Answer 2 different question according to their chapter

2

Goals

Why Are You Doing This Study?

In planning, as well as in assessing, ethnographic research, we must consider its relevance as well as its validity.

—H ammersley (1992, p. 85)

A nyone can find an unanswered, empirically answerable question for which the answer isn’t worth knowing; as T

horeau said, it is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Z anzibar. In addition, it is easy to

become captivated by the stories of your informants, or by what’s going on in the setting you are studying, and lose

sight of your reasons for studying these particular phenomena. Brendan C roskery (1995), reflecting on his

dissertation research on four Newfoundland school principals, admitted that

T he study suffered from too many good intentions and too little focused thinking… . I painfully discovered

that many of the data (though interesting) were not particularly relevant to the core category. (p. 348)

A clear understanding of the goals motivating your work will help you avoid losing your way or spending time and

effort doing things that don’t advance these goals.

T he goals of your study are an important part of your research design. (I am using “goal” in a broad sense to

include motives, desires, and purposes—anything that leads you to do the study or that you want to accomplish by

doing it.1) T hese goals serve two main functions for your research. First, they help to guide your other design

decisions to ensure that your study is worth doing, that you, or those you write for, get something of value out of it.

Second, they are essential to justifying your study, explaining why your results and conclusions matter—a key task

of a funding or dissertation proposal or a published article. In addition, as H ammersley (1992, p. 28) noted, your

goals inevitably shape the descriptions, interpretations, and theories you create in your research. T hey therefore

constitute not only important resources that you can draw on in planning, conducting, and justifying the research,

but also potential validity threats, or sources of bias for the research results, that you will need to deal with (see C

hapter 6).

PE RSO NAL , PRAC T IC AL , AND INT E L L E C T UAL G O AL S

I think it is useful to distinguish among three different kinds of goals for doing a study: personal goals, practical goals,

and intellectual (or scholarly) goals. Personal goals are things that motivate you to do the study, but are not

necessarily important for others. T hey can include the desire to change or improve some practice or situation that

you’re involved in, curiosity about a specific issue or event, a preference for conducting a particular type of research,

or simply the need to advance your career. T hese personal goals often overlap with your practical or research goals,

but they may also include deeply rooted individual desires and needs that bear little relationship to your “official”

reasons for doing the study (see E xample 2.1).

Researchers frequently make a sharp separation between their research and the rest of their lives. T his practice

is harmful to good research in two main ways. First, it creates the illusion that research takes place in a sterile,

“objective” environment, subject only to rational and impersonal motives and decisions. T his obscures the actual

motives, assumptions, and agendas that researchers have, and leads them to ignore the influence of these on their

research process and conclusions. It also leads researchers to hide their actual motives and practices when they

don’t conform to this ideal, feeling that only they are failing to live up to the goal of scientific neutrality and

disinterest. Second, this separation cuts the researcher off from a major source of insights, questions, and practical

guidance in conducting their research; I discuss this in more detail in C hapter 3. For more on these issues, see C .

W. Mills (1959), T he Sociological Imagination, A ppendix, “O n Intellectual C raftsmanship.”

T wo major decisions are often profoundly influenced by the researcher’s personal goals. O ne is the topic, issue,

or question selected for study. T raditionally, students have been told to base this decision on either faculty advice

or the literature on their topic. H owever, in many dissertations, personal goals and experiences have also played

an important role in these decisions. Strauss and C orbin (1990) argued that

C hoosing a research problem through the professional or personal experience route may seem more

hazardous than through the suggested [by faculty] or literature routes. T his is not necessarily true. T he

touchstone of your own experience may be more valuable an indicator for you of a potentially successful

research endeavor. (pp. 35–36)

A particularly important advantage of basing your research topic on your own experience is motivation. L ack of

motivation causes many students to never finish their dissertations, and a strong personal interest in the topic and

in answering your research questions can counteract the inevitable interference from work, family obligations, or

procrastination. E xample 2.1 describes how one student made a substantial change in her dissertation topic as a

result of her life experiences and the goals and interests that these created.

E xample 2.1 Using Personal E xperience to C hoose a D issertation T

opic

C arol K affenberger, a doctoral student in a counseling program, had carefully planned her dissertation

research on the development of conflict resolution skills in children, and was beginning work on her

dissertation proposal. H owever, she found it hard to sustain her interest in this topic. T hree years before

she began her doctoral work, her youngest daughter, then 12, had been diagnosed with a particularly

deadly form of leukemia, was hospitalized for six months and underwent a bone marrow transplant, went

into remission and then relapsed, and required a second transplant before recovering three years later.

