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No, I'm not referring to the election. I'm referring to the universal meta-question that applies to any research. Academics do a lot of research; some of it gets published, some of that gets read, and a minority of that really matters. If no one cares, the results (and the work it took to produce them) don't matter.
I first ran into the "who cares?" question, in any formal sense, in a workshop about doing qualitative research. Quantitative research generally aspires to be generalizable (at least, that's what the quantitative researchers tell me), but qualitative work is always particular to a specific community, a specific set of individuals or situations, a specific time-frame. Which isn't to say that widely-applicable lessons can't be derived from qualitative work, but it is to imply that the particular selection of community, individual, situation, time has an effect on how widely-applicable any findings might be.
Every time since then that I've heard the "who cares?" question posed, I've always understood it to translate -- at least in large part -- to "is there a real world impact?" When people (academics) live their lives surrounded by the theory about the theory against the theory, it's easy to end up doing intellectually interesting work which has no real world applicability. The responses I've heard have generally corroborated this understanding.
That's why it kind of brought me up short this week when I was in a discussion with a mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative in combination) researcher at Greenback who emphasized that she meant "what are the theoretical implications?" when she asked "who cares?" She was understanding the question to mean "who in academe cares?"
I guess it boils down to whether you privilege (hold as more important) the academic community or the world outside the ivory tower. My mixed-methods interlocutor made it quite clear that she preferred the former. I don't. On this, as other campuses, I still hope I'm in the majority on this one. But I'm a little less secure in that than I was before.
