Abstract
This article is a product of qualitative analyses followed by a collaboration and conversation amongst critical friends. Three methodologies (social semiotic/sociocultural, ethnomethodology, and rhizomatic analysis) were used to analyze the same piece of interview data. An inquiry into the various characteristics, commonalities, and distinctions of these diverse approaches to analysis was then undertaken through extended conversations. Authors worked through the kinds of questions that could be asked and the answers that might be possible given particular theoretical and methodological stances and choices. Analysis of the ensuing inquiry suggests the possibility of deeper reflexivity and new understandings in talking across paradigms. Struggles over representation and compromises in the process created tensions and questions that could not be easily resolved.
Recently researchers have asserted the importance of recognizing how researchers’ methodological choices influence the kinds of questions they ask and the kinds of analyses they produce (Honan, Knobel, Baker and Davies, 2000; Lather, 2006; Roulston, 2010). As different methodological choices can highlight different aspects of a piece of data, and can lead to different conclusions, researchers are consistently called on to exercise reflexivity in their work. However, the process of reflexivity is not straightforward, and carrying out reflexivity in isolation can create additional challenges. In this article, we illustrate, in the first instance, how different methodologies produce different kinds of analyses. From there, we proceed to unpack how discussions of methodology amongst peers can assist researchers in their attempts at reflexivity, their articulation of research goals, and their deepening understanding of the field. This paper confirms the diversity, the interrelations, and the implications of perspective and positioning for qualitative research in education, and asserts the value of extended conversations about methodology amongst critical friends to clarify how and why we do the kinds of research that we do.
Initially, taking the work of Honan et al. (2000) as inspiration, we thought to examine the application of three theoretical approaches to the same piece of data. We were provoked by Honan et al.’s examination of ‘Producing Possible Hannahs’, where they examined Knobel’s data about Hannah from three theoretical and methodological approaches (i.e. D/discourse theory, feminist poststructuralism, and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis). We found their description of the affordances of these approaches profoundly useful as we worked to articulate our own theoretical frameworks. However, as we worked together, discussed our analyses, and prepared to present this paper in a conference setting, we began to realize that the dimensions of this process exceeded our initial questions about methodologies, and we were challenged to recognize the assumptions that operate in our respective practices and in the project of qualitative research overall.
As researchers, we come from different backgrounds in terms of research and practice, and we have diverse foci in terms of our current research agendas. Diane is from a background of community literacy and elementary teaching in low-income settings, with a particular interest in popular culture and home and school literacies, as well as issues of power in ethnographic research and learning spaces. Lyndsay is from a background of urban elementary teacher-librarianship, teacher-education, and discourse analysis and has worked with audio data from a variety of sites to examine the cultural production of literacy ideologies, identities, social relations, and values. Mia is from a background of creative practice, applied theatre, and arts education and has researched contemporary cultural practices and policy in their relationship with social, public, and pedagogical spaces. However, regardless of our diverse backgrounds, we share a deep interest in, and commitment to, investigating methodology in qualitative research and in supporting each other as learners and as thinkers.
In a field that is home to a wide array of approaches, standards, processes, and accountability methods, this study is a pause in our work, a project of taking stock, and a practice of putting theoretical and philosophical ideas and assumptions into practice, both in relation to each other and to data analysis. In this way, this paper is positioned to remind researchers of the deep value of cross-paradigm conversations, for both enriching our abilities to articulate our methodological approaches and assumptions, and for uncovering questions that otherwise evade us.