T his illness had initiated a family crisis, and caused major changes in the family’s roles and responsibilities. C

arol quit her job and moved into the hospital with her daughter. H er husband continued to work, maintained

the house, and parented their son, who was 15 at the time of the diagnosis. T heir older daughter was away at

college, but was the donor for the bone marrow transplants.

Initially, C arol had felt that her family was coping well, but as the crisis wore on, she was surprised by the

amount of anger and emotional distress expressed by the older siblings, anger that, despite her counseling

training, she did not understand. Watching her family recover from this ordeal, she realized that they were

never going to be the same. She also realized that her prior assumptions about their experience had been

incorrect, and she became very interested in understanding this experience.

A t a doctoral student meeting, another student, who knew of C arol’s involvement with her daughter’s

cancer, asked her about her dissertation plans. C arol replied that she would be looking at children’s

development of conflict resolution skills, and briefly described her plans. T he student replied, “What a missed

opportunity!” explaining that she thought studying the consequences for families of adolescent cancer would

be a terrific topic. A fter thinking about this, C arol went to her advisor, mentioned the student’s idea, and

asked, “Is this crazy?” H er advisor replied, “I’ve been waiting for you to be ready to do this.”

C arol did a literature review and found that little was known about the meaning and consequences of

adolescent cancer for families, particularly for siblings. She also found that, with increasing survival rates,

schools were dealing with many more students who had been affected by a lengthy experience with cancer, as

either a survivor or the sibling of a survivor, but had little experience in handling these issues. Motivated by her

interest in this topic, the lack of available information, and the growing importance of this issue, she changed

her dissertation to a study of the long-term impact and meaning of adolescent cancer for survivors and their

siblings, and its effect on the sibling relationship. She enrolled in my dissertation proposal course in the fall of

1997, defended her proposal in the spring of 1998, and defended her dissertation one year later. She said that

she “loved every minute of her dissertation”; she even took her data with her on a vacation to Bermuda when

she was finishing her data analysis (K affenberger, 1999, personal communication).

A second decision that is often influenced by personal goals and experiences is the choice of a qualitative

approach. L ocke, Spirduso, and Silverman (1993) argued that “every graduate student who is tempted to employ a

qualitative design should confront one question, ‘Why do I want to do a qualitative study?’ and then answer it

honestly” (p. 107). T hey emphasized that qualitative research is not easier than quantitative research, and that

seeking to avoid statistics bears little relationship to having the personal interests and skills that qualitative inquiry

requires (pp. 107–110). T he key issue is the compatibility of your reasons for “going qualitative” with your other

goals, your research questions, and the actual activities involved in doing a qualitative study. A lan Peshkin’s motives

(E xample 2.2) for doing qualitative research—that he liked qualitative fieldwork and that it suited his abilities—are

perfectly legitimate ones, if you choose research questions for which this is an appropriate strategy.

T raditionally, discussions of personal goals in research methods texts have accepted, implicitly or explicitly, the

ideal of the objective, disinterested scientist, and have emphasized that the choice of research approaches and

methods should be determined by the research questions that you want to answer. H owever, it is clear from

autobiographies of scientists (e.g., H einrich, 1984) that decisions about research methods are often far more

personal than this, and the importance of subjective motives and goals in science is supported by a great deal of

historical, sociological, and philosophical work.

T he grain of truth in the traditional view is that your personal (and often unexamined) motives as a researcher

have important consequences for the validity of your conclusions. If your research questions, selection of settings

and participants, data collection, and analysis are driven by your personal desires without a careful assessment of

the potential impact of the latter on your conclusions, you are in danger of creating a flawed or biased study. K ing

G ustav of Sweden wanted a powerful warship to dominate the Baltic, but this desire led to an ill-considered decision

to add a second gundeck to the Vasa, causing it to capsize and sink, and thus dealing a severe setback to his goals.

For all of these reasons, it is important that you recognize and take account of the personal goals that drive and

influence your research. A ttempting to exclude your personal goals and concerns from the design of your research

is neither possible nor necessary. What is necessary is to be aware of these goals and how they may be shaping your

research, and to think about how best to achieve these and to deal with possible negative consequences of their

influence. For example, a strongly held position on some issue may seriously impair an interview with someone who

holds an opposing view, or distort your analysis of such an interview, if you haven’t explicitly identified your position

and considered how to prevent these things from happening. In addition, recognizing your personal ties to the study

you want to conduct can provide you with a valuable source of insight, theory, and data about the phenomena you

are studying (Marshall & Rossman, 1999, pp. 25–30; Strauss & C orbin, 1990, pp. 42–43); this source will be discussed

in the next chapter, in the section titled “E xperiential K nowledge.” E xample 2.2 describes how one researcher’s

personal goals and values influenced (and were influenced by) a series of qualitative studies.

