1

WHEREFORE RESEARCH
DESIGNS?

FIGURE 1.1     What is this?
Photo credit: Merlijn van Hulst.

What is this? How does it work? And how will you figure that out?

Whatever it is—we will get to that later—it is represented here through a photograph. That means that you are restricted to observing it with your eyes (assuming you are sighted, another issue to take up later, in Chapter 7) as you seek to make sense of it. It is analogous, in this sense, to a word, a phrase or a visual image you might encounter during field research, whether in historical documents you have accessed in an archive or in contemporary research-relevant documents made available to you in the organization or other setting in which you are talking to people (including formal interviewing) and/or observing. If you have only the document(s) or painting, say, to go on, as in historical research, you will have to figure out the meaning of the unknown term(s) or image on your own, using the judgment that you have been developing in an “intertextual” fashion as you have been studying other materials, perhaps from other sources, that come from the same time period and the same or similar context. (More on this in Chapter 5.)

But if you encounter an unfamiliar word or phrase in contemporary documentary research or in the course of an interview or more casual conversation, you can ask for clarification—what it means, when it is used, how it is different from some other term or concept. We do this all the time in learning new languages, on entering new workplaces or on moving to new locations. Whether it is an unfamiliar concept that you have encountered or an object, you will want to know how it is used and not used, with what meanings and referents or in what settings and activities, by whom, for whom it has other meanings or usages, and so on. And much like learning a new word in the context of its verbal usage, if you encounter an unfamiliar object while talking to people (who tell you about it) or while observing them (as they use it, with whatever degree of participation on your part), you develop an understanding of it based on its physical (in addition to its linguistic) usage—where it resides or is stored, how it is handled, what people do with it, what it feels like to use it, on what occasions or in what circumstances it is used, who is forbidden from using it, and so forth. Here, the material world of “objects” and other physical artifacts can include built spaces, such as executive office suites or labor union meeting halls or street corners where strikers or youth congregate, and events (including regularly recurring ones, analytically termed rituals or ceremonies), as well as the items that populate these spaces and events and which are used in them.

“Research design” refers to the basic structure of a research project, the plan for carrying out an investigation focused on a research question that is central to the concerns of a particular epistemic community. That is a community of scholars who share a way of seeing and defining research problems and questions and a way of generating knowledge about these, as articulated in its theoretical or other research literature (see further discussion at the end of Chapter 2). The research design is where the kinds of questions spoken to in the previous two paragraphs, concerning objects, acts, language, actors, settings, and so forth, are articulated and where the researcher indicates how she plans to engage these. The conduct of research entails making choices about all of these matters, including both research questions and sources of evidence that will bear on them, as well as about particular data-generating and -analyzing processes. These choices are worked through in designing the research, and the design document itself provides the rationales for those elements and processes chosen as well as, where appropriate, those not chosen.

Crafting research designs also provides an opportunity to think through the two central hallmarks of scientific practice (as distinct, say, from a religious one): its systematic character, conducted with an attitude of doubt. When researchers (typically, those doing positivist-informed work) talk about “rigorous” research, it is its systematicity they are pointing to—a systematicity of procedure, of argumentation, which is how that hallmark would be discussed in interpretivist work. When those same researchers talk about “testability” (the requirement that propositions be subjected to testing of various sorts), they are pointing to the same concern carried out by interpretive researchers in their own constant, reflexive questioning enacted in various ways to check on sense-making with respect to knowledge claims advanced, subjecting their research processes and analyses to doubt. The design of a research project, whether positivist or interpretive, demonstrates these two central characteristics of science, showing that the researcher has thought about them and how they will be engaged and enacted in the research process.

Research designs are commonly found in research proposals; the two terms are even, at times, used interchangeably. Novice researchers might first encounter a full-blown research design in crafting a proposal for thesis and/or dissertation research to be submitted to departmental committees for approval, although they might also encounter it, in whole or in part, in introductory coursework, especially in research methods courses. Research designs are also the backbone of research proposals submitted for funding by researchers at all levels of research seniority, in all disciplines and across all institutional arenas of research practice. Even when conducting a research project that does not require funding or other approval, crafting a research design can help the researcher prepare more systematically for the research, thinking through the sorts of issues engaged in this book. This kind of preparation is conducted by interpretive researchers as much as it is by positivist ones.

