Research Experience

Juha Suoranta

Searching For Personal Research Experience



Juha Suoranta

University of Lapland



Academic Narrative: Institutional and Personal



	To decide to come and join the QUIG conference is one part of my academic life, part of my academic narrative. Academic narratives comprise at least two kinds of frames. Naturally, one side of any academic narrative is institutional. The institutional frame refers to total institutions called university and science.

    As we know, total institutions have overwhelming power over us. Let me give only a brief example from the Finnish perspective: the academic rhetoric of profit-oriented research keeps telling me two things: 'publish or perish' and 'be international.' These are powerful messages which, of course, influence not only my academic life but my decisions concerning my other life.

    The other side of my academic narrative, the non-institutional, is, I think, more interesting and much more important. I call this personal frame 'the search for personal research experience.'  In what follows, I will look for the elements or characteristics of the personal frame. This task has two simultaneous purposes. On the one hand, it is a short study of the concept of personal research experience and, on the other, personal research experience as such. Before I try to characterize or even define what I mean by personal research experience, I have to begin by examining briefly the canons of qualitative research.

The Canons of Qualitative Research

	As regards the status of qualitative research in the field of education, it could be argued, following Gary Anderson (1994, p. 225), that the recent appearance of two handbooks (LeCompte et al., 1992, and Denzin & Lincoln, 1994a) has unequivocally legitimatized qualitative research. The tendency to produce qualitative research handbooks and textbooks is not only an American phenomenon; they appear also in other western countries as well (including Finland). In my interpretation, it is perhaps a sign of a paradigm shift, maybe a transition from one methodological canon to another. That is just the reason why I want to be on my toes at this point in to-day's paradigm game.

    When Peter Stringer (1990, p. 19) examined the discourse of social psychology textbooks, he noticed that "a revolutionary textbook which seeks to undermine the received versions seems to be a difficult notion to accept." The messages, as I apply them to qualitative research in education, are of three kinds: First, let's be careful with the handbooks, which tell us 'what qualitative research in education is all about.'  Second, let's take care that they do not narrow our personal research experiences for the sake of rigor (in qualitative methods). And third, let's remember that handbooks are good servants but bad masters.

    Nowadays, there are at least two grand narratives in qualitative research. The one is analytical, the other phenomenological.

    These categories are, of course, broad generalizations, but my only purpose is to draw attention to the diversity of qualitative methods and, for my part, to adjust the field of qualitative methodology a little. Let me thus explain the dichotomy slightly further. First of all, the differences between the two narratives lie in their general approaches. In (the discourse of) analytic narrative, various kinds of methods which concentrate on the use of human language are popular. For example, discourse analysis (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) and conversational analysis (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984) are based on the assumption that language use has some significant effects on the everyday practices of the social world. These forms of analysis, which are based mainly on Austin's (1962) and Wittgenstein's (1953) work, view language and spoken interaction as instruments of social action for getting things done in the multiplicity of social situations.

    In (the discourse of) phenomenological narrative it is argued that meaning is the core category of our human existence. Meaning is not reduced, however, merely to language as it is in analytic narrative. We, as human beings, have a much more fundamental relationship to the world than just the meaning carried by the language we use (Heidegger, 1962). The phenomenological approach assumes that there is a true essence behind the visible or speakable (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). This assumption motivates such questions as, what is the structure of the lifeworld?; what it means to be a woman; or what is the experience of running (van Manen, 1990, pp. 8-13)?

    Naturally, these differences in the general approaches have practical consequences for the nature of data, analysis, validity and reliability (see Kirk & Miller, 1986; Silverman, 1993; Moustakas, 1994; Hodder, 1994)

    From my point of view it is interesting that despite the profound differences in basic beliefs, both of these narratives form independent canons and are scientific approaches with a capital S, for, at the methodological level, they share two common tendencies. First, they try to build internally coherent conceptual schemes and second, each tries to convince scientific audiences that the other is doomed to failure and conceptual confusion as an intellectual enterprise.  Both enterprises represent, in a way, the received views in their own territories. While the analytical narrative has more sympathizers among quantitative researchers, the phenomenological side, too, has its own vocabularies and exemplars to follow.