E xample 2.2 T he Importance of Personal Values and Identity

A lan Peshkin’s personal goals, rooted in his values and identity, profoundly influenced several ethnographic

studies he did of schools and their communities (G lesne & Peshkin, 1992, pp. 93–107; Peshkin, 1991, pp.

285–295). In his first study, in a rural town he called Mansfield, he liked the community and felt protective

toward it. T his shaped the kind of story that he told, a story about the importance of community and its

preservation. In contrast, in his second study, an ethnography of a fundamentalist C hristian school (which

he called Bethany Baptist A cademy, BBA ) and its community, he felt alienated, as a Jew, from a community

that attempted to proselytize him:

When I began to write … I knew I was annoyed by my personal (as opposed to research) experience

at BBA . I soon became sharply aware that my annoyance was pervasively present, that I was writing

out of pique and vexation. A ccordingly, I was not celebrating community at Bethany, and

community prevailed there no less robustly than it had at Mansfield. Why not? I was more than

annoyed in Bethany; my ox had been gored. T he consequence was that the story I

was feeling drawn to tell had its origins in my personal sense of threat. I was not at Bethany as a

cool, dispassionate observer (are there any?); I was there as a Jew whose otherness was dramatized

directly and indirectly during eighteen months of fieldwork. (G lesne & Peshkin, 1992, p. 103)

In hindsight, Peshkin realized that if he had been less sympathetic toward Mansfield, he could have told

a different, equally valid story about this community, whereas if he had identified with Bethany and wanted

to support and perpetuate it, he could legitimately have showed how it was much like Mansfield.

In a third study, this one of an urban, multiethnic and multiracial school and community that he called

Riverview, Peshkin resolved at the outset to try to identify the aspects of his identity that he saw emerging

in his reactions. H e listed six different subjective “I’s” that influenced this study, each embodying its own

goals. T hese included the E thnic-Maintenance I and the C ommunity-Maintenance I that he had discovered

in his earlier studies; an E -Pluribus-Unum I that supported the ethnic and racial “mingling” that he saw

going on; a Justice-Seeking I that wanted to correct the negative and biased images of Riverview held by its

wealthier neighbors; a Pedagogical-Meliorist I that was disturbed by the poor teaching that many minority

students received in Riverview and sought to find ways to improve this; and a Nonresearch-H uman I that

was grateful for the warm reception he and his wife received in Riverview, generated a concern for the

people and community, and moderated otherwise sharp judgments he might have made.

Peshkin (1991) strongly recommended that all researchers systematically monitor their subjectivity:

I see this monitoring as a necessary exercise, a workout, a tuning up of my subjectivity to get it in

shape. It is a rehearsal for keeping the lines of my subjectivity open—and straight. A nd it is a

warning to myself so that I may avoid the trap of perceiving just what my own untamed sentiments

have sought out and served up as data. (pp. 293–294)

E xercise 2.1 is one way to engage in this monitoring.

In addition to influencing his questions and conclusions, Peshkin’s personal goals were intimately

involved in his choice of methods. A s he stated, “I like fieldwork, it suits me, and I concluded that rather

than pursuing research with questions in search of the ‘right’ methods of data collection, I had a preferred

method of data collection in search of the ‘right’ question” (G lesne & Peshkin, 1992, p. 102).

In addition to your personal goals, there are two other kinds of goals (ones that are important for other people,

not just for yourself) that I want to distinguish and discuss. T hese are practical goals (including administrative or

policy goals) and intellectual goals. Practical goals are focused on accomplishing something— meeting some need,

changing some situation, or achieving some objective. Intellectual goals, in contrast, are focused on understanding

something—gaining insight into what is going on and why this is happening, or answering some question that

previous research has not adequately addressed.

Both of these kinds of goals are legitimate parts of your design. H owever, they need to be distinguished, because

while intellectual goals are often a fruitful starting point for framing research questions, practical goals can’t

normally be used in this straightforward way. Research questions need to be questions that your study can

potentially answer, and questions that ask directly about how to accomplish practical goals, such as “H ow should

this program be modified to make it more equitable?” or “What can be done to increase students’ motivation to

learn science?” are not directly answerable by any research. Such questions have an inherently open-ended nature

(expressed by terms such as “can”) or value component (expressed by terms such as “should”) that no amount of

data or analysis can fully address.

