Category Archives: methodology

Grounded Theory ~ a brief note

March 31, 2015data analysis, methodology, research design, research examples, researcher rolesSandra Mathison

grounded-theory-new-4-638 Few research methodologies have been so beguiling as grounded theory. Even when researchers are not working squarely within this methodology, many strategies for data analysis are liberally borrowed from the work of grounded theory methodologists. For those who claim to be doing grounded theory, the ground on which they stand has and continues to shift from the original positions proffered by Glaser & Strauss in the mid 60s. Most especially Glaser’s realist ontology has been left behind.

Certainly, Juliet Corbin pushed that process along in her 9780857029140 collaborations with Anselm Strauss and more recently Kathy Charmaz has offered what she calls a constructivist grounded theory approach. On the latter, you can watch this interview with Charmaz that clarifies her view, one that I think captures the emerging contemporary stance on grounded theory.

The use of prior empirical and theoretical literature is a key idea in contemporary grounded theory… the old school notion of avoiding all prior knowledge has been largely set aside in favor of abductive reasoning that sees the researcher traveling back and forth between their empirical data and relevant literature.

Grounded theory has also taken a more narrative turn, emphasizing more literary writing and more acknowledgement of the centrality of the researcher to the analysis. Nonetheless, grounded theory remains unique in the search for a core category, that theoretical idea that integrates the various aspects of the theoretical explanation. (See, for example, this recent article The San Miguel Project.)

The role of empathy in research

December 28, 2014big abstract ideas, methodology, research design, researcher rolesSandra Mathison

Our ability to empathize is key to our success as researchers. To understand the human conditions, social relations, cultural meanings we must first understand and only after that to engage in the conversations of what if. I recently came across a FB post by Kirstie Elgersma. I’ve extracted some parts of her post to illustrate what empathy is and, more importantly, is not:

A monologue on Empathy:
If someone said to me today,’Holy crap, Kristie. Life freakin’ sucks. I’m so broke. And I feel so scared. I’ve never been this far down before. I don’t know how I’m going to make it…’

– I would rarely say:
‘Well where do you live? I can help you find a job….’
That’s fixing it. And no one needs to be ‘fixed’.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘I think you should figure out your life and get your shit together!’
That’s advising and unless they specifically asked for it, they aren’t needing that from me.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘Ohhh shit! How could you let that happen?!?’
That’s interrogating… And they didn’t come looking for the Spanish Inquisition.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘It’s only that way because you aren’t being positive or you aren’t trying hard enough…. You did this to yourself.’
They aren’t looking for an explanation.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘Hey, you shouldn’t see it that way! There are many things in life to be thankful for.’
That would be me correcting them and they are not needing ‘correction’.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘Well, there is much to be learned from this…’
They don’t need an education on what the fuck is happening to them.

– I would rarely say:
‘None of this is your fault.’
They don’t need me to console them.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘Wellllll if you hadn’t quit that job you had then none if this shit might be happening right now…’
They don’t need me to evaluate their lives. And most people hate hearing,’I told you so’.

– I would rarely say:
‘Those FUCKERZ. The 1%. Fuck I wish they would die so we can all be free.’
They don’t need me to commiserate with them as much as I would want to. That serves no one.

– I would rarely IF EVER say:
‘Oh fuck you think you got it bad! You should hear what happened to this one guy I met… etc etc.’
That’s ‘one upping’ them. They don’t need to hear who has it worse than them. I could imagine that that would make people feel shitty for how they feel or feel shitty that they even shared anything with me in the first place.

– I would rarely say:
‘Hey, that reminds me of the time when I was in my early twenties….’
Telling tales distracts people from what is alive in them. And although that may be a great stall tactic it still serves nothing or no one but my furiously ‘telling tales’ thumbs.

– I would rarely say:
‘Omg! That’s so fucking awful!! I feel so bad for you!! What are you going to do?!?’
They don’t need sympathy from me either. Sympathy can dis-able a person further…..

None of these responses is empathetic, although these responses are frequently confused with empathy. To use our capacity for empathy in research and in everyday life what is called for is to listen, to be curious, to try our very best to understand, and of course to care. Demonstrating empathy is never about telling anyone anything, it is about asking and seeking understanding. This is the first step researchers need to take before presuming they know both what the problem and its solution are.

Approaches to indepthness: ethnographic & longitudinal

September 1, 2014methodology, methods, publications, research design, research examplesSandra Mathison

As qualitative researchers there are different ways to think about how our research is indepth, seriously engaged with a research question and research participants. Two possibilities are immersing ourselves in a context (anthropological) or engaging with a context over a long time period (sociological) in order to deeply understand some social phenomenon.

Ethnography or ethnographic approaches are a methodology that draws us into a cultural context through participant observation over a sufficiently long enough period of time to formulate deep understandings of human experience. Living with, speaking with, and seeing from the inside out is the key to this indepth approach which is based on field work, participant observation, and interviewing. Other than the strategy of living within a cultural context, is the sociological strategy of longitudinal studies that continue engagement with research participants over a long period of time, sometimes referred to as a qualitative longitudinal study (QLS) which is based on indepth interviews with the same cohort of participants.

