A Note about Research Methods

I have been thinking about our conversation a few weeks ago regarding research methods, which emerged out of our reading of the Sangtin Writers’ Playing with Fire. At the doctoral level—or, at least, in my doctoral program—there is tremendous pressure to do research and publish it. I have seen a number of my peers have ambitious dreams of doing meaningful research and writing it up in a way that is unique and innovative only to be thwarted by a committee that expects the writing to follow a traditional format (i.e, introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion/conclusion). It speaks, I think to our discussion about both the appeal and peril of trying to write research in the same way that Nagar and the Sangtin Writers told their stories.   

Recently, I finished a book on qualitative research by David Silverman (2007), a fairly prolific author in the field of qualitative research; many of his books are into their third and fourth editions. What drew me into this book in particular, however, was its title: A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, and Reasonably Cheap Book aboutQualitative Research. Silverman makes it clear from the beginning that this book is his unadulterated opinion about how qualitative research should be conducted. His arguments are relatively benign—he’s not a fan of postmodernism, he prefers a mixed methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and he thinks qualitative researchers who rely solely on individual interviews or focus groups are shortchanging both themselves and their participants by not supplementing the data with observations and document analysis. His analysis takes a turn, however, in the final chapter, where he rails against what he sees as qualitative researchers’ preoccupation with lived experience at the expense of broader cultural analyses. This leads him to the rather damning conclusion that “to the extent that qualitative researchers have largely embraced contemporary culture, their work is largely bullsh*t” (p. 124). He goes on to argue that “experimental writing [such as poetry and ethnodrama] that increasingly populations some academic journals is, strictly speaking, bullsh*t” (p. 139).

While I think most of Silverman’s book is a harmless tirade written by a retired white guy who has the luxury to say whatever he wants, I find this final chapter especially problematic. It is not likely that Silverman is alone in his disparaging of “experimental” or innovative methods for doing and writing research. Yet, these methods are often the most valuable and powerful for research or work that aims to illuminate the voices and experiences of those who are marginalized or disenfranchised. What I found remarkable about Playing with Fire was how poignant those stories were—and how especially powerful they became in light of their absence in the mainstream/academic development discourses with which we had engaged all semester.  Thus, the very research methods that Silverman belittles are actually quite important in understanding the gendered impact of development on individuals as well as understanding men’s and women’s roles in, experiences with, and views of development.

In my search for collaborative and novel forms of qualitative research, I came across a site created by a PhD student in Australia who created the site as part of her dissertation work examining collaborative art and ethnographic practices. Although the site, Side by Side, has been dormant for a few years, it offers a number of interesting stories and links to research and work that strives to tell the stories of individuals, communities, and cultures by having those individuals, communities, and cultures tell their stories themselves. In addition, the PEER (Participatory Ethnographic Evaluation and Research) website describes efforts to engage communities in peer-to-peer interviewing. The site contains documents describing how the method works, case studies, and other resources. Together, I think these two websites demonstrate the potential of collaborative and artistic/poetic research methods/narratives to evoke and inform, but they also demonstrate the long road toward legitimacy and widespread acceptance of these methods by the likes of Silverman and other academics.