O n the other hand, research questions such as “What effect has this new policy had on program equity?” or “H

ow did students respond to this new science curriculum?” are not only potentially answerable, but can advance the

practical goals implied in the previous questions. For these reasons, you need to frame your research questions in

ways that help your study achieve your practical goals, rather than smuggling these goals into the research questions

themselves, where they may interfere with the coherence and feasibility of your design. A common problem that

my students have in developing research questions is that they try to base these questions directly on their practical

goals, ending up with questions that not only can’t be answered by their research, but fail to adequately guide the

research itself. I will discuss this issue more fully in C hapter 4; here, I am simply emphasizing the difference between

these two types of goals.

T he point is not to eliminate practical goals from your design; in addition to the reasons given previously,

practical or policy objectives are particularly important for justifying your research. D on’t ignore these goals, but

understand where they are coming from, their implications for your research, and how they can be productively

employed in planning and defending your study.

WH AT G O AL S C AN Q UAL IT AT IVE RE SE ARC H H E L P Y O U AC H IE VE ?

Qualitative and quantitative methods are not simply different ways of doing the same thing. Instead, they have

different strengths and logics, and are often best used to address different kinds of questions and goals (Maxwell,

2004a; Maxwell & L oomis, 2002). Unfortunately, many research methods textbooks are based (explicitly or

implicitly) on a quantitative “mental model” (G reene, 2007, pp. 11–13) for research, privileging quantitative

approaches and minimizing or dismissing the key strengths of a qualitative approach. In my view, a key difference

between the two approaches is the distinction between “variance theory” and “process theory” as two approaches

to explanation (Mohr, 1982). Quantitative researchers tend to see the world in terms of variables; they view

explanation as a demonstration that there is a statistical relationship between different variables. Process theory,

in contrast, tends to see the world in terms of people, situations, events, and the processes that connect these;

explanation is based on an analysis of how some situations and events influence others (Maxwell, 2004a, 2008,

2011b; I say more about this distinction in C hapter 3).

T he strengths of qualitative research derive significantly from this process orientation toward the world, and

the inductive approach, focus on specific situations or people, and emphasis on descriptions rather than numbers

that this requires. I will describe five kinds of intellectual goals for which qualitative studies are especially suited,

and three kinds of practical goals to which these intellectual goals can substantially contribute:

1. Understanding the meaning, for participants in the study, of the events, situations, experiences, and actions

they are involved with or engage in. I am using “meaning” here in a broad sense, including cognition, affect,

intentions, and anything else that can be encompassed in what qualitative researchers often refer to as the

“participants’ perspective.” In my view, these perspectives are part of the reality that you are trying to

understand (Maxwell, 2011b; Menzel, 1978).

Many qualitative researchers have rejected this position, holding that people’s beliefs, values, and so on are

their constructions, rather than part of any reality; they have either seen these constructions as existing

entirely separately from the “real” world, or have denied that there is any real world outside of our

constructions (Schwandt, 1997, p. 134). I don’t think this sort of radical constructivism is either philosophically

tenable, or that it adequately represents the “theory in use” that most qualitative researchers employ in their

actual research. D ealing with this issue in depth is beyond the scope of this book (for a much more extensive

discussion, see Maxwell, 2011b); my point is simply that whatever your stance on this issue, it is important to

recognize that the meanings, beliefs, and so on of the participants in your study are a major part of what you

want to understand. In a qualitative study, you are interested not only in the physical events and behavior

that are taking place, but also in how the participants in your study make sense of these, and how their

understanding influences their behavior. T his focus on meaning is central to what is known as the

“interpretive” approach to social science (Bhattacharya, 2008; Bredo & Feinberg, 1982; G eertz, 1974;

Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979), a fundamental aspect of most qualitative research and a key difference between

qualitative and quantitative research.

2. Understanding the particular contexts within which the participants act, and the influence that this context

has on their actions. Qualitative researchers typically study a relatively small number of individuals or

situations, and preserve the individuality of each of these in their analyses, rather than collecting data from

large samples and aggregating the data across individuals or situations. T hus, they are able to understand

how events, actions, and meanings are shaped by the unique circumstances in which these occur (Maxwell,

2004a).

3. Understanding the process by which events and actions take place. Merriam (1988) stated that “T he interest

[in a qualitative study] is in process rather than outcomes” (p. xii); while this does not mean that qualitative

research is unconcerned with outcomes, it does emphasize that a major strength of qualitative research is in

getting at the processes that led to these outcomes, processes that experimental and survey research are

often poor at identifying (Britan, 1978; Maxwell, 2004a, 2004c; Patton, 1990, p. 94).

