Understanding Social Research

Thinking Creatively about Method

Jennifer Mason, Angela Dale, Jennifer Mason, Angela Dale

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848601451, 9781848601444
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Jennifer Mason and Angela Dale?s book seeks to set out cutting-edge developments in the field of social research and to encourage students and researchers to consider ways of learning from different approaches and perspectives in such a way as to make their own research richer, more insightful and more rewarding.

Social Researching brings together a wide variety of research methods - both qualitative and quantitative - to help students and researchers to consider the relative benefits of adopting different approaches for their own research work.

The authors clearly identify the most appropriate methods for different research questions and also highlight areas where it might be fruitful to compliment different methods with each other or exploit creative tensions between them. The book is therefore a highly practical guide which also seeks to draw readers outside their methodological comfort zones.

This book includes:

- Critical coverage of issues in research design;

- Expert experience in many methodological fields;

- An overview of the many different ways to approach similar research problems;

- Coverage of the tensions between different methodological approaches;

- Examples of excellence in research design and practice;

- An examination of how to turn methodological tensions into richer research practice.

The methods covered include highly innovative, ?cutting-edge? approaches and they are demonstrated in terms of their transferability between the different social sciences. This inter-disciplinary approach is complimented by a wide range of strategically chosen examples which demonstrate the authors? pragmatic and creative take on research design.

ONE

Creative Tensions in Social Research

Questions of Method

Jennifer Mason and Angela Dale

Introduction

There are many different approaches to social science research, and a sometimes bewildering array of methods and techniques, each apparently with its own set of advantages, disadvantages and rules. Although there are increasing levels of resources available to help researchers learn about all of these, for the researcher wishing to research something in particular, it can be difficult to work out the implications of using one method over another, or of combining different methods and approaches. This is partly because some methods or combinations may be better suited to particular research questions than others. We are familiar with the idea that the methods we use influence the quality of the knowledge we can generate in response to specific questions, but importantly they also influence its nature and scope – that is, which parts of the phenomena under investigation it throws light upon. So, one challenge is for the researcher to know what kinds of data and knowledge in relation to specific social phenomena a method can potentially produce before being able to make a good judgement about which methods they should choose.

This is further complicated, though, by a second challenge, which is to understand how a researcher’s conceptual or theoretical stance on the empirical social world leads them to choose a particular method and thus to understand the nature or essence of phenomena in a different way from researchers with different orientations. This means, for example, that two researchers may both be interested in researching the concepts of relationships, or place, or social change – the domains we cover in this book – but they might see the very fabric of what those things are in completely different ways. Thus not only do our substantive interests shape the methods we might choose to use, but our methods shape the thing that is the substance of our enquiry too. To borrow a phrase from two of our contributors, methods and substance ‘generate implications for each other’ (Frosh and Saville Young). This creates a bit of a conundrum for researchers; one that cannot entirely be resolved by reference to texts and resources that focus on method abstracted from substance.

The aim of this book is to help researchers to deal with these kinds of challenges. So instead of writing a textbook covering, in the abstract, the main methodological approaches, we have asked experts who are doing exciting and important social science research to give some insights into the methods they use, and how their methods and substantive foci generate implications for each other. We have picked three broad substantive domains – relationships, places and social change – and asked researchers with very different research orientations to describe their approaches, their logic and the kinds of knowledge their methods can yield. Yet our aim has not been to produce a book that speaks only to these substantive interests, but instead to use them as a focus to help readers to think about the interrelationship between methods and substance in a way that they can then apply more generally to their own research.

We would like the book to be useful to researchers who want to learn about, and be open to, the exciting breadth of research being practised in the social sciences. This means thinking creatively about methods (and substance), and being prepared to take on board other ways of thinking and researching, and possibly to combine methods. Sometimes this means moving outside one’s comfort zone. But in order to do that, one needs not only to see the point of doing so, but also to understand the implications in terms of what kinds of knowledge might be produced, and more generally what might be involved in crossing boundaries between approaches.

