing representations as the research is conducted, and this builds on difference. Positionality is not about being reflexive, but about understanding the sociohistorical/political context from which research is created and thus engages with the micropolitics of a research endeavor. Accountability makes it evident that there are many constituencies to which all academic researchers are accountable—for example, their discipline, intellectual integrity, their institution and academic colleagues, the idea of rigorous scientific research, and academic freedom in research—as well as being accountable to the people with whom the research is being conducted. It is accountability that leads to a critical research project interrogating how the lived experiences and cultures of the research participants are inscribed within the research (see Stoecker, 2012 ).

What might the necessary elements be for ensuring that our research practices retain the criticality we have discussed earlier? We offer four possibilities that could form a filter through which one could decide if research is critical, using our definition of the term. First, all critical qualitative researchers should interrogate the history of ethnographic research that has led to the systematic domination of the poor; working classes; ethnic, racialized, sexual Others; women; and colonized peoples. That is, critical qualitative researchers must begin research with an understanding of how previous research, including their own, may continue to play a part in the subordination of peoples around the world, for example, by reinscribing them into predictable and stereotypical roles. Second, critical qualitative researchers should work to develop a consciousness of what might constitute critical research practices—without fetishizing methods—that challenge the system of domination often present in social research. Third, researchers who embrace critical qualitative approaches must develop comfort with the notion that they are conducting research with a purpose; that is, researchers grapple with and comprehend that critical research demands that they engage with the idea that they conduct research into research inequalities in order to undo these inequalities. Finally, critical qualitative researchers comprehend that their level of comfort can extend into the idea that research does not simply capture social realities; rather, the critical research approach is generative of narratives and knowledges. Once this last idea is accepted—namely, that knowledge is created in a research project and not merely captured—it is then a comparatively straightforward task to see the need for a researcher’s accountability for the narratives and knowledges he or she ultimately produces. In so doing, it is possible to recognize that all representations have a life of their own outside of any intentions and that representations can contribute to histories of oppression and subordination.

We propose that it is the actual practice of research, and, perhaps, even the idea of researcher as witness ( Fernandes, 2003 ), and not a notion of “best practices,” that keeps the politics of research at the center of the work we do. This includes insights into the redistribution of power, representation, and knowledge production. We suggest that critical research is work that shifts research away from the production of knowledge for knowledge’s sake and edges or nudges it toward a more transformative vision of social justice (see Burawoy, 1998 ; Choudry, 2011 ; D’Souza, 2009 ; Hussey, 2012 ; Hunter, Emerald, & Martin, 2013 ).

Thoughts from the Field

Here, based on Collins’s fieldwork, we highlight a set of critical methodological lessons that became prominent while she was conducting her field research in Malate, in the city of Manila, the Philippines, currently a tourist destination but once famous as a sex district. We define her work as a critical research practice.

Since 1999, Dana Collins has conducted urban ethnographic work in Malate, exploring gay men’s production of urban sexual place. She has been interested in the role of “desire” in urban renewal, and, in particular, how informal sexual laborers (whom she terms “gay hospitality workers,” a nomenclature drawn from their own understandings of their labor and lives) use “desire” to forge their place in a gentrifying district that is also displacing them. This displacement has involved analyzing urban tourism development, city-directed urban renewal, and gay-led gentrification, as well as informal sexual labor.

The research has involved her precarious immersion in an urban sexual field. She undertook participant observation of gay night life in the streets, as well as in private business establishments, and conducted in-depth and in-field interviews with gay business owners, city officials, conservationists, gay tourists, and gay-identified sexual laborers. In addition, she drew on insights from visual sociology and also completed extensive archival work and oral history interviewing. In all of this, she explored the collective memories of Malate as a freeing urban sexual space.

There exist multiple and shifting positionalities of power, knowledge, exchange, and resistance in her research. For one, she points out that she occupies multiple social locations as a white, lesbian-identified feminist ethnographer from a US university, one who forges complicated relationships with urban sexual space, sex workers, and both gay Filipino men and gay tourists.

A critical research practice at heart involves the shifting of epistemological foundations of social science research by addressing core questions of how we know what we know, how power shapes the practices of research, how we can better integrate research participants and communities as central producers of knowledge in our research, and how we can better conceptualize the relationship between the research we do and the social justice we are working toward in this world. 3 Such questions function as a call to action for critical researchers not only to examine the power relations present in research, but to generate new ways of researching that can confront the realities of racism, gender and class oppression, imperialism, and homophobia. This is about not only becoming better researchers, but also about seeking ways to shift the very paradigm of qualitative research and ensuring its service to social change. We have learned to use these questions as a central and ongoing part of the research we do.

Feminist and Queer Accountability to the Micropolitics of the Field

One of the primary tenets of critical qualitative research is that researchers must work with a wider understanding and application of the politics of research. For Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1993) , this means that one needs to be accountable to the micropolitics of research because such accountability destabilizes the tendency to conduct and present research from a transcendent position—the “all knowing” ethnographer, the “outsider” going in to understand the point of view of “insiders,” the attempt to (avoid) “go(ing) native,” and the researcher who aims to “gain access” at all costs and in the interests of furthering research. Micropolitics is not only the axis of inequality that shapes contemporary field relations; it is also the historical materialist relationship that constitutes the field and informs the basis of critical qualitative research. Micropolitics therefore is a critical framework that questions the essentializing and power-laden perceptions of research spaces and people because it encourages both a reflexive inquiry into the limited locations of research, and it involves the more critical practice of the researcher turning outward, to comprehend what Bhavnani calls the “interconnections” among researcher, research participants, and the social structural spaces of “the field.”

Micropolitics illuminates how all research is conducted from the limited locations of gender, race, class, sexual identification, and nationality, as well as illuminating the interconnections among all of these locations. This is not a simplistic reflexive practice of taking a moment in research to account for one’s positionality and then moving on to conduct normative field work; Bhavnani has been critical of such moments of inward inspection that lack substantial accountability to the wider micropolitics of the field. Rather, this move requires an ongoing interrogation of the limited locations of research that show how knowledge is not transcendent. Furthermore, when used reflexively, limited locations offer a more critical framework from which to practice research.

Micropolitics encouraged Collins’ attention to the limited location of a global feminist ethnographer doing research on gay male urban sexual space in Manila. For one, she moved among different positionalities throughout her research—of woman, queer-identified, white, US academic, tourist, ate (Tagalog term for older sister)—and none of these positions was either a transcendent or more authentic standpoint from which to conduct ethnographic work. So, for instance, as a white tourist, she moved easily among the gentrifying gay spaces because these spaces were increasingly designed to encourage her movement around Malate. This limited location showed the increasing establishment of white consumer space, which encouraged the movement of consumers like herself yet dissuaded the movement of the informal sexual laborers with whom she was also spending time—the gay hosts. Her limited location as a white woman researcher from a major US university meant that gay hosts sometimes shared their spaces and meanings of urban gay life with her, yet many times those particular spaces and dialogues were closed—she was not allowed into the many public sexual spaces (parks and avenues for cruising and sex late at night), yet gay hosts treated her as an audience for their many romantic stories about the boyfriends they met in the neighborhood.

Hosts emphasized that they gained much from hosting foreigners in terms of friendship, love, desire, and cultural capital. Yet they monitored the information they shared because she remained to them a US researcher who wielded the power of representation over their lives, despite her closeness with a group of five gay hosts. Hence, gay hosts often chose to remain silent about their difficult memories of sex work or any information that could frame them as one-dimensional “money boys,” as distinct from the “gay”-identified Filipino men who migrated to Malate to take part in a gay urban community.

