Research Quest: Ethics and being

In what ways will my inquiry take my values, and those of others, into account?

I am struggling for a way to articulate this, for me at the moment I see whirls that are both beautifully and frustratingly circular. These whirls are just glimpses of a philosophy of freedom, playfulness and learning.

My inquiry aims to free people to learn through playfulness. This playfulness is not a trivial one - it is a state-of-mind. This state-of-mind is with us all the time and can disclose freedom or freedoms absence depending on how caught you are up in your seriousness or your play. An important point here is that permission and judgement of freedom to learn comes from within each individual - in the context of my inquiry the aim would be to do this through playfulness. Being-in-the-inquiry means being valued and being valuing - inwardly and outwardly. Without this then the basis of the inquiry, its philosophy and phronesis, have to be questioned and regenerated or more to the point question and regenerate themselves.

In what ways will the inquiry take ethics into account?

Ethically there are real issues around messing with the stuff of being. Experimenting with a state-of-mind could be considered ethically fraught. However the inquiry is there not to free people to learn, but to allow people to be free to learn. They are the instruments that measure this freedom as well as its author. Permission to continue is not a tacit or fleeting - it is continual and reflective. The inquiry will have its own ethical journey - moving through and intertwining the shared ethics of those within it.

What is the place of myself and my "voice" in the inquiry?

My voice is where I start. Is there a choice here? My 'I' has to be explicit in order for me to transcend what is mine about freedom and playfulness and discover what is and can be shared. Throughout the enfolding of my inquiry what is and can be shared will become mine to a certain extent - well awareness of these at least. My 'voice' will respond to and guide the inquiry in order to allow other voices to be heard - participants, literature, the inquiry itself...

What are my ways of being mindful in research?

I will refer to mindful inquiry that I have taken quotes from before. We can refer to the four knowledge traditions that mindful inquiry is based on:

• Phenomenology: a description and analysis of consciousness and experience
• Hermeneutics: analysis and interpretation of texts in context
• Critical Social Theory: analysis of domination and oppression with a view to changing it
• Buddhism: spiritual practice that allows one to free oneself from suffering and illusion in several ways, e.g., becoming more aware (1998, p. 6)

From my previous post I think that my ways of being mindful align strongly with these four traditions. What may or not be so clear is that the inquiry is intended to enable participants within it to follow these four traditions themselves. Now that is an interesting line of inquiry...

What are my ways of being scholarly in research and writing?

I have already touched on ways I might be scholarly. In short my research and how it is communicated should be open to be schooled (I see fish here rather than classrooms) by literature, participants, itself and so on... My research and writing should have playfulness and freedom to be scholarly - as those should within it.

Questions: (c) Pugh, R & Yaxley, B. 2005

Bentz, V. M., & Shapiro, J. J. (1998). Mindful inquiry in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

What forms might my research take? (first try)

As I have been reading over the past couple of weeks I have been reflecting on what shape my study may take. I feel that it has to be open to many paths - but there still needs to be some structure or form. One way to look at this is by revisiting the purposes of my research.

For me freedom and playfulness, as perspective and practice, has been transforming professionally and personally, with colleagues, students, friends and family. Reflection on the freedom, playfulness and being has is empowering for my transformations. There is commonality and otherness about this sense of transformation that emerges when in dialogue with others about freedom, playfulness and being. Transformation occurs within a person, group, community etcetera, not something that can be applied from the outside. It appears to me that the natures of freedom, playfulness and transformation require that all three are explicit aspects of the research. That is the inquiry would not attempt to distance itself from the participants. The intention would be for participants to be able to transform themselves and participate in the transformation of others. Actually, it is probably enough for them to be able to identify that which is of transformation for themselves and others. How might I achieve this?

As an initial scaffolding for my thoughts about the process my research may take I will look at a generic structure, in the form of phases, proposed by Denzin & Lincoln (Table 1.1, p. 23, 2005).


Phase 1: The researcher as Multicultural Subject

Revisiting an exploration of my own traditions I feel that I need to further explore freedom and playfulness deeply, from a personal point of view and as a member of many communities. This includes exploring the traditions I embody from my family as well as those gained through research and dialogue with others.

The generation of a sharable construct of freedom and playfulness will be hampered, and possibly subverted, without a deep understanding of who I am and how I am evolving in relation to these ways of being.

Freedom, play, playfulness etcetera have lively, circuitous and interwoven histories. Bringing some of these together in new ways to suit my purposes is the parallel first step with situating myself and my shared histories. My guess is that throughout my research these two aspects will take on a life of their own - there will have to be some resolution before continuing however.

