Researching Education from the Inside

Investigations from within

Pat Sikes, Anthony Potts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134076963
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Researching Education from the Inside focuses on research projects that are undertaken by people who already have an attachment to the institutions or social groups on which their investigations are based. They can, therefore, be considered to be 'insiders'. In some cases their insider positioning is primarily important because it gets them access to the particular people and/or the phenomena that they want to investigate. At other times, however, aspects of their own 'insidership' will, in itself, come under scrutiny.

Insider researchers need to consider five distinct stages that can lead to ethical dilemmas, namely: Entering the field, Being in the field, Leaving the field, Writing, and Disseminating the results. This book covers these stages whist considering important issues such as:

• Access,
• Choice of research methods,
• Field relationships,
• Involvement of informants,
• Confidentiality and anonymity,
• Interpretation of findings including validity and reliability.

Failure to properly consider these key factors can lead to disastrous consequences for any research but it can be a special problem for insider investigators. These vital issues are discussed by an impressive range of contributors in this ground-breaking book, making it an invaluable resource for anyone participating in Insider Research.

Section 1
General issues

Chapter 1
Introduction

What are we talking about? And why?

Pat Sikes and Anthony Potts

This book is about research that can be described as ‘research from the inside’, as ‘insider research’ or as ‘member research’. Whilst we are aware that each of these descriptors could mean different things to different people, we are going to resist the temptation to offer a definitive definition. This is not because we condone academic sloppiness or because we are lazy, but rather because we are uncomfortable about creating categories which can lead to what one of us has called Cinderella’s slipper syndrome (Sikes, 2006, p. 46) which occurs when writers and researchers end up behaving like Cinderella’s sisters and resort to remorselessly cutting, slicing and distorting what they have to say in order to make it fit. Consequently, in the chapters that make up the volume, you will find that contributors use whatever term seems most appropriate at any particular time. This, we feel, is an approach in keeping with our stance of acknowledging multiple perspectives and respecting the ways in which researchers chose to define and describe their own work.

The focus of the book is research projects that are undertaken by people who, before they begin to research, already have an attachment to, or involvement with, the institutions or social groups in, or on, which their investigations are based. They can, therefore, be considered to be ‘insiders’. In some cases, their insider positioning (their ‘insiderness’) is primarily important because it gets them access to the particular people (e.g. school boys) and/or the phenomena that they want to investigate (e.g. research assessment exercises). At other times, however, aspects of their own ‘insidership’ will, in themselves, come under scrutiny, when, for instance, they are studying topics such as the experience of institutional inspection, the maintenance of status hierarchies, or what it is like to be a gay man studying gay men.

In recent years, research from the inside has become increasingly common, particularly in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand, where its growing popularity can be seen to be associated with rising participation in professional higher degree programmes. As part of these courses, students are often required to undertake a substantial piece of research and complete a thesis related to their professional interests and concerns. Doing this research in their own workplace is often the easiest, if not the only, practical option, given that most of these people are studying at the same time as being in a fulltime job, such as teaching in a school, college or university, or working in educational administration, social care, health sciences, business and law (Scott, Brown, Lunt and Thorne, 2004). These are all fields where relationships are central, both in terms of relationships with colleagues and with regard to the ‘clients’ these institutions serve. When a teacher or social worker or nurse also becomes a researcher, existing relationships are, inevitably, in some ways altered as new (research related) concerns and understandings are brought into the frame. Often, too, relationship changes come about as a consequence of the researcher obtaining new information about the people they work with. In some cases the change may have ‘positive’ consequences, in others, it won’t, but, regardless of outcomes, the introduction of a researcher identity has, at least, a potential impact upon the status quo, which needs to be anticipated and planned for, insofar as that is possible.

But it is not just with regard to obtaining personal qualifications that research from the inside is being more widely used. Institutional self-evaluations and peer reviews, whereby insiders investigate their colleagues’, clients’ and stakeholders’ perceptions and experiences, is becoming commonplace, and is even, in some instances, taking the place of scrutiny and assessment by independent inspectorates (for UK education based examples, see http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/schools/dataandinformationsystems.cfm; Blanchard, 2002; McBeath, 1999). This type of inspectorial, evaluatory research can have significant consequences for people’s work loads, their conditions of service, their career development, promotion prospects, pay, and even for their continued employment. Inevitably, given this degree of import, relationships between those conducting the ‘research’ and those being investigated can be affected. The situation can be complicated when, in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, senior staff who are also enrolled on higher degree programmes, decide to use the evaluations or reviews they are required to do as part of their job, as the focus for a study. Obviously, taking such a decision requires very careful thought.

