Doing research differently

I am currently reading Doing Research Differently by Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson.  It is really good and so far seems to endorse my own research style which is nice!  The authors are qualitative researchers looking at fear of crime.  They criticise traditional quantitative questions used to measure fear of crime such as "how safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark" as too suggestive of particular types of crime and evoking fears which might not relate to crime at all (Why might you be "walking alone" in the first place?  Is this not the stuff of nightmares and films rather than everyday experience?)  They point to alternative qualitative approaches and in particular the "non-inventionist free narrative".  This approach does not expect the interviewee to understand completely their own actions, motivations or feelings and looks for clues within stories for psycho-social explanations for why they feel the way they do about crime.  Story telling has the advantage of having 'indexicality' in that they contain certain facts or signficances beyond the tellers intentions.

One problem with the free narrative is that whilst I'm sure it can work excellently in a one to one conversation about crime, which is after all a whole literary genre, I'm not sure it works nearly so well in group situations addressing less colourful subjects, say dishwashers or pensions.  In addition, one of my problems with facilitation can be overindulging  the keen story tellers at the expense of the other participants' boredom levels.  My rescue is the facilitator 'box of tricks' which has to be prepared well in advance.  This contains small exercises such as point allocation games, completion tasks or role play to get out of the groove of well rehearsed stories and into new and surprising terrain.

Comments

[Trevor Godman]

Now that IS interesting! (Not that everything else you write isn't, obviously.)

I know very little about either qualitative research or proper social-sector stuff like crime or environmentalism. But ... the value of getting people to tell their own stories and then pick the message out is really interesting, and parallel some developments in quantitative work. Powered by the same kind of text analytics software that will analysis the kinds of comments people post on blogs and the like (eek!) it's now much more practical to let quant questionnaire's much less structured and let punters tell the interviewer what they think about a topic in an unstructured way. They tell us about the stuff that's important to them, and we don't bore them with lots of irrelevant rating scales. In theory anyway ...

PS. Very excited to have stumbled across your blob Gillian :)