The analyses presented here are informed by a range of related but distinct qualitative methods: social semiotic/sociocultural, ethnomethodology, and rhizomatic analysis, respectively. Although all of these theoretical frameworks can be considered as post-positivist, each take up data analysis in different ways, with different foci and using different discourses. Diane’s analysis is influenced by social semiotics (e.g. Halliday, 1978; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Stein, 2008), sociocultural theory (e.g. Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Wertsch, 1985) and theories of hybridity and boundary crossing (e.g. Leander and Rowe, 2006; Massey, 2005; Pennycook, 2007, 2010). This analysis is particularly interested in tracing the socially constructed history of a text, and the hybrid or remixed meanings and identities produced across time and space, through permeable boundaries. Lyndsay’s analysis is informed by ethnomethodology, in particular by applied conversation analysis (Hutchby and Wolfitt, 2008; McHoul and Rapley, 2001) and membership categorization analysis (Hester and Elgin, 1997; Lepper, 2000). This analysis focuses specifically on how people produce particular identities, phenomena, and activities through talk in interaction. Informed by the work of Garfinkel (1967, 2002), Goffman (1981), and Sacks (1992), ethnomethodological analyses pay particular attention to how people ‘bring off’ certain interactions, for example a geography lesson, or a radio interview, as these kinds of interactions. As Roulston (2010) and Baker (2002, 2004) assert, analysts using this approach recognize interview data as co-constructed and see that when people talk to each other they are also performing certain actions (affirming, denying, clarifying, excusing, etc.). Mia’s rhizomatic analysis is grounded in an expanded empiricism, drawing in particular from Deleuze and his collaborations with Guattari (1987, 1994) as well as scholars such as Massumi (2013), and Clough (2010). In practice, and in the footsteps of other contemporary scholars (Conquergood, 2002; St. Pierre, 1997, 2008), this approach lends an analytical focus on what is happening, as well as what is done, and how things function, as well as what they might, or might not, mean.
Process and subject of inquiry
As previously stated, this project began when each of the authors put their respective theoretical and methodological frameworks to work on the same piece of data. We then met to discuss our analyses, and explored some of the similarities and differences in our understandings of the data. These conversations quickly expanded our initial intentions for the project, and became what we now, in hindsight, understand as the second phase of the project that resulted in a complex process of reflexivity and cross-paradigmatic dialogue. Overall, this process extended over one calendar year and provided the material for the writing of this paper, which we might now understand as the third phase of our inquiry (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005).
Data generation
Data for this paper was drawn from two sources: 1) an audio-taped excerpt of an interview between Kyle, 1 a 10-year-old boy, and Diane, that took place in the library of the child’s school; 2) field notes and fragments written and audio-recorded during conversations amongst the three of us about our analyses. The audio data of the interview was part of Diane’s doctoral research. This five-minute excerpt was from a 30-minute interview and was selected because it represented a relatively complete interaction, and because it was available in its original audio-recorded format for each of the authors to analyze separately. In sharing the data with the other authors, Diane sent Lyndsay and Mia both the audio track of the interview and an initial transcription with descriptions of some of the non-verbal actions that occurred during the interview. The initial transcript of the interview is presented below (see Figure 1).
Interview with Kyle, 9 February 2010. Excerpt.
Subsequent to our initial individual analyses, we began a series of extended discussions about the analyses, our respective methodologies, discourses, and possibilities for dissemination. These conversations were instrumental in the development of our initial findings concerning the diversity of results dependent on methodological approach. Our conversations were recorded through audio-taping, note-taking, and follow-up email exchanges. The generation of data such as notes and audio-recordings was not preplanned within systematic parameters, as this process and our interactions evolved over time. Subsequent to a conference presentation early in this project, and in response to our in-person conversations about the details of data representation (for example, we discussed the theoretical importance of including or excluding the transcript in the presentation of our research), our conversations widened to include a focus on reflexivity, but also to how our interactions about our divergence and convergence could be seen as useful data. Our methodological approach during this phase of our project was experimental and emergent. We begun the project unsure of where it would take us.
A final, and perhaps most challenging, phase of the project came with the writing of the manuscript that we would submit for publication. Although ideas had been evolving for some time, the process of writing and consolidating our ideas and perspectives continued a rich process of inquiry. Determining what we wanted to share and how we wanted to share it has been a process that has no clear conclusion.
Data sample
In order to provide the reader with a quick orientation to the data, we offer here a short description of the five-minute interview and an excerpt of a transcription of this interview. In preparation for conducting analysis, Diane familiarized Lyndsay and Mia with the context of the excerpt and provided each of the authors with an audio recording and a transcript of the excerpt. Diane described the audio excerpt as an excerpt of an interview with Kyle, a 10-year-old male participant in her research. She explained that in this audio excerpt Kyle begins by asking her to videotape him. He then tells her of his ‘evil plan’ to take revenge on Stephanie, a classmate and a fellow participant in Diane’s study. As Kyle notes in his interview, Stephanie had promised him he could help her with the classroom recycling duties and then reneged on her promise. In describing this audio data, Diane noted that one of the things she and Kyle talked about was the way that he uttered his threat and how it might compare to something a professional wrestler might say. Diane then passed the audio data and transcript to Lyndsay and Mia and each author set about analyzing the data following their chosen tradition.
