U5D1-68 - Research, Describe, Match, Identify the methodology. Please read and follow all instructions detailed below and in the attachments.

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SIDEBAR

GROUNDED THEORY’S FOCUS ON ACTIONS AND PROCESSES

How grounded theorists use their methodological strategies differs from other qualitative researchers who study topics and structures instead of actions and processes. How we collect data and what we do with it matters. Research actions distinguish grounded theory from other types of qualitative inquiry. Grounded theorists . . . engage in the following actions:

1. Conduct data collection and analysis simultaneously in an iterative process. 2. Analyze actions and processes rather than themes and structure. 3. Use comparative methods. 4. Draw on data (e.g., narratives and descriptions) in service of developing new conceptual categories. 5. Develop inductive categories through systematic data analysis. 6. Emphasize theory construction rather than description or application of current theories. 7. Engage in theoretical sampling. 8. Search for variation in studied categories or process. 9. Pursue developing a category rather than covering a specific empirical topic. (Charmaz, 2011, p. 364)

The guidelines for grounded theory offered by Strauss and Corbin (1998, 1990), in the view of Charmaz (2000), “structure objectivist grounded theorists’ work.” These guidelines are didactic and prescriptive rather than emergent and interactive.

Objectivist grounded theory accepts the positivistic assumption of an external world that can be described, analyzed, explained, and predicted: truth, but with a small t. . . . It assumes that different observers will discover this world and describe it in similar ways. (p. 524)

As a matter of philosophical distinctness, then, grounded theory is best understood as fundamentally objectivist in orientation, emphasizing disciplined and procedural ways of getting the researcher’s biases out of the way but adding healthy doses of creativity to the analytic process. It is also important to note that grounded theory has evolved and has been subdivided into competing camps with different emphases that reflect “tussles, tensions, and resolutions” leading to a multiple-pathways genealogy of ground theory (Morse, 2009, p. 17; see also Charmaz & Bryant, 2008; Clarke, 2005). We shall consider the analytic procedures of grounded theory in more detail in the chapter on analyzing qualitative data. As a general inquiry framework, I have included it in this chapter because of its emphasis on generating theory as the primary purpose of qualitative social science and its overt embrace of objectivity as a research stance. Janice Morse, moderator of the 2008 Banff Symposium on Grounded Theory, sponsored by the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, summarized well the core of grounded theory’s contributions in her opening remarks:

To repeat the mantra one more time: Grounded theory is a way of thinking about data—processes of conceptualization—of theorizing from data, so that the end result is a theory that the scientist produces from data collected by interviewing and observing everyday life. (Morse, 2009, p. 18)

Realism

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Core inquiry question: What are the causal mechanisms that explain how and why reality unfolds as it does in a particular context?

Realism emphasizes that truth is context dependent. Any given study “reveals its truths but in ways that are highly conditional and multiply contingent” (Pawson, 2013, p. 189). More specific to evaluation research, Ray Paulson argues in his realist manifesto “against absolute truths and against relative truths and for the idea that only partial truths emerge from evaluative inquiry. . . . Truth is thus accretive” (Pawson, 2013, p. 192).

Philosophically, realism begins with the premise that reality exists independent of perception. There is a real world. It is patterned (displays regularities) such that it can be studied, known, and explained. Joseph Maxwell (2012), in A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research, asserts,

The idea that there is a real world with which we interact, and to which our concepts and theories refer, has proved to be a resilient and powerful one that has attracted increased philosophical attention following the demise of positivism. (p. 78; see also pp. 79–80, 88, 100)

Ray Pawson (2013) explains that from the perspective of realism,

the world consists of three domains: i) the empirical, ii) the actual and iii) the real. As a first approximation, we can say that the empirical domain consists of our experiences of the world, the observations and perceptions that clamour for our attention (fireworks exploding). The actual domain is realized at the level of pattern, when we see that our experiences are patterned in sequences of events (in the presence of flame, fireworks explode). The final and supreme level, the real, is discovered when we penetrate to an understanding of the subterranean mechanism that creates regular patterns of events (fireworks explode in the presence of a flame because of the chemical composition of gunpowder). (p. 68)

Theory about how the world works (or in evaluation, how a program or intervention works) informs realist inquiry, including especially a realist approach to choosing cases in qualitative research: Realist cases are purposefully chosen “to test and refine theory” (Emmel, 2013, p. 109). Realists aim to move beyond description to explanation. To do so requires theory. “Theory tells us where to but also what to look for. Theory provides explanations and so directs us to vital explanatory components within the world, their interrelationships and the things that bring about those interrelationships” (Pawson, 2013, p. 62). Realists view theoretical constructs as describing actual characteristics of a real world. For example, realists have no problem treating human thoughts, feelings, attitudes, intentions, and mental states as real even though they are not directly observable, a position denied by positivism.

SIDEBAR

WHAT IS REAL IN REALISM?

Concepts, meanings and intentions are as real as rocks; they are just not as accessible to direct observation and description as rocks. In this way they are like quarks, black holes, the meteor impact that supposedly killed the dinosaurs, or William Shakespeare are: we have no way of directly observing them, and our claims about them are based on a variety of sorts of indirect evidence.

—Joseph Maxwell (2012, p. 18) A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research

A theoretical construct central to realism is the concept of causality. This is what Pawson is referring to in the quotation above as “the final and supreme level, the real, . . . when we penetrate the subterranean mechanism that creates regular patterns of events.” Mechanisms means causal mechanisms. Causal mechanisms become “transfactual truths” that, by explaining how an effect is produced within a particular

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context, can transcend the particular context to offer hypotheses for more general “law-producing mechanisms” (Pawson, 2013, p. 70).

Realism, in all of its brands and in relation to both the physical and social world, uses the notion of causal powers or underlying generative mechanisms as the seat of action and as the axis of explanation. (Pawson, 2013, p. 67)

Most realists see causality as a real phenomenon, an explanatory concept that is intrinsic to either the nature of the world or to our understanding of it. (Maxwell, 2012, p. 9)

A realist understanding of causality thus provides a philosophical justification for the ways in which qualitative researchers typically approach explanation. . . . There are three specific aspects of qualitative research that are supported by this understanding: the use of qualitative methods to identify causality in single cases, the essential role of context in causal explanation, and the legitimacy of seeing individuals’ beliefs, values, motives, and meanings as causes. (Maxwell, 2012, p. 38)

The idea of social factors as causal mechanisms was introduced by eminent sociologist Robert K. Merton (1968a) and illustrated by the self-fulfilling prophecy. This occurs when people define a situation inaccurately by acting on their inaccurate understanding and then make what they perceived as true actually become true. Merton illustrated the self-fulfilling prophecy with an example, inspired by events of the Great Depression in the 1930s, of solvent banks becoming insolvent because of the spread of inaccurate rumors of their pending insolvency. As word spreads, wrongly, that a bank cannot meet the demand for cash withdrawals, people rush to withdraw their cash, and the ensuing panic actually makes the bank insolvent (Merton, 1968b).

This cycle of events—belief formation, acting on that belief, creating the situation that was believed to be true—is a very general and powerful mechanism. We can also see some of the conditions that trigger and maintain the mechanism: The definition of the situation must be public and communicable, it must be strong enough to lead to the actions through which the mechanism operates, and the results of these actions must change the situation in the direction of the—initially wrong—definition. (Gläser & Laudel, 2013, section 2)

The ascendance of realism as an inquiry framework for qualitative research is represented by the conceptual journey of Matthew Miles and Michael Huberman. In the introduction to the first edition of their widely used and influential sourcebook Qualitative Data Analysis (1984), they stated modestly, “We think of ourselves as logical positivists who recognize and try to atone for the limitations of that approach. Soft-nosed logical positivists, maybe” (p. 19). They went on to explain what this means and, in so doing, provided a succinct summary of the reality-oriented approach to qualitative research:

SIDEBAR

FOUNDATIONS OF REALISM

Ontological realism—the belief that reality and its components exist independently of any consciousness. Epistemological realism—the belief in the “knowability” of things, which presupposes that propositions about reality must be either true or false, regardless of which is which. (Epstein, 2012, p. 10)

We believe that social phenomena exist not only in the mind but also in the objective world—and that there are some lawful and reasonably stable relationships to be found among them. . . . Given our belief in social regularities, there is a corollary: Our task is to express them as precisely as possible, attending to their range and generality and to the local and historical contingencies under which they occur.

. . . We consider it important to evolve a set of valid and verifiable methods for capturing these social relationships and their causes. We want to interpret and explain these phenomena and have confidence that others, using the same tools, would arrive at analogous conclusions. (Miles & Huberman, 1984, pp. 19–20)

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Ten years later, in their revised and expanded qualitative sourcebook, Miles and Huberman (1994) called themselves “realists” rather than logical positivists. Realism as a qualitative stance is clearly reality oriented, and much of the language quoted above remains in the revised edition. They acknowledge that knowledge is socially and historically constructed, but continue,

Our aim is to register and “transcend” these processes by building theories to account for a real world that is both bounded and perceptually laden, and to test these theories in our various disciplines. . . .

Our explanations flow from an account of how differing structures produced the events we observed. We aim to account for events, rather than simply to document their sequence. We look for an individual or a social process, a mechanism, a structure at the core of events that can be captured to provide a causal description of the forces at work.

Transcendental realism calls both for causal explanation and for the evidence to show that each entity or event is an instance of that explanation. So we need not only an explanatory structure but also a grasp of the particular configuration at hand. That is one reason why we have tilted toward more inductive methods of study. (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 44)

Thus, realist philosophy (Baert, 1998, pp. 189–197; Bhaskar, 1975; Putnam, 1987, 1990) provides an inquiry framework for qualitative inquiry in both research and evaluation (Mark, Henry, & Julnes, 2000; Pawson & Tilley, 1997). It is beyond our purpose here to distinguish the various forms and schools of realism: agential realism, analytic realism, constructive realism, critical realism, depth realism, direct realism, emergent realism, ethnographic realism, experiential realism, innocent realism, metaphysical realism, naive realism, natural realism, perspectival realism, phenomenological realism, philosophic realism, scientific realism, subtle realism, transcendental realism, and universal realism (Altheide & Johnson, 2011; Cumpa & Tegtmeier, 2009; Madill, 2008; Mark et al., 2000; Maxwell, 2012; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Pawson, 2013; Schwandt, 2001). Rather than getting into the splitting of terminological hairs among realists themselves, for our purposes, it is their shared fundamental assumptions and inquiry framework that make realism a distinct perspective within which to undertake qualitative studies, namely, that entities and phenomena, both concrete and abstract, are real and constitute reality, whether we are aware of their existence or not. Because they exist and the world is patterned and knowable, reality can be theorized about, empirically studied, known, and explained. This includes what is sometimes called “commonsense realism”:

Realism presumes the existence of an external world in which events and experiences are triggered by underlying (and often unobservable) mechanisms and structures. Commonsense realism also gives standing to everyday experiences. It is antiformalist in the sense of not expecting logical, formal solutions to vexing problems such as the nature of truth. And it places a priority on practice and the lessons drawn from practice. . . . And as commonsense realists, we believe that although there is a world out there to be made sense of, the specific constructions and construals that individuals make are critical and need to be considered. (Mark et al., 2000, pp. 15–16)

Qualitative methods are particularly useful in capturing and interpreting “the specific constructions and construals that individuals make” about how the world works. Realism places and interprets those constructions and construals within both a specific theoretical and a particular real-world context.

Realism covers a range of complex ontological and epistemological positions within which research can be conducted. The philosophy of science is in continual development, and new and modified realisms are under debate. Many of these are relevant to qualitative research. . . . Realist positions offer qualitative analysis grounding for research findings—sophisticated, complex, and compatible with the ethos of many qualitative methods. (Madill, 2008, p. 735)

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SOURCE: © Chris Lysy—freshspectrum.com

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MODULE

14 Phenomenology and Heuristic Inquiry

Phenomenology

Core inquiry question: What is the meaning, structure, and essence of the lived experience of this phenomenon for this person or group of people?

Pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness. —Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

German philosopher

Phenomenology asks for the very nature of a phenomenon, for that which makes a some-“thing” what it is—and without which it could not be what it is.