    In addition to epistemological and ontological debates arising from the two grand narratives, there are pragmatic paradigm debates (Smaling, 1994). And, as everyone knows all too well, from the pragmatic point of view, quoting Ian Parker (1989, p. 24),

 	scientific debates and differences do not hinge on perception of ducks and rabbits, but on bigger, politically-charged questions about the nature of the world and of human relationships _ and paradigm changes here are a good deal nastier, messier, and more machiavellian.



The Dimensions of Personal Research Experience

    Let me now leave the bad paradigms and see what can be said about personal research experience as a fundamental aspect of the personal frame of academic narrative. It goes without saying that we can not operate freely without any theoretical frames in the field of educational science.  We have to accept, whether we like it or not, that some paradigms, conceptual schemes or scientific cultures are always infecting us. But still I believe that it is worth searching for something which can tentatively be described as personal research experience (PRE). In the following, I will briefly illustrate the concept of personal research experience from four separate perspectives: personal research experience as question- raising, as bricolage, as edification, and as pleasure.

Personal Research Experience as Question-Raising

    First, I would like to refer to the useful distinction made by Gerard Radnitzky (1970, pp. 15-17) in his book Contemporary Schools of Metascience. He sketches two ideal types to polarize the existing types of philosophical enterprises. I think it is fruitful to apply the typology not only to philosophy and philosophers but also to educational science and educational scientists. The first type, called the T-type, describes the researcher who develops such a split consciousness that she or he can do research during office hours. Quite the opposite is the second type, the Q-type, the researcher who wants her or his studies to have some serious implications for educational practice; in other words, she or he is doing educative as well as action research.

    T-type researchers problematize what seems unclear, especially in science and in philosophical doctrines. Their ideal is to achieve the perspective of a God, an 'objective' observer, an innocent bystander. They also have a taste for finished products that are precise and transparent, and, consequently, they insist on dichotomizing 'facts' and 'values.' Furthermore, T-type inquirers presuppose that some sort of ideal communication community has been established between educational scientists without scientific power-elites or methodological ideologies. They are as much security-minded as they are value-respecting in their passion for concentrating on technical details; for them, a means, such as qualitative methods, can become an end in itself. T-type researhers' first and foremost goal in science is to keep it "purely objective" and protect it from hostile paradigms such as women's studies, not to mention gay and lesbian studies.

    In contrast to T-type researchers, Q-types want to problematize and criticize what others take for granted in social and scientific life. Q-types stress that inquirers and the systems studied are steadily interacting and connected to each other. Such an educational researcher knows that it is a must to be both on the stage and in the audience. Q-types understand that it is practically impossible to try to play two different roles, those of scientist and educator, at the same time. To be morally and ethically honest, they have to admit that they are both inquirers and educators. Q-types emphasize the dialectic process between describing and evaluating, and practice and theory. They view communication as an existential necessity _ and even define the individual in terms of the dialogue context.

    For the Q-types, the ultimate task of educational science is to integrate the world of science and the rapidly changing social world with the world of personal experience in order to deepen human understanding and reflection on existential and educational themes.

    Despite these differences, the ideal types have at least one common ground: both require that the inquirers use their brain individually, that they are not "bound by the Book or the Party" (ibid., p. 17). Furthermore, both of them respect to some extent universal scientific values such as accuracy, consistency, simplicity and broad scope. Still, it is evident that my expression 'to search for the personal research experience,' is pointing at Q-type inquiry, especially when speaking of qualitative educational research.

Personal Research Experience as Bricolage

    The second connection to PRE is found from Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1994b, pp. 2-3), who, using L?vi-Strauss's terminology, point out that qualitative researchers are like bricoleurs. This term is reminiscent of Radnitzky's Q-type philosopher, and I would interpret bricoleur as a kind of expression of PRE. The bricoleur is like an inventor who can generate fresh methodological solutions in an old research situation. Someone could argue that the bricoleur is eclectic and unfamiliar with the paradigm differences which dictate all the other choices in empirical research. However, the bricoleur acknowledges, quite to the contrary, that paradigms, methods and approaches are all social constructions ready to collapse, like other conventions created by human beings. The bricoleur is comparable to Richard Rorty's (1991, p. 99) antiessentialist philosopher who

looks forward to the day when all the pseudo-problems created by the essentialist tradition _ problems about the relations of appearance to reality, of mind to body, of language to fact _ will be dissolved. She thinks that all these traditional dualisms collapse, like so many dominoes, once the distinction between essence and accident is collapsed.

