The Methodological Dilemma

Creative, critical and collaborative approaches to qualitative research

Kathleen Gallagher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134044696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This thought-provoking book challenges the way research is planned and undertaken and equips researchers with a variety of creative and imaginative solutions to the dilemmas of method and representation that plague qualitative research.

Fascinating and inspiring reading for any researcher in the Social Sciences this comprehensive collection encourages the reader to imagine the world in evermore complex and interesting ways and discover new routes to understanding.

Some of the most influential figures in educational research consider questions such as:

• How does a socio-political context change the course of our research?
• What counts as a 'truthful account' in qualitative research?
• How do the voices of theory and the voices of 'research subjects' struggle to be heard in our research narratives?
• How can qualitative researchers ethically navigate the difficult terrain of research relationships?
• How is the material body rendered in qualitative research?

Each chapter reveals a range of troubling dilemmas related to the critical aspects of research methodology in the Social Sciences and uses an illustrative case to elucidate the issues encountered by the researcher. Each writer brings a fierce philosophical spirit to her work, showing how methods or techniques of data-gathering grow from the theory and analysis of how research proceeds.

A range of topics are addressed in a cross-disciplinary approach which will appeal to all scholars of qualitative research, undergraduate students in education programs and graduate students in a range of disciplines

Part I
Representation and contexts

Chapter 1
The politics of making claims

Challenges of qualitative web-based research

Megan Boler

Where is the intelligentsia that is carrying on the big discourse of the Western world and whose work as intellectuals is influential among parties and publics and relevant to the great decisions of our time? Where are the mass media open to such men? Who among those in charge of the two-party state and its ferocious military machines are alert to what goes on in the world of knowledge and reason and sensibility? Why is the free intellect so divorced from decisions of power?

(Mills, 1959: 183)

When we seek to make sense of such problematic topics as human nature, culture, society, and history, we never say precisely what we wish to say or mean precisely what we say. Our discourse always tends to slip away from our data towards the structures of consciousness with which we are trying to grasp them; or, what amounts to the same thing, the data always resist the coherency of the image which we are trying to fashion of them.

(White, 1978: 1)

A discussion of methodological dilemmas must, for me, begin with the question of the responsibility of scholarship to publics. How and when does the knowledge we produce and circulate influence the making of history, policies, and social thought? How do we take account of the certain dilemma of the slippery nature of discourse, which always defers itself away from intention and purpose and inevitably mutates into unpredictable limits and implications through its public circulation? Why are we engaged in social science at all?

The question ‘Where is the intelligentsia?’ posed by the sociologist C. Wright Mills at the end of the Cold War is, rather disturbingly, still on the table. How does one grapple with the frequent disjuncture between the majority of our research pursuits and the need for social change that is ostensibly an aim of such inquiries? Perhaps the question is not who to blame—the pundits and powers that refuse to listen to reason and knowledge that do not fit their aims of wealth and power, or the academics and scholars who fail to direct their knowledge into policies, or governing bodies where it might effect change in social and political agendas. Blame aside, there is certainly a question of the responsibility of public intellectuals, a question far more rare than one might take to be the case from right-wing attacks on supposed left agendas of universities. In fact, when one seeks discussion of contemporary commitments to public intellectualism, which figures does one imagine? Which intellectual works can one cite? On the topic of responsibility, Noam Chomsky’s essay from 1966 remains central in part because the topic is not frequently taken up in scholarly discourse:

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

(Chomsky, 1987: 60)

As a tenured academic scholar, I take this role seriously. Particularly in times of war, and of threats to civil liberties and institutions of democracy, I have taken such matters to heart and increasingly shifted my research to questions of media. I understand media as a social and cultural institution and set of practices which function both as a primary curriculum which should be of great concern to education, and as a complex representational practice (in terms of print, broadcast, and now web-based news media) that effectively governs and delimits social thought within so-called democratic states. Many in education, save the relatively small field of media education scholars and some of the cultural studies of education circle who study popular culture, do not engage media as central to the understanding of what actually constitutes the education of societies and subcultures, and political practices and conceptions of citizenship and democracy. Not only is popular culture arguably more influential on young people than is formal schooling, but questions of media as foundational to citizenship are too often mentioned only in passing.