Ethically, if I am attempting to engender a transformation process with freedom and playfulness it would be remiss for me not to explore as many perspectives on my own and others understanding before unleashing it on the world. The aim would be to ensure that the inquiry was at least illuminating, if not a step towards transformation, for all participants.


Phase 2: Theoretical Paradigms and Perspectives

I have already discussed that out of the broad paradigms described, my research largely appears to fall into the constructivist paradigm. With a relativism, co-creation and transferability central to the 'products' of the inquiry.

When situating myself and participating in my inquiry then the paradigms associated with critical theory may provide relief and substance for all participants. When we are talking about being 'freer' to learn - having greater freedom... we have to question what limits or bestows this freedom etcetera. Feminist theory and its focus on emancipation may be informative here - emancipation through transformative inquiry?


Phase 3: Research Strategies

I have outlined above the start of my research - situating myself, in relation to freedom and playfulness as I evolve a philosophy of freedom and playfulness. I have already started evolving a philosophy of freedom and playfulness, reflecting on my personal lived experience as I proceed. There is an obvious, albeit unpredictable, path for this synthesising as I read Heidegger, Gadamer, Greene, Dewey, Steiner and so on. In situating myself I intend to record and interweave narratives from my family - an autoethnographic process. Once this has some sense of resolution - I would hope to have a sharable and accessible model, for want of a better word, for freedom and playfulness which I could use to enter dialogue with others.

These others would be people from my past, present and future who have some experience of transformation. The focus would be on inquiring into how our shared understanding of freedom and playfulness has a place in their experience of transformation and how to move to the next step of providing an environment that engenders freedom to learn and transform. This may take the form of an action research amongst a group of peers at the time.

The model cocreated could be introduced utilising critical ethnography with critical action research - taking the emancipatory and ethical lead from strategies such as feminist communitarianism. The inquiry may be informed though mindful inquiry and other global perspectives throughout.

I will aim towards forming the idiosyncratic, emergent and cohesive set strategies throughout the inquiry.


Phase 4: Methods of Collection and Analysis

In the same way the strategies will be emerging the methods of collection will adapt to suit the life of the inquiry. There will be interviews, observations, artifacts, autoethnography, textual analysis and more. It is intended that the methods of collection and analysis will be largely determined by the participants - including myself.


Phase 5: The Art, Practices, and Politics of Interpretation and Evaluation

Interpretation and evaluation will also be emergent during the inquiry - very difficult for me to imagine at this stage.


So there is a start - I need to discuss, read and reflect before the forms really take shape...


Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) (2005) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Narrative inquiry: multiple lenses, approaches, voices (paper)

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research


Contemporary narrative inquiry

I begin by outlining the a set of five analytic lenses through which contemporary researchers approach empirical material.(p. 656)

Analytic lenses

First, narrative researchers treat narrative - whether oral or written - as a distinct form of discourse. Narrative is a retrospective meaning making - the shaping or ordering of past experience. Narrative is a way of understanding one's own and other' actions, of organizing events and objects into meaningful whole, and of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time. (p. 656)

Second, narrative researchers view narratives as verbal action - doing or accomplishing something. Among other things, narrators explain, entertain, inform, defend, complain, and confirm or challenge the status quo. Whatever the particular action, when someone tells a story, he or she shapes, constructs, and performs the self, experience, and reality. When researchers treat narration as actively creative in this way, they emphasize the narrator's voice. (p. 567)

Third, narrative researchers view stories as both enabled and contained by a range of social resources and circumstances. These include the possibilities for self and reality construction that are intelligible within the narrator's community, local setting, organizational and social memberships, and cultural and historical location. While acknowledging that every instance of narrative is particular, researchers use this lens to attend to similarities and differences across narratives. (p. 657)

Fourth, narrative researchers as socially situate interactive performances - as produced in this particular setting, for this particular audience, for these particular purposes. A story told to an interviewer in a quiet relaxed setting will likely differ from the "same" story told to a reporter for a television news show, to a private journal that the writer assumes will never be read, to a roomful of people who have had similar experiences, to a social service counsellor, or to the same interviewer at a different time... ...a narrative is a joint production of narrator and listener, whether the narrative arises in naturally occurring talk, an interview, or a fieldwork setting. (p. 657)

Fifth, narrative researchers, like many other contemporary qualitative researchers, view themselves as narrators as they develop interpretations and find ways in which to present or publish their ideas about the narratives they studied... ...This means the four lenses just described make as much sense when applied to the to the researcher as they do when applied to the researched... ...narrative researchers are likely to use the first person when presenting their work, thereby emphasizing their own narrative action.(p. 657)

