Planning Your Qualitative Research Thesis and Project

An Introduction to Interpretivist Research in Education and the Social Sciences

Tom O'Donoghue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815349020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351165549
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The new edition of Planning Your Qualitative Research Thesis and Project provides easily accessible worked examples and valuable models which can be used as guides for plans and proposals. By demonstrating the thought and forward planning that is required when proposing a credible interpretivist study, this book provides the reader with all the theory and practical understanding necessary to conduct a successful qualitative research project.

This new edition provides examples of contemporary topics related to a range of countries across the developed and developing world, and new chapters which include:

• An example of a 'perspectives' study
• Policy studies and the interpretivist paradigm
• Life history studies
• Interactionist historical studies
• The interpretivist paradigm and research based on 'problem focused' ideas

With chapters and studies providing contemporary and relevant examples, this new edition is the perfect introductory guide for students looking to complete their first qualitative thesis project. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it is an accessible introduction, and an invaluable resource for early stage doctoral students, and for students undertaking research and enquiry.

Part I

An overview of the research process

Chapter 1

Introduction

For many years it has been common to place the process of engaging in research alongside experiencing and reasoning as the principal ways in which people attempt to understand their environments (Cohen and Manion 1985). While many of us have been socialized into assuming that such engagement is the most sophisticated of the three activities, Candy (1989: 1) has argued that it ‘seems to be as much a natural human function as breathing’. On this he quoted Emery (1986: 1) as follows:

Research … is an ancient and ubiquitous activity. Curiosity about others and the worlds in which they live has always been displayed through conversation, asking questions, working together to see what happens after different kinds of actions are performed, talking or gossiping about others to tease out intentions and other reasons for behaviour, clarifying and understanding circumstances; all are fundamental research functions.

Candy (1989: 1) concluded his consideration of this point by arguing that it is upon such slender foundations that ‘the whole massive superstructure of “research” is based’.

Notwithstanding the basic foundations of the research process, however, an important challenge for anyone contemplating engaging in it is to try to find a pathway from one’s ‘natural’ research inclination into this ‘massive superstructure’ which Candy talks about. One way of proceeding is to view the initial stage in the research process as consisting of two major steps. The first step has its origins in an observation one makes. This observation may arise from viewing something on TV, reading something in the newspaper, hearing something on the radio, becoming cognisant of a particular policy issue, or being faced with some difficult decision to make. What may quickly follow is some curiosity, perplexity, confusion or doubt on one’s part. This curiosity, perplexity, confusion or doubt, in turn, prompts one to want to know something. The result is that one begins to engage in research.

The second major step in the initial stage of the research process often follows quite rapidly. Here the practice, as Bouma (2000: 25) has put it, involves ‘moving from an ordinary everyday question to a researchable question by focusing on one aspect of the issue arousing your interest’. Bouma further argues that the goal in this step is to produce a clear statement of the problem to be studied. Such a statement of a problem must explicitly identify the issues on which the researcher has chosen to focus. This, as he sees it, requires one to ‘clarify the issues’ and narrow the ‘focus of concern’ (Bouma 2000: 36).

Harry Wolcott, the famous anthropologist of education, suggested a way of thinking to help one engage in these related processes of clarifying the issue and narrowing the focus. His position is that as inquiry proceeds, the idea that prompted it should become both better formed and better informed (Wolcott 1992: 7). To this end, he suggested three categories which ‘form a modest typology’ of the ideas that guide inquiry: reform-driven ideas, concept-driven ideas and ‘big’ theory-driven ideas. This can be represented diagrammatically as shown in Table 1.1. Also, each of these positions is spelt out in recent work by Bhattacharya (2017) in a suitable manner that is helpful for beginning researchers.

Table 1.1 A typology of ideas that guide inquiry

Inquiry based on reform-driven ideas

Inquiry based on concept-driven ideas

Inquiry based on ‘big’ theory-driven ideas

It is arguable that most research in education and the social sciences has its origin in reform-driven ideas. On this, it is important to keep in mind that Wolcott uses ‘reform’ as a blanket term to include ‘problem-oriented’ and ‘decision-oriented’ research. What underlies all research questions articulated within the category, however, is an ‘assumption on the part of the researcher that things are not right as they are or, most certainly, are not as good as they might be’ (Wolcott 1992: 15). Examples of research questions which could be posed in this vein include the following:

• What is the most effective leadership style to adopt in schools?

• Does smoking affect academic performance?

• What is the extent of truancy in inner-city high schools?