One piece of data, three perspectives: an interview with Kyle
In the next sections, we provide a taste of what each of us found when we analyzed the short interview with Kyle from our respective positions. We offer these short analyses as illustrations for how researchers might approach their own data from different perspectives.
Constructing meanings and identities through textmaking processes: a social semiotic/sociocultural approach
In analyzing the data, I applied a hybrid social semiotic/sociocultural approach (e.g. Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Halliday, 1978; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Stein, 2008, Wertsch, 1985), alongside theories of hybridity and boundary crossing (e.g., Leander and Rowe, 2006; Massey, 2005; Pennycook, 2007, 2010) to highlight how Kyle relocalized, or remixed, some of the popular culture resources of professional wrestling to create a playful, parodic, hybrid textual performance. My interest in Kyle’s playful textmaking stems from a personal and professional investment in imagining valued literacies broadly, beyond print literacies (i.e. reading and writing) traditionally valued at school (Alvermann and Hong-Xu, 2003; Buckingham and Harvey, 2001; Street, 1984), and in viewing the boundaries between home and school as permeable (Dyson, 2003; Gregory, Long and Volk, 2004; Leander and Rowe, 2006).
This analysis suggests that Kyle was able to use elements of professional wrestling (threatening voice, the format of ‘rant’ humor) to negotiate and shift his relationship with me, the researcher, and to express his dissatisfaction with a classmate in ways that might not have been accessible to him through direct conversation. Kyle was seen to play with ‘wrestler’ as textual form. Three key elements are primary in this analysis: 1) possible meanings of the text itself, 2) what happens through textmaking processes (talk, actions, drafting process), and 3) how audiences receive this text (Rose, 2001). Kyle remade, or relocalized, wrestler as text, producing a hybrid form from the popular culture resources of professional wrestling. Kyle repeated the words, gestures, and intonation of professional wrestling as he spoke about Stephanie and her ‘evil’ deeds and how he was going to ‘take. her. out’. Similar to the performances in professional wrestling, where concerns about what is fake and what is not, are paramount, in this excerpt, Kyle’s words and actions seem both playful (fake) and purposeful (real).
There are two explicit audiences in this excerpt, Kyle and me, but also two implied audiences, Stephanie (the devil’s child) and Kyle’s fans out there, the imagined audience for his wrestling rant. Kyle’s movements in and out of wrestler text allude to his awareness of the performance he creates. The way in which Kyle addresses the video camera directly, and the audio-recorder (by whispering into it) suggests he is aware of the potential for these tools to transmit his messages. The ways in which Kyle and I interact suggest a shift in conventional adult–child relations and this is partly enhanced by the presence of new tools: a digital camera, a video-recorder, and an audio-recorder. Kyle’s request to be videotaped shifts the data-gathering role from the researcher to himself.
This analysis highlights Kyle’s productive use of resources to produce a new text that shows off his abilities to create and remix cultural resources to his own advantage. Relevant to this suggestion, Pennycook (2007, 2010) argues that the relocalization of forms, that is, the repetition of a form in a new time and space, is a creative and productive act.
How people get things done: an ethnomethodological analysis
The next analysis is informed by two popular strands of ethnomethodology: applied conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. Applied conversation analysis looks at talk in institutions (here, in a classroom library between a researcher/teacher and a child/student) as talk that produces, reproduces, and challenges the norms of that institution (Antaki, 2011; Heritage, 2005). Membership categorization analysis focuses specifically on the kinds of categorization work that people do in social interaction. For example, how they enact particular identities, ascribe particular identities to their fellow interlocuters, and assign values to different ways of being.
In looking at the data I was particularly struck by how Kyle and Diane both reproduce and challenge traditional understandings of interviewing, and adult–child relations in and through their talk. My analysis considers how Diane and Kyle bring off this interaction as an interview and how do they ‘do’ ‘being interviewed’ and ‘interviewing’. One of the ways they do this is by making direct and indirect references to the technology that is being used to record their interaction (lines 1; 2; 3; 6; 7; 35–52; 68–85). Diane and Kyle repeatedly use the technology as props, or resources in their performance of interviewer and interviewee. For example, in her first turn (line 1), Diane orients to the fact that this interaction is an interview that is being taped for her to listen to later. She reminds Kyle that if he whispers she won’t be able to hear him ‘on the tape later’. In Kyle’s next turn (line 2), he affirms Diane’s account of the situation, and builds on it, by suggesting that she ‘might need a camera for this one’. In effect, he agrees with her that this is in fact an interview, and suggests that this interview might warrant a different kind of documentation.
