Doing Research in Fashion and Dress

An Introduction to Qualitative Methods

Yuniya Kawamura

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350089808
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Mode- & Textilindustrie

Whether you're investigating fashion as a material object, an abstract idea, a social phenomenon, or a commercial system, qualitative techniques can further your understanding of almost any research topic. Doing Research in Fashion and Dress begins by guiding you through a brief history of fashion studies, and the debates surrounding it, before introducing key qualitative methodological approaches, including ethnography, semiology, and object-based research. Detailed case studies demonstrate how each methodology is used in practice. These case studies include Japanese subcultures, fashion photography blogs and semiotic studies of fashion magazine shoots and advertisements. This second edition also features a new chapter on internet sources and online ethnography, reflecting the adoption of social media tools not only by industry practitioners but also by academics. By contextualizing history, theory and practice Doing Research in Fashion and Dress offers:
-A systematic examination of qualitative research methods in fashion studies in social sciences.
-A practical guide for anyone wishing to conduct fashion research in academia or in the business world.
-An accessible grounding in contemporary fashion studies literature.

1

Theory and Practice

Objectives

• To understand what a theory is

• To recognize the purpose of conducting social scientific research

• To identify the differences between qualitative and quantitative methods

• To learn how quantitative and qualitative methods are used

• To distinguish deductive versus inductive research and objective versus subjective approaches

• To understand how theory and practice are interdependent with each other

• To learn to apply a symbolic interactionist approach to fashion/dress studies

Before investigating and understanding different research methods in fashion/dress studies, it is essential that we understand what a theory means and the link between theory and practice. When we say “practice,” we mean the practice of research that involves methodological inquiry. This chapter explores the connection between theory and practice/method, which are inextricably linked. Theoretical frameworks, intentions, or purposes with which researchers approach their research determine not only the questions that are important but also the methods that are used for social scientific investigation of fashion.

There are different and competing methodologies that are linked to specific theoretical approaches, and they exist side by side in academic discourse. We need to be explicit about the theoretical agendas to which particular methods and practices are attached. I examine predominant theoretical perspectives in social scientific research and discuss how they shape the research done under their theoretical paradigm.

Ideas and thoughts we have can be considered simply guesswork and not scientific knowledge unless they are backed up by research-based facts and evidence (Babbie 2015). The need for facts is one important reason social scientists conduct research. However, the purpose of social research is to check the validity of existing theories about people and society and also to produce information that describes our lives and to develop new theories that explain how our lives are influenced by various social and external forces.

What is social scientific research?

Students who research fashion/dress for the first time may think that it has nothing to do with social sciences. However, fashion/dress needs to be studied social scientifically, that is, empirically, in order to earn enough respect in academia because we come across abundant nonacademic information about fashion in our everyday life. They are in magazines, newspapers, catalogs, TV programs, and internet sites, among many other media sources. Some are subjective opinions and essays on fashion without any reliable sources.

Much of human beings’ behaviors, such as the way we dress or the clothing choices we make, are based on assumptions and untested hypotheses. Such untested hypotheses are usually accepted on faith or some common belief and no attempt is made to verify them. In research, we need the objective verification of hypotheses. As Taylor (2010) explain, the scientific method is designed to discover valid methods of research finding reasons and explanations for controlling natural phenomena which can be replicated. This is what we need to apply to fashion/dress studies.

The fact that we cannot study humans in exactly the same way that we study natural sciences, such as chemistry or physics, can be both a merit and a detriment. One advantage to the social scientists is the ability to pose questions directly to the object of their studies, that is, other humans, and at the same time, this interaction often produces a conscious or unconscious deviation from usual behavior (Babbie 2015). For example, as subjects provide answers to questionnaires or interviews, they know they are being studied and will sometimes try to assist the research effort by supplying answers they believe the researcher is looking for. The subject may treat responses to a questionnaire in a very superficial way. According to Giddens:

Science is the use of systematic methods of investigation, theoretical thinking, and the logical assessment of arguments to develop a body of knowledge about a particular subject matter. Scientific work depends upon a mixture of boldly innovative thought and the careful marshaling of evidence to support or disconfirm ideas and theories. Information and insights accumulated through scientific study and debate are always to some degree tentative—open to being revised, or even completely discarded, in the light of new evidence or arguments. (Giddens 2018: 20)

Science is a logical system that bases knowledge on direct, systematic observation, and its knowledge is based on empirical evidence that is information we can verify with our senses. Empiricism, further discussed in Chapter 2, “Research Process,” being concerned with that which can be observed, has always been an ingredient of social sciences. Reliable knowledge comes from that which can be observed and experimented with. The opposite is knowledge based on philosophic speculations that have no scientific grounding, and some believe that fashion/dress studies tend to be in that category.