Diverse approaches

Without claiming to be comprehensive or exhaustive in my categories, I briefly outline five major approaches in contemporary narrative inquiry. (p. 658)

Some psychologists have developed an approach that focuses on the relationship between individuals' life stories and and the quality of their lives, especially psychosocial development. In addition to gathering extensive life stories, these researchers sometimes use common psychological tests. (p. 658)

A second approach has been developed by sociologists who highlight the "identity work" that people engage in as they construct selves within specific institutional, organizational, discursive, and local cultural contexts. Unlike the psychologists just described, who conceptualize the life story as distinguishable from the - yet having an impact on - the life, these researchers often treat narratives as lived experience. Thus they are as interested in the hows of story telling as they are in the whats of storytelling - in the narrative practices by which storytellers make use of available resources to construct recognizable selves. (p. 658)

The third approach is also sociological. Here, narrative researchers share the interest in the hows and whats of storytelling, but base their inquiry on extensive interviews about specific aspects of people's lives rather than on conversations in specific organizational contexts. These researchers are interested in how people communicate meaning through a range of linguistic practices, how their stories are embedded in the interaction between researcher and narrator, how they make sense of personal experience in relation to culturally and historic specific discourses, how they draw on, resist, and/or transform those discourses as they narrate their selves, experiences, and realities. (p. 659)

Anthropologists have led the way to a fourth approach to narrative inquiry. Some call this approach to narrative ethnography, which is transformation of both ethnographic and life history methods. Like traditional ethnography, this approach involves long-term improvement in a culture or community; like life history, it focuses heavily on one individual or on a small number of individuals. What makes the narrative ethnography distinct is that both the researcher and the researched "are presented together within a single multivocal text focused on the character and process of human encounter" (Tedlock, 1992, p. xiii) (Chase, 2005, p. 659)

A fifth approach t narrative inquiry is found in autoethnography, where researchers also turn the analytic lens on themselves and their interactions with others, but here researchers write, interpret, and/or perform their own narratives about culturally significant experiences. (p. 660)

Chase, S.E. (2005) Narrative inquiry: multiple lenses, approaches, voices. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Tedlock, B. (1992) The beautiful and the dangerous: encounters with he Zuni Indians. New Press, New York.

Participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere (paper)

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research

Participatory research

Three particular are often used to distinguish participatory research from conventional research: shared ownership of research projects, community-based analysis of social problems, and an orientation toward community action. (p. 560)

Critical action research

Critical action research expresses a commitment to bring together broad social analysis - the self-reflexive collective self-study of practice, the way in which language is used, organization and power in a local situation, and action to improve things. (p. 560)

Classroom action research

Classroom action research typically involves the use of inquiry and data collection by teachers (often with the help from academics) with a view to teachers making judgments about how to improve their own practices... ...Primacy is given to teachers' self-understandings and judgements. The emphasis is "practical," that is, on the interpretations that the teachers and students are making and acting on in the situation. (p. 561)

Action learning

The fundamental idea of action learning is to bring people together to learn from each other's experiences. There is emphasis on studying one's own situation, clarifying what the organization is trying to achieve, working to remove obstacles. Key aspirations are organizational efficacy and efficiency, although advocates of action learning affirm the moral purpose and content of their own work and of the managers they seek to engage in the process. (p. 561)

Action science

Action science emphases the study of practice in organizational settings as a source of new understandings and improved practice. The field of action science systematically builds the relationship between academic organizational psychology and practical problems as the are experienced in organizations. It identifies two aspects of professional knowledge: (a) the formal knowledge that all competent members of the profession are thought to share and into which professionals are inducted into the group and (b) the professional knowledge of interpretation and enactment. A distinction is also made between the professional's "espoused theory" and "theories in use," and "gaps" between these are used as points of change. (p. 561)

Critical participatory action research

Although the process of participatory action research is only poorly described in terms of a mechanical sequence of steps, it is generally thought to involve a spiral of self-reflective cycles of the following:

• Planning a change
• Acting and observing the process and consequences
• Reflecting on these processes and consequences
• Replanning
  
• Acting and observing again
• Reflecting again, and so on...

...In reality, the process might not be as neat as this spiral of self-contained cycles of planning suggests... ...the process is likely to be more fluid, open, and responsive. (p. 563)

...participatory action research has seven other key features that are at least as important as the self-reflective spiral.