In examining how Kyle and Diane perform interviewee and interviewer we can also hear what they consider to be their own rights and obligations, and what they consider to be their interlocutor’s rights and obligations. Kyle makes it clear that documenting this interaction is Diane’s responsibility. He repeatedly directs her in using the technology and expresses at least mild frustration when his performances are not captured in the way that he hopes. In contrast, he does not offer to adjust the volume of the audio recorder himself, or to work the camera to capture what Diane has to say. In this way, we can hear Kyle doing ‘being interviewed’ and we can see his understanding of the rights and obligations of interviewees and interviewers.
As Diane comments above, a notable element of this excerpt is the way that Kyle seems to take control of the interview and works to transform it into a forum for performing a kind of wrestler/evil/bad guy persona. From an ethnomethodological perspective (Antaki, 2011; Heritage, 2005), we can understand many of Kyle’s utterances as a kind of challenge to the institution of ‘the research interview’ as he transforms his interaction with Diane from a research interview into a very different kind of interview. In looking at this excerpt, we can hear Kyle performing ‘wrestler being interviewed before a match’/ ‘evil bad guy being interviewed about his dastardly plan’ as much as he can hear himself perform ‘elementary student being interviewed for a university study’.
For her part, Diane, as an adult teacher-researcher can be heard as working to both recover the research interview, and yet support Kyle in his performance. She can be heard as doing ‘being a friendly researcher advocate’ in many ways. For example, Diane offers some analysis of Kyle’s talk during the interaction: ‘You’re like one of the guys who comes on before the matches’, which serves to both provide him with recognition (being friendly) and also provides future listeners with some interpretation of Kyle’s utterances (being a researcher). In this case, Diane’s impromptu interpretation can be seen to help render Kyle more intelligible and more sympathetic to future unknown audiences. Without this friendly interpretation inserted into the interaction, Kyle could have been heard as uttering death threats against his classmate. An ethnomethodological approach allows for an examination of the roles taken up in this interaction and how they are adapted and shifted throughout the process.
Thinking beyond the representational and represented: a rhizomatic analysis
A rhizomatic analysis is rooted in theories of affect. It takes up experience as more than that which can be either represented, predicted, or fixed in language; rather experience is considered a transcendental state acknowledging affect, forces understood as feelings, senses, and the subconscious, and forces of the earth’s vitality that are often non-human (for example inanimate, natural elements, chemical, etc.). Force is a term used carefully by Deleuze as something that exerts itself on others; in contrast to power, forces are always in relation to, and in conjunction with, other forces. This contingency means that no one force can be repeated, it is always in the process of becoming something else (Stagoll, 2005). Affect can be understood to describe the living process of change in response to force. An endeavor to map pathways and processes of affect then, lends attention to what is happening in and around the interactions between Kyle and Diane, rather than what it means or how it is being signified. This approach to analysis implicates everything surrounding my own encounter with the research, some of which will be beyond my abilities to articulate (the subconscious, for example). My own understanding and experience of wrestling, boys, Diane, classrooms, and so on, intricately affects the inquiry that I am able to engage in, and the elements of the events that I am able to draw out. This analysis then is framed by my own relationships with the data, the sensations that it provokes in me, and the ways in which I can understand the functions, processes, and relations emerging from the data events.
The performative form of the video recording of this interview relates the space to screen performance and fiction. These connections can be seen as forces of affect and allow or prompt Kyle to take on a ‘character’, and in doing so open up a space of pretend within a context that is ‘real’. This creates a smooth space for Kyle and Diane to play with aspects of their own subjectivities and with, or through, aspects of an imagined persona. This imagined persona, drawn in part from the culture of wrestling, can confide in whispered tones that he would ‘wipe out’ his classmate ‘for good’, and be met with only playful disapproval. The performative space, where Kyle can plot and scheme crimes of revenge, can be considered in relation to the space of the research interview, in which Kyle is invited to represent himself for the consideration of Diane. In addition, this space is in relation to the striated space of school, in which Kyle seems to be involved in a disagreement with another student over a recycling task. Considered in relation then, this piece of data is a space whereby Kyle moves between subjectivities, ideas, imaginings, and circumstances, fluidly dancing between performances of evil villain, engaged student, and willing research participant. He does this in part with vocal play, body language, discourses of wrestling, and of course, the medium of the video camera.
