Community Conversation as a Method of Gathering and Analyzing Qualitative Data

Learning and Researching Through an Interpretivist Paradigm

An interpretivist paradigm views researcher–participant relationships from a stance of acceptance (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Instead of making an attempt to reduce the influence or control the proximity and contingency between researcher and participant, the strategy is to understand how relationships are key to meaning making. These relationships are not only seen as a factor influencing who participates, but also in the analysis of data, helping to determine which voices are heard and the significance attached to the meaning of their participation. Rather than demanding objectivity, interpretivistic research requires an analytic frame that can acknowledge, scrutinize, and explain the inherent subjectivities that exist in sociocultural contexts. Starting with description, interpretivistic designs explore how words and actions couch meaning. Beyond this initial search for meaning, interpretivistic studies examine explanations embedded in multiple units of analysis (e.g., individuals, institutions) addressing how and why (Patton, 2015). Interpretivistic methodologies include tools for reflecting and analyzing data from multiple points of view.

Each of the studies in this special issue employs interpretivism, to some degree. The Tennessee community conversation study illustrates this through its presentation of analyses of multilevel data, first considering data generated during in-depth interviews with community conversation planners, then examining artifacts generated during the community conversation by the entire group. The purpose of gathering this second level of data was to better understand community-generated potential solutions for facilitating inclusive employment. This was followed by a third level of data, the analysis of which helped show the individual participants’ self-reported follow-up actions captured in survey data (Bumble, Carter, & McMillan, 2018). Similarly, Molfenter et al. (2018) used data from the large group events to generate questions for different groups of stakeholder participants, such as employers, who were subsequently engaged in individual interviews. While a study’s paradigm provides a standpoint from research decisions are made, the methods they employ determine the tools for gathering the types of necessary data for answering the questions. Interpretivistic research paradigms underscore perspective and context, bringing into focus a diversity of methods and a range of approaches characteristic of community conversation as an approach to qualitative research.

Implementing Methods That Highlight Perspective and Context

The stages of design, implementation, and analysis of a single qualitative study often draw upon multiple tools for gathering data. The types of data are highly variable and most often include recordings or documentation of oral and verbal artifacts. Each of the four state-based community conversation studies reflects this diversity in methods and tools, including the use of recording participants’ comments (e.g., conversational dialogue, interviews, surveys) and reviewing participants’ artifacts (e.g., jotlists from small group discussions, group-think posters). Participants were simultaneously trying to solve a problem of interest while providing data for subsequent analysis about the processes of solving that problem, the roles of individuals in problem solving, and the other-level barriers and facilitative factors associated with solutions. Subsequently, the data were explored through descriptive and thematic coding. All four studies treated artifacts from the community conversation events as archival data and examined these for meaning, themes, and triangulating findings.

Qualitative research also employs a range of tools for interpreting data (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003). A grounded theory approach to interviewing, for example, beginning with open-ended questions that allow participants’ comments to steer the interview, can be employed in tandem with other approaches to data analysis such as the examination of narrative or relationships between researcher and participant (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002). Traditionally, grounded theory analysis is inductive; however, researchers can and do use background knowledge deductively and move freely back and forth from research questions to the data in search of meaning (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999).

In the analyses of qualitative data from the community conversation studies, both inductive and deductive approaches were used. Raynor et al. (2018) conducted an analysis of community conversation table notes as artifacts, closely connecting or grounding the analysis in the data itself, determining meaning without a presupposed idea or hypothesis as to what solutions would act as a catalyst to local action. The researchers were inducing meaning here in much the same way as Bumble et al. (2018) generated thematic meanings anchored to responses to open-ended questions exploring motivational factors that led to communities’ inclusive employment development efforts. The researchers were looking for motivations, and they focused on repetition of motivation as a way of indexing the significance of meaning. Contrastingly, the use of the structured interview protocol in the Wisconsin study demonstrates some existing, if unstated, hypotheses. For example, asking how better to share students’ strengths with employers demonstrated researchers’ views that employers’ lack of knowledge about a student employee’s strengths might be a key issue or a source of the problem in developing employment opportunities. Important to reiterate here is that both paradigmatically and methodologically, the diversity of perspectival data and the variation in approaches to analyses are acceptable in qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003). This variation, however, can muddy the roles of participants and researchers in a study’s implementation, providing an additional connection between community conversation and qualitative research.

Working With Participants as Action Researchers

Three centrally defining characteristics of PAR include (a) shared roles and responsibilities for project implementation, (b) community-identified approaches to problem solving, and (c) results that forward community members’ actions toward problem solving (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005). Implementing community conversation entails casting a wide net into the community to engage as many people as possible in a discussion around a common problem. This method recognizes that people from a variety of backgrounds and with a range of disability-related experiences and employment expertise have a wealth of information, influence, and motivation to contribute answers or solutions. While each of these studies clearly demonstrates the latter two tenets of PAR, they vary in the degree to which they incorporate researchers’ and community members’ shared decision making and implementation of community conversation. By developing future transition specialists’ skills for implementing community conversation, Parker-Katz, Cushing, and Athamanah (2018) embraced the shared role of participants and researchers. Researchers guided the future educators in the methods of community conversation and then fostered the development of the questions, implementation details, and analysis of the results of the community conversation. Additional evidence of the tenets of PAR in this special issue included having organizers and community members make joint decisions about who should be invited and how best to promote community member engagement (Bumble et al., 2018; Molfenter et al., 2018).