Micropolitics challenges the authenticity of any one positionality over another; it was Collins’ movement among all of them, as well as her ongoing consideration of their social structural places, that provided her with a more critical orientation to the research. She suggests that she was not essentially a better “positioned” researcher to study “gay” life in Manila because she too is gay. Rather she found that differences of race, class, gender, and nationality tended to serve as more enduring, limited locations that influenced relationships within this research and that required ongoing critical reflexive engagement.

We want to add that a queer micropolitics of the field also offers critical insight into how identities are not stagnant but rather can be fabricated and performative during the research process. This moves researchers away from an essentialist take on their standpoint because an essentialist mind-set can lead to a search for the authentic insider and outsider. It can also lead to an essentialist social positionality that is more conducive for researching. Queer micropolitics show that research is made up of a collection of productive relations and identities. So, for example, her lesbian identification did not create a more authentic connection with gay hosts in Manila; rather, she often fabricated a shared “gay” positionality. This was a performance that served as a point of departure for her many conversations, from which she could proceed to share meanings of what it meant to be “gay” in the Manila and the United States.

Some of the productive relations that arise in research are the continuum of intimacies that develop while doing research. So, like feminists before her, she chose to develop close friendships with hosts where they genuinely loved (in a familial way) as they spoke of love. While learning about gay life in Malate, she stroked egos, offered advice, cried over broken hearts and life struggles, and built and maintained familial relations. Queer micropolitics shows, however, the limitations of such intimacies because intimacy does not equal similarity—the differing social locations of class, race, gender, and nationality meant that the experiences of urban gay life varied immensely. Thus, building such intimacies across these differences requires both the recognition and respect for boundaries that hosts constructed. She had to learn to see and know that when hosts became quiet and pulled away these were acts of self-preservation as well as acts of defiance against the many misrepresentations of their lives that had taken shape in academic research and journalistic renderings of their place in “exotic” sex districts.

A queer micropolitics also shows how research is an embodied practice: researchers are gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized in the field. This became most apparent as she walked alone at night in the “field” and developed a keen awareness of the deeply gendered aspects of Malate’s urban spaces. For one, her embodiment was a peculiar presence because women in Manila do not walk alone at night. This includes women sex workers who publicly congregate in groups or with clients and escorts; otherwise, they are subject to police harassment. Hence, her very movement in the field as a sole woman felt like a transgression into masculine urban space because her feminine body was treated as “out-of-place” in the public spaces of the streets at night—she was flirted with, name called, followed, and sexually handled as she walked to gay bars for her research. As much as her queer location afforded her an understanding of how gender is a discursive production on the body, replete with the possibility of her being able to transcend and destabilize the gendered body as a biological “reality,” she confronted the discomfort of being read as a real woman in what became predominantly men’s spaces at night.

Yet this gendered embodiment, in part, shaped her knowledge of the district as she developed quick and knowledgeable movement through the streets, a queer micropolitical reading of urban space that arose out of this limited gender location. She was aware of the spacing of blocks, the alleys, the street lighting, and the time of night when crowds spilled out from the bars and onto the streets, allowing her to realize that a socially vibrant street life actually facilitated her movement. This queer micropolitical reading of urban space showed how both researchers and research participants do not simply exist in a neutral way in city space; rather, gender leads to our use and misuse of urban space. She has juxtaposed her experience with those of research participants in her study. The latter spoke at length about their exploratory and liberatory experiences of urban space, replete with their access to masculine sexual spaces—parks for cruising and sex, city blocks for meeting clients or picking up male sex workers, and alleys, movie theaters, and mall bathrooms for anonymous sex.

This queer micropolitical read of Malate’s gentrified space showed how very different was her access to the newly opening bars, restaurants, cafés, and lifestyle stores. Her whiteness signaled assumptions of her class location and positioned her as part of the international presence that this gentrifying space was targeting and whose movement among establishments was encouraged. She received free entry, free drinks, exceptional hospitality, and invitations to private parties, and her movements were closely monitored as she entered and exited establishments for the sake of “protecting a foreign tourist from street harassment” (interview with bar owner).

Overall, she experienced whiteness and class as equally embodied because these locations signaled her power as a “legitimate” consumer, allowing access to urban consumer sites and a privileged movement among gentrified spaces. This embodied experience of gentrified space differed from that of her gay hosts, who were often denied access to these establishments for being Filipino, young, working class, gay, and interested in foreigners. Contrarily, their bodies were constructed as a “threat” to urban renewal in the district.

Resisting Reinscription

Critical qualitative research is also concerned with the politics of representation in research. This requires a hard look at the implicit imperialisms of ethnographic work, including the tendency to go in and get out with abundant factual information, as well as the lasting impact of objectificatory research practices on fields of study. Such practices are evident in the now global rhetoric about the so-called Third World prostitute, who in both academic and journalistic renderings tends to be sensationalized and sexually Othered. This rendering is part of a long history of exoticization that has denied subjectivity and rendered invisible the lived experiences of sexual laborers around the world.

Such failed representations are part of what Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1993) has called “reinscription”—the tendency in research to freeze research participants and sites in time and space, thus rendering them both exotic and silenced. Reinscription denies agency to research participants and renders invisible the dynamic lived experiences of those same research participants. Doing research in both postcolonial and sexual spaces means that researchers must grapple with how our research participates in histories of reinscription—we both enter into and potentially contribute to a field that has been already “examined,” overstudied, and often exoticized. Thus, a critical qualitative approach is one that begins with a thorough understanding of these histories of representation so that we are not entering fields naïvely, as spaces only of exploration. Rather, we enter with knowledge of how the field has already been constituted for us through reinscription. A critical orientation has a core objective of understanding how our representations of research at all levels of the research process could contribute to exoticization by reinscribing participants and sites.

The issue of reinscription became particularly apparent when Dana Collins interviewed gay hosts and grappled with what appeared to be their elaboration of a contradictory picture of their sexual labor, as well as of their lives. In short, hosts tended to “lie,” remain silent, embellish “truths,” and articulate contradictory allusions to their life and labor in Malate. When Collins began her interviewing, she held the implicit objective of obtaining the “truth” about hosts’ lives, which she believed resided in “what they do” in the tourism industry. She was concerned with the “facts” about their lives, even though gay hosts were more likely to express their desire—desire for relations with foreigners, desire to migrate to a “gay” urban district, desire for rewarding work, and desire for community and social change. She struggled with many uncertainties about the discussions: how could they hold a range of “jobs” and attend school, yet spend most of their days and nights in Malate? How could they understand gay tourists as both boyfriends and clients? Why resist the label “sex worker” yet refer to themselves as “working boys” and claim to have “clients?” She struggled to make sense of the meanings that hosts offered even as she simultaneously felt misled concerning the “real” relations of hospitality.

Interviewing hosts about sexualized labor—as a way to produce a representation of sex work—did not facilitate the flow of candid information; hosts later expressed their view that sex work and their lives were already “overstudied.” Many researchers had previously descended on Malate to study sex work, and the district was a prime location for the outreach of HIV/AIDS organizations, some of which had breached the confidence of the gay host community. In short, Dana mistakenly started her research without the knowledge of Malate as a hyperrepresented field, and her research risked reinscribing gay hosts’ lives within that field as static and unchanging.