—Van Manen (1990, p. 10)

In Search of the Essence of Lived Experience

What the various phenomenological approaches share in common is a focus on exploring how human beings make sense of experience and transform experience into consciousness, both individually and as shared meaning. This requires methodologically, carefully, and thoroughly capturing and describing how people experience some phenomenon—how they perceive it, describe it, feel about it, judge it, remember it, make sense of it, and talk about it with others. To gather such data, one must undertake in-depth interviews with people who have directly experienced the phenomenon of interest; that is, they have “lived experience” as opposed to secondhand experience.

Phenomenology aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the nature or meaning of our everyday experiences. . . .

Anything that presents itself to consciousness is potentially of interest to phenomenology, whether the object is real or imagined, empirically measurable or subjectively felt. Consciousness is the only access human beings have to the world. Or rather, it is by virtue of being conscious that we are already related to the world. Thus all we can ever know must present itself to consciousness. Whatever falls outside of consciousness therefore falls outside the bounds of our possible lived experience. . . . A person cannot reflect on lived experience while living through the experience. For example, if one tries to reflect on one’s anger while being angry, one finds that the anger has already changed or dissipated. Thus, phenomenological reflection is not introspective but retrospective. Reflection on lived experience is always recollective; it is reflection on experience that is already passed or lived through. (Van Manen, 1990, pp. 9–10)

SIDEBAR

LIVED EXPERIENCE IN PHENOMENOLOGY

The term lived experience derives from the German erlebnis—experience as we live through it and recognize it as a particular type of experience. It could be argued that human experience is the main epistemological basis

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for many other qualitative research traditions, but the concept of lived experience possesses special methodological significance for phenomenology. . . .

Our language can be seen as an immense linguistic map that names the possibilities of human lived experiences. The value of phenomenology is that it prioritizes and investigates how the human being experiences the world: how the patient experiences illness, how the teacher experiences the pedagogical encounter, how the student experiences a moment of success or failure, and how we experience novel ways of interacting with others and the world through computer mediated devices, social network technologies, new media, and so forth. Every lived experience (phenomenon) can become a topic for phenomenological inquiry. The phenomenological attitude keeps us reflectively attentive to the ways human beings live through experiences in the immediacy of the present that is only recoverable as an elusive past.

Phenomenology is interested in recovering the living moment of the now—even before we put language to it or describe it in words. Or to say this differently, phenomenology tries to show how our words, concepts, and theories always shape (distort) and give structure to our experiences as we live them. But the living moment of the present is always already absent in our effort to return to it. . . . We may identify and rate with empirical descriptors the nature and intensity of various forms of pain, but the actual moment of being struck by pain or the lingering discomfort of suffering pain somehow seem to be beyond words as we try to retrospectively appropriate the experience. These experiences can be described, but ultimately the meaning of the primal experience is beyond propositional discourse.

—Adams and Van Manen (2008, pp. 616–617)

The phenomenon that is the focus of inquiry may be an emotion like loneliness, jealously, or anger; an experience like being pregnant, hiking the wilderness, or surviving cancer; or a relationship, a marriage, or a job. The phenomenon may be a program, an organization, or a culture. When used as a framework for program evaluation, phenomenology aims to capture the essence of program participants’ experiences. For example, Breustedt and Puckering (2013) conducted in-depth interviews with vulnerable pregnant women in a prenatal parenting program to examine the effectiveness of psychological and practical techniques aimed at reducing anxiety and promoting well-being.

Phenomenology as a philosophical tradition was first applied to social science by the German philosopher Edmund H. Husserl (1913/1954) to study how people describe things and experience them through their senses. His most basic philosophical assumption was that we can only know what we experience by attending to perceptions and meanings that awaken our conscious awareness. Initially, all our understanding comes from sensory experience of phenomena, but that experience must be described, explicated, and interpreted. Yet descriptions of experience and interpretations are so intertwined that they often become one. Interpretation is essential to an understanding of experience, and the experience includes the interpretation. Thus, phenomenologists focus on how we put together the phenomena we experience in such a way as to make sense of the world and, in so doing, develop a worldview. There is no separate (or objective) reality for people. There is only what they know their experience is and means. The subjective experience incorporates the objective thing and becomes a person’s reality, thus the focus on meaning making as the essence of human experience.

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©2002 Michael Quinn Patton and Michael Cochran

Phenomenological Abduction

From a phenomenological point of view, we are less interested in the factual status of particular instances: whether something happened, how often it tends to happen, or how the occurrence of an experience is related to the prevalence of other conditions or events. For example, phenomenology does not ask, “how do these children learn this particular material?” but it asks, “What is the nature or essence of the experience of learning (so that I can now better understand what this particular learning experience is like for these children)?” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 10)

There are two implications of this perspective that are often confused in discussing qualitative methods. The first implication is that what is important to know is what people experience and how they interpret the world. This is the subject matter, the focus, of phenomenological inquiry. The second implication is methodological. The only way for us to really know what another person experiences is to experience the phenomenon as directly as possible for ourselves. This leads to the importance of participant observation and in-depth interviewing. In either case, in reporting phenomenological findings, “the essence or nature of an experience has been adequately described in language if the description reawakens or shows us the lived quality and significance of the experience in a fuller and deeper manner” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 10).

Phenomenological Reduction and Essence

There is one final dimension that differentiates a phenomenological approach: the assumption that there is an essence or essences to shared experience. These essences are the core meanings mutually understood through a phenomenon commonly experienced. The experiences of different people are bracketed, analyzed, and compared to identify the essences of the phenomenon, for example, the essence of loneliness, the essence of being a mother, or the essence of being a participant in a particular program. The assumption of essence, like the ethnographer’s assumption that culture exists and is important, becomes the defining characteristic of a purely phenomenological study. “Phenomenological research is the study of essences” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 10). Phenomenologists are

rigorous in their analysis of the experience, so that basic elements of the experience that are common to members of a specific society, or all human beings, can be identified. This last point is essential to understanding the philosophical basis of phenomenology, yet it is often misunderstood. On the other hand, each person has a unique set of experiences which are treated as truth and which determine that individual’s behavior. In this sense, truth (and associate behavior) is totally unique to each individual. Some researchers are misled to think that they are using a

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phenomenological perspective when they study four teachers and describe their four unique views. A phenomenologist assumes a commonality in those human experiences and must use rigorously the method of bracketing to search for those commonalities. Results obtained from a phenomenological study can then be related to and integrated with those of other phenomenologists studying the same experience, or phenomenon. (Eichelberger, 1989, p. 6)

Getting at essence, methodologically, means undertaking phenomenological reduction systematically and rigorously in two ways:

(1) The researcher has to bracket personal past knowledge and all other theoretical knowledge, not based on direct intuition, regardless of its source, so that full attention can be given to the instance of the phenomenon that is currently appearing to his or her consciousness, and

(2) the researcher withholds the positing of the existence or reality of the object or state of affairs that he or she is beholding. The researcher takes the object or event to be something that is appearing or presenting itself to him or her but does not make the claim that the object or event really exists in the way that it is appearing. It is seen to be a phenomenon. . . .

Husserl wants to limit our epistemological claim to the way that an event was experienced rather than to leaping to the claim that the event really was the way it was experienced. To make the latter claim is to make an existential or reality affirmation rather than staying within the confines of experience. To limit oneself to experiential claims is to stay within the phenomenal realm. (Giorgi, 2006, p. 355)

Through eidetic reduction and attention to imaginative variation, a phenomenologist aims to describe

an essential finding that is intrinsically general. . . . I may observe a specific chair. But nothing prevents me from switching attitudes and taking a more general perspective toward the particular chair and seeing it as a cultural object designed to support the human body in the posture of sitting. That more general description is as true as the particular details of the chair that is taken as an example of a particular perception. There is no way to prevent one from assuming such a more general perspective. The switch results in eidetic findings which are intrinsically general. (Giorgi, 2006, p. 356)

In short, conducting a study with a phenomenological focus (i.e., getting at the essence of the experience of some phenomenon) is different from using phenomenology to philosophically justify the methods of qualitative inquiry as legitimate in social science research. Both contributions are important. But a phenomenological study (as opposed to a phenomenological perspective) is one that focuses on descriptions of what people experience and how it is that they experience what they experience. One can employ a general phenomenological perspective to elucidate the importance of using methods that capture people’s experience of the world without conducting a phenomenological study that focuses on the essence of shared experience (at least that is my experience and interpretation of the phenomenon of phenomenology).

Qualitative researchers and evaluators using a phenomenological inquiry framework should immerse themselves in its historical evolution. Earlier, I noted the seminal work of Husserl (1913/1954; Husserl & Moran, 2012). Alfred Schutz’s work (1977) helped establish phenomenology as a major social science perspective. Other important influences have been Merleau-Ponty (1962), Whitehead (1958), Giorgi (1971), and Zaner (1970). More recently, phenomenology has become a distinct approach to psychotherapy (Moustakas, 1988, 1995). But along the way and over time, the term phenomenology has become so popular and widely embraced that its meaning has become confused and diluted. It can refer to a philosophy (Husserl, 1967), an inquiry paradigm (Lincoln, 1990), an interpretive theory (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a, p. 14), a social science analytical perspective (Harper, 2000, p. 727; Schutz, 1967, 1970), a major qualitative tradition (Creswell, 2012), or a research methods framework (Moustakas, 1994). Varying types of phenomenology complicate the picture even more: Transcendental, existential, and hermeneutic phenomenology offer different nuances of focus—the essential meanings of individual experience, the social construction of group reality, and the language and structure of communication, respectively (Schwandt, 2001, pp. 191–194). Phenomenological traditions in sociology and psychology vary in their unit of analysis, group or individual (Creswell, 1998, p. 53).

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So, while there are certain basics to understand and master (Giorgi, 1985; Lewis & Staehler, 2010), applications are both diverse and contentious. See Exhibit 3.5 for advice to dissertation students about avoiding fundamental errors in phenomenological inquiries.

Heuristic Inquiry

Core inquiry question: What is my experience of this phenomenon and the essential experience of others who also experience this phenomenon intensely?

Heuristics is a form of phenomenological inquiry that brings to the fore the personal experience and insights of the researcher.

EXHIBIT 3.5 Six Common Errors in Phenomenological Dissertations: What Would Husserl Prescribe?

Distinguished phenomenological writer and teacher Amedeo Giorgi (1985) examined dissertations that “claimed to follow the phenomenological method” but did so inadequately “based upon phenomenology and the logic of research, and not personal biases” (Giorgi, 2006, p. 353). He applied what he considers classic and pure criteria based on Husserl’s prescriptions as the founder of phenomenology. Below are six common errors he identified and critiqued:

1. Failure to ground the dissertation in the philosophy of phenomenology: Unlike certain other qualitative methods, such as grounded theory or certain narrative strategies, the phenomenological method requires a background in phenomenological philosophy which at certain times specifies criteria other than empirical ones. Phenomenology is not against empiricism, but it is broader than empirical philosophy. That is because its method interrogates phenomena which are not reducible to facts. (Giorgi, 2006, p. 354)

2. Citing different approaches to phenomenology without realizing that they contain conflicting perspectives that can be neither ignored nor simply combined: Some students seem to consider it a virtue to refer to as many phenomenologists as possible when discussing the logic and steps of the phenomenological method. However, . . . there are irreconcilable differences among them. Rather, the researcher has to choose one methodologist and stick with the logic proposed by the methodologist. (Giorgi, 2006, p. 355)

3. Failure to mention phenomenological reduction at all, or if discussed, applying it incorrectly or inadequately: “If one is going to use a phenomenological method that is based upon the thought of Husserl, . . . then the phenomenological reduction has to be implemented. However, it seems that few practitioners get this part of phenomenology correct” (Giorgi, 2006, p. 355).

4. Failure to cite or use imaginative variation in order to discover essential characteristics (Giorgi, 2006, pp. 355–356).

5. Using inappropriate and “misguided” strategies to verify findings, like using independent judges and/or presentation of the findings to the participants for them to verify (Giorgi, 2006, p. 357): Phenomenological findings can only be checked by phenomenological procedures, and the ordinary person is unlikely to know those procedures, “so the so-called verification by the participant has to remain dubious” (Giorgi, 2006, p. 358).

