Key themes in Qualitative Research and Enquiry Based Learning: qualitative research projects
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What is a Project?
John Schostak
ELU, 2005
Getting invovled in a project is, for me, always a buzz. Why? After around 50 funded projects you would think all would begin to feel familiar, a little routine. Well, yes, to some degree but the essential thing is: I never quite know what is going to happen. November 2005, after months of negotiation with a major financial institution, a new project was initiated. I came away from the meeting exited but also feeling a great sense of risk. suddenly it was all to happen, a team of researchers was to be set in motion, initiatives around the country were to be evaluated. Where do we start? What are the key questions? What will be the problems? Will it all flop? Of course, a research design had been written, discussed and agreed. But now, this was for real. And the real world is messy, complex. the first task is to get one's bearings:
For any researcher, then, no matter how experienced, the starting point is in a sense a process of making maps without at first knowing a) what the project is to be a map of, b) the appropriate format of a map, and c) whether or not a map constrains, biases, leads one astray or opens up possibilities where none had previously been seen. The initial question to be explored is: how does one find one's bearings in order to make a 'project', that is, project a course of reflection and action sufficient to map, describe and generate debate about an area of interest and concern?
(Schostak 2002)
In my book, from which this extract is taken, I describe this process in some considerable detail. In the introduction to qualitative research on the ELU website you can see an introduction to project development. But it doesn't stop there. A project is always more than just doing an assignment for a course, a thesis for a degree or research for funders. At its broadest it defines a way of life, a core purpose. People grandly talk about the Enlightenment Project, or the project of Modernity or of democracy and emancipation. These are powerful words. these are not just slipped lightly into essays to pass a course, they affect people's lives, transform their cultures, their freedoms. Whenever we engage in research, at the back of it is a complex history of debates. Whatever we are researching, however we are engaging in it, however we analyse and write it up, we are contributing, knowingly or unknowingly to these debates. And the debates are not just hot air expended by tired old academics in their musty ivory towers. They concern ways of seeing and dealing with the world about. Literally, people's lives are at stake. Is this over dramatic? Consider the scientific advances of the last two hundred years and their political, social, economic and ethical implications: both the positive and the negative. Science, politics, economics and cultural activities have transformed how people see and act in the world. That is what is at stake when carrying out a project: the very ways in which people see their worlds, act in them and regard other people.
You can get a sense of the impact of scientific practice on ways of seeing in Kuhn's (1970) famous book on scientific revolutions or in Feyerabend (1975). Here, it is claimed, that changes in scientic practice and the 'knowledge' that results, does not lead to a straightforward accumulation of knowledge but a radical change in ways of seeing the world. I have elaborated the implications of these discussions in my 2002 book and have developed them further in a book that will be available January 2006 (see references below). To summarise:
The project then, defines what is seen, what counts as 'real', the community of believers and the community of disbelievers. In this context, the project has to find its bearings in relation to:
- the Self and
- the subjective organisation of experience
- other people and
- the intersubjective organisation of experience through
- symbolic frameworks involving the values, permissions and prohibitions of religions, the laws of society, political and economic order, the values and traditions of communities the codes of language, as well as the formal laws of mathematics, sciences and so on, and
- the material world
(Schostak 2002)
In developing a project, you are exploring worlds of experience. Critiquing those worlds by challenging assumptions, people's sense of the 'real' is not something to take on board lightly. It requires thinking through the political, ethical, cultural, social and environmental implications. It further requires thinking through what counts as education, that is, the way in which we draw out the possibilties for self development, thought, self expression, being with others and action in the world. There are no right answers that will solve all problems. However, we can engage in dialogues with each other and through our projects learn what it means to value the contributions that each may make to our mutual understanding of the diversity and cultural richness of the peoples of the world and thereby engage in actions that will increase the safety and quality of life that people experience. So:
The project, is like a conversation framed by the questions the researcher directs to the self, the other and the materiality of existence. If social life is a complex of programmes of action where self is oriented to other, then the project proceeds by unpacking this complex by seeking to uncover and describe:
(1) The motives and purposes of the researcher, for example:
(a) Self knowledge
(b) Improving x, y, z
(c) Persuasion of decision makers
(d) Finding the Truth
(e) Making radical changes
(f) etc
(2) The motives and purposes of 'subjects' as members of the 'world out there', for example:
(a) As in 'a-e' above plus
(b) Justifying of self to you-as-other amongst others, and in particular, you as researcher
(c) Managing the impressions of their 'self' to manipulate you and others whether or not you are openly in a research role
(d) etc
Asking questions, whether in self reflection, in conversation, or in the research interview, the response comes in the form of either an evasion (whether intended or unintended) or an account that ostensibly covers the motives, the reasons, the rationale for the situation:
An account is a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry. Such devices are a crucial element in the social order since they prevent conflicts from arising by verbally bridging the gap between action and expectation. Moreover, accounts are “situated” according to the statuses of the interactants, and are standardised within cultures so that certain accounts are terminologically stabilised and routinely expected when activity falls outside the domain of expectations.
(Scott and Lyman 1968:46)'What is going on here?' is a key question to ask of any situation. Asking it assumes there is an ‘answer’. Whether or not respondents claim to have the answer or not what results is an account of what they think they ‘know’, or what they claim to believe, or the reasons why they do not know, or do not care about knowing, believing and so on. During accounts, respondents may ramble, change the subject, and attempt to please the researcher by providing ‘answers’ they think are ‘wanted’ by the researcher. In any case, the account does more than try to explain, convince or deceive someone about a situation it is also a negotiation of identities as between the questionner and the answerer and can 'cover up' as much as uncover ....
(Schostak 2002: extract from chapter 1)
Such creations of accounts generate the 'case', knotting subjects into relationships with purposes, places, organisations. A case study is complex of such accounts and as such is not a bounded, single entity. This approach is further developed in Schostak 2006.
References
Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against Method, London: NLB
Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (2nd edition), Vols. I and II. Foundations of the Unity of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Scott, M.B., and Lyman, S. M. (1968) 'Accounts', American Sociological Review, 33, 1, 46-62