Importantly, those gay hosts who resisted becoming the “good research subjects” who give accurate and bountiful information, prompted a radical shift in her research framework. They told her stories about their imagined social lives, which encouraged her to rethink her commitment to researching sex work because the transformation of the discourses offered another view of the district, their work, and lives, one that offered a more visionary perspective. She began to focus less on “misinformation” and instead followed how hosts framed their lives. She treated these framings as social imaginings in which Malate features prominently in their understandings of gay identity, community, belonging, and change. In short, their social imaginings functioned as counternarratives to reinscription and offered their lived experience of urban gay place. Such imaginations expressed hope, fear, critique, and desire—in short, they present a utopic vision of identity, community, and urban change.

Integrating Lived Experience

Finally, critical qualitative research is a call to study lived experience, which is a messy, contradictory realm, but a deeply important one if we as critical researchers are truly interested in working against a history of research that has silenced those “under study” (see Weis & Fine, 2012 ). Paying attention to lived experience allows us to better engage with the contradictions mentioned earlier because lived experience is about understanding the meanings that research participants choose to share with researchers, and it is also about respecting their silences. As Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1993) has argued, silences can be as eloquent as words. Finally, integrating lived experience can take a critical qualitative project further because lived experience allows researchers to explore the epistemological relationship of the meanings and imaginings offered by research participants and to be explicit about the project of knowledge production. In other words, a central guiding question of critical qualitative research is how can research participants speak and shape epistemology, rather than solely being spoken about or being the subjects of epistemology?

Collins used hosts’ social imaginings as an epistemological contribution because their imaginings showed how hosts draw from experiences of urban gay community to articulate their desires for change, despite their simultaneous experiences of inequality and exclusion. We read social imaginings as a subjective rendering of urban place—the hosts’ social imaginings expressed their history, identity, subversive uses of urban space, and, ultimately, the symbolic reconstitution of that urban space. In this way, hosts were refiguring transnational urban space by writing themselves and their labor back into the district’s meaning, even as the global forces of tourism and urban renewal threatened to displace them.

In conclusion, we seek to highlight how critical research insists on the interplay of reflexivity, process, and practice. In particular, we encourage critical researchers to be mindful of the multiple meanings and usages of the term “critical” so that we can make more explicit our political interests and stand within our disciplines, the academy, our community, and the world. We offer dialectical materialism as a distinct mode of critical analysis that emphasizes an analysis of change in essence, practice, and struggle. We also suggest that, for researchers to be critical in their research, they should strive to take up research questions and projects that study change, contradictions, struggle, and practice in order to counter dominant interests and advance the well-being of the world’s majority. We should strive to build new research relationships—such as overcoming the faulty divides between researchers and research participants and by promoting systems of community accountability—that dialectically fuse research, political activism, and progressive social change.

Furthermore, we suggest that critical research can agitate against the homogeneity of ethnographic representation, allowing for the realities of people’s lives to come into view. Critical researchers recognize the contested fields of research; yet this requires our critical engagement with the research process, as a reflexive, empathetic, collective, self-altering, socially transformative, and embedded exercise in knowledge production. Therefore, critical research can resist imperialist research practices that are disembodied and that assume a singular social positioning. We use an imperative here to say that we must conduct research as embodied subjects who shift between multiple and limited locations. We also have to find more ways to remain accountable to our communities of research as a way to undo implicit imperialisms in social research. Critical research can work against the remnants of an objectivist and truth-seeking method that supports prevailing interests, classes, and groups while embracing research from social locations that offer situated knowledges and the possibility for greater shared understandings. Finally, critical research can engage the micropolitics of research and foreground the need for the accountability of researchers to resist reproducing epistemic violence.

This last is an idealist imagining of what should happen. However, a number of research projects have approximated closely to these goals.

Parts of our argument have appeared in some of our earlier work (e.g., Bhavnani & Talcott, 2011 ; Collins, 2009 ; 2002 ; Chua, 2001 ).

Although we, as the chapter’s three authors, do not usually use “we” in our writing as a general pronoun, it is the most direct way to offer our insights in this section.

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• Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on 5 May 2022 by Amy Luo . Revised on 5 December 2022.

Discourse analysis is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real-life situations.

When you do discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs, and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political, and historical context

Discourse analysis is a common qualitative research method in many humanities and social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies. It is also called critical discourse analysis.

Table of contents

What is discourse analysis used for, how is discourse analysis different from other methods, how to conduct discourse analysis.

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication, such as tone and gestures.

Materials that are suitable for discourse analysis include:

• Books, newspapers, and periodicals
• Marketing material, such as brochures and advertisements
• Business and government documents
• Websites, forums, social media posts, and comments
• Interviews and conversations

By analysing these types of discourse, researchers aim to gain an understanding of social groups and how they communicate.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language use, discourse analysis emphasises the contextual meaning of language.

It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people use language to achieve specific effects (e.g., to build trust, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).

Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words, or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts. The selected sources can be analysed on multiple levels.

Discourse analysis is a qualitative and interpretive method of analysing texts (in contrast to more systematic methods like content analysis ). You make interpretations based on both the details of the material itself and on contextual knowledge.

There are many different approaches and techniques you can use to conduct discourse analysis, but the steps below outline the basic structure you need to follow.

Step 1: Define the research question and select the content of analysis

To do discourse analysis, you begin with a clearly defined research question . Once you have developed your question, select a range of material that is appropriate to answer it.

Discourse analysis is a method that can be applied both to large volumes of material and to smaller samples, depending on the aims and timescale of your research.

Step 2: Gather information and theory on the context

Next, you must establish the social and historical context in which the material was produced and intended to be received. Gather factual details of when and where the content was created, who the author is, who published it, and whom it was disseminated to.

As well as understanding the real-life context of the discourse, you can also conduct a literature review on the topic and construct a theoretical framework to guide your analysis.

Step 3: Analyse the content for themes and patterns

This step involves closely examining various elements of the material – such as words, sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure – and relating them to attributes, themes, and patterns relevant to your research question.

Step 4: Review your results and draw conclusions

Once you have assigned particular attributes to elements of the material, reflect on your results to examine the function and meaning of the language used. Here, you will consider your analysis in relation to the broader context that you established earlier to draw conclusions that answer your research question.

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Introduction

Critical analysis may or may not be a component of this particular course's evaluation, but it is an important component of any research process. 

Inquiry-based learning

Critical thinking is at the heart of scientific inquiry. A good scientist is one who never stops asking why things happen, or how things happen. Science makes progress when we find data that contradicts our current scientific ideas.

Scientific inquiry includes three key areas:

         1.  Identifying a problem and asking questions about that problem          2.  Selecting information to respond to the problem and evaluating it          3.  Drawing conclusions from the evidence

Hart, T. (2018, 18 October) Teaching critical thinking in science - the key to students' future success.  Brighter Thinking Blog . https://www.cambridge.org/us/education/blog/2018/10/18/teaching-critical-thinking-science-key-students-future-success/

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A critical analysis of research methods and experimental models to study working length determination and the performance of apex locators - A narrative review with recommendations for the future

Affiliations.

• 1 Division of Endodontology, Department of Conservative Dentistry and Periodontology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
• 2 Department of Periodontology, Endodontology and Cariology, University Center for Dental Medicine Basel UZB, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
• 3 Adult Dental Health, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
• 4 Conservative Dentistry and Endodontology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
• PMID: 35347726
• DOI: 10.1111/iej.13738

Outcome studies have repeatedly shown that the apical endpoint of root canal preparation and filling is a determinate factor for the outcome of root canal treatment. Accurate determination of root canal length enhances the efficacy of chemo-mechanical disinfection and prevents over-/under-instrumentation and over-/under-filling in relation to the canal terminus. Long and short root canal fillings are consistently reported to be associated with higher rates of post-treatment endodontic disease. Although standards for undertaking and reporting diagnostic accuracy studies are available, publications dealing with the determination of root canal length are highly heterogeneous and describe procedures inconsistently. The aim of this review is to critically assess the methodology of publications in the past three decades. The process of planning, performing and analysing working length studies are presented stepwise with suggestions to optimize research methods.