6. Failure to stay focused on contributing to generalizable knowledge: Should one want to study an aspect of a given individual’s experience one has only to change the goal of the research and the method is equally applicable. The goal of the research is not then the phenomenon as such, but

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a specific phenomenon as experienced by John Doe. But such a strategy does not usually contribute to general psychological knowledge. (Giorgi, 2006, pp. 359–360)

“Heuristic” research came into my life when I was searching for a word that would meaningfully encompass the processes that I believed to be essential in investigations of human experience. The root meaning of heuristic comes from the Greek word heuriskein, meaning to discover or to find. It refers to a process of internal search through which one discovers the nature and meaning of experience and develops methods and procedures for further investigation and analysis. The self of the researcher is present throughout the process and, while understanding the phenomenon with increasing depth, the researcher also experiences growing self-awareness and self-knowledge. Heuristic processes incorporate creative self-processes and self discoveries. (Moustakas, 1990, p. 9)

There are two focusing or narrowing elements of heuristic inquiry within the larger framework of phenomenology. First, the researcher must have personal experience with and intense interest in the phenomenon under study. Second, others (coresearchers) who are part of the study must share an intensity of experience with the phenomenon. Heuristic inquiry focuses on intense human experiences, intense from the point of view of the investigator and coresearchers. It is the combination of personal experience and intensity that yields an understanding of the essence of the phenomenon. “Heuristics is concerned with meanings, not measurements; with essence, not appearance; with quality, not quantity; with experience, not behavior” (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985, p. 42).

The reports of heuristic researchers are filled with the discoveries, personal insights, and reflections of the researchers. Discovery comes from being wide open to the thing itself, a recognition that one must relinquish control and be tumbled about with the newness and drama of a searching focus, “asking questions about phenomena that disturb and challenge” (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985, p. 47).

The fundamental methods text on heuristic inquiry is by the primary developer of this approach, Clark Moustakas (1990). His classic works in this tradition include studies of loneliness (Moustakas, 1961, 1972, 1975) and humanistic therapy (Moustakas, 1995). Heuristic inquiry has strong roots in humanistic psychology (Maslow, 1956, 1966; Rogers, 1961, 1969, 1977) and in Polanyi’s (1962) emphasis on personal knowledge, indwelling, and tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1967). Polanyi (1967) explained tacit knowing as the inner essence of human understanding, what we know but can’t articulate.

Tacit knowing now appears as an act of indwelling by which we gain access to a new meaning. When exercising a skill we literally dwell in the innumerable muscular acts which contribute to its purpose, a purpose which constitutes their joint meaning. Therefore, since all understanding is tacit knowledge, all understanding is achieved by indwelling. (p. 160)

The rigor of heuristic inquiry comes from systematic observation of and dialogues with self and others, as well as in-depth interviewing of coresearchers. Heuristic inquiry is grounded in phenomenology but is different from it in four major ways:

1. Heuristics emphasizes connectedness and relationship, while phenomenology encourages more detachment in analyzing an experience.

2. Heuristics leads to reporting essential meanings and personal significance, while phenomenology emphasizes definitive descriptions of the structures of experience.

3. Heuristics concludes with a “creative synthesis” that includes the researcher’s intuition and tacit understandings, while phenomenology presents a distillation of the structures of experience.

4. “Whereas phenomenology loses the persons in the process of descriptive analysis, in heuristics the research participants remain visible in the examination of the data and continue to be portrayed as whole persons. Phenomenology ends with the essence of experience; heuristics retains the essence of the person in experience” (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985, p. 43).

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Identification of the experiential essence of the phenomenon that is the focus of heuristic inquiry emerges from systematic steps: initial engagement, immersion, incubation, illumination, explication, creative synthesis, and validation (see Exhibit 3.6).

What is important about heuristics for my purpose in this chapter—describing diverse inquiry frameworks for undertaking qualitative inquiry—is that heuristic research epitomizes the phenomenological emphasis on meanings and knowing through personal experience; it exemplifies and places at the fore the way in which the researcher is the primary instrument in qualitative inquiry; and it challenges traditional scientific concerns about researcher objectivity and detachment, much as autoethnography, described earlier in this chapter, does. The psychologist Dave Hiles, of De Montfort University, Leicester, has summarized heuristic inquiry through his own experiences of engaging in it to study phenomena such as near-death experiences, being a victim of serious crimes, and involvement in the helping professions, that is, counselors, nurses, social workers, and advocates.

1. Heuristic inquiry is a research process that is difficult to set any clear boundaries to, with respect to duration and scope. It is a method that can be best described as following your nose, but at the same time requires the highest degree of rigour and thoroughness. It is a method of inquiry that should not be undertaken lightly.

2. In heuristic inquiry, the research question chooses you, and invariably, the research question is deeply personal in origin. Indeed, it is my own experience that the research question has been a preoccupation of mine for at least thirty years, and probably much longer than that.

EXHIBIT 3.6 Essential Elements and Stages of Heuristic Inquiry

Initial Engagement and Focus

Let an intense interest or matter of passion come into focus, something that compels the inquirer, that demands deeper understanding. The focus of inquiry becomes a burning question.

Immersion

The heuristic inquirer takes the question inside, dialogues with it through lived experience, being open to and enveloped by the inquiry, living it in mindful and alert reflection and introspection, and carrying the inquiry beyond awakened times into sleeping and even dreams. Anything and everything connected with the inquiry becomes raw material for reflection during immersion.

Incubation

Openness to tacit knowledge within and beyond consciousness facilitates illumination at a deeper, more subtle level of experience and self-knowledge; intuition comes to the fore, allowing seeing parts within a whole, integrating experience and, thereby, understanding.

Illumination

Indwelling, self-dialogue, and deep introspection eventually generate insight, what amounts to a breakthrough awakening and enhanced awareness that replaces old ways of knowing with a new understanding and experience of the phenomenon that is the focus of inquiry.

Explication

The bridge from illumination to explication is indwelling: a fully mindful, conscious, and deliberate process of going inward, gazing with unwavering attention and concentration into the lived experience of the focus of inquiry. This moves the inquiry into a period of systematic identification, organization, and elaboration of core themes that fully and comprehensively depict the essential nature of the phenomenon —the essence of lived experience deeply understood.

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Creative Synthesis

Out of indwelling and deep reflection, out of solitude and meditation, out of illumination and explication of core themes emerges a sense of the whole that is communicated in the form of a creative synthesis, meanings and understandings expressed as a story, poem, narrative, drawing, painting, or other form of representation and communication. Ivana Djuraskovic wrote letters to her grandfather, her son, and herself as a form of creative synthesis (Djuraskovic & Arthur, 2010, pp. 1580–1583).

Validation

This involves moving back and forth between the data and insights generated during the inquiry, and the creative synthesis to check for meaning, accuracy, and validity in portraying the essence of the phenomenon of inquiry. This process moves outward by engaging with the experiences of others who have shared the experience of the phenomenon under inquiry and can provide additional data, insights, and feedback.

SOURCE: Moustakas (1990).

3. There is a very striking similarity between the methods of heuristic inquiry and the practice of counselling and psychotherapy, particularly with respect to the use of the “self.” It is therefore a method of research that particularly resonates with inquiry into counselling and therapy-related issues.

4. Heuristic inquiry highlights the importance of working with the heuristic process of others, especially with the historical recordings of previous inquiry (especially spiritual texts). Indeed, it turns out that the works of writers, poets, artists, spiritual leaders, and scientists can all be usefully treated as the creative products of heuristic inquiry.

5. In the light of this last observation, it would seem that heuristic inquiry was probably the first research method adopted for psychological inquiry many, many centuries ago. It should really be regarded as the most ancient of methods, with a proven track record well before the advent of modern science and psychology. It is a method of inquiry that is desperately in need of being reinvented! (Hiles, 2001, section 3)

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MODULE

15 Social Constructionism, Constructivism, Postmodernism, andNarrative Inquiry

Understanding Reality as Perceived, Constructed, and Interpreted

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher

Lady, I do not make up things. That is lies. Lies are not true. But the truth could be made up if you know how. And that’s the truth.

—Lily Tomlin Comedienne and actress

Social Constructionism and Constructivism

Core inquiry questions: How have the people in this setting constructed their reality? What is perceived as real? What are the consequences of what is perceived as real?

Social constructionism begins with the premise that the human world is different from the natural, physical world and therefore must be studied differently (Guba & Lincoln, 1990). Rocks don’t think and feel. People do. Because human beings have evolved the capacity to interpret and construct reality—indeed, they cannot do otherwise—the world of human perception is not real in an absolute sense; for example, the sun is real but is “made up” and shaped by cultural and linguistic constructs, for example, the sun as a god.

Phenomenology seeks to discover and illuminate essence. In contrast, social constructionism asserts that things do not and cannot have essence because they are defined interpersonally and intersubjectively by people interacting in a network of relationships. A group of people can assign essence to a phenomenon and do so regularly, but essence does not then reside in the phenomenon but rather in the group that constructs and designates the phenomenon’s essence. From a constructionist perspective, the notion of phenomenological essence is a social construction.

EXHIBIT 3.7 Classic Social Construction Theorems

Thomas theorem: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

—William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1928, p. 572) Sociologists

Historical note from the eminent sociologist Robert K. Merton (1995)

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The designation Thomas theorem “does not, of course, adopt the term theorem in the strict mathematical sense (as, say, with the binomial theorem). It refers, rather, to an idea that is being proposed or accepted as sound, consequential, and empirically relevant.” In proposing the Thomas eponym for both mnemonic and commemorative purposes (Merton, 1942), I had fastened on the term theorem rather than such less formidable terms as dictum, maxim, proposition, or aphorism in order to convey my sense that this was “probably the single most consequential sentence ever put in print by an American sociologist” (Merton, 1976, p. 174). (p. 380)

Mead theorem: If a thing is not recognized as true, then it does not function as true in the community.

—George H. Mead (1936, p. 29) Sociologist

To say that the socially constructed world of humans is not physically real like the sun doesn’t mean that it isn’t perceived and experienced as real by people. Quite the contrary. A basic social psychological theorem is that what is perceived as real is real in its consequences (see Exhibit 3.7). So constructionists study the multiple realities constructed by different groups of people and the implications of those constructions for their lives and interactions with others. Any notion of “truth,” then, becomes a matter of shared meanings and consensus among a group of people, not correspondence with some supposedly objective reality. Constructionist philosophy is built on the thesis of ontological relativity, which holds that all tenable statements about existence depend on a worldview and no worldview is uniquely determined by empirical or sense data about the world. Hence, two people can live in the same empirical world, even though one’s world is haunted by demons, the other’s by subatomic particles. Constructionist philosophy is epistemologically subjectivist in that the qualitative inquirer is also engaged in social construction as opposed to objectively depicting reality. (Exhibit 3.8 distinguishes between constructionism and constructivism, terms that are often used interchangeably because they share the same ontology and epistemology.)

How all-encompassing is the constructionist view? Michael Crotty (1998) asserts,

It is not just our thoughts that are constructed for us. We have to reckon with the social construction of emotions. Moreover, constructionism embraces the whole gamut of meaningful reality. All reality, as meaningful reality, is socially constructed. There is no exception. . . . The chair may exist as a phenomenal object regardless of whether any consciousness is aware of its existence. It exists as a chair, however, only if conscious beings construe it as a chair. As a chair, it too “is constructed, sustained and reproduced through social life.” (pp. 54–55)

EXHIBIT 3.8 Constructionism Versus Constructivism

Michael Crotty (1998) makes a distinction between constructivism and constructionism, a distinction that illustrates how the process of social construction unfolds among scholars. It remains to be seen whether this distinction will gain widespread use since the two terms are so difficult to distinguish and easy to confuse.

It would appear useful, then, to reserve the term constructivism for the epistemological considerations focusing exclusively on “the meaning-making activity of the individual mind” and to use constructionism where the focus includes “the collective generation [and transmission] of meaning.” . . .