4. Identifying unanticipated phenomena and influences, and generating new, “grounded” (G laser & Strauss,

1967) theories about the latter. Qualitative research has an inherent openness and flexibility that allows you

to modify your design and focus during the research to pursue new discoveries and relationships. T his

flexibility derives from its particularistic, rather than comparative and generalizing, focus, and from its

freedom from the rules of statistical hypothesis testing,2 which require that the research plan not be

significantly altered after data collection has begun.

5. D eveloping causal explanations. T he traditional view that only quantitative methods can be used to credibly

draw causal conclusions has long been disputed by some qualitative researchers (e.g., Britan,

1978; D enzin, 1970; E rickson, 1986). Miles and H uberman (1984) argued that

Much recent research supports a claim that we wish to make here: that field research is far better than solely

quantified approaches at developing explanations of what we call local causality—the actual events and

processes that led to specific outcomes. (p. 132)

A lthough the traditional view has been abandoned by some researchers, both qualitative and quantitative (see

Maxwell, 2004a, 2004c, in press), it is still dominant in both traditions (D enzin & L incoln, 2000; Shavelson & T owne,

2002).

Part of the reason for the disagreement has been a failure to recognize that quantitative and qualitative

researchers tend to ask different kinds of causal questions. A s described previously, quantitative researchers tend

to be interested in whether and to what extent variance in x causes variance in y. Qualitative researchers, on the

other hand, tend to ask how x plays a role in causing y, what the process is that connects x and y. Weiss

(1994) provided a concrete illustration of this difference:

In qualitative interview studies the demonstration of causation rests heavily on the description of a

visualizable sequence of events, each event flowing into the next… . Quantitative studies support an

assertion of causation by showing a correlation between an earlier event and a subsequent event. A n

analysis of data collected in a large-scale sample survey might, for example, show that there is a correlation

between the level of the wife’s education and the presence of a companionable marriage. In qualitative

studies we would look for a process through which the wife’s education or factors associated with her

education express themselves in marital interaction. (p. 179)

T his is not to say that deriving causal explanations from a qualitative study is an easy or straightforward task

(Maxwell, 2004c). H owever, the situation of qualitative research is no different from that of quantitative research

in this respect. Both approaches need to identify and deal with the plausible validity threats to any proposed causal

explanation; I will discuss this further in C hapter 6.

T hese intellectual goals, and the inductive, open-ended strategy that they require, give qualitative research a

particular advantage in addressing three additional, practical kinds of goals:

1. G enerating results and theories that are understandable and experientially credible, both to the people you

are studying and to others. Patton (1990, pp. 19–24) gave an example of how the responses to the open-

ended items on a questionnaire used to evaluate a teacher accountability system had far greater credibility

with, and impact on, the school administration than did the quantitative analysis of the standardized items.

Bolster (1983) made a more general argument, that one of the reasons for the lack of impact of educational

research on educational practice has been that such research has largely been quantitative, and doesn’t

connect with teachers’ experience of everyday classroom realities. H e argued for a qualitative approach that

emphasizes the perspective of teachers and the understanding of particular settings, as having far more

potential for informing educational practitioners.

2. C onducting research that is intended to improve existing practices, programs, or policies, what is often called

“formative evaluation” (Scriven, 1967, 1991; Patton, 2001), rather than to simply assess the impact or value

of these. In such research, it is more important to understand the processes by which, and the specific contexts

in which, things happen, and how these are understood by participants, than it is to rigorously compare this

situation with others or to establish that a change in outcomes occurred as a result of a change in practice

(Maxwell, 2004a; Pawson & T illey, 1997). I discuss the implications for your research questions of the

difference between the intellectual goal of understanding these meanings, contexts, and processes, and the

practical goal of improving the practice or policy studied, in C hapter 4.

3. E ngaging in action, participatory, collaborative, or community-based research with participants in the study.

T he face credibility of qualitative research, and its focus on particular contexts and their meaning for

participants in these contexts, make it particularly suitable for collaborations with these participants

(Brydon-Miller, K ral, Maguire, Noffke, & Sabhlok, 2011; Finley, 2008; Jordan, 2008; Pushor, 2008; Somekh,

2008; T olman & Brydon-Miller, 2001).