Keywords: Study error; accuracy tolerance; endodontic working length; experimental design; review; root canal length determination.

© 2022 British Endodontic Society. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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• Published: 05 March 2024

A systematic review of the methodology of trade-off analysis in agriculture

• Timo S. Breure   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5695-8064 1 ,
• Natalia Estrada-Carmona   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4329-5470 2 ,
• Athanasios Petsakos   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0224-4087 3 ,
• Elisabetta Gotor   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0533-3077 3 ,
• Boris Jansen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4493-1734 4 &
• Jeroen C. J. Groot   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6516-5170 1  

Nature Food volume  5 ,  pages 211–220 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Agroecology
• Ecological modelling
• Ecosystem services
• Environmental impact
• Sustainability

Trade-off analysis (TOA) is central to policy and decision-making aimed at promoting sustainable agricultural landscapes. Yet, a generic methodological framework to assess trade-offs in agriculture is absent, largely due to the wide range of research disciplines and objectives for which TOA is used. In this study, we systematically reviewed 119 studies that have implemented TOAs in landscapes and regions dominated by agricultural systems around the world. Our results highlight that TOAs tend to be unbalanced, with a strong emphasis on productivity rather than environmental and socio-cultural services. TOAs have mostly been performed at farm or regional scales, rarely considering multiple spatial scales simultaneously. Mostly, TOAs fail to include stakeholders at study development stage, disregard recommendation uncertainty due to outcome variability and overlook risks associated with the TOA outcomes. Increased attention to these aspects is critical for TOAs to guide agricultural landscapes towards sustainability.

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Contemporary agriculture should not only provide food, fibre, feed and fuel but also environmental and socio-economic benefits for rural communities and beyond 1 . To ensure that agriculture delivers multiple services while minimizing its negative impacts, society must be aware of the trade-offs and synergies that may arise. The nature of these trade-offs depends on location-specific natural, social and cultural conditions that place constraints on the inputs and outputs of an agricultural system. For example, market-based farmers are concerned with enhancing commodity production, whereas the priority of subsistence farmers lies with improving food security 2 . The global imperative to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underscores the need to reduce the environmental impact of land use practices and strengthen equitable social outcomes at both landscape and community levels. However, achieving the SDGs might require sacrifices to primary productivity and economic revenues. Thus, to reconcile the demands of agriculture and inform decision-making, an analysis is required of potential trade-offs measured against agronomic, environmental, economic and social indicators 3 .

Trade-off analysis (TOA) was established as a concept to generate quantitative information on competing (trade-offs) or complementary (synergies) indicators that can be used to guide policy and decision-making 4 . A typical TOA project starts with three preparatory steps: formulation of the research question, identification of which indicators to assess, and formulation of hypotheses about the relationships between the indicators and the associated trade-offs and synergies. Subsequently, the management, policy or technological changes that affect the TOA indicators can be identified and included in the analysis framework. Then, the trade-offs and synergies under changing conditions or scenarios can be quantified and, finally, the results are communicated to relevant stakeholders to inform decision-making and policy 4 . Since its first implementation in the context of agriculture, a wide range of methods have been used to conduct TOAs, including optimization, simulations, qualitative, econometric and narrative-based approaches. In some cases, these approaches are deployed in a spatially explicit manner with the support of geographic information systems (GIS) 5 .

Although important advances have been made regarding TOA in agricultural contexts, researchers have expressed concerns about the scope and methodological limitations of published studies. These concerns relate to the limited transfer of the academic knowledge generated by TOA into decision- and policy-making due to the inability to take into account social and cultural factors 6 , the sparsity of multi- and cross-scale assessments 3 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and the limited representation of uncertainty 8 , 9 and risk analysis 5 .

The concerns reported in the literature on the limitations of TOA analysis can indeed have important implications. First, failure to recognize the importance of scale (spatial, temporal, jurisdictional and legislative) in TOA may lead to erroneous inferences on how the relationships between trade-offs and indicators develop across scales. Multiple scales can be analysed without interactions between them or a cross-scale analysis can be performed that accounts for interactions between scales 10 . Furthermore, adverse effects appearing outside the TOA case study area (off-site effects) may offset any gains stemming from a TOA-informed policy 11 . Second, recognition of social interactions and cultural values is needed to assure representation of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries relevant to the topic at hand, that is, distributional justice 9 , 10 . Representation among stakeholders and their involvement in the design and implementation of a TOA can increase the legitimacy of its findings, assure that the data used are relevant to the context and thus enhance adoption of a study’s findings 12 . Third, validation and acknowledgement of uncertainty in both data and model estimates increase the robustness of a TOA and can facilitate risk-based decision-making 13 , 14 , 15 .

Previous literature reviews on TOA in agriculture adopted a ‘storytelling’ approach, where key studies were selected from the literature to discuss research trends. However, given the wide scope of TOAs applied in the context of agriculture, a systematic review could reveal the variety of approaches used and potential knowledge gaps, as well as the indicators that were studied and by which methods, ultimately facilitating the comparability of results.

Here we report on the TOA indicators, methodology and analysis used in 119 peer-reviewed articles. Descriptive statistics are used to characterize articles based on the extent to which they considered (1) indicators relevant to environmental and socio-economic services, (2) multiple spatial scales and their interactions, (3) the comprehensive involvement of stakeholders, and (4) the validity of trade-offs and recommendations in the context of associated uncertainties and risks (see Table 1 for further details). Finally, a cluster analysis shows which indicators were frequently studied together and which TOA methods were associated with each cluster.

The aim of this study was thus to provide an overview of the peer-reviewed literature on TOA in the context of agriculture using a systematic approach. For this purpose, we sought to define how trade-offs in agriculture are conceptualized, characterized and analysed in the TOA literature. Based on these findings, we have identified common gaps in the implementation of TOA.

The distribution of publication dates for the articles in the sample was mainly centred in the years 2015–2021 (Extended Data Fig. 1a ). Specifically, 73% of the articles were published after 2014, which indicates an increasing research effort directed towards TOAs in an agricultural context (Extended Data Fig. 1b ).

Common interrelationships and co-occurrences among TOA indicators

The articles examined included a median of 3.8 ± 1.9 (s.d.) TOA indicators, ranging from 1 to 10. Based on the cumulative distribution, 52% of the articles included three or fewer TOA indicators, while 90% included six or fewer TOA indicators (Extended Data Fig. 2a ). The most prevalent indicators across all articles were ‘profitability’ (57%, economic), ‘yield’ (44%, agronomic) and ‘water quantity’ (34%, sustainable resource management). The second most common set of indicators encompassed a selection of biophysical (for example, ‘water quality’ and ‘greenhouse gases’), agronomic (for example, ‘input efficiency’ and ‘land use efficiency’) and economic indicators (for example, ‘assets’), ranging between 13% and 21% (Fig. 1 ). The remaining TOA indicators were used less frequently and related to economic (that is, ‘labour productivity’ and ‘poverty’), human health (for example, ‘nutrition’, ‘health’ or ‘food security’) and agronomic (that is, ‘self-sufficiency’) aspects, representing a share of 5–6% (Fig. 1 ). Rarely considered TOA indicators (less than 5%) included ‘market supply or demand’ (economic), ‘yield stability’ (agronomic), ‘empowerment’ and ‘gender equity’ (both human health; Fig. 1 ).