Whatever the terminology, the distinction itself is an important one. Constructivism taken in this sense points out the unique experience of each of us. It suggests that each one’s way of making sense of the world is as valid and worthy of respect as any other, thereby tending to scotch any hint of a critical spirit. On the other hand, social constructionism emphasizes the hold our culture has on us: it shapes the way in which we see things (even in the way in which we feel things!) and gives us a quite definite view of the world. (p. 58)

Elsewhere, Crotty (1998) uses the example of a tree:

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What the “commonsense” view commends to us is that the tree standing before us is a tree. It has all the meaning we ascribe to a tree. It would be a tree, with that same meaning, whether anyone knew of its existence or not. We need to remind ourselves here that it is human beings who have constructed it as a tree, given it the name, and attributed to it the associations we make with trees. It may help if we recall the extent to which those associations differ even within the same overall culture. “Tree” is likely to bear quite different connotations in a logging town, an artists’ settlement and a treeless slum. (p. 43)

How, then, does operating from a constructionist perspective actually affect qualitative inquiry? While a realist would seek to both describe and explain a singular reality within some context by identifying and validating causal mechanisms, a constructionist would seek to capture diverse understandings and multiple realities about people’s definitions and experiences of the situation. A singular or universal explanation would not be sought. In this way, constructionist qualitative inquiry honors the idea of multiple realities.

One way in which the idea of multiple realities is honored is through the place of the researcher in the research. The researcher is not objective. It is expected that the researcher will bring biases to the research. Qualitative research addresses this by calling for the researcher to disclose his or her biases and explain how they may have affected the research. There also is acknowledgment that the researcher provides only one perspective.

Those who participate in the study provide additional perspectives. Each person who participates in the study provides a different view on the topic being investigated. Each brings his or her own assumptions, beliefs, and perspective. This is commonly shown through the use of different quotes from participants. Quotes may show that participants do not agree on the topic and/or that they have had different experiences. Consistency is not necessarily the goal. Dissonant points of view are acceptable. Qualitative research frequently illustrates the complexity of multiple realities.

A third way in which multiple realities are honored is through flexible guidelines. Due to their emergent nature, qualitative methodologies tend to be malleable. . . . There is not a set procedure that must be followed. (Norum, 2008, p. 739)

Social Construction for Program Evaluation

Let’s consider the implications of social construction for program evaluation. A constructionist evaluator would expect that different stakeholders involved in a welfare program (e.g., staff, clients, families of clients, administrators, and funders) would have different experiences and perceptions of the program, all of which deserve attention and all of which are experienced as real. The constructionist evaluator would capture these different perspectives through open-ended interviews and observations, and then examine the implications of the different perceptions (or multiple “realities”), but would not pronounce which set of perceptions was “right” or more “true” or more “real,” as would a truth- and reality-oriented (postpositivist) evaluator. The constructionist evaluator would compare various program participants’ perceptions with one another and with those of funders or program staff. The analysis could include interpreting the effects of differences in perceptions and experiences on attainment of the stated program goals. For example, those welfare recipients who perceive the program as an opportunity to get out of poverty may have different experiences and outcomes from those who view the program as merely meeting a requirement to keep receiving welfare payments. The inquiry could include looking at what shapes these different experiences and perceptions as reported by participants themselves.

In the evaluation of a diversity and inclusion project in the Saint Paul Schools, a major part of the design included capturing and reporting the experiences of people of color. Providing a way for African American, Native American, Chicano-Latino, and Hmong immigrant parents to tell their stories to mostly white, corporate funders was an intentional part of the design, one approved by those same white corporate funders. The final report was written as a “multi-vocal, multicultural” panorama that presented different experiences with and perceptions of the program’s impacts rather than reaching singular conclusions. The medium of the report carried the message that multiple voices needed to be heard and valued as a manifestation of diversity (Stockdill, Duhon-Sells, Olson, & Patton, 1992). The parents and many of the staff were most interested in using the evaluation processes to make themselves heard by those in power. Being heard was an end in itself, quite separate from the use of findings to make decisions about the program.

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SIDEBAR

CONSTRUCTED, EVER-CHANGING REALITY

Each moment of our lives, each thing we say, is equally true and false. It is true, because at the very moment we are saying it that is the only reality, and it is false because the next moment another reality will replace it.

—Charles Simic (2000, p. 11) Poet

I go to the University of Colorado every year in order to [analyze] a film one shot at a time. We spend 10 hours going with a stop action projector or laser disc through an entire film. Every 10 years I do La Dolce Vita. And what I said the last time I did it was “When I saw this movie in 1962 for the first time, it represented everything that I dreamed would happen to me. When I saw it the second time, in 1972, it represented everything that I was stuck in. When I did it in 1982, it represented everything I had escaped from and the next time I do it, it will represent a pretty good movie that I remember from my youth.” But the movie has not changed. It’s a time capsule and as you see it, it evokes all of those feelings from all of those earlier viewings. The movie is the same. The emotions we bring to it are different. And if it’s a good movie—because bad movies aren’t worth seeing more than once, if once—but good movies are worth seeing over and over again because like good music or a good book, they read differently every time.

—Roger Ebert (1996) Distinguished film critic

Primary Assumptions of Constructivism

Guba and Lincoln (1989) included among the primary assumptions of constructivism the following, whether for evaluation or research more generally:

• “Truth” is a matter of consensus among informed and sophisticated constructors, not of correspondence with objective reality.

• “Facts” have no meaning except within some value framework, hence there cannot be an “objective” assessment of any proposition.

• “Causes” and effects do not exist except by imputation. . . . • Phenomena can only be understood within the context in which they are studied; findings from one context

cannot be generalized to another; neither problems nor solutions can be generalized from one setting to another. . . .

• Data derived from constructivist inquiry have neither special status nor legitimation; they represent simply another construction to be taken into account in the move toward consensus. (pp. 44–45)

The idea that social groups like street gangs or religious adherents construct their own realities has a long history in sociology, especially the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Indeed, Restivo and Croissant (2008) proclaim that “social constructionism is a fundamental theorem of the sociological imagination” (p. 225). The ascendance of social constructionism as a major qualitative inquiry framework is evident throughout the comprehensive Handbook of Constructionist Research (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008).

But it wasn’t until this idea of socially constructed knowledge was applied to scientists that constructionism became an influential methodological paradigm. No work has been more influential in that regard than Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). Before Kuhn, most people thought that science progressed through heroic individual discoveries that contributed to an accumulating body of knowledge that got closer and closer to the way the world really worked. In contrast, Kuhn argued that tightly organized communities of specialists were the central forces in scientific development. Ideas that seemed to

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derive from brilliant individual scientific minds were actually shaped by and dependent on paradigms of knowledge that were socially constructed and enforced through group consensus. Rather than seeing scientific inquiry as progressing steadily toward truth about nature, he suggested that science is best seen as a series of power struggles between adherents of different scientific worldviews.

Kuhn emphasized the power of preconceived and socially constructed ideas to control the observations of scientists. He insisted that without the focusing effect of agreed-on constructs, investigators would not be able actually to engage in research. A fully “open” mind would not be able to focus on the details necessary to engage in “normal” science, that is, testing specific propositions derived from a theory or “scientific paradigm.” What made his analysis so important and controversial was that it undermined the presumption that scientists were open-minded, value-free, and unencumbered by inherited ideas. Quite the contrary, he argued, scientists, like everyone else, operate within socially constructed preconceptions that, taken together, constitute a paradigm. Socially constructed scientific paradigms determine what questions get priority, what methods of inquiry are preferred, what findings deserve attention, and which scientists get status and recognition. Kuhn applied to science the kind of language normally used to describe confrontations between opposing political and ideological communities, especially during revolutions. He argued (and showed with natural science examples) that communities of scientists, like ideological or religious communities, were organized by certain traditions that periodically came under strain when new problems arose that couldn’t be explained by old beliefs. New explanations and ideas would then compete until the old ideas were discarded or revised, sometimes sweepingly. But the competition was not just intellectual. Power was involved. The leaders of scientific communities wielded power in support of their positions just as political leaders do. The assessment of Kuhn’s contribution, three decades after his work first appeared, by Berkeley historian David Hollinger (2000) shows the importance of his analysis: “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions presented the strongest case ever made for the dependence of valid science on distinctly constituted, historically particular human communities” (p. 23).

Scientists constitute a critical case for social constructionism. If scientific knowledge is socially constructed and consensually validated, as opposed to consisting of empirical truths validated by nature, then surely all knowledge is socially constructed. “Accordingly, not only the social scientist but equally the natural scientist has to deal with realities that, as meaningful realities, are socially constructed. They are on equal footing in this respect” (Crotty, 1998, p. 55).

Social Construction and Postmodernism

Kuhn’s analysis, though remaining controversial and heavily critiqued (e.g., Fuller, 2000), became a cornerstone of the postmodern skepticism about scientific truth. Postmodernism, Radavich (2001) asserts, has become “the most prevalent mode of thinking in our time. . . . Postmodernist discourse is precisely the discourse that denies the possibility of ontological grounding” (p. 6). In other words, no truth or “true meaning” about any aspect of existence is possible, at least not in any absolute sense; it can only be constructed. To understand constructionism and its implications for qualitative inquiry, a brief review of postmodernism may be helpful in that it has shaped contemporary intellectual discourse in both science and art.

The term “postmodernism” suggests something coming after modernism, which was the philosophical and aesthetic cultural dominant until approximately 1960, some postmodern theorists argue. Around 1960 there was a huge cultural shift, and the philosophical system we call postmodernism took control of life. The term has been described by a postmodern theorist, Jean-François Lyotard, as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” which means that the old overarching philosophical systems that shaped our beliefs, such as liberalism and a belief in progress, were jettisoned, and people created their own micro-narratives, which shaped their lives. The problem was that without anything to guide people, they became erratic, and there was a crisis of legitimation. What is the right thing to do if you have no philosophical or religious belief to guide you? (Berger, 2010, p. 100)

Belief in science as generating truth was one of the cornerstones of modernism inherited from the Enlightenment. Postmodernism attacked this faith in science by questioning its capacity to generate truth, in part because, like all human communications, it is dependent on language, which is socially constructed and,

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as such, distorts reality. Postmodernism asserts that no language, not even that of science, can provide a direct window through which one can view reality. Language inevitably and inherently is built on the assumptions and worldview of the social group that has constructed it and the culture of which it is a part. Thus, language does not and cannot fully capture or represent reality, a posture called the “crisis of representation” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a; Turner, 1998, p. 598). Translated into Kuhn’s framework, scientific language and constructs are paradigm based and dependent.

It follows from this that the continuity of knowledge over time and across cultures is called into question. Modernism’s faith in science included the assumption that knowledge increased over time and that such accumulation constituted continuous progress toward deeper and deeper truths. “Postmodernists argue that because there is not a truth that exists apart from the ideological interests of humans, discontinuity of knowledge is the norm, and a permanent pluralism of cultures is the only real truth that humans must continually face” (Turner, 1998, p. 599). Constructionism, then, consistent with postmodernism, is relativistic, meaning that knowledge is viewed as relative to time and place, never absolute across time and space, thus the reluctance to generalize and the suspicion of generalizations asserted by others.

SIDEBAR

POSTMODERN EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY

Should the starting point for the understanding of history be ideology or politics, or religion or economics? Should we try to understand a doctrine from overt content or from the psychological makeup and the biography of its author? We must seek an understanding from all these angles simultaneously; everything has meaning, and we shall find the same structure of being underlying relationships. All these views are true provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective.

—Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French philosopher

The Phenomenology of Perception (1962, pp. xviii–xix)

What does this quote mean and what is its significance? . . . Perhaps this is a rhetorical question but, in case it is not, we may find that all of these aspects of historical underpinnings are not only helpful, but essential to the understanding of contemporary [postmodern] research. By the same token, when he asks if we should understand a doctrine from its overt content or from the psychological makeup and biography of its author, there is a recognition that both concrete and abstract conditions need to be met in order to gain clarity. Merleau- Ponty proceeds to suggest that we must seek understanding from a multiplicity of perspectives in order to gain a truer picture of the nature of anything that we are questioning.

The concept is elegant in its simplicity. Everything contains meaning, and we shall find that this is true of any question that we ask about anything. This is deceptively complex and serves to send us scurrying throughout the world gathering our information puzzle pieces in order to arrive at something that is asymptotic—always almost arriving but never quite achieving true or full understanding. Merleau-Ponty comes to our rescue by noting that all views are true provided that they are not isolated views. We must delve deeply into a multiplicity of perspectives in order to arrive at a core of meaning that each perspective provides.

Why is this important at all? It is important because, in essence, the meaning which emerges from each perspective speaks to some part of the primacy of our very existence. Thus, the search for meaning, for understanding, is therefore essentially an existential undertaking. Simply put, this quote (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) represents what [postmodern research] is all about.

