Doing Research/Reading Research

Re-Interrogating Education

Paul Dowling, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135653439
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This bestselling text enables beginning researchers to organise and evaluate the research they read, and to plan and implement small scale research projects of their own. It gives structured, practical guidance on:

• the development of a research question
• techniques of data collection
• qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis
• the writing and dissemination of research.

• 
  
  

The authors present research as a principled activity that begins with the establishing and structuring of theoretical and empirical fields and research findings as serving to ask questions of educational practice rather than directing it.

This revised and updated second edition includes a new chapter dealing with the complex issue of research ethics. It also includes consideration of digital technologies and new media, both as settings of research and research tools, the chapters on qualitative and quantitative analysis have been expanded and the annotated bibliography updated.

The authors have been active researchers in educational studies for more than twenty years. They have also supervised numerous doctoral and masters dissertations and taught research methods programmes in various higher education institutions around the world as well as in the Institute of Education, University of London.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The three Rs of research

This book emerged very gradually out of work on which we have been engaged, individually and collaboratively over a period of ten years or so, prior to the publication of the first edition, and over the ten years since. This work has involved research and research education, teaching about research. The central motivation of the book developed out of two fields of commitment and experiences. These have shaped and been shaped by the general approach to the reading and doing of research that constitutes the principal theme of the book. That is, that research is properly conceived, not, primarily, as a sequence of stages, nor as a collection of skills and techniques, nor as a set of rules, though it entails all of these. Rather, it should be understood, first and foremost, as the continuous application of a particularly coherent and systematic and reflexive way of questioning, a mode of interrogation.

Our first commitment is to research as a distinctive attitude. The products of educational research are currently being thrust more than ever before into the public domain of political positioning and manipulation. But all too much of this output is interrogated exclusively in terms of its summary conclusions and rarely in respect of its methodological integrity. Under these conditions, ‘research’ is very easy. Say we want to argue that homework is good for you. Well, all we have to do is select half a dozen schools that have received positive inspection reports and some others that were negatively evaluated. We then count the number of hours of homework that each school sets. A fast piece of arithmetic on the back of an envelope and, lo and behold, we find that the good schools set more homework than the bad schools. Solution: advocate a national homework policy or, alternatively, leave it to the schools to decide, so long as they publish their individual policies (which headteacher is going to declare themself with the baddies?). Both sides of the political game get ammunition for their manifesto and happily sponsor the ‘researcher’ to keep up the good work. Or they just might employ another one who looks better on the TV – after all, just about anyone can do this!

In the heady atmosphere of serious political debate, no one notices that, since the criteria for positive inspection include setting a lot of homework, the ‘research’ can hardly be described as adding a great deal to the sum of human knowledge.

Our own experience of research is that it is difficult and frustrating and that it takes a lot of time and brings a lot of tears. But eventually, it can generate ways of looking at the world that you didn’t have before and that can motivate real developments in your professional practice as well as spur you on to further research activity.

Our second commitment is to teaching as a distinctive attitude. And here, teaching is not to be understood as a relay of performance objectives to be measured by standardised tasks by a functionary whose relation to the content is challenged rather than fostered by bureaucratic authority. Nor is teaching itself to be conceived as a sequence of phases, a set of skills and techniques, or a set of rules, although, again, it entails all of these. We see teaching as the establishment of an apprenticing relationship between a relatively experienced and a relatively inexperienced practitioner. The aim is the transmission of the practice from the former to the latter; we make no apology for the use of the expression ‘transmission’, though we are not by any means intending that ‘transmission’ entails cloning; research and research methodology are, at their best, creative and developing fields.

The teaching or transmission of one’s practice relates to, but is different from, the doing of one’s practice in its own right and for its own sake. We propose that the relationship between a practice and its transmission is to be understood as one of constructive dialogue. This is particularly apposite where the practice concerned is educational research: research and teaching, then, cast their respective interrogative gazes upon each other; each stands as a critic with respect to the other. The motive force of the dialogue is, of course, sustained only so long as the two do not tend to dissolve into each other. In our own research, we describe the distinctions between practices such as research and teaching in terms of the distinctive nature of the structures of social relations that constitute the fields in which they respectively operate. These relational structures include peer group evaluation, in the case of research, and a hierarchical, apprenticing relationship between transmitter and acquirer, in the case of teaching.