When we consider the topic of the recycling conflict in terms of affective moment, Kyle’s feeling of betrayal as conveyed in the data draws attention to the position of Kyle within an interconnected network of segmentary lines involving personal, social, and hierarchical dynamics within the territory of the school. Kyle’s ideas, the desires he expresses (dominance of Diane’s attention, ownership of the recycling task, etc.) are in relation to a wider set of circumstances, of forces, and affects that influence his roles, positions, relations, and his actions in his classroom and interview setting. In this case he describes an established dynamic, or perceived line of segmentarity, of his betrayal by Stephanie, and the affect of him being less than powerful in the context of others sharing this classroom territory. Provided with a smooth space of performative play, Kyle’s attention is drawn to initiating a rupture in his current situation. This rupture is a disruption of something already established, and by voicing and planning this rupture (in this case of ‘wiping her out’); Kyle imagines where that rupture could lead. Put another way, he follows the line of flight, or new possibilities that could emerge from his actions. In this case, he imagines Diane’s research project becoming more focused on him, and the classroom recycling job becoming his.
A rhizomatic analysis highlights the constantly evolving and entangled nature of the various roles, encounters, and ideas including myself, the researcher, in that dynamic.
Conversations: part 1
In part, this paper offers three different ways to approach qualitative data analysis in education research. As such, it provides an illustration of three different methodologies in action and suggests the importance of recognizing the effects that methodological choices have on the kinds of questions that can be asked and the kinds of answers that are found. In examining the three analyses of this data, through conversation and critical feedback, we found that although there were many areas of commonality, there were also multiple areas of difference. While we each began feeling that we shared a very similar post-positivist orientation, through our discussions we learned to see how diverse even this shared heritage could be. Through structured collaboration we became aware of the spaces between our individual perspectives and methods, and those of our close colleagues. These spaces, or divergences, were all at once unsettling, and liberating, and they were quickly filled in with rich discussion, debate, and conversation. These possibilities for deeper analysis and reflection occurred at various moments and intersections of our project, and were made explicit as we attempted to talk across unfamiliar traditions, and articulate our own assumptions and processes in relation to each other’s work.
The following section touches on some of the commonalities and contrasts of our methodological journey, explored through shared findings and reflections on our methodological choices.
Common threads of interest were related to the possibilities afforded by the relationship between Diane and Kyle, the roles taken up by them in this context, and the potential interpretations of Kyle’s wrestler statements or performances. However, through conversation, these areas were teased out and emerged as topics relevant and understood in different ways, and ultimately as different products of our theoretical frameworks. Diane was interested in how adult–child power relations might be shifted (in this context and in educational contexts more broadly) and how Kyle’s wrestler performance offered a new kind of text and a display of Kyle’s expertise. Lyndsay was similarly interested in research roles, how Kyle and Diane took up and challenged roles, and focused on the production of identities in and through the talk of the interview excerpt. She was also interested in the tools used in the interaction, but was less concerned with the performances of wrestling per se and the home–school connections important to Diane. Mia, interested in the possibilities and performances offered to Kyle and to Diane in this conversational space, saw Kyle taking on an imagined persona of wrestler at the same time that he occupied other performances, including that of research participant. Kyle’s desires, ideas, and representations were seen as influenced by forces that can be located in the interview context as well as the social and cultural contexts of school, wrestling, family, and so on.
One of the occasions when our assumptions about research and analysis became most visible was during our discussion of the merit or importance of presenting the full transcript when disseminating our findings to potential readers/audiences. For a particular conference presentation, Diane and Mia did not feel the need to present the transcript of the interview, and indeed preferred not to, whereas Lyndsay felt it was an important aspect of the presentation. This initial difference of opinion began a much larger discussion about what counts as data, and led us to more nuanced, specific, and differentiated understandings of our respective positions. For the purposes of this study, we have attempted to take up our three methodological approaches in as uncomplicated a form as possible. Having said that, the complexities and limitations of our respective methodologies have never been more apparent than they are now, at the end of this project. The following section summarizes some of the critiques that resulted in our diverse positionings.