Sorting out and assessing the different personal, practical, and intellectual goals that you bring to your study

can be a difficult task. In addition, this is not something you should simply do once, when you begin designing the

study, and then forget about, as E xample 2.2 illustrates. Some of your goals may not become apparent to you until

you are well into the research; furthermore, they may change as the research proceeds. E xample 2.3 provides an

account of how one doctoral student went about identifying her goals in making a decision about her dissertation

topic. E xercise 2.1, at the end of this chapter, is what I call a “researcher identity memo”; it asks you to write about

the goals and personal identity that you bring to your study, and their potential benefits and liabilities for your

research. E xample 2.4 is one such memo, written for my qualitative methods class; it shows how one student

wrestled with deep and painful issues of her identity and goals in planning for her dissertation research on language

curriculum reform in Bolivia. A ll of the examples in this chapter illustrate some of the advantages that reflection on

your goals can provide for your research; in addition, such memos can be valuable in developing your conceptual

framework, as described in C hapter 3.

E xample 2.3 D eciding on a D issertation T opic

D uring her first year of doctoral work, Isabel L ondoño, a native of C olombia, enrolled in a qualitative

research methods course. For her research project, she interviewed seven women from her country who

were working in Boston, exploring their experiences balancing work and family. While working on the

project, she also began to read some of the feminist literature available in the United States on women

executives, women’s psychological development, and women’s experience managing work and family. She

was excited by the new ideas in this literature, which she had not had access to in her own country, and

decided that she wanted to focus on issues of executive women in her country for her dissertation.

A t the end of her first year, Isabel took a leave of absence from the doctoral program to work as the

chief of staff of her former college roommate, whose husband had just been elected president of C olombia.

A mong her responsibilities was gathering information on employment, education, and the status of women

in her nation. O ne of the issues that emerged as critical was the need to assess the effect of a recent shift

in educational decision making from the national to the local level. In the past, most decisions had been

made by the national ministry of education; now, decisions were being shifted downward to the mayors in

local municipalities. No one was really sure how this change was being implemented and what its effects

were.

Isabel found that investigating an issue that affected the lives of many people in her country changed

her perspective, and raised questions about her choice of a thesis topic:

It became an issue of what was my responsibility to the world. T o find out how to solve a personal,

internal conflict of executive women? O r was there a problem where I could really be of help? A

lso, what was more rewarding to me as a person—to solve a problem that affected me personally

or solve a problem of the world?

She also felt pressure from others to select a topic that clearly linked to her career goals and showed

that she knew what she wanted to do with her life. C oming to a decision about her dissertation research

topic forced Isabel to identify and assess her personal and practical goals.

I thought about why I got into a doctoral program. What I hoped to get out of it personally,

professionally, academically. Why did I end up here? T hen, I thought about what are the things

about the world that move me, that make me sad or happy? I analyzed what that interest was

about—people, feelings, institutions. It was important for me to see the themes in common in my

interests and motivations. It gave me strength. I also was open to change. C hange is the most scary

thing, but you have to allow it.

She decided that she would study the decentralization of educational decision making in six

municipalities in her country. In making this decision, she chose to disregard others’ opinions of her:

What I have decided is no, I am going to do my thesis about something that moves me inside. I don’t

care if I am ever going to work on that topic again because it’s something I want to learn about. I

don’t want to use my thesis as a stepladder for my work, that feels like prostitution. So I believe the

interest should be on the thesis topic itself, not on where that is leading you, where you’re going to

get with it.

O ne of the things that supported her decision was reading the literature on her topic:

T hat was very important because I discovered that what I was interested in was something that

had interested a lot of other people before, and was going on in a lot of other places in the world,

and was affecting education in other countries. T his made my topic relevant. It was very important

for me to understand that it was relevant, that I was not just making up a dream problem. I think

that’s something you always fear, that the problem you see is not really important. I also learned

that although other people had done work on the problem, nobody had the interest I had—the

human impact of implementing a reform in the administration of education.

Writing memos for classes was key, having to put things to paper. I also started keeping a thesis

diary and wrote memos to myself in it. T he date and one word, one idea, or something that I’d

read. Many of the things I’ve written about have now become the list of what I’m going to do after

I do my thesis!

Finally, I think it’s important to really try to have fun. I figure, if you don’t have fun, you shouldn’t

be doing it. O f course, sometimes I get tired of my topic and hate it. I sit at the computer and I’m

tired and I don’t want to do it, but every time I start working, I forget all that

and get immersed in my work. A nd if something has the power to do that, it must be right.

T he particular decisions that Isabel made are not necessarily the right ones for everyone; they are

unique to her identity and situation. H owever, the way that she went about making the decision—

seriously and systematically reflecting on her goals and motives, and the implications of these for her

research choices—is one that I recommend to everyone deciding on a major research project.