• Does a concurrent programme of teacher education where students engage in teaching practice throughout their years of undergraduate study produce better-skilled teachers than a consecutive programme where students first study for a degree in a substantive subject-area and then undertake a one-year teacher preparation programme?

The researcher who poses questions such as these usually feels that all is not well with current practice and is prompted to bring about change directed at trying to improve the situation.

Wolcott’s second category of ideas that guide inquiry are those identified as ‘concepts’. These come in all shapes and sizes: ‘Concepts point in an orienting consciousness-raising, but saucily independent manner’ (Wolcott 1992: 11). He went on to state that working at this level with, for example, a concept like ‘culture’, ‘can provide a focus without allowing the seeming absence of theoretical structure to become overbearing’ (Wolcott 1992: 11). The main concern of those adopting such an approach is with attempting to describe aspects of culture, an activity often referred to as ethnography. Goetz and Le Compte (1984: 17) described the activity thus:

The purpose of educational ethnography is to provide rich, descriptive data about the contexts, activities, and beliefs of participants in educational settings. Typically, such data represent educational processes as they occur. The result of these processes is examined within the whole phenomenon; isolation of outcomes is rarely considered.

Researchers who are informed by a cultural perspective in their investigations are said to succeed if their research reports enable readers to behave appropriately in the particular cultural settings they purport to describe (Bogdan and Biklen 1984: 38).

LeCompte and Preissle (1993: 137–8) have provided a number of other examples to illustrate how research can be concept-guided. They pointed out that Sindell (1974) developed research questions in his study of the socialization of Mistassini Cree children from factors identified as important in Bandura’s social learning theory. They also pointed out that Spindler’s examination of the impact of the school on perspectives on urbanization among inhabitants of a rural German village drew explicitly from assimilation theory (Spindler 1974). Another trend they highlighted was a tendency in much research on adolescent alienation from school to draw heavily on the concepts of hegemony, symbolic violence and the political context of knowledge and meaning (LeCompte and Preissle 1993: 138).

Wolcott’s third category of ideas that guide inquiry encompass those ideas that relate to an overall ‘grand’ or ‘big theory’. He quoted the sociologist Robert Merton in this regard, where Merton spoke of ‘the all-inclusive systematic effort’ to develop a unified theory that explains ‘all the observed uniformities of social behaviour, social organization and social change’ (Merton 1968: 39). Wolcott argued that those who ‘think theory’ in this ‘grand’ sense are attempting to ‘link up in someone’s – perhaps even their own – Big Theory, everything that matters to everyone’ (Wolcott 1992: 7).

This book is about undertaking a particular type of research from the point of view of Wolcott’s third category of ideas that guide inquiry, namely, that of ‘big theory’. The argument running throughout is that research in education and the social sciences can, in fact, be underpinned by one of four major ‘big’ theories, namely, positivism, interpretivism, critical theory, and postmodernism. Also, it is held that each of these ‘big theories’ can, in turn, be broken down into a number of related theoretical perspectives. For example, the interpretivist ‘big theory’ embraces such theoretical positions as hermeneutics, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and phenomenology. This categorization of ‘big’ theory can be represented as shown in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 Interpretivist paradigm and related theoretical perspectives

‘Big’ theories	Four major theoretical perspectives withinthe interpretivist ‘big’ theory
Positivism
Interpretivism	• Hermeneutics
	• Ethnomethodology
	• Phenomenology
	• Symbolic interactionism
Critical theory
Postmodernism

The specific aim of this book is to provide new researchers with a guide to planning qualitative research projects based upon interpretivism as the ‘big theory’ and upon symbolic interactionism within it. At the same time, as readers progress through the work they should come to recognise that all research, including that guided by concept-driven ideas and problem-focused ideas, can ultimately be mapped back to show that it has ‘grand theory’ or ‘big theory’ foundations. Yet, this is not a book which explicitly seeks to engage readers in such a backward-mapping exercise. Instead, in setting out to demonstrate how research projects can be planned by adopting interpretivism as one’s ‘big theory’ – and adopting within it the theoretical position of ‘symbolic interactionism’ – it is recognised that one can also plan research projects based upon one of the other ‘big theories’.

Before moving directly to such planning issues, however, it is necessary to clarify a number of central ideas so that the theoretical foundations of the remainder of this book are clearly established. The rest of this chapter provides such clarification. First, consideration is given to the position that the idea of research as being guided by ‘big theory’ is more usually talked and written about as being research which is ‘paradigm guided’. To this end, the notion of a research paradigm is explained and the four major ‘big theories’ already outlined are considered in terms of how each constitutes a research paradigm. Consideration is also given to the matter of how research questions are posed differently, depending upon the research paradigm one adopts.