—Cooper and White (2012, p. 2) Qualitative Research in the Post-modern Era

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Power comes into the picture here because, since views of reality are socially constructed and culturally embedded, those views that are dominant at any time and place will serve the interests and perspectives of those who exercise the most power in a particular culture. By exercising control over language, and therefore control over the very categories of reality that are opened to consciousness, those in power maintain their power and privilege (Ball, 2013).

Some postmodernists and constructionists question the possibility of ever finding and expressing true reality, even in the physical world, because language creates a screen between human beings and physical reality. “Vocabularies are useful or useless, good or bad, helpful or misleading, sensitive or coarse, and so on; but they are not ‘more objective’ or ‘less objective’ nor more or less ‘scientific’” (Rorty, 1994, p. 57). This is because discovering the “true nature of reality” is not the real purpose of language; the purpose of language is to communicate the social construction of the dominant members of the group using the language.

SIDEBAR

TWO VIEWS OF OBJECTIVITY

Whether you are managing an organization or trying to manage your own life, your ability to cope successfully, to succeed—even survive—depends on objectivity. The Japanese word sunao translates roughly as “the untrapped mind.” It describes the ability to see the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be.

—Arnold Brown and Edith Weiner Management consultants

(Quoted in Safire & Safire, 1991, p. 158)

versus

If I were objective or if you were objective or if anyone was, he would have to be put away somewhere in an institution because he’d be some sort of vegetable.

—David Brinkley Distinguished journalist

(Public television interview, December 2, 1968)

Deconstruction

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. —Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

English novelist and essayist

The postmodern perspective, and its many variations—for postmodernism is not a unitary perspective (e.g., Constas, 1998; Pillow, 2000)—has given rise to an emphasis on deconstruction, which means to take apart the language of a text to expose its critical assumptions and the ideological interests being served. Perspective and power occur as hand in glove in postmodern critiques. Social constructions are presumed to serve someone’s interests, usually those of the powerful. As Denzin (1991) has asserted with reference to deconstructing mass media messages, a critical analysis should “give a voice to the voiceless, as it deconstructs those popular culture texts which reproduce stereotypes about the powerless” (p. 153). Thus, deconstruction constitutes a core analytical tool of constructionists.

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SIDEBAR

DECONSTRUCTION EXAMPLE: THE CONCEPT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Ogbor (2000) has examined “mythicizing and reification in entrepreneurial discourse.” The analysis discusses “the effects of ideological control in conventional entrepreneurial discourses and praxis.” Ogbor argues that the concept of entrepreneurship is “discriminatory, gender-biased, ethnocentrically determined and ideologically controlled, sustaining not only prevailing societal biases, but serving as a tapestry for unexamined and contradictory assumptions and knowledge about the reality of entrepreneurs” (p. 605).

Deconstructing constructionism and constructivism, one finds a range of assumptions and positions from the radical “absolutely no reality ever” to a milder “Let’s capture and honor different perspectives about reality.” These positions share an interest in the subjective nature of human perceptions and skepticism about the possibility of objectivity. Reality-oriented researchers, in kind, are skeptical of the subjective knowledge of constructivism. How contentious is the debate? One gets some sense of the gulf that can separate these views from an assessment of postmodernism and constructivism by Rutgers mathematician Norman Levitt (1998) in an article titled “Why Professors Believe Weird Things”: “Scientific evidence—which is to say the only meaningful evidence—cannot be neutralized by ‘subjective knowledge,’ which is to say bullshit” (p. 34). He goes on to comment on constructivism as a particular manifestation of postmodernism: “a particular technique for getting drunk on one’s own words” (p. 35). Of course, that’s Levitt’s social construction of the scientific debate articulated from within his own paradigm assumptions about the nature of reality. The debate, especially about whether constructionism applies to both the social and the natural world, goes on (Hacking, 2000). What is not debatable is that social constructionism is an important inquiry framework for qualitative inquiry.

Further deconstructing the inquiry framework of social construction, one may find “inescapable connotations of manufacturing,” as if people sat around and made things up. But

to say that people produce the world is not the same as saying that they are solipsists, that they are able to fashion the world according to their whims. . . . One cannot ordinarily produce an imaginary or nonsensical phenomenon and expect to be taken seriously. The mistake is to think of the process of production as one that is free of constraints when in fact it is a structure of constraints. (Watson & Goulet, 1998, p. 97)

Attending to the social construction of reality, then, points us not only to what is constructed but how it is constructed, and the very question of what it means to say it is constructed. Exhibit 3.9 summarizes the core contributions of social construction to qualitative inquiry. The premise that what is perceived as real is real in its consequences is at the heart of the social constructionist inquiry framework.

EXHIBIT 3.9 Ten Core Elements of the Social Construction Inquiry Framework

1. Inquire into the perceptions of reality shared by different groups of people. What is each group’s perception and experience of reality?

2. Inquire into how what is perceived as real is real in its consequences. What are the behavioral and interaction consequences of what is perceived as real by people in a group?

3. Capture and honor multiple perspectives, and seek to understand multiple realities. What are the similarities and differences of perceptions about and experiences of reality within and between groups of people?

4. Inquire into the ways in which social groups come to share a worldview. How do shared social constructions emerge?

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5. Be sensitive to the critical importance of context for understanding social constructions of reality. How does the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental context illuminate social constructions?

6. Track the ways in which social constructions and worldviews change over time. How have the social constructions of a group (or comparative groups) evolved and changed?

7. Deconstruct language, and pay particular attention to the ways in which language as a social and cultural construction shapes, distorts, and structures perceptions of reality. What words are used to make sense of shared perceptions of reality?

8. Inquire into how power differentials affect and shape social constructions and perceptions of reality. Who exercises control over a group’s shared meanings and benefits from particular perceptions of reality? Who is disadvantaged by those shared constructions?

9. Be reflective about how the subjective perspectives of researchers and evaluators affect their methods choices, shape findings, and inform their understandings of others and themselves. What social constructions and paradigm assumptions affect the inquirers’ inquiry?

10. Inquire into how social constructions emerge out of and are affected by relationships, including the relationship between the inquirer and those being studied. How do the experiences of people being studied and their perceptions about the researcher or evaluator affect what is learned and how it is communicated (represented)?

Constructivist Credo The Constructivist Credo is a set of foundational principles in the form of 150 propositional statements based on the work of Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba (2013), pioneers in articulating the constructivist paradigm for qualitative inquiry.

Narrative Inquiry

Core inquiry questions: How can this narrative (story) be interpreted to understand and illuminate the life and culture that created it? What does this narrative or story reveal about the person and world from which it came?

The narrative approach to qualitative inquiry focuses on stories. The beginning, middle, and end is the story. Narrative inquiry examines human lives through the lens of a narrative, honoring lived experience as a source of important knowledge and understanding (Clandinin, 2013). The more academic and scholarly term narratology was coined by Todorov in 1969 “in an effort to elevate the form ‘to the status of an object of knowledge for a new science’” (Riessman, 1993, p. 1); but that term hasn’t caught on. Narrative inquiry is the more general terminology and framework.

Personal narratives, family stories, suicide notes, graffiti, literary nonfiction, and life histories reveal cultural and social patterns through the lens of individual experiences. Stories organize and shape our experiences and also tell others about our lives, relationships, journeys, decisions, successes, and failures. Researchers and evaluators collect stories about formal education and planned program experiences and outcomes, as well as informal experiences of daily life, critical events, and life’s many surprises as they unfold in particular situations, contexts, or circumstances. The stories are captured through interviews, transcribed, and analyzed for the patterns and themes they reveal, helping us learn about both specific individuals and society and culture more generally. The “narrative turn” in qualitative inquiry (Bochner, 2001) honors people’s stories as data that can stand alone as pure description of experience, be worthy as a narrative documentary of experience (the core of phenomenology), or be analyzed for connections between the psychological, sociological, cultural, political, and dramatic dimensions of human experience.

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Story and narrative are not the same thing, however. Narrative inquiry is more than just telling or capturing stories (Bell, 2002). One distinction is to treat the story as data and the narrative as analysis, which involves interpreting the story, placing it in context, and comparing it with other stories. Another distinction is that the story is what happened and the narrative is how the telling of what happened is structured and scripted within some context for some purpose. However, in data collection, the word story is more straightforward to ordinary people and carries a connotation different from that of narrative or another common label, case study. For example, in program evaluations, people may be invited to share their stories instead of being asked to participate in case studies or share narratives (Krueger, 2010). The central idea of narrative analysis remains, that stories offer especially translucent windows into cultural and social meanings when understood and analyzed as narratives.

In addition to stories collected through interviewing, written texts and rhetoric of all kinds can be fodder for narrative analysis, for example, the rhetoric of politicians or teachers (Graham, 1993). Policymakers construct narratives, for example, a “national strategic narrative” of U.S. military actions (Slaughter, 2011). Robert Coles, Harvard Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities (his title offers interesting narratological fodder), has written about The Call of Stories (1989) as a basis for teaching, learning, and moral reflection. Michael White and David Epston’s (1990) analysis Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends looks at the power of stories in the lives of individuals and families and the connection between storytelling and therapy. They suggest that people have adjustment difficulties because the story of their life, as created by themselves or others, does not match their lived experience. They propose that therapists can help their patients by guiding them in rewriting their life stories. Another example of the applied potential of narrative inquiry is Columbia University Medical School’s (2013) Program in Narrative Medicine, which involves practicing medicine with narrative understanding and competence, including awareness and appreciation of the complex, interactive narrative relationships among doctors, patients, colleagues, funders, policymakers, and the public.

In a quite different applied arena, Lisa Roberts (1997) used narratives to document, explore, and deepen understanding of people’s experiences in museums. The title of her book, From Knowledge to Narrative, reverses the usual order. Narratives are usually analyzed to generate knowledge. Roberts looked at people’s experiences with knowledge (museum exhibits) to see how that knowledge was translated into and communicated to others as narratives, as stories.

Analyzing Narrative Reality

The term narrative reality is used by Gubrium and Holstein (2009) “to flag the socially situated practice of storytelling, which would include accounts provided both within and outside of formal interviews.” They continue,

The term suggests that the contexts in which stories are told are as much a part of their reality as the texts themselves. The narrative reality of the stories of WWII and Vietnam veterans, for instance, would not only include narrative elicited in research interviews, but extend to other circumstances in which such stories were incited and told. It could extend, for example, to occasions such as veterans’ reunions, therapy groups, or the exaggerated “war stories” that some circumstances encourage. Stories not only are told in interviews, but they also wend their way through the lives of storytellers. They are boundless in that regard, are told and retold, with no definitive beginnings, middles, or ends in principle, even while a sense of narrative wholes and narrative organization is always in tow. This obliges us to analyze stories and storytelling in an extended framework, with the aim of documenting what the communication process and its circumstances designate as meaningful and important, together with the various purposes stories serve. (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, p. 2)

SIDEBAR

NARRATIVES: FACTS, MEMORIES, AND PERSPECTIVES

Social scientists have explored the impact of memory on people’s stories. The evidence is that stories “are not simply recounted as a remembered set of events but are evaluated and interpreted, leading to developmental changes in understanding through the act of reminiscing” (Bold, 2012, p. 28).

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The issue of memory is one that concerns those who seek facts about a situation, for example a road traffic incident in which identification of fault is necessary for insurance claims and prosecution processes. In professional workplace research, the identification of facts may be less important since the narrative data collected will most likely contribute to a collection of different perceptions and actions within the context. Each narrative adds to the others, creating a patchwork of information on the whole situation from which similarities and differences are identifiable. In research that supports the development of practice in the workplace, exploring the ways that participants understand each other’s narratives is highly relevant since relationships between people rely on developing common understandings of events and situations. In addition, the impact of memory and previous experience on the telling or the understanding of a narrative serves to remind us that any narrative is a representation of actuality. Many researchers keep a research diary or an aide-memoire, which is a fluid narrative of their research process, maintaining chronological records and sustaining reflective thought. As they continue to reread and reflect further, the meaning they attach to the content will alter.

SOURCE: Bold (2012, p. 29).