1. Participatory action research is a social process. Participatory action research deliberately explores the relationship between the realms of the individual and the social...
2. Participatory action research is participatory. Participatory action research engages people in examining their knowledge (understandings, skills, and values) and interpretive categories (the ways in which they interpret themselves and their action in the social and material world)...
3. Participatory action research is practical and collaborative. Participatory action research engages people in examining the social practices that link them with others in social interaction...
4. Participatory action research is emancipatory. Participatory action research aims to help people recover, release themselves from, the constraints of irrational, unproductive, unjust, and unsatisfying social structures that limit their self-development and self determination...
5. Participatory social research is critical. Participatory action research aims to help people recover, and release themselves from, the constraints embedded in the social media through which they interact - their language (discourses), their modes of work, and the social relationships of power (in which the experience affiliation and difference, inclusion and exclusion - relationships in which, grammatically speaking, they interact with others in the third, second, or first person...
6. Participatory action research is reflexive (e.g., recursive, dialectical). Participatory action research aims to help people to investigate reality in order to change it... ...it is a deliberative through which people aim to transform their practices through a spiral of cycles of critical and self-critical action and reflection...
7. Participatory action research aims to transform both theory and practice. Participatory action research does not regard either theory or practice as preeminent in the relationship between theory and practice; rather it aims to articulate and develop each in relation to the other through critical reasoning about both theory and practice. (pp. 566-8)

Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. (2005) Participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Grounded theory in the 21st Century: applications for advancing social justice studies (paper)

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research

Constructivist Grounded Theory

A constructivist approach emphasizes the studied phenomenon rather than the
methods of studying it. Constructivist gorunded theorists take a reflexive
stance on modes of knowing and representing studied life. That means giving close attention to empirical realities and our collected renderings of them - and locating oneself in these realities. It does not assume that impartial observers enter the research scene without an interpretive frames, biographies, and interests as well as the research context, their relationships with research participants, concrete field experiences, and modes of generating and recording empirical materials. No qualitative method rests on pure induction - the questions we ask of the empirical world frame what we know of it. In short, we share in constructing what we deifne as data. Similarly, our conceptual categories arise through our interpretations of data rather than emanating from them or from our methodological practices. (pp. 509-10)

Grounded theory - has a past

Grounded studies emerge from wrestling with data, making comparisons, developing categories, engaging in theoretical sampling, and integrating an analysis. But how weconduct all these activities does not occur in a social vacuum. Rather, the entire research process is interactive; in this sense, we bring past interactions and current interests into our research, and we interact with our empirical materials and emerging ideas as well as, perhaps, granting agencies, institutional review boards, and community agencies and grous, along with research participants and colleagues. Neither data nor ideas are mere objects that we passively observe and compile. (p. 510)

Rather than abandoning the traditional positivist quest for empirical detail, I argue that we advance it - without the cloak of neutrality and passivity enshrouding mid-century positivism. Gathering rich empirical materials is the first step. Recording these data systematically prompts us to pursue leads that we might otherwise ignore or not realize. Through making systematic recordings, we also gain comparitative materials to pinpoint contextual conditions and to explore links between levels of analysis. By seeking empirical answers to emerging theoretical questions, we learn about the worlds we enter and can increase the cogency of our subsequent analyses. Hence, data need to be informed by our theroetical sesitivity. Data alone are insuffiicent; they must be telling and must answer theoretical questions. (p. 511)

Charmaz, K. (2005) Grounded theory in the 21st century: Applications for advancing social justice issues. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Mindful Inquiry: A Learner-Centered Approach to Qualitative Research (paper)

With thanks to Adair Linn Nagata

Mindful inquiry combines the Buddhist concept of mindfulness with phenomenology, critical theory, and hermeneutics in a process that puts the inquirer in the center(Bentz & Shapiro, 1998, p. 171). Mindful Inquiry helped me develop both reflexivity and voice and resulted in personal transformation especially valuable in researching intercultural interactions.

Mindful Inquiry (MI)

MI is based on 13 philosophical assumptions that are listed here.

1. Awareness of self and reality and their interaction is a positive value in itself and should be present in research processes.


2. Tolerating and integrating multiple perspectives is a value.


3. It is important to bracket our assumptions and look at the often unaware, deep layers of consciousness and unconsciousness that underlie them.


4. Human existence, as well as research, is an ongoing process of interpreting both one’s self and others, including other cultures and subcultures.


5. All research involves both accepting bias––the bias of one’s own situation and context––and trying to transcend it.


6. We are always immersed in and shaped by historical, social, economic, political, and cultural structures and constraints, and those structures and constraints sually have domination and oppression, and therefore suffering, built into them.