As we have announced, our commitments to research and to teaching have shaped and have been shaped by our general methodology. This general methodology begins with an insistence that dialogue is more productive than monologue in generating new ideas. In the next chapter, we shall describe the fundamental dialogue in research as operating between the theoretical and the empirical. More generally, the approach derives from Dowling’s constructive description, which is presented by Dowling in detail in his own work (Dowling, 1998, 2009). In this work, Dowling also presents his particular organisational language, or theoretical framework, social activity method,¹ which has also informed our presentation of the research mode of interrogation.

These commitments to research and to teaching have also arisen from particular sets of experiences during the ten-year period of gestation of the first edition of this book and the further ten years since its publication. We both, for example, benefited enormously from our own research apprenticeships. In both of our cases, this included a substantial period of time working under the supervision of Basil Bernstein, at the Institute of Education, University of London. A dominant figure in educational research since the 1960s, Bernstein was also an inspirational teacher of research. This is not to say that what we are presenting here is fully in accord with Bernstein’s own approach. Indeed, Dowling (2009) has marked out a number of quite fundamental points of difference between Bernstein’s and his own sociology. However, the mark of a good teacher is the production of constructive practitioners rather than acolytes and, even if he did not dictate this book, he certainly was inspirational in its production.

Our own teaching, over more than twenty years, has included a substantial amount of work on higher degrees programmes, including the supervision of masters dissertations and doctoral theses. We also developed a general course in doing and reading educational research, of which this book is a direct result. The course arose out of teaching that we were initially doing in London, but that has since been taken around the world. In particular, we have taught the course in South Africa, Hong Kong, Cyprus and Brazil. In presenting the course, we have employed a diverse range of pedagogic techniques, including the use of computer-mediated communication modes for the supervision of coursework following the face-to-face components.² The interests of course members have varied from a diverse range of curriculum subject and phase specialisms to cross-curricular interests, such as health education, educational media and information technology, and the more general disciplines such as educational management, educational philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Since the publication of the first edition of the book, our research education activities have focused more on doctoral research and we continue – now, mainly individually – methodological courses for a very diverse range of doctoral students and other individuals and groups carrying out personal or collaborative research. In our experience, it is very often the teacher who gains most in the pedagogic encounter. In a very real sense, then, our production of this book owes a great deal to the enthusiastic participation of and critical evaluation by participants on these courses.

Our practice in presenting our original course was to adapt it to the linguistic, national and disciplinary interests of the members of the particular programme that we were running and, naturally, to develop the general structure and specific activities that constitute the course on the basis of experience and feedback each time we ran it. The book, however, represents a transition. Clearly, we cannot target our readership in quite the same way. We do, nevertheless, have an audience in mind.

We envisage that readers of our book will comprise intending producers and consumers of research in the academic and professional fields of education. The kind of producer we have in mind might be someone who wishes to conduct a small-scale piece of research. Commonly, this might form part of an academic course of study, such as a masters or doctoral programme. Alternatively, it might be a response to a problem or a question that arises in the course of the professional educational activity of, for example, a teacher, an educational administrator, or a health educator. Whatever its origins, the research will involve the collection and analysis of data, which is to say, it will be empirical research. The research will also entail a systematic enquiry that attempts to be self-conscious about its assumptions, method of approach, and its limitations.

The producer of research will need to draw on existing work that is associated with their particular interest; that is to say, they will also be consumers of research. Within an academic context, the author is required to situate their work within the field of research. This means that they must make their consumption explicit. Professional research may or may not place a high value on its bibliography. Nevertheless, the professional researcher as well as the academic researcher can gain much from a consideration of previous research, not least in respect of the ways in which other researchers have selected and deployed their methods of data collection and analysis and organised their arguments.

The category ‘consumer’ of research is, however, more extensive than that of producer. Whereas all producers are (or, at least, should be) consumers, not all consumers are producers. Much of the public output of both academic and professional educational research is aimed at a practitioner as well as a researcher audience. This book, then, is as much about reading research as it is about doing research.

Of course, the producer of research will generally want to address an audience of their own in relaying their work. So, in this book, we shall also address the writing of research. Reading, Researching and Relaying: the three Rs of Research.

Our readership, thus defined, will have diverse interests, backgrounds and needs in terms of research activity. We cannot hope, nor shall we attempt, to meet them all. This book is not, for example, a summary of widely used data collection and analysis techniques. Nor do we spend very much time discussing the metatheoretical (for example, epistemological, ontological) and political debates that take research itself as an object of study. Nor have we compiled a collection of anecdotes on the practical experiences of researchers in the field. There are excellent publications available in each of these categories. We have referred to some of them in our annotated bibliography.

