Understanding Educational Research

David Scott, Robin Usher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134789986
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores educational research in terms of the relationship between epistemology, methodology and practice. Divided into two sections, the first examines the frameworks which underpin the methods educational researchers use. The second looks at a broad spectrum of approaches, including feminist approaches, action research, ethnography and biographical research. The issues covered are central to all within the research community including students undertaking research degrees or research methodology courses.

1 Introduction

David Scott and Robin Usher

The extensive and growing literature on research in education tends to be of two main types. First, there is a ‘technical’ literature where the concern is with practical issues and problems in conducting research in education. Second, there is a literature where the prime concern is to contribute to the ongoing debates about methodological issues and controversies in the social sciences. Both of these have problematic elements. The concentration on purely practical issues and problems leads to an excessive emphasis on methods and techniques, borrowed without examination from the social sciences. The consequence is a trivialisation and technicisation of educational research. On the other hand, the concentration on methodological controversies in the social sciences tends to downgrade the latter to a mere sub-species of social research and results in neglect of the specific problems of an educational research necessarily located in the practice of education.

Since educational resear chmust of necessity be social in its orientation, it cannot entirely dissociate itself from the discourses of social research. However, this does not imply that it should be trapped in the latter’s often sterile dichotomies and questionable paradigms. There is a need therefore to look anew at educational research paradigms and the epistemological contexts of educational research. This position, while recognising the contiguity of educational research and educational practice, does not commit educationalists to technicising research. While accepting the need for educational researchers to possess appropriate research skills, there is also a need for educational practitioners to become critical ‘readers’ and ‘writers’ of research.

Accordingly, this book explores educational research in terms of the relationship between epistemology, methodology and practice. The various authors have considered these issues not in an abstract way but in relation to researching educational practice. At the same time, they have attempted to relate research to educational practice in terms of wider epistemological and methodological contexts. These frameworks, which underpin and legitimate methods used by researchers to investigate educational processes, systems and institutions are treated as problematic. Questions which are often taken for granted are brought to the surface and examined: what is legitimate knowledge in educational research? What is the relationship between ‘educational theory’ and the collection and analysis of data? How reliable and valid are conclusions drawn from particular collections of data about educational issues? How do research methods and techniques relate to current epistemological controversies about representation and reality in education?

This book therefore examines the philosophical and socio-cultural contexts of educational research and relates the latter to contemporary paradigm shifts such as feminism, critical theory and postmodernity. In the latter part of the book, a number of distinct, innovative and in some cases controversial approaches such as evaluation, action research, feminist research, ethnography and biographical research are critically examined. Each of the authors relates their approach to the framework presented here and in the first part of the book.

Robin Usher, in Chapter 2, refuses to treat educational research simply as a ‘technology’, a set of methods, skills and procedures to be implemented. Arguing that research should be seen as a social practice, he explores the implications of this position. This involves looking at traditional epistemological questions to do with what constitutes legitimate knowledge, models of explanation, theory-justification and acceptance, the nature of objectivity, probability and causality, and different traditions such as empiricism, rationalism and realism. Indeed, he argues that educational research is characterised by adiversity of purpose, a diversity closely related to the types of questions that historically have been asked in and about it. There is therefore a need to examine those historical, political and socio-economic contexts within which it operates, and the extent tow hich they constitute a paradigm shift or a dispersal of paradigms. Paradigms are not simply ways of looking at the world, but are imbued with the workings of power/knowledge (Foucault 1980). Strategies of educational research have therefore to be understood in relation to this.

In Chapter 3 he takes this argument one stage further and addresses the important issues of reflexivity and textuality. Having identified a repressed textual, and, it should be said, reflexive, dimension to most educational research, he argues that there is a need to bring these to the surface and inscribe them in the texts themselves.Authors frequently attempt to conceal their authorship, yet they rarely succeed. Whether it is possible to write without ‘authority’, to produce the ‘writerly’ text (Barthes 1975), is controversial. Much depends on whether the epistemological and ontological assumptions that researchers as writers make about the world are foregrounded or allowed to remain hidden. To some extent, this is also a question of power in the sense of a research community’s power to exclude and repress.