And then there is practitioner action research (see Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Elliott, 1991; Somekh, 2005). This, it could be argued, has moved from being the interest of a relatively small and committed number of individuals, concerned primarily to develop their practice and improve the experiences of their clients, into the mainstream repertoire of strategies for continuing professional development. Action research unequivocally sets out to make a difference and to effect change, change that can have consequences beyond the immediate focus on and at which the research was directed. In some cases too, action research which aims towards social justice ends can challenge orthodoxies, established hierarchies and long-held privileges. Redistribution to achieve greater equity may not be welcomed by those who may have to relinquish something that they value and have come to see as theirs. For example, action research which seeks to change beliefs, attitudes and practices related to gender and sex differentiation may not be universally welcomed if it ‘threatens’ traditional patterns of behaviour and achievement (e.g. as it did when girls begin to ‘outperform’ the boys, as seems to have happened in the UK and elsewhere following implementation of strategies to increase female participation). Similarly, action research projects which result in changes to working practices which have traditionally placed minimal demands on staff, may face resistance. People who lead such research can find that their relationships with colleagues alter, and not always to the good.

From the 1980s onwards, there has been an auto/biographical turn within the social sciences and this is also significant when it comes to considering growing interest in, and use of, insider approaches. Nowadays, researchers almost routinely include a declaration of their positionality in their research writings. This is because it is generally accepted that biographical experiences arising from individual and social characteristics have (more or less) influence on, and import for, the research interests people have, the methodologies they adopt, the methods they use, how they interpret and analyse their data, and the ways in which they re-present and disseminate their ‘findings’. Taking this concern with personal involvement a step further, autoethnographers (see Bochner, 2000; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Ellis, 2004; Jones, 2005; Journal of Contemporary Ethnography: Thematic Edition, 2006) research their own lived experiences, relating these to broader contexts and understandings in much the same way as life historians analyse life stories in the light of historical, sociological and/or psychological theories and perspectives. Autoethnographers can be seen to be taking an insider stance, both personally, in terms of their introspective investigation, and with regard to the institutions and groups they belong to and in which the experiences they are researching are situated (see, for instance, Sikes and Clark, 2004). Once again, the practical and pragmatic benefits that autoethnography offers to a busy person, working full time whilst studying can, at first sight, seem to be obvious. However, autoethnography, like any other type of research from the inside, can raise issues for relationships, can give rise to ethical dilemmas and, what is more, can provoke personal questioning and uncertainties which may be uncomfortable and difficult to deal with. It is far from an easy option (see Ellis, 2004).

As even our brief consideration has suggested, people have different and complex motivations for embarking on inside, insider research. There are those who do it primarily in order to gain a further and higher qualification, perhaps for career progression purposes. Others do it out of a concern to change, develop and improve practice; some may get involved to prove or disprove a point, and so on. Whatever the reason, researchers need to be aware of what they may be letting themselves and those they study, in for. They need to give thought to the possible consequences that may follow from such investigations because this is research which can give rise to specific methodological and ethical issues.

Highlighting and discussing some of these concerns is the intention of this book, which we decided to put together on the basis of our respective experiences (a) of undertaking research from the inside and (b) of many years of working with graduate students doing this type of investigation. We have personal, informed knowledge of the sorts of things that can happen and so have all of the other contributors. We have all been involved in some form of research from the inside and all of us have lived to tell the tale (albeit sometimes only just). We write, therefore, from the basis of ‘real’, grounded experience – warts and all!

Groundings

Insider research has, traditionally, been a term associated with anthropologists and sociologists adopting an ethnographic approach within a specific social setting: namely – and variously – ‘the field’. Key differences between the work of these people and the sort of research we are considering in this book are:

• that anthropologists and ethnographers primarily go into the field in order to do their research, whereas our contributors and, we anticipate, many of our readers will usually already be established in the setting where they intend to conduct their investigations. The intention is, usually, that they will be staying there and will continue to do whatever it was that they were doing before they began the research. These people are, in many cases, researching professionals, as opposed to professional researchers (Wellington and Sikes, 2006, p. 725) or to use Gregory’s (1997) slightly different notion, ‘scholarly professionals’ as opposed to ‘professional scholars’;
• the researchers we have in mind will come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines and will use a range of methodologies and methods; they won’t all be sociologists and nor will they all be doing ethnography. Some may, for instance, be using formally administered closed questionnaires and interviews, whilst others might be conducting controlled experiments which will be analysed and interpreted using statistical tests.