Percentage of articles that include a TOA indicator (black dotted line and circles) and the share of each TOA method M1–M9 used to study that indicator (coloured bars). The prefixes of the TOA indicators refer to their class association (A, E, H, S) and number of occurrence within that class as provided in Table 1 . Table 1 also describes the TOA methods M1–M9.

The articles were grouped into 11 clusters, depending on which TOA indicators were assessed (left y -axis dendrogram in Fig. 2 ). These clusters show a dominant theme based on the co-occurrence of TOA indicators (right y- axis in Fig. 2 ). For example, in cluster 7, ‘poverty’ was studied in conjunction with ‘soil nutrients’, whereas in cluster 5, ‘poverty’ was studied in conjunction with ‘profitability’, ‘food security’ and ‘nutrition’. The clustering of articles by TOA indicator reveals which TOA indicators are often studied together. Indicators of ‘profitability’ and ‘yield’ were the most commonly used (Figs. 1 and 2 ) and were generally combined with case-specific environmental and social indicators (Fig. 2 ). This suggests that agronomic and economic viability are conditional for the exploration of improvements in agricultural system sustainability. The cluster with the largest number of articles (cluster 6, Fig. 2 ) concerned agricultural production and water quality. This highlights the strong focus on solving pressing issues related to pollution by surplus nutrients from fertilizers and manure.

The articles were clustered by TOA indicator (row-wise) and TOA indicator clusters (column-wise). The associations of articles with clusters are indicated by the colours and labels on the left of the figure; the colours are arbitrary. TOA indicator clusters (top x axis) are specified by colour, corresponding to the main indicator categories (legend in top left of the figure), and their name (bottom x axis). The matrix indicates whether a TOA indicator has been included in an article (red) or not (beige). The labels on the right list the main TOA indicators included in each cluster. GHG, greenhouse gases; SOC, soil organic carbon; supp./dem., supply or demand.

The clustering of TOA indicators (top x -axis dendrogram in Fig. 2 ) shows that for 50% of the indicators, the indicator closest in the dendrogram belongs to the same category (sustainable resource management, agronomic, economic or human health). In particular, four out of five human health indicators were studied in isolation from other indicators, forming closely paired branches (top x -axis dendrogram, orange colour, in Fig. 2 ).

The application of TOA methods varied across different TOA indicators and clusters. For example, the TOA indicators ‘labour productivity’, ‘empowerment’, ‘gender equity’ and ‘yield stability’ lacked cases involving spatially explicit methods (M1 or M8; Fig. 1 ). This same observation applies to the clusters in which these TOA indicators belong (Fig. 3 ). While the absence of spatially explicit methods for social indicators such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘gender equity’ is expected, given that their spatial dimension is often disregarded, it is worth noting that gender and empowerment may relate to the spatial distribution of fields and resources in the landscape. For instance, their distance from the location of the homestead or decision-making processes regarding the (distribution of) use and ownership of these resources. Clusters of articles associated with ‘yield’, ‘energy’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘land use’ exhibited a high use of GIS (M8), qualitative (M6) and other (M9) methods, with fewer articles applying optimization methods (M3; Fig. 3 ). Lastly, an interesting anomaly is the ‘health’ indicator, where methods M1–M3, encompassing (spatially explicit) simulations and optimization methods, were conspicuously absent (Fig. 1 ).

Cluster associations are as per Fig. 2 and the number of articles within each cluster is given by n .

Frequency of criteria levels

The majority of TOAs were conducted at regional (65%) and farm (17%) scales, followed by field (7%) and national (6%) scales. The TOAs conducted at multi-country (4%) and global scales, along with ‘other’, accounted for only a small proportion of the analyses (Fig. 4a ). The spatial scales for TOAs differed from the scales at which modelling was performed or data were collected, with the farm and field scale contributing to a combined share of 48%. Of the articles considered, 12% implemented cross-scale analyses and 17% considered off-site effects (Fig. 4a ). Case study areas were predominantly delineated using administrative borders (54%), followed by biophysical delineation (24%), with 18% of the articles using both methods (Fig. 4b ).

a , Criteria related to the scale of the analysis. TOA: the spatial scale at which the TOA was conducted. The numbers refer to the spatial scales of field (1), farm (2), regional (3), national (4), multi-country (5) and global (6). Off-site: whether off-site effects have been considered in the TOA. Discipline: the spatial scale at which modelling or data collection was performed for a discipline. The numbers refer to the spatial scales detailed above for TOA. Cross-scale: whether aggregative (1), interactive (2) or no cross-scale modelling was performed (3). b , Criteria related to the TOA framework. TOA method: the methods used to perform the TOAs. The numbers refer to the TOA methods M1–M9 defined in Table 1 . System border: which boundaries were used to define the TOA case study area. Scenario: whether the article considered a scenario and, if so, which type of scenario. The numbers refer to the scenarios 1–8 defined in Table 1 . c , Criteria related to stakeholders. Type: whether local beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, experts, government, farmers, distant beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, academics, private organizations or environmental organizations were involved. Inclusion: whether the study included stakeholders. Implementation: whether stakeholders were involved in consultation, co-development, valuation or validation. d , Criteria related to TOA robustness: whether the article performed a validation, risk analysis or acknowledged uncertainty. e , The frequency (shown in the circles) for each spatial scale at which the modelling or data collection was performed for a given discipline. f , The frequency (shown in the circles) at which an article considered a given scenario in TOA for each spatial scale. The scenario numbers 1–8 are defined in Table 1 .

Including a scenario in the TOA allows investigation of the effect of a postulated event or driver on the TOA indicators. In our analysis, scenarios focusing on climate, behavioural or demographic change accounted for 14% of the articles, while scenarios involving alternative intensities of resource use constituted 37% of the articles. Scenarios were absent in 25% of the articles (Fig. 4b ). Over half of the articles included stakeholders in their analysis, with a relatively equal spread across stakeholder types, except for ‘distant beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries’, which were under-represented. Farmers and experts constituted a larger share (48%) compared to other categories (Fig. 4c ). Stakeholders were mainly involved in consultation and valuation, with co-development and validation implemented in less than 25% of the articles considered (Fig. 4c ). Overall, the robustness of the TOA results was not widely considered, as the criteria ‘uncertainty’ and ‘validation’ were logged for less than 50% of the articles. Articles incorporating risk analysis constituted 12% of the sample (Fig. 4d ).

Links between spatial scales and criteria

Of the articles considered, ‘livestock’, ‘fisheries’ and ‘forestry’ accounted for a relatively small share (16%) compared with ‘crop’, ‘economic’ and ‘environmental’ disciplines. For the livestock discipline, modelling and data collection were predominantly carried out at the farm scale, while for forestry, they were primarily conducted at the field or regional scale (Fig. 4e ). For the economic discipline, modelling and data collection were evenly distributed between the farm ( n  = 34) and regional ( n  = 34) scales (Fig. 4e ), in contrast to the overall share of these scales across all of the articles, where ‘regional’ constituted 65% and ‘farm’ constituted 17% of the articles (Fig. 4a ). In general, for a large share of the reviewed articles, data were collected and modelling was performed at the field and farm scales, but the TOA was conducted at the regional scale. These findings show that, before the TOA, some form of aggregation occurs in the majority of the reviewed articles. Regarding the spatial scale at which the TOA was conducted for articles including a scenario, two observations can be made. First, all of the scenarios (except the resource use scenario) were rarely studied at scales larger than the national scale. Second, the climate, behavioural and demographic change scenarios were almost exclusively studied at the regional scale (Fig. 4f ). These results show that few studies investigated how scenarios unfolding at smaller or larger scales affect the indicators at the TOA scale.