7. Knowing involves caring for the world and the human life that one studies.


8. The elimination or dimunition of suffering is an important goal of or value accompanying inquiry and often involves critical judgment about how much suffering is required by existing arrangements.


9. Inquiry often involves the critique of existing values, social and personal illusions, and harmful practices and institutions.


10. Inquiry should contribute to the development of awareness and self-reflection in the inquirer and may contribute to the development of spirituality.


11. Inquiry usually requires giving up ego or transcending self, even though it is grounded in self and requires intensified self-awareness.


12. Inquiry may contribute to social action and be part of social action.


13. The development of awareness is not a purely intellectual or cognitive process but part of a person’s total way of living her life. (Bentz & Shapiro,1998, pp. 6-7)

MI is based on four knowledge traditions which Bentz and Shapiro describe as follows:

• Phenomenology: a description and analysis of consciousness and experience


• Hermeneutics: analysis and interpretation of texts in context


• Critical Social Theory: analysis of domination and oppression with a view to changing it


• Buddhism: spiritual practice that allows one to free oneself from suffering and illusion in several ways, e.g., becoming more aware (1998, p. 6)

Originally I thought that I would produce a competency model that could be the basis for training courses, but the main result of my efforts is an appreciation for a different way of being and relating. Simply stated, a transformation occurred while I was immersed in trying to understand how to relate more skillfully.

I do not have time to really go into what I came to understand about resonance, but let me try to summarize it in three points. I was particularly interested in three aspects of the phenomenon of resonance.

• Intrapersonal Level: Promotion of an internal state that can contribute to a
  kind of inner peace, pursued through self-cultivation


• Interpersonal Level: Relational attunement, an experience of synchrony
  between two people that provides the basis for mutuality


• Research Application: A characteristic of good qualitative
  research

I want to emphasize again the advantages I see of using MI for intercultural communication research. It offers a learner-centered approach to personally important questions, a holistic approach for inquiring into complex, multilayered interactions with the added bonus of providing a method of self-cultivation for you as an interculturalist. Because MI allows you to investigate phenomena that really matter to you, it can also help reveal the real, deeply personal meaning of your research.

Bentz, V. M., & Shapiro, J. J. (1998). Mindful inquiry in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Nagata, A.L. (2002) Mindful Inquiry: A Learner-Centered Approach to Qualitative Research,Keynote at 2002 SIETAR Japan Conference.

The Practice of Practice (paper)

A quick re-visit to knowing

With thanks to Max van Manen

The prominance of practice

With some authors the discourse of practice is especially associated with critical theory, postmodernist and deconstructionist writing. In the work of other authors we encounter a more commonplace usage of "the practice of teaching," analogous to the practice of religion or the practice of medicine. Similarly, the educational nomenclature such as "moral practice," "reflective practice," "critical practice" stands for the range of possible actions and vocabularies that these terms evoke. So it appears that practice has become a buzz-word.

Practice as explanation stopper

Another interesting feature is that practices, in this more fundamental sense (as reproductive dispositions, language games, genealogies, or embedded vocabularies) are not directly accessible, observable, measurable, definable. Rather, they are hidden, tacit, often linguistically inexpressible in a direct or propositional sense.

The important point is that while in educational discourses the term practice may be a gloss, it does hide a complex and fascinating pedagogical reality.

Lived practice

At the micro level of the practice of teaching there are layers of action and mutual understanding that are instantly and often unreflectively realized in everything that teachers do in constantly changing situations.

(Un)refective practice

It seems therefore that, on the one hand, the theory of reflective practice seems to overestimate the possibility of introspective "reflection on action while acting" (van Manen 1994, 1995). Phenomenologically it is very difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to be emersed in interactive or dialogic activities with their students while simultaneously stepping back from the activity. On the other hand, the theory of reflective practice seems to underestimate the complexity of the organization of ordinary teaching practices, and the incredible intricacies of practical actions in teaching-learning situations. I would argue that the practice of teaching is so challenging not only because it is cognitively complex but also because the knowledge that inheres in our practices is in part noncognitive...

Knowledge in practice

This is how I would make sense of these forms of noncognitive knowing:

(a) Knowledge resides in action as lived, e.g.,- as confidence in acting, style, and practical tact- as habituations and routine practices

(b) Knowledge resides in the body, e.g.,- as an immediate corporeal sense of things- as gestures and demeanor

(c) Knowledge resides in the world, e.g.,- as being with the things of our world- as situations of at homeness, dwelling

(d) Knowledge resides in relations, e.g.,- as encounter with others- as relations of trust, recognition, intimacy

By noncognitive I mean then that in their practice experienced teachers commonly demonstrate a kind of confidence that is really a form of knowing except that this "knowledge" cannot necessarily be captured in words.