Having said this, and reiterating our earlier point, we do not intend to imply that we believe that there are clear boundaries to, or, indeed, specific categories or types of insider research from the inside. For example, some ethnographers and anthropologists were already in what became their field and ‘opportunistically’ (Reimer, 1977) took advantage of their position to undertake research. David Hayano (1982), who studied professional poker players whilst being one himself, is a case in point.

Research from the inside can often be seen to have its roots in the work of Robert Park and other faculty and students of the department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. These sociologists, and those who followed in their stead, believed that understanding required immersion in the field and data, which provided insight into how and why people did what they did in the ways that they did it. This belief, particularly when manifest in the researcher adopting the role of a participant observer, posed a fundamental challenge to dominant notions of the researcher as necessarily occupying an objective, distanced observer, ‘God’s eye’ type of position. In addition and for various reasons, the Chicago School type research was often focused on the marginalised and disadvantaged, with the emphasis being on redressing imbalances. Howard Becker’s (1967) question ‘whose side are we on?’, with the answer being ‘the underdog’s’, reflects this perspective, as it also underlies the work of those who adopt critical theory and research approaches (see Kinchloe and McLaren, 2005, for an overview).

A criticism often levelled at inside and insider research concerns the extent to which it can be considered to be ‘objective’ and hence ‘reliable’ and ‘valid’ according to the so-called scientific criteria. A further associated complication arises from the implications and consequences of researchers ‘going native’, that is, of ‘over-identification with the culture and group under observation, getting too close … or staying too long’ (Stein, 2006, p. 72). ‘Going native’ means researchers adopt the same perspectives as those they are studying. Sara Delamont asserts that ‘going native’ is an ‘objectionable term’ (2002, p. 37) and we agree with her, for the phrase carries connotations both of distasteful colonial attitudes and of researcher superiority. Ethnographers are often exhorted to ‘make the familiar strange’ and ‘the strange familiar’. This is good advice when seeking to gain a view of a situation which includes a number of participants of whom each may have their own personal perspective on matters. It is also worth bearing in mind that, as Susan Matoba Adler suggests, all researchers who investigate social situations are ambivalently positioned, simply because they themselves are social beings. They (and we) are always ‘insiders in some contexts and outsiders in other situations’ (Adler, 2004, p. 107).

For the inside researcher who is also a ‘proper’ member of the setting they are investigating, the problems associated with criticisms around failure to maintain a distance in order to be able to take a clear and an unbiased non-partisan approach are significant and complicated. This is because adopting a distanced approach may, in some cases, be inimical to doing one’s job in the way in which one has been hired to do it. People are expected to be loyal and committed to their employer and employing organisation and, whilst loyalty and commitment do not preclude taking an objective stance in order to develop and improve, detachment can be problematic in institutional terms. Without wishing to appear to be flippant, our view on objectivity is similar to that of Lawrence Stenhouse’s when he wrote, ‘whilst I acknowledge the need to take up the issue of objectivity in social research, it is not an issue I am well equipped to handle, partly because I personally have been untroubled by the problem’ (in Rudduck and Hopkins, 1985, p. 14). Our take on what Stenhouse is saying here is that he doesn’t waste time worrying about the issue when there is research to be done and situations to be improved.

Indeed, and in general, it is as a result of people like Stenhouse popularising and championing insider research, along with what some commentators have referred to as paradigm shifting (e.g. Kuhn, 1962), others (e.g. Flyvbjerg, 2001) have talked about in terms of fashion, and which Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (e.g. 2005) refer to as ‘moments’, that we are in a position to be discussing research of this type as legitimate and ‘proper’ research that can be submitted for higher degrees and published in peer reviewed academic journals. As our contributors’ chapters show, research from the inside can be both scholarly and rigorous. That it may not be the same as some other forms of social science work is, on one level, neither here nor there. As Bill Tierney put it, we should:

refrain from the temptation of either placing our work in relation to traditions or offering a defensive response. I increase my capacity neither for understanding nor originality by a defensive posture. To seek new epistemological and methodological avenues demands that we chart new paths rather than constantly return to well-worn roads and point out that they will not take us where we want to go.

(1998, p. 68)

Nevertheless, regardless of the paths they take and the approaches that inside researchers chose to use, their work should be, at all times and in all respects, ethical. We have alread...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• SECTION 1 General issues
• SECTION 2 Philosophical and theoretical issues
• SECTION 3 Insider research in schools
• SECTION 4 Insider research in universities
• SECTION 5 Conclusion