Multi-scale, cross-scale and robustness criteria

Figure 5 shows the percentage of articles that include a TOA indicator (black line, the same as shown in Fig. 1 ). The articles were then divided into subsets according to whether they included a cross-scale, multi-scale or robustness criterion. The coloured lines represent the percentage of articles in the subset that include a specific TOA indicator. With the exception of indicators rarely included in all articles (for example, those related to nutrition or health), most TOA indicators were present in articles adopting a cross-scale modelling framework (Fig. 5a ). These findings occur despite the overall low number of articles (<20%) reporting cross-scale analyses (Fig. 5a ). Notably, articles applying an interactive modelling framework did not include ‘water quality’, ‘soil erosion’, ‘soil organic carbon’ and ‘biodiversity’, despite these indicators having a relatively high frequency across all articles (Fig. 5a ).

The percentages of all reviewed articles and subsets of articles that include specific TOA indicators. a – c , The subsets comprise articles that included cross-scale ( a ), multi-scale ( b ) and robustness ( c ) criteria. In b , TOA refers to articles in which the TOA was conducted on multiple spatial scales, ‘Discipline’ refers to articles that considered multiple spatial scales for modelling or data collection, and ‘Off-site’ refers to articles in which effects outside the TOA case study area were considered.

Across all articles, 17% considered off-site effects (Fig. 4a ). Notably, the ‘poverty’ and ‘soil erosion’ indicators were under-represented in articles considering off-site effects (Fig. 5b ). Eight indicators were excluded in articles considering multiple spatial scales in modelling or data collection (‘discipline’ in Fig. 5b ). This finding is particularly striking for ‘biodiversity’, given that it constitutes a large share of spatially explicit TOA methods (Fig. 1 ).

Thirteen per cent of articles reported TOA on multiple spatial scales, with seven indicators excluded in these cases (‘TOA’ in Fig. 5b ). Among the excluded indicators, those related to human health dominated (except for ‘nutrition’). For certain indicators, these findings are to be expected. For instance, market supply or demand (economic) is irrelevant at low geographical scales (field and farm) as prices are determined at the regional (local), national or international scale. The articles that included a risk analysis showed stark contrasts between TOA indicators with respect to their representation relative to all articles. Economic and human health indicators were particularly over-represented, while ‘yield’, ‘input efficiency’ and a set of biophysical indicators were under-represented (Fig. 5c ). For articles in which uncertainty was acknowledged or validation was performed, no indicators were over- or under-represented relative to their inclusion across all articles (Fig. 5c ).

Limitations on the inclusion of TOA indicators

Recent reviews on TOA have stated that there is little to no representation of indicators related to social interactions, justice and gender issues in TOAs for agricultural systems 5 , 6 . These studies referred in particular to intra-household equity, asset ownership, health, education and nutrition. Our results also demonstrate that social and cultural TOA indicators are largely absent, mostly considered in isolation and studied by statistical approaches. These findings are probably a result of the limited data availability and the inability of TOA methods to include socio-cultural indicators for features and processes that are difficult to capture quantitatively 16 , 17 . We further note a similarly low frequency for the following indicators: food security, self-sufficiency and yield stability. These findings raise questions about the rationale behind the selection of TOA indicators. That is, the prevalent use of profitability and crop yield as primary indicators reflects the focus on profit and crop yield maximization in the literature 5 . The outcomes and priorities of a TOA depend on the chosen objectives and indicators. Alternative indicators might therefore facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of the delivery of environmental, economic and socio-cultural services from agriculture. One illustrative example is the metric ‘nutritional yield’, defined as “the number of hectares required to provide sufficient quantity to fulfil 100% of dietary reference intake for a nutrient for one adult” 2 . Nutritional yield thus allows the assessment of land use efficiency in both agronomic and social terms. Integrating nutritional yield into TOA in the context of subsistence agriculture could unveil the need for changes in farmers’ crop plans to balance food security and economic profitability objectives.

TOA methodologies

The formulation of research objectives, questions and methodology determines the information base that a TOA can provide 16 , 18 . Decisions regarding TOA objectives and methodology determine the degree to which scales, disciplines and indicators are compartmentalized. In addition, these decisions influence the range of interventions and scenarios explored for alternative agro-environmental management of land, resources and technologies 7 , 18 . The results of our analysis reveal associations between TOA methods and indicators, indicating common gaps, such as the absence of articles reporting the use of spatially explicit methods to study the indicators ‘human health’ and ‘yield stability’. Studying these indicators in a spatially explicit manner could allow for targeted land use planning at the local scale. For instance, Prestele and Verburg demonstrated that spatially explicit analysis of climate-smart agriculture adoptions unveils local-scale trade-offs affecting yield and soil carbon sequestration at an aggregated scale 19 . Our results also underscore expected patterns, with socio-economic indicators predominantly studied through statistical approaches and qualitative methods. These methods, static and based on existing datasets, differ from mechanistic models, which allow extrapolation and ex ante assessment under alternative future scenarios. Simulations based on mechanistic models hold the potential to explore scenarios that minimize trade-offs between indicators 3 , 7 . However, the validity of this kind of optimization depends on having sufficient understanding of relevant processes and feedbacks in the socio-environmental system 3 . For example, while crop models vary in their capacity to assess climate change impacts, they share common limitations, such as inadequate representation of low-intensity agricultural systems 20 . We found that a description of study limitations in the context of the TOA framework, for example, excluded aspects, was often absent. Ideally, models and associated uncertainties would be assessed in the design phase of the TOA. This could ensure the availability of adequate information for quantifying all desired parameters at the desired resolution, allowing the study to comprehensively represent the agricultural system. Such an approach is crucial to guide planning in future management decisions aligned with research objectives 17 .

Involvement of stakeholders and practical application of TOA results

One recurring concern in the literature is the frequent omission of stakeholders at the onset of the TOA, potentially limiting the practical application of TOA results 6 , 8 . Our findings partially support these concerns, given that co-development with stakeholders was observed in only 10% of the articles. However, making a definitive statement on equal representation among stakeholders proved challenging as there was generally an absence of a systematic inventory outlining the relevance of different stakeholders to the decision-making process based on their interests and influence 21 . Our analysis shows that farmers and experts were the primary stakeholders included in the articles. Nonetheless, the omission of distant beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries is noteworthy as they are likely to be relevant to the decision-making process in numerous cases, especially when off-site effects are considered in TOAs conducted on multiple scales.

Multi- and cross-scale analysis

Depending on the research objectives, the TOA literature underscores the importance of acknowledging processes across scales and including them in research 3 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 22 . In many of the articles, data were collected or modelling was performed at field and farm scales, yet the TOA was conducted at the regional scale. This highlights an opportunity for multi-scale TOA analysis, potentially enhancing the relevance of TOA studies to policy. For example, bilevel optimization is a promising approach to facilitating nested decision-making processes at different scales. In this approach, the solution at the higher level (for example, larger spatial scale) depends on the solution at the lower level (for example, smaller spatial scale). Bostian et al. demonstrated the application of this methodology in recognizing multiple spatial scales inherent to non-point pollution regulation 23 . However, the restricted application of cross-scale analysis in our sample (12%) shows the limited extent to which TOA in agriculture captures the hierarchical nature of social, cultural, environmental, economic and agronomic processes.