E xercise 2.1 Researcher Identity Memo

T he purpose of this memo is to help you examine your goals, experiences, assumptions, feelings, and

values as they relate to your research, and to discover what resources and potential concerns your identity

and experience may create. What prior connections (social and intellectual) do you have to the topics,

people, or settings you plan to study? H ow do you think and feel about these topics, people, or settings?

What assumptions are you making, consciously or unconsciously, about these? What do you want to

accomplish or learn by doing this study?

T he purpose is not to write a general account of your goals, background, and experiences. Instead,

describe specifically those experiences, and the beliefs, goals, and expectations that emerged from them,

that are most directly relevant to your planned research project, and reflect on how these have informed

and influenced your research. See E xamples 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 for some of the things you can do with such

a memo—not as models to mechanically follow, but as illustrations of the kind of thinking that this memo

requires. If you are just starting your project, you can’t be as detailed or confident in your conclusions as

some of these researchers were, but try to aim for this sort of exploration of how your identity and goals

could affect your study.

T he memo is intended to be mainly for your benefit, not for communicating to someone else; try to

avoid substituting presentation for reflection and analysis. I suggest that you begin working on this memo

by brainstorming whatever comes to mind when you think about your prior experiences that may relate to

your site or topic, and jot these down without immediately trying to organize or analyze them. T hen, try

to identify the issues most likely to be important in your research, think about the implications of these,

and organize your reflections.

Next are two broad sets of questions that are productive to reflect on in this memo. In your answers to

these, try to be as specific as you can.

1. What prior experiences have you had that are relevant to your topic or setting? What beliefs and

assumptions about your topic or setting have resulted from these experiences? What goals have

emerged from these, or have otherwise become important for your research? H ow have these

experiences, assumptions, and goals shaped your decision to choose this topic, and the way you are

approaching this project?

2. What potential advantages do you think the goals, beliefs, and experiences that you described have

for your study? What potential disadvantages do you think these may create for you, and how

might you deal with these?

E xample 2.4 Researcher Identity Memo for a Study of E ducational

Reform in Bolivia

Barbara Noel

T here are several layers of personal interest I hold in the topic of educational reform in Bolivia. Probably

the most personal is the bilingual/bicultural nature I share with the profile of the Bolivian population. It

wasn’t until I was well into my adulthood that I recognized how deeply being bilingual has shaped my life

consciously and unconsciously. H aving spent my childhood in Peru and Mexico, with my bicultural parents

(Peruvian mother, very C alifornian father), I was exposed to Spanish yet grew up speaking E nglish at home

and at school. When my family moved to T exas I was 11 and shortly after felt the powerful, sneering

attitude to everything L atin A merican. I and the rest of the family quickly, individually, and without any

discussion or conscious inner dialogue spent the next few years carving out the L atino in us and successfully

assimilating to the mainstream U.S. culture. I continue to observe this inner battle within my siblings and

mother. Fourteen years later, I started speaking Spanish again once I realized the futility and extent of

destruction from trying to stamp out one culture in favor of another. Since then, I have turned away from

a sort of cultural schizophrenia and have begun to identify where I can integrate the two cultures,

consciously choosing what I see as the best of both.

In the Bolivian society, I see the same struggle I personally experienced magnified on a very large scale.

I see how for most of the nation’s history, one dominant culture has sought to eliminate all the others. It is

no accident that forced schooling in an incomprehensible language has produced a population where more

than half of the adults over 15 years of age are illiterate. T he minds of the indigenous people have also

been colonized. T hey passionately fight for their children to speak only Spanish because this, as they see

it, is the only vehicle for attaining political voice and economic security. Many of them desperately seek to

assimilate and cut out any traces of “cholo” or Indian in them. E ven if they or their children understand an

indigenous language, they will act as though they don’t understand.

I mostly feel angry as I write about these issues. In a way it is this anger and the subsequent passion for

justice that drove me to the field of intercultural, bilingual education. Now I find myself inside a whole

country wrestling with the same problems my family and I wrestle with. I must be careful to not project my

own journey onto my perception of Bolivian society. I need to seek external validation for my perceptions

and ongoing theories about this struggle in Bolivia to avoid painting an inaccurate picture. T he confusion

for me will come from assuming that my inner lens is the same as the lenses of those with whom I speak.

Writing this memo, I have come to see how my personal base could provide a unique contribution to

studying this bilingual/bicultural struggle in Bolivia. My own experience will help me capture my

interviewees’ stories more vividly and sensitively. By having an inside perspective, I can help the people I

interview trust me. I need to figure out just how much to share with them in order to open up dialogue and

yet not have my experience corrupt their story. T his sort of sharing, “I’ve been there too,” may help my

interviewees move past the barrier of how I look, a blond “gringa” from an imperialistic nation.