The same research question has been answered using both strategies. Two classic ethnographic studies that ask what happens to working class kids in schools are Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor and Jay MacLeod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It. Willis’ study looks at how British working class kids experience school so that class structures are perpetuated and MacLeod’s study looks at what happens to two groups of kids who differ by race but not class and their experiences of educational aspiration and schooling. MacLeod’s study is classic ethnography with a twist: twice after the initial research he went back to the Boston inner city neighbourhood to check in with his research participants and new editions of the book include appendices updating us about where the boys/men are at each point in time. MacLeod’s study might now be seen as a hybrid of the two approaches.

The Long Shadow is a good example of how understanding the same phenomenon, in this case framed as the transition of urban disadvantaged youth into adulthood, might be fostered by a long sustained relationship with research participants, i.e., knowing them for a longer time rather than intimately for a shorter time. What started out as a study to look at transitioning from home to grade one turned into a 25 yr longitudinal study of 800 low income inner city Baltimore kids.

These three studies are exemplars for researchers and implicitly offer lessons and advice on how to conduct indepth qualitative research in these two different ways.

The QLS is useful for answering questions like:

what changes between T1 and T2 and Tn?
when does change occur?
are there epiphanies, tipping points, revelations?
what is missing over time? what is consistent over time?
what are the contextual factors related to change or stasis?

Click here for a short paper on the advantages/disadvantages, purposes and challenges of QLS and Johnny Saldaña’s Longitudinal Qualitative Research is another good resource.

Narrative Analysis Tools

April 22, 2014data analysis, methodology, narrative inquiry, publications, representationSandra Mathison

TV Tropes is a rich wiki repository of resources described as tricks of the trade for writing fiction, but as social scientists we borrow as needed in trying to understand and explain the social world. The emphasis is on tropes, which are described as:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them… Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, do their best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere.

Narrative analysis can be facilitated by looking at the tropes at the centre of the stories we are investigating, and in the section on narrative devices one can investigate a range of possibilities. Tropes are named (such as “always need what you gave up,” “dead end job,” “dramatic irony,” “fighting for survival,” “human shield,” “I just want to be normal,” “shapeshifting,” “with due respect”), a short explanation is provided and links to many examples are given.

Other sections focus on characters, plot, setting and so on.

The wiki is a rich resource, every changing, including such gems as the Periodic Table of Storytelling.

food ~ illustrating how material culture explains many things

April 20, 2014material culture, methodology, representationSandra Mathison

This post is about food, really about food as a window on culture. It is meant to illustrate how something ordinary can be a powerful analytic construct. So even though this is about food, it’s not really about food, it’s an illustration of an idea.

Food is core to all cultures, it is part of the traditions, ceremonies, economics, cosmology, and social structure of any cultural group. On the surface, food is, well stuff one eats. But if that’s all it were then given our particular eco-environment we would eat whatever physically sustained us. Not true. Cultural anthropologists, food scientists, environmentalists, sociologists ~ folks often known as food scholars ~ study food as a window to cultural meanings and values. The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition is a good place to begin exploring the meaning of food and its complex intersection with every other aspect of social life.

Food as material culture
Food can be the window to ceremonies , to eating and health (Eating Right in America), to the artisanal food movement (The Life of Cheese), to globalism (Greek Whisky: The Localization of a Global Commodity), to social solidarity (in the allegory of long spoons in many cultures, and Foods, Farms and Solidarity). Where we prepare food matters, and Emily Contois’ Not Just for Cooking Anymore: Exploring the Twenty-First-Century Trophy Kitchen illustrates that kitchens are places where food, as well as social and cultural capital, are produced.

Food as Representation
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats illustrates how globalization, migration and rising affluence are affecting the diets of communities around the globe focuses on 30 families in 24 countries. Each chapter features a family photographed alongside a week’s worth of groceries. There are many images of families food shopping, cooking and eating, but the primary images are staged ~ the family in the background, and the food they eat in the foreground. Text describes the details or the week’s food, including the cost of the food.
And, food and literature are always an interesting combination. A notable example is, of course, Alice B. Toklas’s literary memoir disguised as a cookbook . Instructive as representation is Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals, in which Dinah Fried cooks and photographs meals from famous fiction. Each photograph is accompanied by the passage in which the recipe or food description appears, as well as a few comments about the respective author, novel, or food.

Photographs courtesy of Dinah Fried

Mixed Methods International Research Association ~ inaugural conference

November 19, 2013events, methodology, methodsSandra Mathison

picture is the link to the conference website…

Researching the virtual world

January 20, 2013ethics, methodology, methods, technologySandra Mathison

The explosion of social media has opened a new space in which human interaction and social life unfold, and perhaps are differently constructed. As the social world goes digital, social scientists are challenged to adapt research methodologies and methods to this new space, one where thousands and possibly millions of people interact.