The chapters that follow inform the reader about different kinds of approach, and they cover a wide range of methods including ethnography, cartography, survey methods, psychosocial methods, biographical methods, historical methods, narrative methods, visual/sensory methods and social network analysis. Each chapter will give the reader a good sense of ‘the point’ of using a particular method in relation to a grounded set of issues, and the kinds of knowledge that are produced. And by reading all the chapters in each section, the reader will gain a good sense of some of the different ways in which methodological approaches can define or influence phenomena under investigation.

However, to fully grasp the implications of using a particular set of methods, or crossing boundaries between approaches, it is important to discuss some core or cross-cutting issues here in the introduction. This chapter is written primarily as a guide for the reader to key points of tension, difference and, sometimes unexpected connection between approaches. These are often more implicit than explicit. In this chapter we provide a guide to ‘what to look out for’, or be alert to, in understanding the implications that a particular approach has for the relationship between methods and substance that we have argued is so crucial to social science research. It is a guide that can be used not only when reading the chapters in this book, but more generally in deciphering social science approaches: when making judgements about which are best suited to one’s own purposes and what might be involved in using and combining them. Hence it is structured around issues that all researchers have to think through and make decisions about when choosing and using methods in real life research.

As you read through the chapters therefore, you may find it helpful to keep a critical eye on how the following kinds of questions and issues – about how the social world is envisaged – figure in the arguments of the authors, both implicitly and explicitly. We are not using conventional distinctions and ‘labels’ that are often applied to perspectives on social science research – such as ‘relativist’, ‘positivist’, ‘realist’, ‘interpretivist’, ‘post-structuralist’ and so on – for several reasons. In part we think that they are sometimes so ‘broad brush’ as to be quite unhelpful in practical terms, for the researcher who is trying to work out how to go about a particular project. Additionally, we are not sure that such labels are always honestly applied or attributed, and often more telling signs of a researcher’s ontological or epistemological positions can be picked up in the way they write about their methods or the accounts they give of their research. Perhaps most importantly though, we think that applying labels can be a little stultifying, since it helps to construct the idea that these are discrete and clearly defined world views, or positions, with little fluidity in them. We want the reader of this book to feel a little more liberated than that, and to embrace the possibility of using approaches with which they may not be very familiar.

What kind of social world is envisaged?

Sometimes authors will spell out explicitly the kind of social world they envisage when they describe the phenomena they are investigating, but at other times this is more implicit or taken-for-granted and, in these instances, the language and vocabulary used can be a telling sign of the kind of ontology being drawn upon, as we shall show.

We set out below some different possibilities for envisaging the social world, all of which appear in some shape or form in this book. As we have suggested, however, that these are not meant to depict discrete world views or research strategies. Instead, they are more like ‘ontological dimensions’. Many researchers would want to adopt a mobile view that traverses or even transcends these, arguing perhaps that the social world is made up of multiple elements or dimensions, which come more or less into view depending upon our perspectives or the methods we use. The point, however, for the reader of this book, is to be able to spot the connections between the kinds of ontology that are expressed or implied by authors (in this book and elsewhere) and the methods and approaches that have been devised to generate knowledge of them. That will enable you both to judge how good the fit is between these (ontology and methods) and also to decide on the value of particular approaches for producing knowledge about the kinds of phenomena that you personally are interested in.

A world of stories and interpretations

Stories and narratives figure in a wide range of research approaches as methods of data generation or analysis; many researchers see stories as good ways of eliciting perspectives on the social world, or of narrating experiences of it. However, here we want to draw attention to approaches where stories have a more fundamental and ontological role – where the social world is itself seen as a ‘storied’ entity, in the sense that stories, involving some kind of sentient composition – where people ‘make’ and ‘tell’ stories, rather than just acting a part in them – are part of its very fabric. This idea can take many different forms, and perspectives that encompass some sense of a world that is storied do not necessarily share other basic premises.

