AI and the future of qualitative research

Speakers: Rachel Thomson (Sussex University) Susan Halford (Bristol University) and Les Carr (Southampton University)

The growth of Large Language Models has prompted widespread claims that these ‘tools’ will transform the future of qualitative research. Overall, the message is that qualitative researchers should equip themselves for a fast-approaching future, or risk being replaced. In this talk we examine these claims theoretically – drawing on work in the sociology of futures, and the social life of methods – and practically, by reporting on our own experiments with LLMs. Pulling these two elements together, we can see the current debate about LLMs in qualitative research as future making claims mobilized through a nascent re-assembling of the dominant methodological apparatus. Here we return to our own experiments. In distinction from the dominant approach, which tends to carefully controlled lab experiments to test LLM capabilities, we report on a ‘live’ project, paying attention to the multiple and complex relations involved. This suggests, to us at least, a rather different way of thinking about LLMs and the future of qualitative research. Our conclusion is not to reject the use of LLMs, but rather to change the terms of the debate, fully aware of its consequences the futures in-the-making.

image credit: IceMing & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/