Mia, positioned within the post-structural frame of rhizomatic analyses, previously moved away from social semiotics as a methodological approach when she recognized that it depended on an understanding of data as pieces of representation (texts, images, settings, etc.) and therefore fixed or concrete in some way. It did not adequately give her the tools to analyse change, movement, and embodiment. She acknowledges that there is an element of semiotics in an affective mapping; like there is an inevitable reliance upon representational thought (the reasons for this include her training, the common discourses and terminology at her disposal, and the paradigm of thought that dominates our society). While Lyndsay appreciates the way social semiotics allows analysts to celebrate ‘out of school literacies’, she feels the approach is ultimately too broad for her and lacks an attention to the details of social processes and how meaning is co-constructed between people in specific social interactions.
Diane, who uses social semiotics, would not use an ethnomethodological approach because of the magnified focus on small pieces of linguistic data. Mia has an underlying interest in the complex interrelations that binds together the human, the non-human, the material and the virtual; based on this, while some scholars have worked to bring ethnomethodology to data beyond talk (Ball and Smith, 2011; Francis and Hart, 1997; Goodwin, 2001), for the most part, an ethnomethodological analysis does not afford her the tools, or lens, to see beyond the specific bounded circumstances of an interaction represented primarily through linguistic data.
Diane would not use a rhizomatic analysis, primarily because of the audience for whom she is writing and the daily context within which she does her academic work. Her intentions are to connect with theoretical frames that she sees as accessible, in terms that relate to educators’ everyday work. Lyndsay enjoys reading her colleague’s rhizomatic analyses, and is intrigued by the inclusion of inanimate objects, including the natural world, and yet, like Diane, she is not ready to use it in her own work. Like Diane, Lyndsay finds the approach less accessible than her method of choice. Lyndsay feels ethnomethodology’s focus on everyday talk, often classroom talk, can be remarkably useful in connecting with practicing and pre-service teachers and for illustrating social processes in educational institutions.
A consideration of the some of the reasons behind our methodological choices can be further unpacked by an overview of the various understandings afforded by the different methods of analysis undertaken. For example, from a social semiotic/sociocultural reading, we can see that when popular culture is legitimized as a resource in institutional settings like interviews, children may be more able to appropriate familiar genres and relocalize them for specific purposes. In other words, sanctioning the use of popular culture in institutional settings may afford children a wider range of options for expressing themselves. This perspective reminds us that everyday texts and textmaking practices can be viewed as creative through a consideration of multimodal performances as texts, and an examination of the processes of hybrid textmaking.
From an ethnomethodological reading, we can see that both Kyle and the Interviewer work together to make meaning of their interaction and to both transform, and conserve, the institution of the interview. This analysis suggests that children and adults are both agents in their interactions and that they can, and do, transform institutions in and through their talk in interaction. Educators are alerted to the work being done in our classrooms every day to make and remake different institutions, and we are prompted to think about which institutions we want to transform, and which ones we want to conserve.
From a rhizomatic perspective, an examination of this data suggests we can rethink the ways that we evaluate expected and unexpected behavior, order, and breaks from order. This allows us to think about ruptures in terms of new possibilities for experience. We can also see the implications of introducing performative modes, like the video camera, for enabling Kyle’s experiments with positions and subjectivities outside of his own familiar and expected performances of self.
Conversations: part 2
In this final section, we focus on two critical characteristics of the project outlined: discourse (in this case taken up to describe the words we use and the meanings we grant those words) and reflexivity. These two aspects of research emerged as profoundly significant to the choices we make as researchers, to the affordances of our methods, and to the potential implications of the work.
In talking across paradigms, it became plain that discourse was a distinguishing factor that created intersections and allowed us to think through data in different directions. Diane depended on terms that described texts and textual performances in terms of play, parody, and relocalization with a focus on what is created and creative about new texts. Identity is a useful term within social semiotics, in this case organizing recognizable, yet socially constructed, positions for researcher and participant. Lyndsay understood the data as conversational turns, and highlighted how interlocuters in the data extract oriented themselves within the interaction. The notion of talk is taken up as central to the ethnomethodological approach, and actions and identities are seen to be performed in and through this talk. Mia drew on post-structural language that attempts to avoid fixed categories. Movement, interrelations, and space are described in terms of rhizomatic lines (lines of segmentarity, lines of flight) and affects. Actions and representations of meaning are taken in terms of performance and relations.
