Creativity, dialogue and empowerment: influences on a PhD methodology

Selecting a methodology and designing method(s) for a piece of research is influenced by your research paradigm amongst other things - your academic 'world view'. I'd like to put that (very important) issue to one side for a moment to think about another influence.

For me, if my methodology and methods can also reflect my passions and experience all the better. After all, the reality of PhD study requires stamina (I'm told) and I guess stamina in turn requires engaging with your passions and interests. 

In the spirit of that, I'm remembering the sorts of things I'd like to connect with in this process. Of course, the 'health warning' here is that it would be easy to be led by our interests and passions and let these direct the design of PhD research more than your research paradigm, questions and so forth. As the piece of work is so personal, though, my hope is that there can be a convergence of my questions and interests. We'll see. 

Here's a list of a few things I've really enjoyed doing over the years I hope I can draw on in some way of other:

• Principles of community development and informal education have always underpinned work with young people, communities and families - both in youth work, neighbourhood work, community development projects and in the early years. These principles link to principles that can be found in participatory action research amongst other approaches. 

• My community arts work has found ways to get people 'telling their own story' by giving people tools to express themselves in a way which bypasses some of the pressures people can feel when asked to talk about themselves or any other subject they may struggle to articulate. This makes me think about what Giddens has to say about levels of consciousness (discursive/conscious vs. practical/tacit) and what David Gauntlett (and others) have to say about helping people access that 'everyday' or 'ingrained' information they may never talk about in everyday life.

 

• My 1-1 work (such as mentoring leaders) which has encouraged people to see their experience in a wider context and come to realisations about the meaning, significance and priority of what they are doing or have done. For me, an effective research environment should be empowering, safe and should not place the 'researchers' bias onto the subject. Saying that, I've got a sense that my research paradigm and methodology won't draw a firm line between researcher and subject - more of than another post. 

Methods I have in my imagination involve things like making and discussing 'situational' (Clarke, 2005) or cultural maps and perhaps making, manipulating, positioning and negotiating metaphorical models of self and 'community'. The goal is insight into perceptions (to go back to symbolic interactionism) - supporting people and groups to articulate and communicate (perhaps in the wider sense) about their professional selves - how and why they change.

The place of theory?

I've got some helpful contacts on Twitter: this weekend some of them
have (quite rightly) pointed out that if I'm interested in using
grounded theory as a methodological approach, I shouldn't really be
setting out a series of propositions. Of course, in grounded theory
comes from the data as it is built and drawn upon to analyse 'what
bubbles up'. It's a good reminder to not get too wrapped up in the
detail of theory at this stage.

The funny thing is, I've realised the postgraduate research proposal
paperwork requires a certain amount of reference to theory, possibly
one if the reasons I've worked on this a little. Not having undertaken
a large scale research project using grounded theory to date, I wonder
if it's useful to have an idea of potentially applicable theory held
'to one side' - we all know researchers are not fully objective - BUT
to draw on this as the coding leads? Early questions, I know, but a
useful prompt from my friends who Tweet!

Early PhD steps: work on title, propositions, areas of investigation

I'm coming to the end of two weeks annual leave - which I've used to focus on my family, not work or study, hence the lack of posts, sorry. However, like many of us I have had thoughts 'ticking over' whilst that's been going on. Mostly I've been amazed / in awe of how much time some people have to devote to Twitter. When I think I should be more productive, I remind myself that we've got four young children, so I'm in this for the long haul..one brick in the wall at at time!

The one thing that I've scribbled a note about is (following my previous post) work on my research question, assumptions / propositions and potential areas of enquiry. These are developing all the time, and no doubt will continue to do so as I start things 'properly' this coming semester.

Here's where I'm at to date, which is not very far!

 

Working Title:  "Game Changing: understanding accounts of professional change in multi professional children's services."

Early Propositions (as you can see, framed by the theory I've mentioned so far, especially Gidden's theory of structuration):

- individuals consciously and unconsciously (re) shape their 'self' which is an internal social object used to make sense of and position them in their experience of their world(s).

-  individuals interact with their professional communities both shaping and being shaped by them.

- individuals experience their professional 'selves' on conscious (discursive) and practical (tacit) levels.

- Individuals can be supported to present accounts of both the conscious (discursive) and tacit (practical, automatic) information about themselves through visual, interactive, metaphorical methods. I've made reference to David Gauntlett's work on this in his 2007 book "Creative Explorations"

Possible areas of investigation:

- identification of organisational 'rules' that influence the behaviour of social actors within selected multi professional communities of practice in children's services.

- individual accounts of change, focusing on the nature of changing professional identity and practice: what has changed? what relationships, processes, mechanisms (etc) can be identified and examined?

- investigation into the interaction between individuals and their communities of practice and how each influence / shape one another.

Refining a research question: next steps

I've realised that because I have not yet booked out regular time for work on my PhD (it's very early days, so no stress there) I make progress 'in my head' but perhaps don't capture that except in this blog. I do have a series of scrappy bits of paper, but until I get an organised system (see previous post) there perhaps will be a bit of frustration at not 'moving forward' as quickly as a would ideally like to. I sometimes catch myself thinking 'how would I explain that?' but find I don't yet have the words to explain ideas that are still forming. If I noted down the questions, they might crystallise:

• Is Gidden's theory of structuration too abstract for practical use? 
• Do the pragmatist ideas of symbolic interactionism fail to address structural issues such as organisational context?
• How can I use activity theory (Cultural Historical Activity Theory) to work on issues of changes in professional identity and practice?
• How much 'mixing and matching' of philosophies and theories is useful? - can I use all the 'useful' perspectives I have previously mentioned (or drawn) be used together?

Alongside (and perhaps because of) this, I've realised how much my central question might have to change over the months and years of research. I thought I'd done well to put my first draft research proposal together, but now that initial proposal looks very simplistic, and does not reflect all that thinking and reading I've been doing. That's positive, and perhaps is all part of the 'disequilibrium' (to use a Piagietian concept) needed to push research forward. 

So - how to move forward? Well, the first step is the skill of writing down questions - a version of the example given above, worked in a little more detail - and I think the second, for now is about noting assumptions. What I mean here is that I have gone to my question, and rather than re write it with a blank piece of paper, I have taken it apart a little, being a little more explicit about the assumptions I have made in writing it. Once I did that, it really helped and it made me think about whether the question still did the job it needed to do. So, little steps one at a time - but in the right direction. 

Finally, I'm pleased to be making contact with interesting people on twitter: but I've a question here too - which is how to transform that list of 91 followers into people who I can interact with. Luckily, I've got some time to work that one out.