Concepts and variables

Social research makes assumptions about the nature of the world as well as people’s actions, both of which are predictable, and there are causal relationships. Every event has a constant antecedent, such as why we wear a tank top or a wool sweater. There are external reasons for why we choose to dress in a certain way.

A basic element of science is the concept, a mental construct that represents some part of the world in a simplified form. Social scientists use concepts to label various aspects of social life, including “fashion” or “pink” and to classify human begins into different categories, such as gender, social class, or race/ethnicity, and social scientists use them in their theories. A concept can be described as a word or symbol that represents a phenomenon that is a label we use to name and classify our perceptions and experiences, or it can be an abstract idea generalized from particular instances (Turner 2013).

In research, a concept becomes a variable whose value changes from case to case, and it becomes measurable. The use of variables depends on measurement, which is a procedure for determining the value of a variable in a specific case. Some variables are easy to measure, such as counting the number of outfits in your wardrobe. However, measuring abstract concepts, such as the level of awareness in the latest fashion trends, as variables can be more difficult.

Researchers, quantitative ones in particular, seek to find how two or more variables are related and find their correlation, which is the relationship between cause and effect. Correlation means a relationship in which two or more variables change together. Social scientists seek to investigate not just how variables change but why they change (Bordens and Abbott 2017). Scientists refer to the causal factor as the independent variable and call the effect the dependent variable.

Cause (independent variable) → Effect (dependent variable)

Understanding cause and effect is essential because it allows researchers to predict how one pattern of behavior produces and reproduces another. These linkages explain time order, causality, correlation, description, or explanation, and they can represent any action occurring between the concepts. The connections are generalizations, which are called theories.

What is a theory?

The word “theory” is a grand term that is intimidating and frightening to many students and even scholars. It is difficult to grasp and is difficult to comprehend in its entirety in concrete terms since they are not concrete. Theories are found in the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, and economics, as well as within many subfields. To locate and read about these theories requires searching literature databases or reviewing guides to the literature about the research topics.

A theory is a generalization about a phenomenon, an explanation of how and why something happens. Therefore, theoretical perspectives are interrelated sets of assumptions, concepts, and propositions that constitute a view of the world (Turner 2013). Theories can be broken into two parts: the things to be connected and the connection itself. They may be concrete and tangible objects, such as a hat, a pair of jeans or shoes, or they can be abstract ideas, such as style, beauty, ugliness, or industries. Frequently, these concepts become linked to even more general theories. Such simple behavior as shopping at a particular store or wearing certain brands can be placed in a larger theoretical framework. Any human social action can be analyzed theoretically.

A theory does not seem to be connected to the real world and our everyday life because of its abstractions. But in fact, our whole way of looking at the world and society depends on our theoretical perspective. Theory and real life, such as a fashion phenomenon and practice, are very much tied together. To read and understand theory is to understand a great deal more about what/who we are and what our world is like. Practical issues actually embody certain theoretical assumptions, and by becoming more aware of them, we become more observant, analytical, and critical.

Theories are embedded in human thought and vary in size, density, abstractedness, completeness, and quality. Many theories are complex and difficult to understand. All scientific theories are speculative to some extent because they are held tentatively as generalizations.¹ But some theories do contribute to the practice they are supposed to inform. Theories can be defined as statements about how things are connected, and their purpose is to explain to and inform us how things are connected, why things happen as they do, including why people dress the way they do. The purpose of a theory is to explain why things happen as they do (Neuman 2019).

Theories help us organize our otherwise disorganized world, make sense of it, guide us how we behave in it or we should behave in it, and also helps us predict what might happen in the future. They are created by developing a set of propositions or generalizations that establish relationships between things in some systematic way and are derived from information that people collect by seeing, hearing, touching, sensing, smelling, and feeling, which is the process of data collection.

According to Creswell and Creswell (2018), theories develop when researchers test a prediction many times. Researchers combine independent, mediating, and dependent variables based on different forms of measure into hypotheses or research questions. These hypotheses or questions provide information about the type of relationship. When researchers test hypotheses over and over in different settings with different populations, a theory emerges and someone gives it a name. Thus, theory develops as explanation to advance knowledge in particular fields.

Deduction versus induction and subjectivity versus objectivity

The deductive-inductive dimension refers to the place of theory in a research study (Flick 2018a; Bordens and Abbott 2017). Deductive research begins when a theoretical system develops operational definitions of the propositions and concepts of the theory and matches them empirically to some data. Deductive researchers hope to find data to match a theory while inductive researchers hope to find a theory that explains their data. Inductive research begins with collection of data, such as empirical observations or measurements of some kind, and builds theoretical categories and propositions from relationships discovered among the data. That is, inductive research starts with an examination of a phenomenon and then from successive examinations of similar and dissimilar phenomena develops a theory to explain what was studied.

Research designs may also be characterized along a subjective and objective continuum. Ethnography, discussed in Chapter 3, “Ethnography,” builds the subjective experiences...