The thought experiment with which this chapter begins allows us to introduce what is perhaps the key difference between interpretive research and other ways of knowing, one that has central implications for designing research projects which enact an interpretive methodology. Note that in all of the circumstances discussed there, the meaning of the term or object—it could equally as well have been an event, interaction, situation, image, document, and so on—which the researcher seeks is its situated, contextual meaning: that specific to those who are its everyday creators and/or users. Other approaches to research typically begin by stipulating definitions of the concepts that researchers want to study ahead of time, then operationalizing those concepts in ways that are intended to render them “testable” when the researcher gets to the research setting (whether in the archives or in an interactive “field” that draws on interviews, surveys, field experiments, focus groups, and the like).¹ This requires turning the concepts into variables abstracted from the lived experience they represent. Some of these variables are understood to “depend on” other variables, and researchers conducting such research generate formal hypotheses about the relationships among these independent and dependent variables. They then conduct those “tests” to see how good—how accurate—the hypothesized relationships were as explanations or representations of the social phenomena of interest.

Interpretive research designs, by contrast, do not set out to test key concepts defined before the research has begun. If they are interested in studying a particular concept (e.g., work practices, violence) or role (school principal, mid-level manager), they will have developed a sense of how those concepts or roles are discussed in the established, research-relevant literature. This is what Geertz termed an “experience-distant” concept: “one that specialists of one sort or another . . . employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical aims” (Geertz 1983: 57). It is parallel to what Pike (1990) called an etic perspective on the concepts, categories, and rules of behavior that characterize the social group being studied, which is rooted in formulations meaningful to the scientific community studying that group. But interpretive researchers working with such concepts and perspectives are not bringing their own scientific definitions with them to field settings in order to test the accuracy of those understandings.² Researchers want, instead, to understand how those concepts, roles, and so forth are used in the field. They want to let their understandings and, indeed, the very existence of concepts that are key to a particular setting or situation “emerge from the field”—as they often say, although that language is not unproblematic, as we discuss further in Chapter 2. What the phrase is meant to capture is the distinction between definitions that are shaped by interactions between the researcher and the theoretical literature, determined a priori before the field or archival research begins, and definitions of concepts that are shaped by their situational use and by the lived experience of those “naturally” working, playing, etc., in the study setting. These include those long gone whose lived experiences have been captured in the written word and stored in archives of various sorts or in oral histories, stories, narratives, and the like.

This difference is of central significance for the design of a research project. We will pick up this discussion and add other points of distinction in later chapters; but first, we engage the importance of research designs and then look at a typical outline of one.

Research Design: Why Is It Necessary?

In the process of designing their research projects, researchers make choices. These can be of a theoretical, ontological, and/or epistemological character; researchers also choose specific methods of data generation and analysis to use in their studies. Researchers want their “findings”—the insights into the focus of their investigations, which emerge through systematic analyses of research-related evidence that has also been generated systematically—to be persuasive. They want the members of their epistemic, scientific communities, along with other readers, to accept their results. For research to be persuasive, the choices of method need to be consistent, logically, with the methodology—the presuppositions about the “reality status” (ontology) of what is being studied and its “know-ability” (epistemology). A research design presents these choices, along with the argumentation that explains and justifies their selection (at times, discussing alternatives not chosen), in light of the intended purposes of the research project.

A research design can usefully be seen as a signaling device (an observation brought out in analyses of scientific work from a practice perspective, which includes seeing its persuasive, political character): it communicates certain things to the reader of the research proposal, often without naming them explicitly. To begin with, a well-crafted research design signals to a reader, such as a reviewer of a grant or dissertation proposal, that the researcher has the ability to plan a research project, especially one of significant scope and ambition. It also signals that the researcher has mounted a serious engagement with the established literature particular to that research topic. The design itself indicates the extent to which it is feasible for this plan to be implemented, in general and with respect to the length of time designated in it. More indirectly, the text of the research design indicates that this researcher is qualified to carry out this research (in addition to whatever explicit arguments the researcher also makes, e.g., via an attached CV, references, and/or some other text).

But importantly, a research design implicitly signals which epistemic community the researcher is a member of or is positioning her- or himself to join. This is done through many subtle ways. One of these is in the framing of the research question, including through the selection of literature. The research literature on most topics these days is quite large, such that a “literature review” does not, and cannot, encompass it all. In selecting those works that are key to a particular way of thinking about the topic, researchers position themselves in a particular epistemic community with respect to the subject of the research (discussed further in Chapter 2). Moreover, in the choice of methods and citations to methods sources, researchers also signal membership—this time, in a methodological epistemic community. Reading a reference list often provides a quick indication of the ways in which a researcher is positioning her- or himself with respect to both theoretical and methodological concerns.