One example comes from Harvey and Knox’s chapter on the ethnography of place which uses the example of road construction projects in Peru. Storytelling figures quite centrally in their chapter. Here is an extract:

Our travels on the roads of Peru taught us a great deal about the specific materiality of roads and, as importantly, about how the layering of materials through which a road appears in the environment as a specific and relatively stable structure also carried with it histories of skills, of trade, of hopes and of struggle. These histories leave their traces in the stories people tell, in the physical make up of a place, and in the daily practices of those we encountered along the way. (Harvey and Knox, Chapter 7, this volume, pp. 116–17)

From this perspective we can see that stories (and histories) are more than just tales about the road – they are part of what the road is, or what a place is.

Thomson’s chapter on researching motherhood provides a different kind of example. She explains that she ‘wanted to capture the “zeitgeist” of contemporary motherhood’. A zeitgeist is the spirit of a particular age or period of history. It seems to us to be a concept very closely connected with stories and storytelling, and certainly Thomson’s chapter is redolent with these. For example, she explains that the research ‘sought to capture the ways in which women might be storying their pregnancies’, and she goes on to argue that:

women draw on publicly available narrative resources in order to ‘story’ their lives and make them intelligible to others (Butler, 2004; Thomson et al., 2009). New stories emerge in the confluence of developing identities and available resources that facilitate both the story telling and its reception (Plummer, 1995). The transition from private story to the generation of a public problem involves struggle and recognition of subjecthood, and the privilege to narrate oneself (rather than to be narrated by others) reflects wider dimensions of social, cultural and economic status (Adkins, 2003; Skeggs, 2004). (Thomson, Chapter 4, this volume, p. 68)

In this example, then, the aim is to investigate a zeitgeist, that involves and is implicated in processes of storying and storytelling. It is not simply that stories yield data about pregnancy and mothering, or about a zeitgeist, but instead that they are fundamentally bound up in what those concepts are.

A third example comes from Weeks’ chapter on understanding change in sexual and intimate life. The object of Weeks’ investigation is history itself, or more particularly historical narratives of sexuality. He says:

Historians also tell each other stories, which they easily assume tell the ultimate truth about the way things were, and are. But we need to learn to understand these narratives better, and especially how they structure meanings into a more or less coherent account of what is happening to us. Narratives or stories are examples of the ways in which ‘reality’ is constituted through sets of beliefs, assumptions and the appropriate selection of evidence. They are powerful because they carry the unconscious assumption that what is being elaborated for the reader is a ‘true history’. But I want to argue that the very act of selection can occlude a complex and more contested history. (Weeks, Chapter 12, this volume, p. 185)

Weeks wants to explore the shaping and dominating role of certain historical narratives and the hidden assumptions that can be traced within them, and to connect these with the ways in which people both live sexuality and campaign for transformation. The very essence of the social world he envisages is one where stories and histories are not simply told about the world, but are woven tightly back into the fabric of both everyday existence and societies and cultures.

We have discussed three different examples of how it is possible to have an ontological view of the social world that is storied, and there are more examples in this book as well as, of course, in the wider world of social research (see the chapters by Mason and Davies [Chapter 2], Elliott [Chapter 14], Frosh and Saville Young [Chapter 3]). We think the examples have in common the idea that the sentient composition of a story, at some level, is a core part of the reality that research seeks to investigate. But there are also many differences between them.

Vocabulary that can sometimes be indicative of this kind of perspective includes: stories, narratives, histories, accounts, perspectives, experiences, traces, interpretations.

A world of socio-architectural structures

Another way of envisaging the social world involves perspectives that operate with some sort of ‘socio-architectural’ view. What we have in mind here are perspectives that see the social landscape in terms of ‘structures’, ‘levels’ or ‘networks’, for example. These are ‘architectural’ characteristics in the sense that they are seen to have a kind of social solidity, with definable and potentially identifiable properties, characteristics or effects. For some resea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Creative Tensions in Social Research: Questions of Method
• Section I Researching Relationships and Personal Life
• Section II Researching Place
• Section III Researching Change
• Index