In short, the study of the practice of teaching would need to be sensitive to the experiential quality of practical knowledge: the acknowledgement that much of knowing what to do, ensues from the complex dimensions of practice: one's body, actions, relations, and the things of one's world.

Complexity in practice

Teaching techniques employed by different teachers may look behaviorally the same on the outside but individual teachers always have acquired and developed these practices in a personal manner–sometimes in entirely different biographical and situational settings. Thus, particular practices get embodied in the context of personal life histories and backgrounds, and these practices become habituated in uniquely different situational and relational spheres.

Van Manen, M. (1994). Pedagogy, virtue, and narrative identity in teaching, Curriculum Inquiry, OISE/John Wiley (Toronto), Summer 1994, Vol. 4, No. 2. pp. 135-170.

Van Manen, M. (1995) On the Epistemology of Reflective Practice. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice. Oxford Ltd. Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 33-50.

Van Manen, M. (1999) The Practice of Practice.In: Lange, Manfred; Olson, John, Hansen, Henning & BŸnder, Wolfgang (eds.): Changing Schools/Changing Practices: Perspectives on Educational Reform and Teacher Professionalism. Luvain, Belgium: Garant.

Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research (paper)

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 12

Critical Ethnography

As critical researchers attempt to get behind the curtain, to move beyond assimilated experience,to expose the way ideology constrains the the desire for self-direction, and to confront the way power reproduces itself in the construction of human consciousness, they employ a plethora of research methodologies. (p. 324)

Catalytic validity points to the degree to which research moves those it studies to understand the world and the way it is shaped in order for them to transform it... ...Research that possesses catalytic validity will not only display the reality-altering of the inquiry process; it will also direct this impact so that those under study will gain self-understanding and self-direction. (p. 324)

To construct a socially critical epistemology, critical ethnographers need to understand holistic modes of human experience and their relationship to communicative structures. (p. 328)

Kincheloe, J.L. & McLaren, P. (2005) Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research (paper)

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 6

I have chosen to pick out some bits on ethics and research - again starting with the the basic:

Codes of Ethics

In value-free social science, codes of ethics for professional and academic associations are the conventional format for moral principals.

Informed consent

Proper respect for human freedom generally includes two necessary conditions. First, subjects must agree freely voluntarily to participate - that is, without physical or psychological coercion. Second, their agreement must be based on full and open information. (p. 145)

Deception

...deliberate misrepresentation is forbidden. (p. 145)

Privacy and confidentiality

Confidentiality must be assured as the primary safeguard against unwanted exposure. All personal data ought to be secured or concealed and made public only behind a shield of anonymity. Professional etiquette uniformly concurs that no one deserves harm or embarrassment as a result of research practices. (p. 145)

Accuracy

Fabrications, fraudulent materials, omissions, and contrivances are both nonscientific and unethical. (p. 145)

I think it is easy to see how all of these have to be considered during research and how if they are not the validity of inquiry can be compromised. As Christians (2005) says himself when these inhabit the living world of research then they generate complex issues. In particular, I don't intend to have a value-free approach - however what is valued must be explicit and considered by participants. Each aspect of a code such as this can be broken only in the light of a greater ethic associated with valuing participants and their shared understanding.


Feminist Communitarianism

Social ethics

Over the past decade, social and feminist ethics have made a radical break with individual autonomy and rationalist presumption of canonical ethics... (pp. 148-9)

Rather than searching for neutral principles to which all parties can appeal, social ethics rests on a complex view of moral judgments as integrating into an organic whole various perspectives - everyday experience, beliefs about the good, and feelings of approval and shame - in terms of human relations and structures. (p. 149)

Compassion and nurturance resolve conflicting responsibilities among people, and as such these standards are totally the opposite of merely avoiding harm. (p. 149)

Accumulated wisdom, moral meaning from our own choices of decency, and the ongoing summons of the Other together reintroduce love, happiness, sympathy, and beauty into a modern, nonabsolutionist, but principled theory of morals. (p. 149)

Humans are defined as communicative beings within the fabric of everyday life. Through dialogic encounter, subjects create life together and nurture one another's moral obligation to it. Levinas's ethics presumes and articulates a radical ontology of social beings in relation. (p. 150)