David Scottin Chapter 4 examines the meaning of ‘data’ in the context of educational research and the relationship of these meanings to theory and practice in education. He focuses on the epistemological and ontological assumptions of experimental, survey, correlational, ethnographic and case study research, and in particular on political, ethical and reflexive problems. He argues that our knowledge of the social world, and in particular, the way we understand education, can only be secured if we take account of the views and perspectives of the social actors that are central to the activities we wish to describe. But this creates problems as to how we conceptualise the relationship between the researcher and the researched. The social actor always offers a view of the past mediated through their present understanding projected into the future (Ricoeur 1991). This leaves a gap between the text and what it refers to that is difficult to bridge.

In Chapter 5, David Scott looks at the various attempts that have been made to produce a set of specifications to judge quality in educational research. He considers a number of attempts by academic researchers from different traditions, all of whom have attempted to specify directly ways of differentiating ‘good’ from ‘bad’ research. Inevitably, he is concerned here with questions such as: if we abandon (for good reasons) correspondence versions of reality, do we then abandon the search for a coherent set of validity criteria? If the research text can only be retrospectively deconstructed rather than used to inform practice in a prescriptive manner, what sense is there in its production?

These questions have a particular relevance to educational evaluation, since its avowed purpose is to inform and improve practice. Janet Harland in Chapter 6 examines the theory and practice of evaluation research as it has come to be understood and practised over the past thirty years in different institutional, local and national policy contexts, and focuses on the politics and ethics of this type of research, methods of data collection and analysis, styles of reporting for different audiences, fieldwork ethics and skills, and contractual conditions for independent research. Again she poses questions about the relationship between educational theory and practice, which are taken up in the next chapter.

Ian Bryant in Chapter 7 conceptualises action research as a form of hermeneutical enquiry oriented to change as well as to understanding. Its primary concern is to widen understanding beyond, rather than develop knowledge within, the boundaries of academic disciplines on the one hand, and ‘practical concerns’ on the other. He examines the characteristics of action research, as revealed in action research projects, and in particular shows how action, understanding and change are mutually interactive. Action research has come to be associated with the notion of the reflective practitioner. This notion is examined in relation to the theory–practice problematic in educational research.

Another form of hermeneutic enquiry, albeit of a radical kind, is feminist research which addresses in particular the relationship between the researcher andwhat they are researching, and the value-impregnated nature of all such enquiry. Pat Usher, from a postmodernist vantage point, challenges in Chapter 8 the fundamental assumptions on which modernist thought is based, in particular the commitment to universal concepts of truth, objectivity, observer neutrality and methodologies believed to guarantee the ‘truth’. Specifically, she challenges its gendered and weighted dualisms, for example, rational/irrational, subject/object, culture/nature, that structure thought and action, and argues that masculinity is always associated with the first element and privileged over the second which is always associated with femininity. In particular, she addresses the question of how participatory dialogue and reflexive approaches to research can be practised in empirical work.

In order to understand these reflexive approaches, relationships between researchers and the objects of their research need to be explored. David Scott in Chapter 9 assesses the relevance of ethnographic methods to the study of educational processes, institutions and texts. He identifies a number of important problems with a naive ethnographic approach: that the researcher can gain direct access to educational settings by close immersion in those activities which constitute them. He argues that understanding is always located within traditions, self-referencing and mutually incommensurable. This creates particular problems for the ethnographer seeking to bridge the gap between them.

Finally, Michael Erben discusses in his chapter the purposes and methods of biographical research. The purpose of biography or life-history research is to examine the manner in which social context and individual lives intersect. It then becomes an enterprise in which the strengths of both phenomenological and structuralist perspectives are utilised in the understanding of individual persons or selves. But this applies to the researcher as well as to the person or persons being researched. It is the tension between these two processes which gives the study of biography its particular importance, especially with regard to educational activities.

Robin Usher and David Scott close the book by drawing together the threads of the various arguments developed in the preceding chapters, while at the same time relating the theoretical framework developed in the first part to the various accounts of different educational research strategies in the second.

Finally, there is a need to stress that the authors do not write from the same perspective, and indeed, it would be surprising if they did. Social theory and epistemology are characterised by a theoretical pluralism and thus any one definition is inevitably controversial. The reader looking for consensus is bound to be disappointed. All the authors, however, have moved beyond advocacy of a naive form of positivism. Some argue from a modified hermeneutic position; others from a postmodernist stance, with its stress on the decentred self, the separation of semantics from syntactics, and the questioning of universal notions of truth and objectivity; still others occupy more pragmatic ground and locate themselves within deliberative discourses (Walsh 1993).