The chapter then moves on to argue that a paradigm’s approach to research requires us to adopt a view of the process as involving much more than simply rushing headlong into selecting appropriate methods for the investigation of a problem. Certainly, examining any problem or hypothesis requires the use of methods in the form of techniques to gather and analyse data. However, once we have grasped the notion of what is involved in a paradigm-guided approach to research, we quickly come to recognise the need for a strategy, plan of action, process or design to link our paradigm-guided questions with particular methods. This is what is referred to when we argue for the need for an appropriate methodology. A wide variety of such methodologies exist, ranging from survey research to ethnography, from experimental research to grounded theory, and from discourse analysis to heuristic inquiry.

Overall, then, the intention of the remainder of this chapter is to provide an overview of:Such an overview should provide appropriate scaffolding for an understanding of why one particular type of qualitative research project can be planned where:

• the paradigm is interpretivism;

• the specific theoretical position adopted within the paradigm is symbolic interactionism;

• the methodology is grounded theory;

• the research methods are semi-structured interviewing, participant and non-participant observation, and document study.

• the idea of paradigms;

• the basic ideas of the four major paradigms;

• the distinction between methodology and research methods.

This understanding should, in turn, place one in a better position to understand the remaining chapters of the book, where the emphasis is very much on how research projects based on such a framework can be planned.

Research paradigms

At this point it is important to once again recall Wolcott’s (1992) third type of research, namely, that of ‘grand theory’ or ‘big theory’. As has already been pointed out, the more sophisticated term used when referring to such research is to talk about it as being ‘paradigm guided’. In considering what is meant by this it is important to recognise from the outset the point made by Punch (1998: 28) that paradigm is a complex term. He elaborates as follows:

As used in social science it [paradigm] means a set of assumptions about the social world, and about what constitutes proper techniques and topics for inquiry. In short, it means a view of how science should be done. It is a very broad term, encompassing elements of epistemology, theory and philosophy, along with methods. Paradigms have been the subject of vigorous debate.

(Punch 1998: 28)

Usher (1996) is helpful in developing this point. He proceeds by highlighting some aspects of the thinking of Thomas Kuhn whose major work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), played a significant part in ‘changing our understanding of science, research and scientific method’ (Usher 1996: 14).

In Kuhn’s work the concept of the paradigm is defined both as ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, shared by members of a given scientific community’ (Kuhn 1970: 75) and ‘as an exemplar or exemplary way of working that functions as a model for what and how to do research, what problems to focus on and work on’ (Usher 1996: 15). On this, Usher states:

Paradigms are frameworks that function as maps or guides for scientific communities, determining important problems or issues for its members to address and defining acceptable theories or explanations, methods and techniques to solve defined problems. When a paradigm becomes settled and dominant within a scientific community, Kuhn calls the research carried out ‘normal science’. This way of doing research is largely characterised by routine, problem-solving discontinuities (which Kuhn calls ‘scientific revolutions’). Here a paradigm shift occurs, dominant paradigms are overthrown and new paradigms take their place.

(Usher 1996: 15)

He concludes by saying that a paradigm shift involves a new way of looking at the world, and hence new ways of working, or new ways of doing ‘normal’ science.

Over the past 30 years or so there has been much talk and debate about the various major paradigms which exist and which influence the production of research in education and the social sciences. Some researchers and theorists have produced ‘typological charts listing the principal schools of contemporary research methodology along with some definitive statements for each’ (Bhattacharya 2017: 2; Carspecken 1996: 1). These include charts where paradigms are compared according to their ontological and epistemological assumptions. Such charts, of which that of Guba and Lincoln (1994: 109) is probably the best known, are invaluable in that they illustrate a range of frameworks which are of help in locating and clarifying the paradigm within which we might wish to locate our research. Also, they help to remind us that all research in education and the social sciences is either implicitly or explicitly conducted within a framework of theoretical assumptions.

One could engage in a review of the various charts which exist. To do so, however, would be to confuse many readers from the outset. In order to make sense of them one would need quite a background in philosophy in general, and philosophy of science in particular. The contention is that a more practical way to proceed is to commence by outlining a simple typology of paradigms. To such an end, the particular typology chosen here is that developed by Connole et al. (1993: 38–9), with its four paradigms – positivist, interpretivist, critical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: An overview of the research process
• II. Extending the range of interpretivist studies
• References
• Index