A Feminist Communitarian Model

...the mission of social science research is enabling community life to prosper - equipping people to come to mutually held conclusions. The aim is not fulsome data per se, but community transformation. The received view assumes that research advances society's interests by feeding our individual capacity to reason and make calculated decisions. Research is intended to be collaborative in its design and participatory in its execution. Rather than ethics codes in the files of academic offices and research reports prepared for clients, the participants themselves are given a forum to activate polis mutually. In contrast to utilitarian experimentalism, the substantive conceptions of the good that drive the problems reflects the conceptions of the community rather than the expertise researchers or funders. (p. 151)

Interpretive Sufficiency

In contrast to an experimentalism of instrumental efficiency, this paradigm seeks to open up the social world in all its dynamic dimensions. The thick notion of sufficiency supplants the thinness of technical , exterior, and statistically precise received view. Rather than reducing social issues to financial and administrative problems for politicians, social science research enables people to come to terms with their everyday experience themselves. (p. 151)

Interpretative sufficiency means taking seriously lives that are loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural complexity. (p. 152)

Multivocal and Cross-Cultural Representation

With the starting hypothesis that all human cultures have something to say, social science research recognizes particular cultural values consistent with universal human dignity. Interpretative sufficiency in its multicultural dimension locates persons in a non-competitive, non-hierarchical relationship to the larger moral universe. It helps persons imagine how things could be different in the everyday world. It imagines new forms of human transformation and emancipation. It enacts those transformations through dialogue. (p. 153)

Moral Discernment

Communities are woven together by narratives that invigorate their common understanding of good and evil, happiness and reward, the meaning of life and death. Recovering and refashioning moral vocabulary help to amplify our deepest humanness. Researchers are not constituted as ethical selves antecedently, but moral discernment unfolds dialectically between researchers. (p. 154)

Our widely shared moral convictions are developed through discourse within a community. These communities, where moral discourse is nurtured and shared, are a radical alternative to the utilitarianism of modernity. But in feminist communitarianism, communities are entered from the universal. The total opposite of an ethics of individual autonomy is universal human solidarity. Our obligation to sustain one another defines our existence. (p. 154)

OK - that is enough for now. Time for a walk...


Christians, C.G. (2005) Ethics and politics in qualitative research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Reform of the Social Sciences, and of Universities Through Action Research (paper)

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 1

I am continuing to go back to fundamentals in an effort to try and find direction. As such I am going to pick bits and pieces out - for my record as much as anything.

Tacit knowing

Much of our knowing is tacit; it expresses itself in our actions. (p. 49)

...tacit knowing connotes the 'hidden' understandings that guide our actions without our ability to explicitly communicate what the knowledge is. (p. 50)

Knowing how

"Knowing how" grounds knowledge in actions and, because this is precisely how we are able to identify tacit knowing, knowing how seems a more direct anchor to use. (p. 50)

Collective knowing

Knowledge is also inherently collective... ...People working together develop and share knowledge as a collective effort and collective product, the petty commodity view of knowledge production notwithstanding. (p. 50)

...refers to the work of Aristotle in making a taxonomy based on episteme (theoretical knowledge), techne (pragmatic knowledge and context-dependent practical rationality) and phronesis (practical and context deliberation about values). (p. 50)

...phronesis is best understood as the design of action through collaborative knowledge construction with legitimate stakeholders in a problematic situation... ...Phronesis is a practice that is deployed on groups in which all the stakeholders - both research experts and local collaborators - have legitimate knowledge claims and rights to determine the outcome... ...phronesis involves an egalitarian engagement across knowledge systems and diverse experiences. (p.51)

This is clarifying for me - I am not sure how you could work with people and not have phronesis as such... however....


Action research

...Either social research is collaboratively applied or we do not believe it deserves to be called research. It should simply be what it is: speculation. (pp. 52-3)

A different grounding for social research can be found in pragmatic philosophy. Dewey, James, Pierce... ...offer an interesting and fruitful foundation for ontological and epistemological questions inherent in social research that is action relevant. Pragmatism links theory and practice. The core reflection process is connected to action outcomes that involve manipulating material and social factors in a given context. Experience emerges in a continual interaction between people and their environment; accordingly, this process constitutes both the subjects and the objects of inquiry. The actions taken are purposeful and aim at creating desired outcomes. Hence, the knowledge creation process is based on the inquirer' norms, values and interests. (p. 53)

The research logic is constituted in the inquiry process itself, and it guides the knowledge generation process. (p. 53)

These general characteristics of the pragmatist position ground the action research approach. Two central parameters stand out clearly: knowledge generation through action and experimentation in context, and participative democracy as both a method and a goal. (p. 53)