A literature that provides guidance on how to do research in growing and includes books like:

Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online by Robert V Kozinets
Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method, edited by Annette N. Markham & Nancy K. Baym

And journals devoted especially to the topic:

A key consideration in research in this new space are ethical issues of privacy, consent, and research participants’ rights. Some references that deal with these issues are:

Banks, W. and M. Eble, 2007, Digital Spaces, Online Environments, and Human Participant Research: Interfacing with Institutional Review Boards, in Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues, H. McKee and D. DeVoss (eds.), Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, pp. 27–47.
Brown, R. & Gregg, M. (2012). The pedagogy of regret: Facebook, binge drinking and young women. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 26 (3): 357-369.
Buchanan, E. A. and Zimmer, M., Internet Research Ethics, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition).
Burden, K., Shuck, S., & Aubusson, P. (2012). M-Research: Ethical issues in researching young people’s use of mobile devices. Youth Studies Australia, 31 (3): 17-26.
Morrow, V. (2008). Ethical dilemmas in research with children and young people about their social environments, Children’s Geographies, 6 (1): 49-61.
Zimmer, M. (2010). “But the data is already public”: On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12 (4): 313-325.

Street Ethnography

November 12, 2012field notes, image based research, importance of place, methodology, publications, research examples, technologySandra Mathison

Street ethnography is an emerging research approach that focuses on public exterior spaces… sidewalks, parks, neighbourhood spaces. Both the ethnographer and the ethnographic participants are moving through these public spaces and so are engaged with each other in informal ways as both use these spaces in a fairly equal way. The tools for street ethnographers include neighbourhood walks, going along with ethnographic participants, and photography.

A good illustration of street ethnography is, Urban Fieldnotes, a mash-up of research and street style blogging. Blogger Brent Luvaas, a visual and cultural anthropologist & Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Drexel University, describes Urban Fieldnotes this way…

Urban Fieldnotes is a street style blog documenting fashion, style, and dress on the streets of Philadelphia and beyond. It is also a blog about street style blogging, an experiment in auto-ethnographic research and open-source fieldwork that is part of an ongoing project entitled “Street Style 2.0: New Media and the New Politics of Fashion.”

His research project is connected to the rise of street style fashion blogging as a form of amateur ethnography that challenges prevailing modes of expertise in the fashion world. Just to make sure you know this is research, he also says…

Your comments and suggestions are welcome, but please note that any comments posted to this blog may be used in future presentations and publications, both print and digital, by Brent Luvaas.

Street style blogs are plentiful, but perhaps one of the mostly widely read is The Sartorialist, but Luvaas provides a long list of street style blogs from around the globe. Others he might have included are Advanced Style, which focuses specifically on ‘older folks’ and Bill Cunningham’s work for the NY Times. And there are an increasing number of models come street style bloggers, like Hanneli Mustaparta and Christine Reehorst.

There isn’t much written about street ethnography, although R. Weppner’s 1977 Street ethnography: Selected studies of crime and drug use in natural settings is a good resource, if you can get your hands on it.

Perspectives & context

September 26, 2012big abstract ideas, methodology, technology, UncategorizedSandra Mathison

As interpretive researchers we observe in order to make sense. And we know that our perspective matters in what we see. The kind of perspective I am talking about here is not so much our personal lenses, but the circumstances that allow (or don’t allow) us to see. If I am in an airplane I see in a particular way… I get the big macro picture. The patterns that are apparent from 30,000 feet up are not so easily discernible if I am on the ground. From the air one gets a sense, for example, of the nature of land sharing and use for agriculture. It is also possible to enjoy a joke that is accessible only from this same perspective.

When one is driving or walking in that same space, the perspective changes and one gets a micro view, but necessarily loses sight of the bigger aerial perspective picture. What might have been a solid mass of colour or shape from the air now is discernable as individual plants and flowers. What seemed like lines drawn between fields become roads.

In both cases we see something valuable, indeed something complete from that perspective. But only one perspective gives us just that… a complete picture from one vantage point. In doing research we want to capture social phenomena from as many perspectives as possible, to give as thorough an account of the phenomenon as we are able. Knowing that there are always other perspectives as yet unexplored.

To illustrate just a couple more perspectives for this example, consider a GPS map or a road map.

Being aware of the possibilities of multiple perspectives should not be seen as a limitation, but rather an opportunity to think outside a single researcher, research framework, or methodology when we strive to understand social phenomena as fully as we are able.

Arts based research

February 9, 2012image based research, methodology, publicationsSandra Mathison

Arts Based Studio’s Blog is a good resource for those interested in arts based research. The blog is described as: “an informal group of researchers who
generally hold to a sense that various forms of artistic expression can and does compel one’s attention in a way that tacitly suggests art, as a particular way of knowing things, engages our fuller consciousness.” There are notifications of events at the Arts Based Studio at the University of Alberta, as well as stories and links to other resources.

Qualitative Research Cafe

Food for thought on interpretive and critical research approaches