Like language translation, speaking across disciplines is not an exact science, meanings are contextually bound, definitions are slippery, and what a term means within the context of one methodological tradition may be different in another. ‘Text’, for example, is a central and complex term within social semiotics, taken up to describe representational communication of many forms, it can be broken down into linguistic, visual, gestural, to name but a few. Within ethnomethodology, due to the linguistic focus of the analysis, text is often the substitute for, or representation of, talk. Within a rhizomatic analysis, text is generally understood as that which is a static representation of one moment in time within a much larger and moving interaction of forces and affects.
There are other terms that are used productively in one approach and excluded almost entirely in another. Take ‘identity’, for example: within Diane’s social semiotic analysis, identity is a critical term used to summarize the participant’s recognizable positions as a student, as a boy, or as a wrestler. In addition to this, however, identity is also understood as something that can be taken on and then shed again, or as a text in itself that can be made, and then re-made. An ethnomethodologist would see identity as something that is spoken into being, in and through an interaction, rather than as something that can be transported between interactions and yet, interlocuters will often assume identities that would recognizable outside the specific interaction (eg. adult/child; teacher/student). In a rhizomatic analysis, identity would be regarded as fixed representational category (student, boy, wrestler, etc.) that does not contribute to an understanding of the complex, unique, and always moving positions of a participant. Rather, the term ‘subjectivity’ may be more frequently drawn on within a rhizomatic analysis as a way to describe a state in relation and in a constant state of motion.
Aside from the subtleties and significance of many aspects of our discourse, there are of course terms that carry consistent weight and meaning across all three approaches. One of these terms was reflexivity. As our conversations delved into notions of bias, researcher positioning, and assumptions, it became clear that the practice of reflexivity was not only pivotal in our individual approaches to research, but was the driving force in our collaboration overall. To our surprise, although we all identified ourselves as qualitative researchers, our own familiarity with quantitative and positivist traditions crept into our interactions as we worked through notions such as ‘blind spots’ in research, and the possibility that we might ‘see’ those blind spots in search of a more truthful representation of the data under analysis.
In qualitative research, reflexivity has been variously defined as self-analysis or awareness of one’s position within one’s research (Lincoln and Guba, 1984; Maxwell, 2005); critical consciousness of one’s agenda; responsibility to those researched (Fine and Weis, 1998; Foley, 2002); and ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ (Pillow, 2003: 188) that involve constant and rigorous questioning at all stages of conducting and writing research. What emerged through our work together is that reflexivity in itself is a process of research, accompanied by a paradigm, a set of methods, and research questions. It is a process that is rarely described, but generally accepted as being embedded in contemporary post-positivist social science research. Reflexivity then became a central topic of inquiry, and our understanding of it has been deeply enriched. We do not claim to have unearthed a method of reflexive practice that would work for all, but we do propose that cross-paradigm conversations can play an important contribution to meaningful reflexive practice. Amongst other things, these conversations, when undertaken with supportive and critical friends or colleagues, can raise difficult questions, unravel assumptions, encourage new ideas, and above all continue and expand inquiry through the articulation of process and findings in the detail and language that is accessible to all involved.
The spaces between our approaches and analyses made explicit and tangible the partial and contingent nature of the work we do in qualitative research. The intellectual understanding of this contingency, that we all comfortably claim, has been tested and revisited again and again through the collaborative engagement of this study. Theory materialized in practice. At the same time, the spaces in which we saw our differences at times became places where we found ourselves adjusting, adapting, and responding to each other in a movement (albeit unintentional) towards cohesion. One of many questions that emerged was: is our research, in part, about persuasion or about winning audiences over to our point of view? Struggles over representation and compromises in the process created tensions and questions that could not be easily resolved. This paper can be seen in some ways as a paradox in play: three researchers at once attempting to differentiate paradigms and processes, while at the same time we attempt to draw the other in and find a common purpose.
This project began as a methodological and hypothetical inquiry that, once begun, quickly unraveled into a vast and complicated conversation: one that we believe has great significance. This paper alerts researchers and consumers of research to the need for reflexivity in our analysis and our evaluation of other researchers’ analyses. During our process of analyzing and discussing our analyses, all three authors found their assumptions about research, analysis, and representation were challenged and their own scholarship was enriched. It is through dialogue with each other across paradigms and methods that we gain a more nuanced understanding of the interactions that we participate in as researchers and as educators.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.