Could a variant of this be used to ground my research, worth considering... and again, this time with a name:


Cogenerative Inquiry

Cogenerative inquiry processes involve trained professional researchers and knowledgeable local stakeholders who work together to define the problems to be addressed, to gather and organize relevant knowledge and data, to analyze the resulting information, and to design social change interventions. (p. 54)

Validity, Credibility and Reliability

The core of the validity claim centers on the workability of the actual social change activity engaged in, and the test is whether or not the actual solution to a problem arrived at solves the problem. (p. 54)

Dealing with Context Centered Knowledge

Precisely because the knowledge is cogenerated, includes local knowledge and analyses, and is built deeply into the local context, comparison of results across cases and the creation of generalizations is a challenge. (p. 54)

Comparison and Generalization

Central to the action research view of generalization is that any case that runs counter to a generalization invalidates it... ...and requires the generalization to be reformulated. (p. 54)

Time to go and clean the bathroom and reflect...



Greenwood G.J. & Levin M (2005) Reform of the sciences and of universities through action research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research (paper)

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 1

On the previous post, and with the remaining questions on my 'Research Quest' I found myself spiraling into eddies of repetition. So I am leaving those important questions (on ethics and aporia) to have a quick look at what form my research may take. To this end I am having a quick look at Denzin and Lincoln's third edition of their Handbook of Qualitative Research (2005). I have not read any of this text since the first edition - which I used to guide earlier inquiries. I think this text will be useful for me now for finding some possibilities for the for of my inquiry and giving me something further to ponder and pursue. I expect in this process I will be able to do more justice to the questions from Roy and Bevis that I have left unanswered. I know what follows is very general - but that is where I am most comfortable and, I think, where I need to be.

Three interconnected, generic activities define the qualitative research process. They go by a variety of different labels, including theory, analysis, ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Behind these terms stands the personal biography of the researcher, who speaks from a particular class, gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic community perspective. The gendered, multiculturally situated researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology) that he or she then examines in specific ways. (methodology, analysis). (p. 21)

Well that is good news - looks like I am on the right track. It is pretty clear where I am headed for the first of these, though the other two have less clarity. The reason for the muddiness here is partially because it is the nature of the beast and, I reckon, mostly because I have not given it enough thought.


Interpretive Paradigms

The net that contains the researcher's epistemological, ontological, and methodological premises may be termed a paradigm. (p.22)

Three broad categories for paradigms according to the handbook:

Positivist / postpositivist

They work from a realist and critical realist ontology and objective epistemologies, and they rely on experimental, quasiexperimental, survey, and rigorously defined qualitative methodologies. (p. 24)

Constructivist

The constructivist paradigm assumes a relativist ontology (there are multiple realities), a subjectivist epistemology (knower and responder cocreate understandings), and a naturalistic (in the natural world) set of methodological procedures. Findings are usually presented in terms of grounded theory or pattern theories... ...Terms such as credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability replace the usual positivist criteria of internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity. (p. 24)

Feminist, ethnic, Marxist, cultural studies, and queer theory models

...privilege a materialist-realist ontology; that is the real world makes a material difference in terms of race, class, and gender. Subjectivist epistemologies and naturalistic methodologies (usually ethnographies) are employed. Empirical materials and theoretical arguments are evaluated in terms of their emancipatory implications.(p.24)

On first glance, the second option is the most attractive and if I had to pick one paradigm to inhabit I think that this would be the one. However, I think the other two have value for me and can have value for my inquiry - even if it is in the 'keeping it real' category. There is something about this way of organising paradigms that I am not entirely comfortable with. I think that I will end up skipping between these - playfully?


Strategies of inquiry

A research design situates the researcher in the world and... also specifies how the researcher will address the two critical issues of representation and legitimation.

A strategy of inquiry comprises a bundle of skills, assumptions, and practices that the researcher employs as he or she moves from paradigm to the empirical world. Strategies of inquiry put paradigms of interpretation into motion. At the same time, strategies of inquiry also connect the researcher to specific methods of collecting and analyzing empirical materials...

...These strategies include the case study, phenomenological and ethnomethodological techniques, and the use of grounded theory, as well as biographical, autoethnographic, historical, action, and clinical methods. (p. 26)

I am starting to have more questions - which is great. Even though I know there are many ways to form research, this brief summary has helped. I would still like it to be the case that I can weave together strategies as they become appropriate. I wonder how I can do this? I think I can... but how?

Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) (2005) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.