   

    In other words the bricoleur embodies, at least partly, a postmodern or constructivistic conception of truth (see Kvale, 1995), for, just as she/he can make and create culture literally with her or his own hands, a constructivistic conception of truth means that knowledge is made, rather than found, during the research process.

Personal Research Experience as Edification or Autobiography

    The third view on PRE opens up when the concept is seen as edification after Richard Rorty (1980, p. 360) or as autobiography following Ren? Arcilla (1990, p. 36). Both of them refer to the lifelong project of trying to live with the question "what sort of person as a whole do I want to become?" (Arcilla, 1990, p. 36). This is basically the same thing as the search for PRE, only expressed in other words. The institutional aspects of science can be ruled out of court for a moment, but personal ones are always present, ready at hand, so to speak, in everyday experiences, that is, in our life-world.

    Furthermore, here we face the question of two educations. The one is education from above, socialization or oppression as we have learnt to call it. The other is individualization or, in Rorty's terms, edification, the education of equals. In this context personal research experience refers to the integrity of other persons and other cultures. To see PRE from this point of view is to maintain that the only virtues the educational scientist should have in this polyphonic world of postmodernism are "the habits of relying on persuasion rather than force, of respect for the opinions of colleagues, of curiosity and eagerness for new data and ideas ..." (Rorty, 1991, p. 39).

    To the qualitative researcher, PRE as edification and autobiography brings to mind Bruner's (1987) distinction between logical and narrative modes of knowing. If one applies Bruner's formulations to the qualitative research process, it should be evident that in the same way as there is no such thing as life itself _ it is always a narrative achievement _ there is no such thing as method or methodology as such. The value of this notion is that it may force us to reflect upon the research process more closely than before.

    According to Maso (1994, p. 94), the researcher must be open to three elements in qualitative research: to the research situation, to the research, and, above all, to her/himself. If we have lost our faith in larger-than-life methods and qualitative inquiry lacks a center, as Denzin (1994, p. 305) claims, a new center, or, rather, new centers can be found in ourselves. This task of finding ourselves afresh demands several new starts and experiments with multiple forms of narration.

Qualitative Research and PRE as Pleasures

    In her fascinating book Uses of Philosophy, Mary Warnock (1992) argues that the primary goal of education should be pleasure. Of course, such a statement would leave administrators and education policy-makers speechless. But why not set the same goal for qualitative research in education? Should we listen Norman Denzin (1994, p. 305) who says that "We shall not take ourselves too seriously. We shall have fun doing what we are doing." Do we have the guts to say out loud that pleasure is one of our strongest personal motives for inquiry? Can we think of it even ourselves?

    The concept of pleasure is topical in other respects as well in today's methodological discourses in qualitative research. It is related to contemporary discussion of postmodernism which argues that aesthetic thinking (Welsch, 1991), pleasure (Barthes, 1990) and affective experience (Grossberg, 1992) are crucial parts of (lived) experience of postmodernism. Thus, it is more than likely that the postmodern era seduces qualitative research also into  

a stylistic promiscuity favouring eclecticism and the mixing of codes; parody, pastiche and irony; a playfulness and the celebration of the surface depthlessness of culture (Featherstone, 1991, p. 7).

    I think that still another and, at this time, the final way to speak about PRE as pleasure is to define it as the pleasure of writing up qualitative research as well as methodological texts. I am tempted to conclude my search for PRE with the words of Roland Barthes (1990, pp. 24-25), who writes that

[T]o be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly, if reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.

  

PRE: Personal and Ethical



    What I have said above about the search for personal research experience can be summarized in two lessons. First, just like Bob Berkowitz always reminds us in his NBC show Real Personal that the things he has to say are "real personal," it could be said that qualitative inquiry in education, too, is "real personal."  Regardless of how abstractly we try to speak, write or think, we are always children of a particular time and space, of certain cultural and historical contexts.

    This means that my roots and cultural background as a Finnish male born in the sixties, at least to some extent, determine my world-view and experiences in the same way as, say, a small nineteenth-century town called Burlington, Vermont shaped those of John Dewey. Still, because I am neither a cultural relativist nor imperialist, it is possible and desirable that these cultural differences are understood more as challenges and incentives than barriers to the development of human science.