Beyond the relative silence on media as a site of curricula or tool of social control that necessitates central understanding for those in educational studies, educational scholars too rarely assess how to insert their research into the public sphere, including into news media. A century ago, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann debated this role of the scholarship to news media.¹ Irrespective of where one stands on hopes for democratic engagement on the part of publics, a second fundamental obstacle to engaging public intellectualism has to do with the contemporary rise in discourses of knowledge mobilization, accountability, and the increased conservativism determining funding which has narrowed the kinds and focus of research engaged by scholars across North America.

Why engage in social science research? My own reasons as an interdisciplinary scholar trained in the humanities are threefold: to ask my own specific questions about social phenomena and issues, and develop a data set that begins to address my specific questions, rather than using the data produced by others which does not always precisely address my questions; to contribute to public debate about questions of media and democracy in times of war, as state interest in war always results in a heightened control of media and damage to espoused ideals of democracy and civil rights, including freedom of speech (specifically, I undertook to study the motivations of individuals who use, write, and produce digital media to create counterpublics and dissent in relation to dominant corporate-owned media); and to engage qualitative research not only for its unique methods of information gathering but because this kind of research affords additional legitimacy beyond speculative knowledge, as one seeks to insert new ideas into the public discourse of media. In short, as an academic committed to critical inquiry about the role of press during times of war and ideals of free speech and democratic citizenship, it became an intellectual responsibility to engage in the kinds of methods that are too often used to justify, as C. Wright Mills (1959: 181) says, being adviser to the king. Rather, I envision these tools in his ideal of remaining ‘independent, to do one’s own work, to select one’s own problems, but to direct this work at kings as well as to “publics”’. In 2004, when this research proposal was submitted, it is likely that it is only because it was a Canadian and not an American funding source that we received finance for the project (in this case from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, 2005–2008).

I wish to contextualize my remarks about, engagements with, and reflections about the nature of social science. From a meta-view, social science is best understood as a set of discourses and in turn as rhetorical approaches to knowledge production. Given my training, I cannot help but be constantly aware of what Hayden White laughingly referred to in our graduate seminars as the ‘truth effect’. My graduate studies benefited from the oversight of such scholars as White and Donna Haraway, Jim Clifford, and Helene Moglen, and the public talks and seminars held on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus between 1985 and 1992 by Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Wendy Brown, Joan Scott, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Teresa DeLauretis, and Angela Davis, among many others. When I think back on this epoch of intellectual history, it is fair to say that this period reflects a remarkable emergence of concerns about discourse and its functions, and operation, and circulation, about the politics of knowledge and representation. Scholars of the late twentieth century were in the midst of perhaps the most fertile and thorough era of cross-disciplinary investigation about the assumptions and premises of the disciplines in which they worked, whether that discipline be history, sociology, semiotics, or biology—or feminist theory and cultural studies as informed by all of these and many other disciplines. Cultural studies was in its prime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, solidifying through many of its projects the now widely shared questioning of science as a model for truth claims. Yet, arguably, by the mid-1990s, one began to see cultural studies issuing new calls for empirical studies as still necessary knowledge despite the intensive interrogation of the politics of knowledge production.

C. Wright Mills (1959: 13) describes the need for the sociological imagination: ‘It is now the social scientist’s foremost political and intellectual task—for her the two coincide—to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference.’ By ‘uneasiness and indifference’, Mills was referring to the general social malaise at the end of the Cold War. While his writings indicate the generational frequency with which disciplines question their methods, it is also fair to say that the 1980s heralded the greatest ‘uneasiness’ about methodology and truth claims we have likely ever seen. Poststructuralism, or at least vague misreadings of what this means alongside its elision with postmodernism, has had effects now felt within every discipline; there is no discipline whose scholars have not had to grapple at least in stance with poststructuralism’s implications for scientific methods.

It is within that intellectual context that I discuss the questions that arose and continue to arise in making sense of the data collected in my three-year funded study. I pose to the reader and student of social science these questions:

• How can we uphold a meta-questioning stance in relation to our selected methods? In other words, how can we productively question the validity and veracity of the knowledge we claim to produce without losing our capacity as trained intellectuals to be engaged in these important public and critical inquiries into the nature of humans, culture, society, and its problems?
• Why are we using social science methods? Have we merely fallen into a discipline, or are we electing to use these tools, as Mills suggests, to prod the kings? Speaking to the need for philosophy as well as science, Mills (1959: 180) remarks, ‘Were the “philosopher” king, I should be tempted to leave his kingdom; but when kings are without any “philosophy”, are they not incapable of responsible rule?’
• What kinds of ironies are inherent to the limitations of the efforts to make social scientific truth claims? What kinds of productive correspondence can our investigations generate in terms of accounts of the world, and what are the limits of our certainties—both because of the limits of science and because of the inevitably slippery nature of discourse and representations? When do social scientific truth claims function merely as a self-legitimating confirmation within a discursive community? In order to speak within certain communities, we must use this language, yet the discourse community in its ties to the legacy of science often discourages one from questioning the methods one engages.