Analyzing Narrative Reality . . . considers the circumstances, conditions, and goals of accounts. We are especially concerned with how storytellers work up, and what they do with, the accounts they present. We are particularly interested in the functions stories serve in different situations. Adapting familiar phrasing from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), storytellers not only tell stories, they do things with them. What speakers do with stories shapes their meaning for listeners, as well as the consequences of their communication. (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, pp. xv–xvi)

Interpreting Narratives

Much of the methodological focus in narrative studies concerns the nature of interpretation, as in Norman Denzin’s seminal qualitative works Interpretive Biography (1989a), Interpretive Interactionism (1989b), and Interpretive Ethnography (1997b). Interpretation of narrative poses the problem of how to analyze “talk and text” (Silverman, 2000). Tom Barone (2000) has entered into literary nonfiction to hone his interpretive aesthetic.

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©2002 Michael Quinn Patton and Michael Cochran

Budding Narratologist

All great literature, I think, lures those who experience it away from the shores of literal truth and out into uncharted waters where meaning is more ambiguous. . . .

Ultimately, I erased the boundary between the realm of text which purports to give only the facts and that of the metaphor-laden story which dares (as Sartre once put it) to lie in order to tell the truth. But I did so haltingly, and not in a single confident stroke of understanding. Indeed, my insight came only gradually, after confronting a form of writing that aims to straddle the boundary between actual and virtual worlds, one foot firmly planted in each. These works are hybrids of textual species, essays/stories written in a literary style but shelved (curiously) in the nonfiction section of the library. (pp. 61–62)

Here, we have an example of personal narrative in the form of the narrative researcher’s report of his journey into cross-genre exploration of the nature of textual interpretation. Later, he uses narrative as a method for exploring what it means to be a professional educational researcher, exploring the narratives researchers construct about themselves and the implications of those narratives for their relationships with nonresearchers (Barone, 2000, pp. 201–228).

W. Tierney (2000), in contrast, examines historical biographies and testimonios to explore interpretive challenges in using life histories in the postmodern age. His narrative analysis looks at the intersection of the interpreted purpose of a text, the constructed and interpreted “truth” of a text, and the persona of the author in text creation, all of which are called into interpretive question in the postmodern age.

Tedlock (2000) examines different genres of ethnography as constituting varying forms of narrative. She distinguishes life histories and memoirs from “narrative ethnography,” a hybrid form that was created in an attempt to portray accurately the biographies of people in the culture studied and also to include ethnographers’ own experiences in their texts. She assesses this as a “sea change in ethnographic representation” because it unsettled “the boundaries that had been central to the notion of a self studying an

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other” and replaced it with an “ethnographic interchange” between self and other within a single text (pp. 460–461).

Narrative analysis has also now emerged as a specific approach to studying organizations. As such, it takes at least four forms:

1. Organizational research that is written in story-like fashion (tales from the field) 2. Organizational research that collects organizational stories (tales of the field) 3. Organizational research that conceptualizes organizational life as story making and organizational theory

as story reading (interpretative approaches) 4. A disciplinary reflection that takes the form of literary critique (Czarniawska, 1998, pp. 13–14)

The Story

The story is at the center of narrative analysis, whether they are stories of teaching (Preskill & Jacobwitz, 2000), stories of and by students (Barone, 2000, pp. 119–131), stories of participants in programs (Kushner, 2000), stories of fieldwork (Van Maanen, 1988), stories of relationships (Bochner, Ellis, & Tillman-Healy, 1997), or stories of illness (Frank, 1995, 2000). How to interpret stories and, more specifically, the texts that tell the stories is at the heart of narrative analysis.

SIDEBAR

NARRATIVE INQUIRY, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND GLOBAL INTERCONNECTEDNESS

Intentional use of narrative reinforces the world’s trend toward networked connection.

Narrating experience integrates (1) the chaos of our conscious world and (2) subconscious tacit knowledge. . . . Although the linguistic and visual sound bites of text messages, Twitter, and Facebook verge on the point of banality or even meaninglessness for some people, others perceive them as condensed narrative platforms that afford the development of personalized and perpetually evolving narrative language; they create a multidimensional intertwine of social exchange. Over time, space, and context, these linguistic and visual condensations yield personalized iconic styles and become narrative tools by which to connect multiple generations and global participants.

—Nancy L. Pfahl (2011, p. 81)

Catherine Kohler Riessman (2008), one of the thought leaders in narrative analysis, cautions that high- quality data consist of detailed and lengthy accounts with many different crosscutting themes rather than short, succinct, and fragmented segments. Critical and illuminative contextual and structural elements of a story can be lost when it is coded narrowly and reduced to bite-size units. As we’ll see in the chapter on interviewing, gathering such detailed and complex narrative accounts involves highly specific techniques and skillful interviewing (Andrews, Squire, & Taboukou, 2008; Wengraf, 2001).

Practice Stories as a Particular Narrative Niche

Practice stories explain something (e.g., how working-class children end up in working-class jobs) by describing how it develops over time as norms, rules, and organizational arrangements are acted on and adapted by people as part of their daily lives and in the context of their social lives (their communities, groups, networks, and families). One form of practice stories elucidates professional practice in a specific field, like program evaluation. More generally, practice stories help make sense of things as ongoing

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processes, both shaped by and shaping general patterns, arrangements, rules, norms, and other structures. Practice stories are a specific approach to capturing and reporting narratives developed by sociologist and ethnographer Karen O’Reilly (2012a, 2012b, 2013).

Practice stories pay attention to people’s feelings and emotions, their experiences and their free choices, but also to the wider constraints and opportunities within which they act. More than that, practice stories take account of how these different features of social life interact, and thereby how structures (like social classes, for example) get produced or reproduced. Theoretically, practice stories can draw from a wide range of social theory that comes under the description of structuration theory or practice theory. (O’Reilly, 2013, p. 1)

O’Reilly developed practice stories to address what she found at the heart of a great deal of sociological theory: an agency/structure dualism, that is, a tendency to perceive the agency of individual human actors as distinct and separate from social structures. In early sociology, she explains, the emphasis was on structures. In the work of Durkheim, for example, “social facts,” such as laws, religion, education, and other more relational aspects such as norms, are depicted as having a force of their own on societies, independently of the individuals and their actions. In Marx’s work, socioeconomic forces work independently to shape human societies.

This approach was gradually challenged by a variety of schools of thought we might call “subjectivism,” including symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, phenomenological sociology, social constructionism, and hermeneutics. These approaches emphasized the creative, reflexive and dynamic aspects of social life. They were especially influenced by a set of philosophical ideas known as interpretivism. For interpretivists, it is essential to see humans as actors in the social world rather than as re-acting like objects in the natural world. Sociology has now reached something of a consensus, in which it is impossible to ignore all that has been learned on either side and scholars are seeking ways to understand the ongoing interaction of structure and agency. These approaches tend to be called structuration or practice theories. (O’Reilly, 2013, p. 1)

Collecting Data to Tell Practice Stories

O’Reilly (2013) drew on these various theoretical perspectives to start thinking about how social life unravels in practice.

Methodologically, this involves conceptualizing and learning about the wider structures that frame the practice of a given community or group. This can use both grand theorizing as well as learning practically about the smaller, local, relevant context. But abstract-level arguments should always be linked overtly to the analysis of the practice of daily life.

Practice stories should reveal the complexity of people’s daily lives, should try to understand cultural differences, and challenge stereotypes and typifications. But structures are both internal and external, so agents’ perceptions can never be divorced from structural contexts.

Furthermore, a researcher might understand aspects of the context not perceived by the agent. A methodology that enables a perspective beyond just that of the agent seems crucial. The gaze of the researcher cannot be restricted to the “present moment” or to “individual action.” We have to study broader institutional systemic and structural frames and wider forces, but the focus is on how these are manifested in practice. (p. 1)

Narratives and stories reveal and communicate our human experiences, our social structures, and how we make sense of the world. The flow of a story—beginning, middle, end—is essentially a sense-making structure. As we interact with each other, we create and tell stories. Qualitative inquiry focused on capturing and analyzing those stories reveals our quintessentially social nature.

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MODULE

16 Ethnomethodology, Semiotics, Symbolic Interaction, andHermeneutics

Human Beings as Quintessentially Social Animals

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

—Aristotle Philosopher, Ancient Greece

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. —David Brooks (2011)

The Social Animal

Ethnomethodology

Core inquiry question: How do people make sense of their everyday activities so as to behave in socially acceptable ways?

Ethnomethodology focuses on the ordinary, the routine, and the details of everyday life. Harold Garfinkel (1967) invented the term. While working with the Yale cross-cultural files, Garfinkel came across labels such as “ethnobotany,” “ethnophysiology,” and “ethnophysics.”At the time, he was studying jurors. He decided that the deliberation methods of the jurors, or for that matter of any group, constituted an “ethnomethodology,” wherein “ethno” refers to the “availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the ‘whatever’” (Turner, 1974, p. 16). For the jurors, this was their ordinary, everyday understanding of what it meant to deliberate as a juror. Such an understanding made jury duty possible.

Wallace and Wolf (1980) defined ethnomethodology as follows: “If we translated the ‘ethno’ part of the term as ‘members’ (of a group) or ‘folk’ or ‘people,’ then the term’s meaning can be stated as: members’ methods of making sense of their social world” (p. 263). Ethnomethodology gets at the norms, understandings, and assumptions that are taken for granted by people in a setting because they are so deeply understood that people don’t even think about why they do what they do. It studies “the ordinary methods that ordinary people use to realize their ordinary actions” (Coulon, 1995, p. 2). Or put another way, ethnomethodologists study, reveal, and make explicit “taken-for-granted methods of producing order that constitute sense” (Rawls, 2008, p. 701). In this sense, revealing common sense is the sense-making focus of ethnomethodology.

Ethnomethodology has been particularly important in sociology.

Ethnomethodology is, as the name suggests, a study of methods. It asks not why, but how. It asks how people get things done—how they transform situations or how they persevere situation “unchanged,” step by step, and moment

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to moment. As its name also suggests, it is interested in ordinary methods, the methods of the people rather than their theorists. (Watson & Goulet, 1998, p. 97)

Ethnomethodologists elucidate what a complete stranger would have to learn to become a routinely functioning member of a group, a program, or a culture. To do this, ethnomethodologists conduct in-depth interviews and undertake participant observation. They stray from the nonmanipulative and unobtrusive strategies of most qualitative inquiry by employing “ethnomethodological experiments.” During these experiments, the researcher “violates the scene” and disrupts ordinary activity by doing something out of the ordinary. A very simple and well-known example of such an experiment is turning to face the other people on an elevator instead of facing the doors. In such qualitative experiments, “the researchers are interested in what the subjects do and what they look to in order to give the situation an appearance of order, or to ‘make sense’ of the situation” (Wallace & Wolf, 1980, p. 278). Garfinkel (1967) offered a number of such experiments in his classic book, and those undertaking ethnomethodological studies have created a great many more (Rawls, 2002).

Ethnomethodologists also observe and document naturally occurring experiments where people are thrust into new or unexpected situations that require that they make sense of what is happening, “situations in which meaning is problematic” (Wallace & Wolf, 1980, p. 280). Such situations would include intake into a program, immigration clearance centers, the first few weeks in a new school or job, and major transition points or critical incidents in the lives of people, programs, and organizations.

In some respects, ethnomethodologists attempt to make explicit what might be called the group’s tacit knowledge, to extend Polanyi’s (1967) idea of tacit knowledge from the individual to the group. Ethnomethodologists get at a group’s tacit knowledge by forcing it to the surface through disrupting violations of ordinary experience, since ordinary routines are what keep tacit knowledge at an unconscious level.

In short, ethnomethodologists “bracket or suspend their own belief in reality to study the reality of everyday life” (Taylor & Bogdan, 1984, p. 11). Elucidating the taken-for-granted realities of everyday life in a program or organization can become a force for understanding, change, and establishing a new reality based on the kind of everyday environment desired by people in the setting being studied. The findings of an ethnomethodological evaluation study would create a programmatic self-awareness that could facilitate program change and improvement. Ethnomethodology can also contribute to public policy by illuminating the everyday practices that emanate from policies, for example, what happens in courtrooms (Dupret, 2011; Jenkings, 2013).