Some of the methods used in each of the community conversation studies diverge from PAR. Aside from the harvesting of ideas from all community conversation participants, none of the studies engaged the larger group in data analysis. For example, all four studies implemented interviews and surveys that were largely, if not completely analyzed by the researchers themselves. In doing so, identifying the themes, selecting which were important or demonstrative of significant meaning, and establishing a set of implications based on results were actions relegated to the researchers with little or no input from the community participants. This is an important distinction to acknowledge because PAR generally employs an interpretivistic paradigm prioritizing the participants’ lenses through which the data are viewed and the ways that this variation affects resulting conclusions. However, and perhaps because of the inherent tenets of community conversation, each study demonstrated the potential for “actionability” (p. 28), a defining characteristic that Stoecker and Brydon-Miller (2013) describe as the change that results from action research. An example of this is provided in the stakeholder connections that resulted from the Wisconsin community conversation and the Tennessee participants’ reported efforts to share transition information with those who did not attend a community conversation.

The exploration of community conversation as a methodology for qualitative research illuminated several convergences that support the use of community conversation as a tool for research. At the same time, opportunities to increase the capacity of community conversation as a research methodology are also notable.

Honing the Application of Community Conversations as a Method of Research

One of the most compelling reasons to do research is to solve real-world problems. In general, qualitative research has close ties to the practical implications of research and the translation of knowledge that are borne both from its connections to naturalistic settings as the field of research and its capacity to induce meaning grounded in the words, perceptions, and experiences of people. This is not to say that qualitative research is never esoteric or theoretical, or that qualitative methods are not used to purposefully explore the distance between research and resulting implications. Research applications for community conversation, however, fit more clearly in the first group. The purpose of examining community conversation as a type of research is to consider how the findings from these local applications contribute to patterns of meaning that might be instructive and evidentiary for the field of transition. Each of the studies in this special issue illustrates this point by building an argument for its respective purposes as work attempting to address gaps in the availability and access to inclusive, community-based employment for individuals with disabilities.

The rigor of research methods and the importance of following precedent and protocol to ensure that conclusions are valid are both important (Brantlinger, Jiminez, Klingner, Pugach, & Richardson, 2005; Trainor & Graue, 2015; Trainor & Leko, 2014). Qualitative research is inclusive of a range of paradigms and methodologies with a high tolerance for variation in application, opening the door for considering its confluence with community conversation. At the same time, there are indicators, what Trainor and Graue (2013) referred to as “touchstones” (p. 7), signaling parameters for identifying distinguishing characteristics and sound design and implementation decisions. Two touchstones of common across interpretivistic designs that present opportunities for a more research-oriented implementation of community conversation are the focused exploration, documentation, and analysis of context and the documented examination of researcher-reflexivity.

Each of the four studies provide some details about the context of the community conversation; however, contextualized analysis of the data, particularly in the examples of studies where multiple community conversations within a study were implemented, could help readers interpret the relevancy of the findings and implications to other research and practice settings. For instance, in the Illinois study, the focus on a thematic analysis of the interviews illustrated participants’ goals for developing effective transition collaborations (Parker-Katz et al., 2018), but we have little information about how the participants framed the contexts of such collaborations (e.g., transition planning vs. job development; rural, suburban, or urban locales; with parent vs. other professionals). In the California study, cultivating relationships with employers and business owners emerged as an important theme. The authors focused analysis on the community conversation attendees’ positions in the communities; however, other contextual variables such as unemployment rates and sustained business growth were not observed or, if so, remained unstated. Additional context and its analysis in the identification of patterns can make the results and implications of these studies more useful.

Similarly, qualitative research methods are strengthened when relationships and positions of both participants and researchers are part of analysis. Researcher reflexivity, as this is known, is an important factor in establishing the validity of the results (Ellis & Bochner, 2003). Reflexivity includes both taking action (e.g., bracketing, analytic memoing) and disseminating through transparent documentation of research decisions (Patton, 2015). While the four studies include some observation about the roles and positions of participants, the researchers were largely invisible. In sociocultural interactions embedded in educational settings and research in these contexts, researchers and participants have divergent roles that act as conduits for differentiated power. Researchers’ identities, positions, and their proximity to those with whom they implement studies potentially reveal important details about the lenses brought to the interpretive process, its results, and the implications, particularly in data that are heavily based on interviewing (Trainor, 2013). While the Wisconsin community conversation project illustrates how participants-as-researchers’ status—in this case insider status—can foster additional community participation in a study, we know less about the social and cultural identities of these stakeholders and what, if any, impact this had on others who participated and how they were engaged in the community conversation. To what extent did they reach across groups and support participation from stakeholders from differing backgrounds and with diverse community experiences? Reflecting and reporting reveals more for information for interpretation.

Relatedly, reflexivity is also a way to address the sociocultural variables that are invariably present in qualitative research. The identities of researchers and participants in the community conversation have implications for the range of communication, experiences, and interactions among stakeholders. At a minimum, sociodemographic variables associated with all members, researchers, and participants should be shared, as they were in the Illinois and California studies. Understanding why race/ethnicity, for example, might matter in the creation of inclusive employment requires additional reflection and analysis. The shared power between researchers and participants in the community conversation and qualitative research more generally creates a space to do this work, but it does not guarantee that it gets done. Given the current affronts to both equality and equity (e.g., poverty, postsecondary access) in our larger society and in the field of special education (e.g., disproportionality in school discipline and associated risks to positive transition outcomes), these types of analyses provide theoretical and empirical support for shoring up both reflexivity in analysis and in dissemination of results and implications.

Research in Practice and Practice as Research

The transition from high school to adulthood for students with disabilities is a process in which employment plays a key role. As Carter and Bumble (2018) point out, the development of inclusive, community-based employment settings is deserving of continued attention in both research and practice. The community conversation studies in this special issue present opportunities for researchers to be immersed in practice and for stakeholders who practice transition (e.g., educators, parents, individuals with disabilities, employers, and other community members) to be an integral part of research projects. Using qualitative touchstones for quality will likely strengthen both.