Furthermore, 17% of the articles considered effects outside the TOA case study area, considering off-site effects in a diverse array of subjects, including transnational emission permits, water trading and increased demand for scarce resources, anticipated to influence their shadow prices 24 , 25 , 26 . However, off-site effects might have feedbacks, such as dependencies between alternative production systems within a supply chain 27 . In such cases, the delineation of the system boundary must be considered in the context of these feedbacks to ensure their inclusion within the system. In cases where off-site effects do not have feedbacks, these can be classified as ‘teleconnections’, denoting processes whose cause and effect are widely separated 28 . A case in point is a study of the water quality of the Danube River, in which distant beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, represented by an international committee, were considered in the TOA 29 . The results also show that climate, behavioural and demographic scenarios were rarely assessed at lower or higher scales (compared to the regional scale). This underscores that the extent to which these scales are relevant to TOA is understudied and merits further research. For example, generic methods, such as the carbon 30 or water 31 footprint, can provide a broad assessment of which off-site effects at larger scales are relevant to TOA outcomes. These approaches may facilitate the inclusion of underlying causes, the involvement of more inclusive stakeholders and account for leakage effects, such as the expansion of agricultural lands beyond the TOA case study area 32 .

Ideally, a TOA methodological framework is conceptualized such that (1) it recognizes multi- and cross-scale interactions where applicable, (2) the system boundary aligns with substantiated biophysical and relevant socio-institutional boundaries, and (3) it recognizes the heterogeneity in which scales and associated consequences are perceived as well as valued by different stakeholders 10 .

Robustness of TOA results

The risk associated with TOA extends across spatial, temporal and jurisdictional scales, carrying implications for the dissemination of TOA results 13 . The under-representation of ‘yield’ in articles considering risk analysis highlights the dichotomy between yield and profitability as the most prominent indicators. That is, risk analysis appears to be mainly associated with the economic domain 5 . However, it is important to recognize that the evaluation of risk and the formulation of relevant strategies (risk aversion, mitigation or offsetting) are critical for farmers adopting system transformations, such as alternative forms of land use to mitigate inputs and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Integrating risk into TOA enables the study of the policies and incentives necessary for achieving whole-system transformations towards sustainable agricultural practices 13 , 14 . Decision-making under uncertainty becomes interpretable when recommendations are accompanied by an assessment of associated risks. Ideally, these risks are context-specific. For example, Hochman et al. provided TOA results on crop rotations alongside a minimum risk threshold quantified as the highest gross margin for the poorest 20% of years 33 .

While a moderate number of the articles considered uncertainty, only a few articles quantified changes in trade-offs as a function of uncertainty. The inclusion of stochastic components and the associated uncertainty inherent in biological systems could facilitate a more realistic description of outcomes, proving valuable for decision-making 13 , 15 . Varying input data or model parameterization within an expected range could reveal the sensitivity of results. For instance, when climate scenarios are used, realizations of these scenarios can be used to assess the stochasticity of the objectives for which the TOA is implemented 34 . This approach enables the acknowledgement of both the frequency and pattern of stochastic events, including extreme weather events, and their impact on TOA outcomes. Consequently, an analysis of the adaptability of a farming system would not solely rely on optimal solutions given the mean output but would also account for associated variability and unexpected events 15 . However, it is crucial to contextualize the effect of stochasticity. For example, the relative impact of model or parameter uncertainty on optimization outcomes has been shown to vary depending on the prioritization of objectives and site conditions 35 .

Limitations of this study

An important limitation of our review lies in the use of ‘trade-off analysis’ as a single term in our Web of Science search string. There are research areas that address trade-offs and synergies across various disciplines, scales and methods without explicitly using the term ‘trade-off analysis’ to describe their research objectives. Examples include the ‘food–energy–water nexus’ literature 36 , as well as research under the auspices of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) ( https://agmip.org/ ) and the Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-Use and Energy (FABLE) Consortium 37 . Both AgMIP and FABLE are particularly concerned with the relevance of TOA to policy. AgMIP explicitly states the use of “multiple scenarios and models to assess and probabilistically manage risk” 38 . Given the focus of these studies on global and regional assessments, we anticipate that our findings for those spatial scales could be affected. Indeed, the identified gaps in TOA implementation need to be viewed in the context of our sample, which mostly comprises studies in which modelling or data analysis was performed up to the regional level and TOA at the regional scale.

The method used to log the occurrence of pre-set criteria not only affects the variance within a criterion but also influences its abundance. For example, Sanon et al. included a large number of TOA indicators that were all classified under ‘biodiversity’ 29 . Thus, binary criteria logging does not capture the intensity with which a criterion is considered, a well-known phenomenon in the field of ecology 39 . This limitation may have resulted in the underestimation of both the intensity with which certain TOA indicators and their classes have been studied (Fig. 1 ) and the total number of TOA indicators considered per article (Extended Data Fig. 2 ).

Conclusions

Based on our analysis, it is possible to identify some actions that would increase the contribution of TOAs to SDG-aligned agricultural landscapes.

For instance, future studies should include multi- and cross-scale effects when relevant to the research objectives. We have identified an opportunity for multi-scale analysis, given that many studies aggregated farm- or field-scale data before performing TOA at a regional scale. As the inclusion of multiple scales, indicators and methods may in some cases reduce the generalizability of results and make them more context-specific, an alternative would be to discuss the anticipated implications of multi- and cross-scale effects on the study findings.

Furthermore, the relevance of TOA to society and policy can be improved by formulating research objectives such that TOA indicators lie within the scope of frameworks such as the SDGs. The most frequent indicators were biophysical or informed by profit maximization theory (for example, profitability and yield). However, indicators relevant to human well-being, security and farm resilience (for example, empowerment, nutrition and yield stability) occurred less frequently. To aid the interpretation of TOA results, the rationale behind the TOA methodology that is used to assess indicators should be listed together with a critical review of how the agricultural system under study is represented and what is excluded as a consequence.

In the reviewed articles, the most consulted stakeholders were farmers and experts, stakeholder co-development and validation were rare, and scenarios were predominantly based on resource use with little consideration of off-site effects. These findings suggest that TOAs mostly explore alternative management across a set of farms rather than policies and incentives that would facilitate whole landscape and food system transformations.

Agricultural policy- and decision-making carry an inherent risk. TOAs will become more operational when they evaluate associated risks and list strategies to manage these risks. This process could promote the robustness of quantified trade-offs with respect to the associated uncertainty of data and variability in outcomes. Finally, an inventory of stakeholders that are relevant to the decision-making process and their respective roles in the study would provide legitimacy of results. While this element has already been recognized in the literature 12 , 29 , some of the shortcomings that we have identified here would probably occur less frequently, particularly the lack of stakeholder inclusion and the over-representation of specific stakeholder types and methods of stakeholder engagement.

Closer adherence to these guidelines could enhance the relevance of TOA to the scientific community, policy-makers and farmers.

We followed the approach of Lautenbach et al. and Seppelt et al. in their systematic review of the literature on ecosystem services 9 , 22 . The generic structure involved (1) the identification, screening and selection of relevant peer-reviewed literature from a global repository, (2) formulation of the criteria against which to evaluate each article (Table 1 and Supplementary Table 1 ), and (3) descriptive statistics and cluster analysis to assess common interrelationships between criteria and identify knowledge gaps.