Both ethnomethodology and symbolic interaction, the next inquiry framework we’ll examine, focus on human beings as social animals. Sociologist Aaron Wildavsky summarizes this perspective succinctly:

What matters to people is how they should live with other people. The great questions of social life are “Who am I?” (To what kind of a group do I belong?) and “What should I do?” (Are there many or few prescriptions I am expected to obey?). Groups are strong or weak according to whether they have boundaries separating them from others. Decisions are taken either for the group as a whole (strong boundaries) or for individuals or families (weak boundaries). Prescriptions are few or many indicating the individual internalizes a large or a small number of behavioral norms to which he or she is bound. (Wildavsky, quoted in Berger, 2010, p. 65)

Symbolic Interaction

Core inquiry question: What common set of symbols and understandings have emerged to give meaning to people’s interactions?

Symbolic interaction, grounded in social psychology and most closely associated with George Herbert Mead (1934) and Herbert Blumer (1969), emphasizes the importance of meaning and interpretation as essential human processes. In this regard, symbolic interaction was a reaction against behaviorism and mechanical stimulus–response models in psychology. People create shared meanings through their interactions, and those

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meanings become their reality. Blumer articulated three major premises as fundamental to symbolic interactionism

1. People act toward things, including each other, on the basis of the meanings things have for them. 2. The meanings of things are derived out of social interaction with others. 3. The meanings of things are managed and transformed through an interpretive process that people use to make

sense of and handle the objects that constitute their social worlds. (Snow, 2001, p. 367)

These premises led symbolic interactionists to qualitative inquiry as the only real way of understanding how people perceive, understand, and interpret the world. Only through close contact and direct interaction with people in open-mined, naturalistic inquiry and inductive analysis could the symbolic interactionist come to understand the symbolic world of the people being studied. Blumer was one of the first to use group discussion and interview methods with key informants. He considered a carefully selected group of naturally acute observers and well-informed people to be a real “panel of experts” about a setting or situation, experts who would take the researcher inside the phenomenon of interest, for example, drug use. As we shall see in the chapter on interviewing, group interviews and focus groups have now become highly valued and widely used qualitative methods.

Labeling theory—the proposition that what people are called has major consequences for social interaction —has been a primary focus of inquiry in symbolic interaction. For example, using a sample of 46 participants in a 12-step group, Debtors Anonymous, Hayes (2000) studied how people who are unable to manage their finances responsibly come to feel shame. In program evaluation, labeling theory can be applied to terms such as drop-outs and at-risk youth because language matters to staff and participants and can affect how they approach attaining desired outcomes (Hopson, 2000; Patton, 2000).

The Sociological Quarterly celebrated the 25th anniversary of symbolic interaction as an inquiry framework with a special issue in 1964. In that retrospective review, social psychologist Manford H. Kuhn (1964) characterized “the past twenty-five years [as] the age of inquiry in symbolic interactionism” (p. 63). As an example of such inquiry, he praised Howard Becker’s (1953) classic study on becoming a marijuana user, asserting that “there is, in the literature, no more insightful account of the relation of the actor to a social object through the processes of communication and of self-definition, than Becker’s account of becoming a marijuana user” (Kuhn, 1964, p. 73).

Though this perspective emerged in the 1930s, symbolic interactionists are showing that they can keep up with the times, for example, by applying their perspective to “cybersex” on the Internet. Computer-mediated human interaction constitutes

a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex— fundamentally a bodily activity—provides an ideal situation for examining these kinds of potential transformations. In the disembodied context of on-line interaction both bodies and selves are fluid symbolic constructs emergent in communication and are defined by sociocultural standards. Situations such as these are suggestive of issues related to contemporary transgressions of the empirical shell of the body, potentially reshaping body-to-self-to-social-world relationships. (Waskul, Douglass, & Edgley, 2000, p. 375)

Perusing any issue of the journal Symbolic Interaction provides a sense of the wide range of contemporary issues being explored through application of symbolic interaction as an inquiry framework: understanding sheng nu (“leftover women”), the phenomenon of late marriage among Chinese professional women (To, 2013); “dark secrets and the performance of inflammatory bowel disease” (Thompson, 2013); and the social ecology of “normal adolescence”—insights from DiabetesCare (Allen, 2013).

For our purposes, the importance of symbolic interactionism to qualitative inquiry is its distinct emphasis on the importance of symbols and the interpretative processes that undergird interactions as fundamental to understanding human behavior. For program evaluation, organizational development, and other applied research, the study of the original meaning and influence of symbols and shared meanings can shed light on what is most important to people, what will be most resistant to change, and what will be most necessary to change if the program or organization is to move in new directions. The subject matter and methods of

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symbolic interactionism also emphasize the importance of paying attention to how particular interactions give rise to symbolic understandings when one is engaged in changing symbols as part of a program improvement or organizational development process.

SIDEBAR

NAKED VERSUS NUDE: A SYMBOLIC INTERACTION ILLUMINATION

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen as naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

—John Berger (1972) Ways of Seeing

(Quoted in Berger, 2010, p. 31)

Semiotics

Core inquiry questions: What signs (words and symbols) carry and convey special meaning in particular contexts? What are the implications of those signs for human beliefs, behaviors, and interactions?

Humans are distinctively symbol-generating and sign-using animals. As social animals, we communicate with each other through signs and symbols. Semiotics as an inquiry framework blends linguistics and social science by analyzing the creation, use, and meanings of signs. Umberto Eco (1976) provided the most basic classic definition: “Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign” (p. 7). And a sign is “anything that stands for something else” (Chandler, 2007, p. 2). Semiotics includes studying the rules and forms of language as well as the relationship between language and human behavior (Manning, 1987). Walker Percy (1990) has explained the insights generated by studying language as opposed to studying the physics of a solar eclipse or the biological basis of rat behavior, namely, that language brings us face to face with the nature and essence of being human because humans are distinctively sign-using and symbol-generating animals (pp. 150, 243). Semiotics offers an inquiry framework for “analyzing talk and text” (Silverman, 2000, p. 826) and studying “organizational symbolism” (Jones, 1996), or communications and media (Moore, 2011). It can include attention to nonverbal signals, for “ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to constitute them” (Brooks, 2011, p. 12).

A building simultaneously provides shelter and sends a message through its architecture, imagery, materials, and location. What we wear not only serves straightforward utilitarian purposes (warmth, protection, hiding our nakedness) but also communicates something, often a great deal, about who we are. The location of an office—upper floor, corner with window versus middle of the room windowless cubicle— speaks volumes. An evaluation report contains findings, but its thickness, cover graphics, print quality, and binding communicate meanings beyond its content.

What we say and how we look (nonverbal communications, body language) can send different messages. Smells stimulate olfactory sensations and send messages: perfume, flatulence, curry, sweat—these are signs that carry different meanings. Political campaigns are rife with signs. Terrorists send messages through acts of terror. Mothers and fathers send signs of love. A practical problem of semiotics is the search for a universal symbol for danger. Exhibit 3.10 offers one candidate, but it has to be evaluated in many different contexts among many different peoples to determine its universal meaning. Or perhaps you’d be more interested in a universal sign of safety. Or love.

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Qualitative methods are used in semiotic inquiries to observe how people create signs, how we behave in the presence of various signs, and how to interview people about the meanings they attach to signs. Exhibit 3.11 presents a summary of fundamental assumptions about qualitative semiotic inquiry.

EXHIBIT 3.10 Semiotic Inquiry: Might This Be a Universal Sign of Danger?

SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons (2012).

EXHIBIT 3.11 Semiotic Inquiry Framework: Five Basic Assumptions

It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe—not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents, as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth”—that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

—Charles S. Peirce

(Quoted in Berger, 2010, p. 16)

Semiotic research is motivated by a set of fundamental assumptions about research and the world:

1. The world can be read just like a text: . . . We are interested in how the world can come together as a coherent and meaningful whole and in the implicit and explicit codes that allow this to happen.

2. The world is always talking to us: [Semiotist pioneer Charles] Peirce once insisted that the world was perfused with signs. Since we are always searching for meaning in order to avoid genuine doubt, we are always drawing guidance and affirmation from the world. Therefore, there is usually a meditative or even contemplative dimension to semiotic research where we allow the order of the world to come to us on its own terms.

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3. The world is rich in meaning: Semioticians go beyond the notion that we make all the meaning we find, either singly or collectively. We share Peirce’s sense that there is some form of logical order to the world, and that there are things in the world that are meaningful on their own terms, and not necessarily on ours. Stepping outside our own personal or cultural frames of meaning can be one of the most exciting forms of semiotic research.

4. The presence or absence of specific things often serve as clues to the nature of reality: One good way to think of semiotic researchers is to compare them to detectives. Signs are clues and symptoms and omens of things. Our job is to find them in intelligent and creative ways.

5. Although semioticians assume that the world can be understood, we do not necessarily assume that it can always be understood easily in human terms: . . . Simply put, semioticians try not to impose order on things, unless they are things we are supposed to impose order upon. Most of the time, we watch, learn, synthesize, and organize. If we are patient, we are often rewarded with startling, and even beautiful, insights.

SOURCE: Shank (2008, pp. 806–810).

Hermeneutics

Core inquiry question: What are the conditions and context under which a human act took place or a product was produced that makes it possible to interpret its meanings?

Understanding How and Why Context Matters So Much

Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he should do next.

—Gregory Bateson (1988, p. 15) Anthropologist

Mind and Nature

Qualitative inquiry includes document analysis. Anything written can be a source of data for qualitative analysis: evaluation reports, meeting minutes, client case files, political speeches, news accounts of current events, editorials, blogs, Facebook posts, and on and on. The modern age is an age of texts. Everything and anything from historical writings to real-time Twitter posts can be material for qualitative study, seeking meanings, patterns, and themes that provide insights into how those who wrote what is being analyzed understood and interpreted the world. While observation, interviews, and fieldwork dominate qualitative methods, analysis of documents and text is taking on increased importance in an information and communications age when texting has emerged as a verb. Hermeneutics examines “how we read, understand, and handle texts, especially those written in another time or in a context different from our own” (Thiselton, 2009, p. 1). In the real-time world of the Internet, texts “written in another time” can mean just minutes ago, and texts “written in a context different from our own” can mean anywhere else in the world, from down the street to the other side of the globe.

In this brief (or not so brief, depending on your perspective) excursion through the varieties of qualitative inquiry, hermeneutics is yet another approach that can inform qualitative inquiry. It can also help put all the other inquiry frameworks in this chapter in perspective, in that it reminds us that what something means

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depends on the cultural context in which it was originally created as well as the cultural context within which it is subsequently interpreted. This reminds us that each of the inquiry frameworks reviewed in this chapter emerged from a particular context to address specific concerns at that time—and each of these inquiry frameworks have generated deviations, adaptations, debates, new applications, and departures from the original, as time has moved on and new contexts have emerged with new issues and old issues addressed in new ways. As we consider the contributions of these diverse inquiry frameworks to the study of current interests and concerns, we do so in a different historical, scholarly, political, and cultural context.

Hermeneutic philosophy, first developed by Frederich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and applied to human science research by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and other German philosophers, focuses on the problem of interpretation. Hermeneutics provides a theoretical framework for interpretive understanding, or meaning, with special attention to context and original purpose. The term hermeneutics derives from the Greek word hermeneuein, meaning “to understand” or “to interpret.”

There is an obvious link between hermeneuein and the god Hermes. Hermes is the fleet-footed divine messenger (he has wings on his feet!). As a messenger, he is the bearer of knowledge and understanding. His task is to explain to humans the decisions of the gods. Whether hermeneuein derives from Hermes or the other way round is not certain. (Crotty, 1998, p. 88)

In modern usage, hermeneutics offers a perspective for interpreting legends, stories, and other texts, especially biblical and legal texts. Hermeneutics constitutes an interpretive theory (Porter & Robinson, 2011) that includes guidance for analyzing any kind of narrative data and text. To make sense of and interpret a text, it is important to know what the author wanted to communicate, to understand intended meanings, and to place documents in a historical and cultural context (Palmer, 1969). Following that principle, hermeneutics itself must be understood as part of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century

broad movement away from an empiricist, logical atomistic, designative, representational account of meaning and knowledge. . . . Logical empiricism worked from a conception of knowledge as correct representation of an independent reality and was (is) almost exclusively interested in the issue of establishing the validity of scientific knowledge claims. (Schwandt, 2000, p. 196)

In other words, hermeneutics challenged the assertion that an interpretation can ever be absolutely correct or true. It must remain only and always an interpretation. The meaning of a text, then, is negotiated among a community of interpreters and to the extent that some agreement is reached about meaning at a particular time and place, that meaning can only be based on consensual community validation. Texts, then, must be “situated” within some literacy context (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanič, 2000).