However, what formally unites them is an interest in a number of fundamental questions central to the study of education: how can we characterise the relationship between educational theory and practice? What is the role of values in educational enquiry? How should we understand the relationship between data-collection from educational settings and the development of educational theory? What sense can we make of educational theory? In short, this book explores the complex set of relations between epistemology, methodology and practice with particular reference to the study of education, and argues that these issues are frequently disguised and/or neglected. To surface and foreground them, as this book has attempted to do, is an important part of the process of better understanding.

REFERENCES

Barthes, R. (1975) S/Z, London: Jonathan Cape.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings 1972–1977, C. Gordon (ed.), Brighton: Harvester.

Ricoeur, P. (1991) ‘Life in Quest of Narrative’ in D.Wood (ed.) On Paul Ricoeur, London: Routledge. Walsh, P. (1993) Education andMeaning: Philosophy in Practice, London: Cassell.

Part I
Frameworks

2 A critique of the neglected epistemological assumptions of educational research

Robin Usher

Science is a human activity. Therefore whatever we as scientists do as we do science has validity and meaning: as any other human activity does only in the context of human coexistence in which it arises.

(Maturana 1991: 30)

The focus of this chapter is a critical exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of research, specifically the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie different research traditions – assumptions which have tended in the main to be largely unexamined in relation to the research process. It will be argued that it is the failure to examine these assumptions which leads to research normally being understood as a ‘technology’, as simply a set of methods, skills and procedures applied to a defined research problem. The quote from Maturana above alerts us to the fact that ‘science takes place within the context of human coexistence’ and I take this to mean that science (i.e. research) is a social practice, and that therefore what it says and what it does is significantly located within that context.

Having said this, however, it is certainly the case that until quite recently the dominant view has been that, although research investigates particular social contexts, its warrant, or the validity of its knowledge, must come from being located outside of any context. A feeling of strangeness is still evoked in the face of the claim that research is a social practice, yet it is only by making such a claim that it becomes possible both to examine the activity of research critically and to understand how research may itself be a critical activity.

Before proceeding further, however, I must emphasise that what follows is written from a personal perspective. Different research traditions are examined but it will be clear that I find it impossible to adopt the orthodox stance of complete neutrality and impartiality. Whether such a stance is possible anyway is a key issue to be discussed. Furthermore, having advocated the need for reflexivity I recognise that this is also applicable to my text (the question of reflexivity will be examined in more detail in the next chapter). I strongly hope that readers will also ask reflexive questions about this text and others they are bound to encounter as researchers, including, of course, their own.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF RESEARCH

In answer to the question: what are we doing when we do research? a common answer would be that we are systematically attempting to address and investigate certain pre-defined issues or problems. Of course, in a sense, ‘addressing and investigating’ educational questions, issues and problems is something that is likely also to be found in everyday practice. Does this mean therefore that practitioners are also always researchers? To some extent: yes. As practitioners we are also researchers more often than we think. Certainly, to be effective practitioners we ought to try and be researchers of our practice. But can we in our everyday practice also be researchers in the way in which ‘research’ is conventionally understood?

This raises the question of what characterises research and differentiates it from the kind of problem-solving or finding-out which occurs in everyday practice. In most text-books on research methods the main defining characteristic of research is taken to be its ‘systematic’ nature. Of course, once research is characterised as ‘systematic’ this also suggests related characteristics such as ‘rigorous’ and ‘methodical’. There is no doubt that the correct use of appropriate method is accorded a significant place in all types of research and I shall return to this shortly. For example, empirical research, the most common research form, is commonly described as involving the collection, analysis and presentation of primary data in a rigorous, systematic and methodical way.

In empirical research, data on their own are not considered of much use per se. They assume significance only when used within descriptions, explanations or generalisations. Descriptions answer the question – what is happening? Or they can be more historical in orientation and answer the question – what has happened? Explanations answer the question – why is this happening? – and this ‘why’ generally tends to be answered in terms of a cause. Generalisations are the answer to ‘why’ questions which also utilise causes, but here the explanation always goes beyond a particular setting: for example, not why does X happen in this particular classroom but does it happen in all classrooms and if so is there an underlying and common cause Y? A generalisation is prized precisely because, in not being limited to a particular setting, it is seen as making application possible. Thus generalisations have traditionally been considered the highest level of research...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Frameworks
• Part II: Practices