What we have attempted to do can be summarised as four aims. First, and as we have suggested above, this book is not neutral. We approach educational research from a particular position. This position understands research as a particular coherent and systematic and reflexive mode of interrogation. Our first aim is to establish and present this mode of interrogation in a form that is accessible to the beginning researcher, as we have described them. In other words, to apprentice our reader to the research mode of interrogation. We should point out, however, that we have not made major concessions in the sense of diluting the principal ideas in the book. This is a serious position statement as well as a pedagogic resource. Readers will find some, though by no means all, of the book hard work. Second, we aim to achieve this within the context of an introduction to and some development of the language and techniques of research methods. Third, we aim to signal some of the difficulties entailed in research and to provide practical advice on their management. Fourth, we aim to present our approach so that it can be applied in the reading and doing and, ultimately, the presentation of educational research.

The structure of the main body of this book is as follows. Following this introduction, we have included two chapters that focus on the clarification of the context of a research project. Chapter 2 considers the first stages of the development from a general area of interest to the sketching out of relevant theoretical and empirical fields within which the research is to take place. Chapter 3 takes this development further to the sharper delineation of the research problem and empirical setting, including the definition of variables, sampling procedures and so forth.

Chapter 4 is a completely new chapter. It opens up the very important area of research ethics, which was certainly underplayed in the first edition of the book. It is important, again, to understand the content of this chapter and the various guidelines on ethical practice that are associated with the professional research associations as components of a mode of interrogation. These guidelines ask important questions of your research practices; they generally do not provide you with neat answers to these questions.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on issues of data collection. Chapter 5 focuses on observational approaches and the generation of researcher accounts; Chapter 6 considers the eliciting of accounts from others, including the use of questionnaires and interviews. Chapters 7 and 8 move to issues and techniques of data analysis, Chapter 7 emphasising qualitative analysis and Chapter 8 providing a limited introduction to quantitative approaches. Essentially, although we would like readers to read the book in the order in which it is presented, it is possible to read Chapters 4–8 in any order, making use of the cross-references where necessary.

In Chapter 9 we present the research mode of interrogation in a schematic way, drawing on the discussions of the previous chapters. Chapter 10 focuses on the points of entry to and exit from the research process. In the first half of Chapter 10 we shall revisit the initial phase of the research process that is introduced in Chapter 2. This time, we will be able to make use of some of the terminology that has been developed in the intervening chapters. In the second part of the chapter, we shall give some consideration to the process of writing up one’s research. Finally, in Chapter 11, we return to some of the issues raised in this introduction and present our ‘manifesto’ for educational research.

We contend that, in terms of reading on research methodology, it should be possible for a beginning researcher to produce a good quality piece of work in the form of, say, a masters dissertation without going beyond this book. We would not, however, advise it. We have, therefore, included an annotated bibliography that will enable the reader to broaden their methodological understanding both technically and in terms of general methodology. Certainly, we would strongly advise doctoral researchers to read well beyond this book in terms of research methodology.

So, this book cannot turn you into a researcher. Ultimately, you can make that transition only by involving yourself in the practices of research, preferably alongside a more experienced practitioner – possibly your tutor on a higher degree programme. This is why, whenever we have taught this course ourselves, it has been very much a practical activity and this practical nature also characterises our continuing work in research education. We cannot replicate this practical nature in a book, nor are we attempting to. The book stands in relation to your developing research practice in the same kind of relationship as that which we are claiming obtains between educational research and professional educational practices. That is, as a mode of interrogation. Its fundamental role is to challenge you to greater coherence and systematicity and reflexiveness in the research practice that you are now beginning.

This concludes our introduction, save to say that after Chapter 11 we have included an invitation to send us your responses to the book (and your suggestions for future editions). We are giving advance warning of this here so that you can make notes as you go along ;-).

Chapter 2

Declaring an interest

The empirical and theoretical contexts of the research

Empirical and theoretical domains and the research process

This book is concerned with empirical research within the general field of education. By research, we mean an enquiry that seeks to make known something about a field of practice or activity that is currently unknown to the researcher. In referring to the research as empirical, we mean that the enquiry should, in part, justify any claims that it makes in terms of reference to experience of the field to which these claims relate. We shall refer to this field as the empirical field. By introducing this definition, we are trying to establish an attitude, rather than rule out certain kinds of enquiry. For example, suppose that you are interested i...