A nother layer of interest in this study is the experience of teachers as they undergo making changes

the reform asks them to make. T hey are being told to completely change their mental schemas for

teaching, from a transmission approach to a constructivist approach, without any clear guidelines, models,

or examples. T his leaves the teachers at a loss as to how to begin. Six years after the reform program began

they are still confused. I also entered the profession under similar circumstances, when in the U.S. teachers

were being told to teach through a whole language approach. It was like being in a dark room not knowing

what to grab on to and trying to act as if you have everything under control lest your job be in jeopardy. H

ad someone interviewed me about this process at that time, my major concern would have been to appear

as if everything is wonderful and that the approach was a magic bullet for teaching. I would have been

alienated from my colleagues if they had found out I had said anything remotely negative. T his experience

helps me to understand how vulnerable these teachers might feel and their need for expressing bravado

at all costs.

T he personal strength I have in this area is also my biggest weakness. My ability to “put myself in their

shoes” and view things from behind their lenses can also get confused by my own projection of the situation

based on my own experiences. I might also be tempted to move beyond my role as investigator to reformer,

provider of “magic bullets.” In the past, I have impulsively offered several workshops, at no cost, just

because I’d gotten so caught up in the deep needs I’ve perceived in their practice and their desire to learn.

I need to measure my energies so that I can indeed finish what I start out to do. It will be hard to balance

this relationship. I don’t feel comfortable just going in as an investigator, yet my “save the world”

inspirations need to be tempered into a practical approach that meets the dual purposes of helping and

investigating. For me, the reform provides hope that a society may start turning around a long history of

oppression by valuing its deeply multicultural character in a way I was able to do on a minute scale.

Addendum, July 2000

It is now several months since I wrote this memo. A fter having read through it again, I notice several things

I learned as a result of going through this exercise. Before writing this memo, I knew I felt intensely drawn

to the subject but didn’t know why. I felt passionate about righting the wrongs but didn’t understand where

the motivations were coming from or even that they had a personal basis. H ad I not identified my

motivations for doing research in this area, I would not have realized how strongly my personal experiences

could impact my study. I now realize that even though I try to be very aware, my perceptions will be

inevitably colored by my personal background.

It would be easy to fault myself as a researcher by thinking that such an emotional attachment would

automatically render me unqualified for such a venture. Y et, through the exercise, I was able to turn the

coin around and see the strengths that I also bring through a more empathic stance. While my empathy

might help me perceive subtle and important motivations for my informants’ responses and behavior, it

might also introduce dynamics I unconsciously bring into the situation. I also identified a pattern of

behavior I engage in which is to get overly involved with a project so that my emotional connection takes over.

I lose my focus and change my role from the one I had objectively started out with. H aving identified this

pattern, I can, in a way, construct an overhead camera to monitor my actions that might often blink a bright

red light to indicate overheating.

What I have come away with from this exercise is clarity of purpose. T he real reasons for doing the study.

I identified how strongly I felt about the importance of the study personally and professionally. T his passion

has the possibility, then, to become the engine that sparks my flagging energies and guides me through the

blind curves and boring straight stretches of mundane routines during the process of data gathering,

transcription, and analysis. I am aware of ways I might possibly corrupt the quality of the information. I also

understand how my emotional attachment to the study can be beneficial. T his type of reflection helps put in

motion a mental machinery that can help monitor my reactions and warn me when I veer off course. Now I see

how this memo grounds the rest of the study because it clarifies, energizes, and audits the unique role each

researcher brings into the arena.

NO T E S

1. I have called these “goals,” rather than “purposes,” to more clearly distinguish them from the usualmeaning

of “purpose” in research methods texts—the specific objective of a study, for example, “T he purpose of this study

is to investigate (understand, explore) _______” (C reswell, 1994, p. 59). I see this meaning of “purpose” as more

closely connected to the research questions of a study, although distinct from these.

2. A lthough statistical testing of hypotheses is integral to much quantitative research, as a way of dealingwith

the possibility of chance associations between variables, the usual approach to this, termed “null hypothesis

significance testing” or NH ST , has been so widely misinterpreted and misused, and so often misrepresented even

in textbooks, that many prominent statisticians have argued that it should be completely abandoned (C ohen, 1994,

H arlow, Mulaik, & Steiger, 1997; H uck, 2009), particularly since there are now much better alternatives to NH ST

(C umming, 2011). Qualitative researchers rarely make use of such tests, but if you plan to do this, you need to be

aware of the limitations of NH ST , and to know what such tests actually tell you.