When researching education and social practices, methodological considerations are no longerâif indeed they ever wereâlinear, seamless, or even consistently coherent. Increasingly, the markers of difference among research methodologies in the social sciences are challenged, ambushed even, as fit-for-purpose methodological relationships are constructed. This edited collection echoes such developmental trajectories from the oppositional stances of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods to the emerging nimble, fluid, recursive, and iterative paradigms evocative of the messiness characterising the web of independent problems that emerge as research progresses (Ackoff, 1979; Law, 2004; Hester & Adams, 2014).
Through an eclectic mix of research cases where methodological approaches are manoeuvred to fit the research context, this book engages with the confusion and difficulties faced by doctoral candidates and early career researchers. The authors reject the positivismâinterpretivism binary when constructing the appropriate methodological framework for the project. They have realised the constraints that some research methods implyâthe binary of quantitative versus qualitative enquiry. Conceptually, they provide a differentiation from previous work in the area of postgraduate and early career research education for capacity building (Denholm & Evans, 2009; Midgley, Tyler, Danaher, & Mander, 2011; Danaher et al., 2014). Yet at the same time, they acknowledge an intellectual debt to these works while incorporating its unique conceptual meshing of research work in tension with a virtual plethora of orientations towards designing and undertaking research.
Qualitative research is a broad church encompassing a bewildering profusion of similarity with elusive differences often requiring years of immersion to understanding its scholarship. Those seeking this understanding, bring with them ways of knowing their worlds that both challenge and are challenged by the fundamental tenets of qualitative research. In this process, non-linearity is foregrounded and situated in the interdisciplinary spaces of qualitative research. Most significantly, it highlights researchersâ experiences manoeuvring through the â-ologiesâ of a qualitative research paradigm, namely, its ontology (nature of its reality), epistemology (the relationship between the researcher and what can be known about that reality), axiology (values underpinning the ethical stance of the research process), and its methodology (how to go about investigating what can/could be known) (Punch, 2014). This focus on methodological manoeuvring is fundamental to the construction of a qualitatively framed research worldview or paradigm that engages with the âwhyâ behind the methods of data collection and analysis to encapsulate the actuality of experiences.
When constructing methodology for qualitative research, an initial challenge for novice qualitative researchers and experienced research-supervisors in education, creative and performing arts, the humanities, and social sciences more broadly is to assimilate these high-end philosophical notions of ontology, epistemology, and axiology. This challenge may be met by negotiating methodological allegiances while developing research expertise investigating and interpreting critically the contextualised social practices of various projects (Wray & Wallace, 2011). Yet too often, such work invariably begins from the standpoint of naĂŻve novices uncontaminated by previous knowledge of and experience with singular or multiple research methodological frameworks. This collection challenges such a fallacy. It demonstrates that those disciplines espousing singularly quantitative approaches may have not had cause to question the philosophical basis for the methods employed to construct knowledge until engaging in educational and other social world problems where researchers reflexively engage with âthe baggage you take in, the biases and interests and areas of ignoranceâ (Richards, 2005, p. 42) as they are entrenched in data analysis, (re)interpretation, and elucidation of data.
Constructing a research design requires deliberation of qualitative versus quantitative approaches and the ubiquitous mixed-methods frameworks for investigations in both the social sciences and professional fields in which applied research is practised (Marshall & Rossman, 2011; Creswell, 2012; Denzin & Lincoln, 2013; Anfara & Mertz, 2015). However, it is often when ethical considerations are encountered and subsequently challenge social scientists at all stages of their research careers, that the messiness of methodology is encountered. The latest fourth edition of Ranjit Kumarâs (2014) Research Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners is an example of such thinking. Nevertheless, as Marshall and Rossman (2011) illustrate in their work on Designing Qualitative Research, research processes are more likely to be frustratingly fluid and intriguingly iterative, as well as recursively rigorous.
Constructing Qualitative Researchers
Over the last decade, there has been considerable concern over the fate of social science research workforce development in the context of commodified national and international higher education policy agenda (Edwards, 2010; Sursock & Smidt, 2010; Bexley, James, & Arkoudis, 2011). At the same time, people are coming into the research field seeking ways of investigating seemingly insurmountable social issues, illogical politically induced changes impacting decision-making in local/global policy, professional practices, and peopleâs everyday lives (Flick, 2011). Career trajectories reflect this process as novice researchers bring to their investigations a rich diversity of ages, dispositions, cultures, linguistic capabilities, and lived experiences.
Thus, this book gives voice to these twenty-first-century researchers who choose to engage with societal, political, legal, and economic tentacles of power inscribed in everyday life; and with forces that name and control what counts as research and the work of researchers (Lee, Goodyear, Seddon, & Renshaw, 2011). This is necessary because reconceptualising the logic and effect of qualitative research work undertaken by novice and experienced researchers is as much a political project as it is an educational project. As an exercise of power in a democratic society, it is anything but self-evident and more than worthy of considerable analytical critique (Lee et al., 2011; Seddon et al., 2013).