We used the following search string “ALL=agricultur* AND (“trade off* analysis” OR “trade-off* analysis” OR “tradeoff* analysis”)” in the Web of Science (on 14 September 2021) to identify peer-reviewed articles in English reporting TOA. We found 153 articles with publication dates spanning from 1993 to 2021. We excluded studies that mentioned the existence of trade-offs but did not assess relationships between indicators. For this reason, review and opinion papers were considered off-topic and were excluded from the search results. Furthermore, methodological papers that did not involve a case study were also excluded, leading to a total sample of 119 articles.

We selected criteria based on current TOA research 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 16 , 22 and recorded information on these criteria that were relevant to the conceptualization, characterization and analysis of trade-offs in agriculture (research objective 1). Briefly, the criteria included the type of TOA methods used, the spatial scales at which the analyses were performed and/or data collected, the indicators assessed in the TOA, which stakeholder types were included as well as how the stakeholders were engaged in the case study, whether the case study included alternative scenarios and of what type, how the case study area was delineated, whether effects outside the case study area were considered, and whether the case study acknowledged and accounted for uncertainty, validated results or performed a risk analysis. To assess whether cross-scale analyses were performed in case studies, we adopted the definition of Kanter et al., who distinguished between model frameworks that aggregate outputs at lower scales to use as inputs at higher scales (aggregative) and model frameworks that have submodels operating at different spatial and temporal resolutions (interactive) 6 . Thus, whereas an aggregative model framework follows a sequential approach, an interactive model framework performs analysis across scales simultaneously, allowing for interactions between scales and emergent indicators at higher levels. Furthermore, descriptive information was collected for three criteria: the agricultural system(s) studied, agricultural activities and knowledge gaps reported in the discussion section of the article. All of the criteria are listed in Table 1 with a generic description. We refer the reader to Supplementary Table 1 for more detailed information on the criteria. Based on these criteria, knowledge gaps were then assessed through descriptive statistics and cluster analysis (research objective 2).

The decision of which TOA indicators to include is a major methodological decision in TOA as it determines which interrelations are considered and analysed, and therefore which trade-offs and synergies can be identified. We anticipated thematic clusters of TOA indicators based on the discipline, scale, geography and method considered. To identify co-occurrences between TOA indicators, we performed hierarchical Ward clustering to group articles by TOA indicators as well as the TOA indicators themselves based on the Jaccard similarity coefficient 40 . Through the use of the Jaccard similarity metric, we accounted for the double-zero problem. Namely, the absence of a TOA indicator in two articles does not indicate a similarity, whereas its presence does 9 . For the clustering of articles by the TOA indicators used, the number of clusters to be retained was decided by the ‘elbow’ method based on the Mantel correlation between the data for each cluster and the raw distance matrix 40 . For the clustering of TOA indicators, the dendrogram was not cut to visualize common co-occurrences for all of the TOA indicators.

Criteria were logged in a Microsoft Office Excel (2021) spreadsheet (Supplementary Data 1 ). The data collected during this systematic review were further analysed and visualized in R (ref. 41 ). Data handling, visualizations and analysis were performed using the following R packages: tidyverse 42 , dendextend 43 , cluster 44 , vegan 45 and pheatmap 46 .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The dataset created has been made available as extended data.

Code availability

The code created for data handling, analysis and visualizations is available on request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge R. Seppelt for his comments on the initial methodology. This work was made possible by the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) and the One CGIAR Initiatives ‘Nexus Gains—Realizing Multiple Benefits Across Water, Energy, Food and Ecosystems’ and ‘Nature Positive Solutions’, together with all of the donors who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR and One CGIAR Fund. For a list of One CGIAR Fund donors, please see http://www.cgiar.org/our-funders . This research was partly funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID; AID-BFS-G-11-00002) as part of the US government’s Feed the Future Initiative. The contents of this Article are the responsibility of the producing organizations and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of USAID or the US government.

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T.S.B. conceived and designed the study, led and performed the review and data analyses, interpretations and writing. N.E.-C. contributed to the study’s design, interpretations and writing. A.P., E.G. and B.J. contributed to interpretations and writing. J.C.J.G. contributed to the study’s design, analysis, interpretations and writing.

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Extended data

Extended data fig. 1 articles per year of publication..

Number of articles by publication year ( a ) and its cumulative distribution ( b ).

Extended Data Fig. 2 Figures on the number of trade-off analysis (TOA) indicators considered.

Cumulative distribution of articles per number of TOA indicators included within an article ( a ). Frequency (%) of the number of TOA indicators included within an article, color-coded by cluster as specified in Fig. 2 in the main text ( b ).

Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

Supplementary Table 1, Figs. 1–9 and a list of articles included in the systematic review.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary data 1.

Criteria assessed in the systematic review. This file was used to perform the analysis and create the figures.

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Breure, T.S., Estrada-Carmona, N., Petsakos, A. et al. A systematic review of the methodology of trade-off analysis in agriculture. Nat Food 5 , 211–220 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-00926-x

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The overall stability of a partially unstable reservoir bank slope to water fluctuation and rainfall based on Bayesian theory

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• Wengang Zhang 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 6 ,
• Songlin Liu 1 ,
• Luqi Wang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5108-250X 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• Weixing Sun 1 ,
• Yuwei He 1 ,
• Yankun Wang 4 &
• Guanhua Sun 6  

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In geotechnical analysis, the factor of safety (FOS) is crucial for slope stability assessment. Traditional methods often overlook the nuances of partial slope instability. Accurately determining geotechnical parameters for FOS in complex simulations is challenging and resource-intensive. The limit equilibrium method (LEM), considering unit weight, cohesion, and internal friction angle, is used to address this. This study focuses on the Jiuxianping landslide, analyzing its stability and failure behavior. Utilizing the Bayesian theorem, the study back-analyzes shear strength parameters, considering partial instability and uncertainties in the Janbu corrected method. The parameters’ posterior distribution is determined using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) for efficient sampling. These parameters are then used for precise FOS calculation at the critical point of partial instability, corroborated by 2021 data from the Jiuxianping landslide. The study finds that while the entire slope remains stable, partial instability caused by long-term water erosion significantly lowers the FOS about 10.9%, highlighting its critical impact on overall slope stability.

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The authors are grateful to the financial supports from Cooperation projects between Chongqing University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutes (HZ2021001), and Transportation Science and Technology project of Sichuan Province (2018-ZL-01).

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School of Civil Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400045, China

Wengang Zhang, Songlin Liu, Luqi Wang, Weixing Sun & Yuwei He

Key Laboratory of New Technology for Construction of Cities in Mountain Area, Ministry of Education, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400045, China

Wengang Zhang & Luqi Wang

National Joint Engineering Research Center of Geohazards Prevention in the Reservoir Areas, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400045, China

School of Geosciences, Yangtze University, Wuhan, 430100, China

Yankun Wang

Sichuan Yanjiang Panning Expressway Co., Ltd, Xichang, 615000, China

Wengang Zhang

Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430071, China

Wengang Zhang & Guanhua Sun

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Methodology, SL; validation, LW; software, YH; resources, SW; supervision, WZ and GS. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Luqi Wang .

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Overall stability of a partially unstable reservoir slope based on Bayesian theory.

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Zhang, W., Liu, S., Wang, L. et al. The overall stability of a partially unstable reservoir bank slope to water fluctuation and rainfall based on Bayesian theory. Landslides (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-024-02250-8

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Received : 11 April 2023

Accepted : 14 March 2024

Published : 25 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-024-02250-8

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