Kvale (1987) has suggested that “the attempts to develop a logic of validation within the hermeneutical tradition are relevant for clarifying the validity of interpretation in the qualitative research interview.”

The interpretation of meaning is characterized by a hermeneutical circle, or spiral. The understanding of a text takes place through a process where the meaning of the separate parts is determined by the global meaning of text. In principle, such a hermeneutical explication of the text is an infinite process while it ends in practice when a sensible meaning, a coherent understanding, free of inner contradictions has been reached. (p. 62)

SIDEBAR

A HERMENEUTICS OF VULNERABILITY

Clifford (1988) developed the construct of a “hermeneutics of vulnerability” to discuss the constitutive effects of relationships between researchers and research participants on research practice and research findings. A hermeneutics of vulnerability foregrounds the ruptures of fieldwork, the multiple and contradictory positionings of all participants, the imperfect control of the researcher, and the partial and perspectival nature of all knowledge. Among the primary tactics for achieving a hermeneutics of vulnerability . . . is the tactic of self- reflexivity, which may be understood in at least two senses. In the first sense, self-reflexivity involves making transparent the rhetorical and poetic work of the researcher in representing the object of her or his study. In the

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second (and, we think, more important) sense, self-reflexivity refers to the efforts of researchers and research participants to engage in acts of self-defamiliarization in relation to each other. (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2011, p. 560)

Exhibit 3.12 offers four principles for hermeneutic inquiry and analysis that can be applied beyond the interpretation of legends, literature, and historical documents to any kind of qualitative data. This includes interviews, family conversations, works of art, photographs, or anything written or visual, for, from a hermeneutic perspective, the world is essentially narrative and text (Flick, 2009, p. 350). The hermeneutic viewpoint involves the belief that there is no such thing as a pure description; every communicative act involves interpretation, and therefore, when a social researcher writes about an experience, this is always an act of reconstruction (Seale, 2012, p. 448). “Social science understanding, therefore, is always essentially an understanding of understanding, an understanding ‘of the second degree’” (Soeffner, 2010, p. 97).

Thus, hermeneutic researchers use qualitative methods to establish context and meaning for what people do. Hermeneutists

are much clearer about the fact that they are constructing the “reality” on the basis of their interpretations of data with the help of the participants who provided the data in the study. . . . If other researchers had different backgrounds, used different methods, or had different purposes, they would likely develop different types of reactions, focus on different aspects of the setting, and develop somewhat different scenarios. (Eichelberger, 1989, p. 9)

EXHIBIT 3.12 Principles for Hermeneutic Inquiry

Below are four principles for hermeneutic inquiry and analysis that can be applied beyond the interpretation of legends, literature, and historical documents to guide interpretation of any qualitative data.

1. Understanding a human act or product, and hence all learning, is like interpreting a text. 2. All interpretation occurs within a tradition. 3. Interpretation involves opening myself to a text (or any qualitative data) and questioning it. 4. I must interpret a text (or data of any kind) in the light of my situation.

SOURCE: Adapted from Kneller (1984, p. 68).

Thus, one must know about the researcher as well as the researched to place any qualitative study in a proper, hermeneutic context. Hermeneutic theory argues that one can only interpret the meaning of something from some perspective, a certain standpoint, a praxis, or a situational context, whether one is reporting on one’s own findings or reporting the perspectives of the people being studied (and thus reporting their standpoint or perspective). This means that “prior understandings and prejudices shape the interpretive process” (Denzin, 2010, p. 123). These ideas have become commonplace in much of contemporary social science and are now fundamental, even basic, in qualitative inquiry, but such was not always the case. Two centuries of philosophical dialogue provide our current foundation for understanding the centrality of interpretivism in qualitative research. As Michael Crotty concluded after his review of the historical development of hermeneutics and its influence on qualitative theory, “our debt to the hermeneutic tradition is large” (1998, p. 111). To follow the ongoing contributions of hermeneutics to scientific inquiry, you can track the conferences and publications of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science, which, in 2013, held its 20th anniversary conference in Vienna, Austria, and Budapest, Hungary.

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MODULE

17 Systems Theory and Complexity Theory

Understanding Systems Dynamics

We contend that the primary challenge in research-practice integration is a failure to frame the effort from a systems perspective.

—Jennifer Brown Urban and William Trochim (2009, p. 539) Evaluation researchers

The core aspects of systems thinking are gaining a bigger picture (going up a level of abstraction) and appreciating other people’s perspectives on an issue or situation. An individual’s ability to grasp a bigger picture or a different perspective is not usually constrained by lack of information. The critical constraints are usually in the way that the individual thinks and the assumptions that they make—both of which are usually unknown to that individual.

—Jake Chapman (2004, p. 14) System failure:

Why governments must learn to think differently

Systems Theory

Core inquiry questions: How and why does this system function as it does? What are the system’s boundaries and interrelationships, and how do these affect perspectives about how and why the system functions as it does?

In the eleventh century, King Canute, the sovereign who reigned simultaneously over Denmark, Norway, and England, stood at the seashore and ordered the tide to stop rolling in and out. His order had no effect. He repeated the order, shouting at the top of his lungs for the rolling tides to cease. Again, no effect. How are we to make sense of this story?

An ethnographer would look at what the story reveals about the culture of eleventh-century northern Europe. A positivist would say that he had positively demonstrated that human commands do not affect the tides. A realist would say that he had tested the causal hypothesis that kings can command the seas and determined that such a mechanism of causality does not exist. A grounded theorist would seek other examples of royal commands and look for patterns to generate a theory explaining royal commands using the constant comparative method. A phenomenologist would seek the essence of the lived experience of attempting to control nature. A narrative inquirer would examine the story for its larger narrative themes. A social constructionist would seek to understand the meanings of this story as interpreted by those involved. A semiotician would study the command to the tides as a sign or symbol of sovereign significance. A hermeneuticist would place the story in the context of the eleventh century to determine its meaning contextually. An ecological psychologist would revel in the story’s rich material about the relationship between humans and nature. So what would systems thinking bring to the table?

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Systems analysis would have us inquire into the perspective of the king and his subjects concerning the interrelationship between the sea and human beings and the interrelationship of the king with the people he ruled. In particular, the very fact that the story concerns a king directs our attention to a hierarchical system of power and privilege. The king’s command to the tide would have to be understood as occurring within a system of power-based relationships that would determine its meaning. Indeed, following that line of inquiry, according to the legend, the cunning King Canute conducted this experiment to demonstrate to the hyperbolic flatterers who surrounded him, ever assuring him that his every command would always be obeyed, that he knew the limits of royal power. He did not expect the tides to cease on his command. He was demonstrating for all to see his knowledge of the systemic limitations on his power to command and control. The natural inclination to flatter those in power, however, has proved as persistent as the tides. Social scientists inquire into theories of human behavior, like flattery, as part of a social system. Natural scientists test theories of nature, like the ebb and flow of tides, as part of the ecological system. The story of King Canute looks at what happens when those two systems intersect.

Parallel to the philosophical and methodological paradigms debate between positivists and constructivists about the nature of reality, real or socially constructed, there has been another and corresponding paradigms debate about mechanistic/linear constructions of the world versus organic/systems constructions. Classic organizational theorists expounded systems thinking as providing both conceptual and methodological alternatives for studying and understanding how organizational systems function (Azumi & Hage, 1972; Burns & Stalker, 1972; Gharajedaghi, 1985; Lincoln, 1985; Morgan, 1986, 1989). Systems inquiry includes attention to the differences between closed systems and open systems and the implications of such boundary definitions for research, theory, and practice in understanding programs, organizations, entire societies, and even the whole world (Wallerstein, 2004, 2011).

It is important to note at the outset that the term systems has many and varied meanings. In the digital age, systems analysis often means looking at the interface between hardware and software, or the connectivity of various networks. The idea of “systems thinking” was popularized as the crucial “fifth discipline” of organizational learning in Peter Senge’s (1990) best-selling book by that name. A number of management consultants have made systems thinking and analysis the centerpiece of their organizational development work (e.g., Ackoff, 1999a, 1999b, 1987; Anderson & Johnson, 1997; Kim, 1993, 1994, 1999). Indeed, since the publication of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy’s classic General System Theory (1976), a vast literature about systems theory and applied systems research has developed (e.g., Checkland, 1999; Checkland & Poulter, 2006).

Some of it is highly quantitative and involves complex computer applications and simulations. Indeed, part of the challenge of using systems thinking as an inquiry framework is that there are so many different systems meanings, models, approaches, and methods, including system dynamics, soft systems methodology, cultural- historical activity theory, and critical systemic thinking, each of which has specific implications for research and evaluation (Williams, 2005; Williams & Hummelbrunner, 2011). At the same time, a literature on systems thinking and evaluation has emerged that offers distinct and important alternative ways to focus an evaluation (Fujita, 2010; Funnell & Rogers, 2011; Morell, 2010; Patton, 2011, 2012a; Williams & Iman, 2006).

Given this broad and multifaceted context, my purpose is quite modest. I want to call to the your attention three points: (1) a systems perspective is becoming increasingly important in dealing with and understanding real-world interconnections and interrelationships, viewing things as whole entities embedded in context and still larger wholes; (2) some approaches to systems research lead directly to and depend heavily on qualitative inquiry; and (3) a systems orientation can be very helpful in framing questions and, later, making sense out of qualitative data.

Systems Thinking

Holistic thinking is central to a systems perspective. A system is a whole that is both greater than and different from its parts. The systems theorists Gharajedaghi and Ackoff (1985) are quite insistent that a system as a whole cannot be understood by analysis of its separate parts. They argue that “the essential properties of a system are lost when it is taken apart; for example, a disassembled automobile does not transport and a disassembled person does not live” (p. 23). Furthermore, the function and meaning of the parts are lost when

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separated from the whole. They insist that, instead of taking things apart, a systems approach requires “synthetic thinking”:

Synthetic thinking is required to explain system behavior. It differs significantly from analysis. In the first step of analysis the thing to be explained is taken apart: in synthetic thinking it is taken to be a part of a larger whole. In the second step of analysis, the contained parts are explained: in synthetic thinking, the containing whole is explained. In the final step of analysis, knowledge of the parts is aggregated into knowledge of the whole: in synthetic thinking understanding of the containing whole is disaggregated to explain the parts. It does so by revealing their role or function in that whole. Synthetic thinking reveals function rather than structure: it reveals why a system works the way it does, but not how it does so. Analysis and synthesis are complementary: neither replaces the other. Systems thinking incorporates both.

Because the effects of the behavior of the parts of a system are interdependent, it can be shown that if each part taken separately is made to perform as efficiently as possible, the system as a whole will not function as effectively as possible. For example, if we select from all the automobiles available the best carburetor, the best distributor, and so on for each part required for an automobile, and then try to assemble them, we will not even obtain an automobile, let alone the best one, because the parts will not fit together. The performance of a system is not the sum of the independent effects of its parts; it is the product of their interactions. Therefore, effective management of a system requires managing the interactions of its parts, not the actions of its parts taken separately. (Gharajedaghi & Ackoff, 1985, pp. 23–24)

This kind of systems thinking has profound implications for program evaluation and policy analysis, where the parts are often evaluated in terms of strengths, weaknesses, and impacts, with little regard for how the parts are embedded in and interdependent with the whole program or policy. For example, Benko and Sarvimaki (2000) applied systems theory as a framework for patient-focused evaluation in nursing and other health care areas. Such a framework, they found, allowed interactive processes in health care to be captured by conducting simultaneous analyses of relationships on different levels. Their “systemic model” generated insights into system dynamics in both “downward” and “upward” directions—and into the interconnections of these systems dynamics in affecting patient care and outcomes. Surgeon Atul Gawande (2002) has examined how hospital errors (e.g., giving someone the wrong medication, amputating the wrong leg) must be understood as systemic problems and not just individual mistakes. In a similar vein, Harvard professor of medicine Jerome Groopman (2008) incorporated systems understandings in his analysis How Doctors Think. Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz (2006) used case studies to show the failures of the American child protection system and the long-lasting damage those failures cause in children.