Constructing methodology for qualitative research is a process of strategic risk taking for researchers (Harreveld, 2004). Articulating the messiness of methodology requires the bricoleur qualitative researcher to articulate through explicit engagements with assumptions about investigative worlds, the topics worthy of consideration and the tactics of enquiry into the topics from within those worlds (Denzin & Lincoln, 2013; Zipf, Chap. 5). âBricoleurs allow for dynamics and contexts to dictate which questions get asked, which methods to employ and which interpretive perspectives to useâ (Rogers, 2012, p. 6). Accordingly, the collection has been guided by a grand tour question (Leech, 2002): How do qualitative researchers manoeuvre through the maze of methodology to make meaning for their research projects?
Educators and social scientists engage with a range of methodological allegiances and contestations when being and becoming researchers. Our approach is qualitative in its methodological orientation and ethnographic in its execution (Fetterman, 2010; Marshall & Rossman, 2011). The text has been developed iteratively through a research symposium followed by a series of writing workshops with inbuilt cycles of reflective collegial critique complemented with a double blind peer-review process for each chapter and the text as a whole.
The possibilities of methodological choice explored in this collection are ontologically audacious yet epistemologically cautious. While epistemology may require an explicit phenomenon of enquiry from within a particular societal framing, ontological perspectives are more wide-ranging in their theoretical construction. This process engenders confidence in the bricolage approach (Rogers, 2012) when seeking synergies between the investigative technique/s and the construction of ontological facets of the research context.
Constructing Methodology
The book flows structurally through two iterative processes when constructing methodology for qualitative research. First, there is the positioning of the researcher within the process; and second, that of manoeuvring self within the practices of qualitative research across necessarily selective social science disciplines in education, arts, and humanities. Constructing self methodologically investigates the individuals in qualitative research as they bring their worldviews to the project that may be challenged and/or confirmed through consideration of its ontological, epistemological, and axiological dimensions that influence and are influenced by methodological allegiances and alliances. These chapters reflect those challenges, their contestations, and resolutions. The practices of manoeuvring are concerned with the ways in which qualitative researchers construct methodological frameworks that mesh with and respond to their work as practitioner-researchers.
Gemma Mann (Chap. 2) presents an autobiographical account of her journey from experienced quantitative to novice qualitative researcher. When moving into the qualitative realm of education research, Gemma found that she could not leave behind totally her quantitative background constructed during PhD studies in physics. She is both an expert and a novice researcher, utilising knowledge of quantitative methods while constructing a qualitative framework for her project investigating quantitative literacy. Further, Gemma is both student and teacher as the non-binary, non-linear nature and complex maze of her journey unfoldsâa journey in which seemingly incongruent ideas and experiences overlap. Her chapter illustrates the skills of that previous methodological experience brought intoâtranslated intoâher current work as an education researcher.
Research in medical imaging, particularly diagnostic radiography, has traditionally been quantitative, reflecting its clinical scientific focus. This is the world in which Cynthia Cowling is undertaking an ethnographic study of the sociological practice of radiography, including a comparison of its workplace practices in a number of different countries. In terms of the radiography profession, the authors of Chap. 3 represent both insider (Cynthia) and outsider status (Celeste Lawson). Methodologically, Celeste is the experienced qualitative researcher as Cynthia reprises previous knowledge and experiences with qualitative research from earlier studies in anthropology while coming to terms with the challenges of manoeuvring through both occupational and cultural differences in the construction of radiography work. This chapter provides a voice to the validity of ethnography for research in a discipline usually yoked to the quantitative framing of what counts as knowledge and its construction.
Michael Cowling is a researcher in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), who comes from a background steeped in experimentation and is making a methodological shift to contribute to qualitative research discussions in learning and teaching. Building on the work of Chinn, Buckland, and Samarapungavan (2011), who argue that epistemological perceptions must be broadened to help with cognition, his chapter (Chap. 4) fractures the epistemology learned as an academic in this field. He seeks to explain this positivist epistemology as encountered when completing PhD research in ICT, a discipline in which the âscientific methodâ was espoused. The process through which Michael came from technology research to navigate an epistemological shift for learning and teaching research whilst still being involved with the ICT discipline forms the core of this chapter.
Taking a bricoleur approach to navigating self through the methodological maze enables Reyna Zipf to take a nebulous concept, creativity, and research it in a complex setting, secondary school science lessons (Chap. 5). She interrogates her novice researchersâ methodological journey to arrive at a methodological approach underpinned by a bricoleur stance. This is presented through four milestones: entering the maze; inside the maze; emerging from the maze; and arriving at your methodological destination. Reyna positions âentering the methodological mazeâ as risky business that involves overcoming fear of failure. Inside the maze requires...