    Second, the path on the search for personal research experience is an ethical adventure. On the one hand, nothing can be taken for granted. On the other, it offers a certain kind of openness to the world. These "rules" seem to point in opposite directions, the former to the critical function of inquiry and the latter to respect for otherness. According to Emmanuel Levinas, the difference is, however, merely apparent, for the purpose is to emphasize that to be qualitative researchers we have to understand that whatever we were supposed to do or wanted to do in our research, that something _ reality, strange situation or other person _ will always be something other than totalities of ourselves: we can never appropriate the essence of the other into ourselves (Young, 1992, p. 178). And this demand, that we substitute a respect and dignity for the other, for a grasping of it, provides the ethical basis for personal research experience.

References

Anderson, G. (1994). The cultural politics of qualitative research: Confirming and 

contesting the canon.  Educational Theory, 44(2), 225-237.



Arcilla, R. (1990).  Edification, conversation, and narrative: Rortyan motifs for 

philosophy of education.  Educational Theory, 40(1), pp. 35-39.



Atkinson, M. J., & Heritage, J. (Eds.). (1984).  Structures of social action: Studies 

in conversation analysis.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do things with words.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.



Barthes, R. (1990).  The pleasure of the text.  Translated from the French by 

Miller.  Oxford: Basil Blackwell.



Bruner, J. (1987).  Life as narrative.  Social Research, 54(1), pp. 11-32.



Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (1994b). Introduction: Entering the field of qualitative 

research. In N. Denzin, & Y. Lincoln, (Eds.),  Handbook of qualitative research.  Thousand Oaks: Sage. pp. (1-17.)





Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). (1994a).  Handbook of qualitative research. 

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.



Denzin, N. (1994).  Evaluating qualitative research in the poststructural moment: The 

lessons James Joyce teaches us.  Qualitative Studies in Education, 7(4), 295-308.



Featherstone, M. (1991). Consumer culture and postmodernism.  London: Sage.



Grossberg, L. (1992).  Is there fan in the house?: The affective sensibility of 

fandom.  In L. Lewis, (Ed.) The adoring audience pp. 50-65.  London: Routledge. 



Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time.  London: Basil Blackwell.



Hodder, I. (1994). The interpretation of documents and material culture.  In N. Denzin, & 

Y. Lincoln, (Eds.) Handbook of qualitative research (393-402).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 



Kirk, J., & Miller, M. L. (1986). Reliability and validity in qualitative research. 

Qualitative Research Series Vol. 1.  Newbury Park, CA: Sage.



Kvale, S. (1995). Validation as communication and action.  Qualitative Inquiry, 1(1), 

(forthcoming).



LeCompte, M., Millroy, W., & Preisle, J., (Eds.). (1992). The handbook of 

qualitative research in education.  New York: Academic Press.



Maso, I. (1994). The excellent researcher.  In W. Harman, & J. Clark (Eds.) New 

metaphysical foundations of modern science (81-95).  Ann Arbor: Institute of Noetic Sciences.



Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible.  Evanston, IL: Northwestern 

University Press.



Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods.  Newbury Park, CA: Sage.



Parker, I. (1989).  The crisis in modern social psychology.  London & New York: 

Routledge.



Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology. London: 

Sage.



Radnitzky, G. (1970). Contemporary schools of metascience.  Lund: Scandinavian 

University Books.





Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the mirror of nature.  Princeton, NJ: 

Princeton University Press.



Rorty, R. (1991).  Objectivity, relativism, and truth.  Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press.



Silverman, D. (1993). Interpreting qualitative data.  London: Sage.



Smaling, A. (1994). The pragmatic dimension.  Quality & Quantity, 28(3), 233-249.



Stringer, P. (1990). Prefacing social psychology: A textbook example.  In I. Parker, & 

J. Shotter, (Eds.) Deconstructing social psychology (17-32).  London & New York: Routledge.



van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience.  New York: State University of 

New York Press.



Warnock, M. (1992). Uses of philosophy.  Oxford: Blackwell.



Welsch, W. (1991). Zur Aktualit?t des ?sthetischen Denken.  In T. Aittola, & 

J. Matthies, (Eds.) Philosophie, soziologie and erziehungswissenchaft in der postmoderne. Publications of the Research Unit for Contemporary Culture, 26, (pp. 36-54).  Jyv?skyl? University Press.



Wittgenstein. L. (1953). Philosophical investigations.  London: Basil Blackwell.



Young, R. (1992). White mythologies.  In N. Royle, (Ed.) Afterwords (160-195).  Tampere: 

Outside Books.