Here is where Mills’ advocating of the sociological imagination is so important: we are not to be pawns; we are not to get caught up in micro- or in essentializing claims about all humans or all societies. We must always situate our claims within the historical context in which they make sense. That historical context, I wish to emphasize, requires a recognition of the politics of representation. We are increasingly faced with a power-struggle if not outright war about what might even be called reality. As Ron Suskind reported in October 2004 in a now oftcited exchange with an ‘unnamed Administration official’:

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Within such a high-stakes game, what are the best strategies for engaging social sciences effectively to understand the many issues which mark great uneasiness of human society and culture? How can scholars become genuine members of a public intelligentsia that has some hope? In the words of Donna Haraway (1991: 187), the

problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.

The irony of seeking methods to track discourses of truth

My present research project, ‘Rethinking Media, Democracy and Citizenship: New Media Practices and Online Digital Dissent after September 11’, was conceptualized after many years of close study of the news media representation, first of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991–1992 and then news representation of war in the years following September 11, 2001. By 2004, my studies not only of corporate-owned news media but of the increased use of digital media by diverse individuals to express dissent and frustration with corporate and dominant news media led me to recognize what I see as an important and crucial paradox: that the desire expressed by publics for politicians and media to ‘tell the truth’ is held in paradoxical contradiction to the ‘postmodern sensibility’ (or ‘widely shared skepticism’ towards authority as it attempts to exert control through spectacle) that all narratives are constructed, that all the world is a fiction. The paradoxical desire for truth alongside awareness of truth’s impossibility is a hallmark of this stage of spectacular complicity.²

For the purposes of this chapter, perhaps the best concept to employ to capture the slippery, double-sided nature of the truth problem (the public demand for truthful accounts from media and politicians alongside the general cultural awareness that paradoxically we simultaneously know that any truthful account is also necessarily a representation that cannot be relied upon as truth) is the recently re-popularized notion of ‘truthiness’. Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2006 was ‘truthiness’, a term coined by comedian Stephen Colbert on his cable broadcast nightly ‘fake news’, which uses satire to critique US politics and the media. ‘Truthiness’ is defined as ‘the quality by which a person claims to know something intuitively, instinctively, or “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts’ (Wikipedia, retrieved October 10, 2007). This sense of ‘troubled truth’ captures a recurring theme I first began to notice in 2003 in my studies of indie digital media communications: as stated by one Bushin30Seconds Quicktime production, ‘Americans are dying for the truth’ (MoveOn.org, ‘Polygraph’). This new expression and demand for ‘truth’ led me to investigate a paradox that I see as a hallmark of the networks of digital dissent of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, many audiences are now aware of the seemingly ‘postmodern’ sensibility that all truth is a fiction; all representations are socially constructed. However, alongside this awareness is a paradoxical demand for ‘truthful accounts’, especially from politicians and media. This paradox reflects a ‘new desperation’ in the face of mainstream media spin especially during times of war.

Methodological dilemmas

For the remainder of this chapter, I describe ongoing questions that reflect perhaps new twists on dilemmas well documented in the vast literature interrogating social science and qualitative research. Without rehearsing those arguments and debates, I will engage some recent analyses by qualitative researchers working in the sphere of web-based qualitative research during the discussion of the particular challenge of studying blogs.

Overall, from the first two years of this study, the methodological dilemmas that stand out to me are these: how to formulate a question or problem; how to delineate data sets from the blogosphere that are theme-based; how to administer online surveys with decent response rate; and how to make meaning from ‘triangulated’ survey results, interview material, and discourse analysis in ways which are compelling and potentially generalizable or at minimum helpful in arguments about areas of ‘social uneasiness’ (to use Mills’ term). Having some clarity about the nuances of these dilemmas which bridge a sense of responsibility to evidentiary notions of justification for claims, alongside the recognition of the politics of all representation and the rhetorical power of science, may help one understand how research into human activity informs theory and vice versa in ways that inform publics to make the best arguments within the public, political, and policy spheres. Over the last two years of studyi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Representation and contexts
• PART II Representation and relationships
• PART III Representation and bodies