An Outline of a Research Proposal, Including the
Research Design

An ideal-typical outline of a proposal to conduct an interpretive research project might look like that presented in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 An ideal-typical outline of a proposal for funding, IRB or doctoral committee approval of a research project

Sources: In addition to our general familiarity with such outlines from years of teaching, advising, writing proposals, etc., we have drawn on several specific sources in compiling this outline, among them the Haverland-Yanow Netherlands Institute for Governance “General Methodology” research design course syllabus and the Graduate Research Fellowship Application, Eccles Graduate Fellowship Application, and Institutional Review Board project template, all at the University of Utah.

Individual departments, faculties, universities, or funders are likely to have their own specific requirements for proposals, leading to differences in terminology and/or in the order in which they expect these items to appear. Some will want other, fewer, or additional sections. The subsection under item 4 is intended to indicate that placement of some information is variable: privacy concerns could equally as well be discussed in the methods section, as noted.

Within this general proposal outline, it is item 2—the planned methods for generating and analyzing data—that constitutes the research design in its purest form. However, as a methods plan would make little sense without the research question (item 1) that motivates it, the research question is also considered part of the design. And it is the connection between research question and methods that reviewers evaluate. They are likely to ask: Do the research methods (item 2) connect logically to the focus of the research (the research question, item 1)? They might frame their evaluation in terms of whether the research methods (item 2) “address” the research question (item 1) in ways that are likely to lead, logically, to the anticipated learning from the research that would potentially make a contribution or be of value or significance to the research community or some other audience (item 3). And they are also likely to be asking: Is the research question (item 1) worth investigating? That is, what is its significance, addressed to some extent in item 1 in terms of debates in the relevant theoretical literature, as well as, in one form or another, in item 3 in terms of the likely value of its projected learning for the academic or other community? As research is carried out with some eye toward the future—toward its contribution to a scientific undertaking or its potential utility in addressing some policy or practice—and as the dissemination of that learning is key to enacting that contribution, item 4 (dissemination) is also at times considered part of a research design.

You might be thinking that this outline does not look all that different from any other you've seen before. In part, that is because we have written it as an ideal type, reflecting the broadest understanding of the items that are often called for, whether by funding agencies, IRBs, doctoral committees, or some other evaluating body, regardless of methodology. When we look at the contents of several of these sections when fleshed out from an interpretive methodological perspective, however, as we do in the next chapters—especially the treatment of a research question and the issues that arise in generating data—the differences between interpretive and positivist content become clear. For instance (and to anticipate the later discussion), the distinction drawn in item 2 between methods for generating data (2a) and methods for analyzing those data (2b) points to a difference between interpretive and some qualitative research designs, on the one hand, in which the generation and analysis of data are often intertwined, and quantitative and some other forms of qualitative research designs, on the other hand, in which data generation and analysis are completely separate. The distinction is useful in showing how interpretive–qualitative and positivist–qualitative research part company: as noted in the book's introduction, both use the same methods for generating data—some combination of observing, talking, and close reading— but their orientations toward those processes are quite different and they often use very different methods in analyzing those data. In addition, this section (usually called “Methods”) is where the methodological orientation of the research might be discussed. We note that this is not common for positivist research, although interpretive researchers might be expected to make their presuppositions explicit.

Some of the language commonly used in talking about the parts of a research proposal—in particular, “projected results,” “impact,” “outcomes,” “findings”—derives from experimental research and its design, a point we take up more fully in Chapter 4. For this reason, we have not used those terms in Table 1.1, relying instead on language that is a better fit with interpretive research.

Chapters 3–6 explore the contents of item 2 (research methods) at length, as seen from an interpretive perspective. Before then, Chapter 2 takes up in greater detail what it means to do research from the perspective of interpretive logics of inquiry or ways of knowing.

There is one item missing from the outline in Table 1.1 that we think merits attention, thought, and discussion but that, typically, has not been part of a research proposal: research ethics. Meskell and Pels (2005: 1) argue that the “dominant tendency [is] to disembed, exteriorize, and alienate ethics from everyday scientific practice,” an observation consistent with the general silence on ethics in this ideal-typical research proposal outline (see also Lincoln and Denzin 2003: 4–5). Silence on this topic has been mitigated to some extent by requiring researchers working with “human subjects” to indicate whether they have already obtained or will obtain Institutional Review Board approval (IRB) for their designs. But ethics boards’ approval is not the same as engaging with ethical issues. In fact, the addition to research proposals of inquiries about IRB approval seems largely to have sidelined discussions of research ethics, as IRB procedures bureaucratize the topic. We see this in perusing the two dozen methods textbooks on our shelves: about half of them have no discussions of ethics, and those that do primarily engage questions of informed consent.³

In interpretive social science, ethical concerns are not a separate subject, but instead emerge throughout the project, “reembedded in the practices, politics, and presentation of research results” (Lincoln and Denzin 2003: 5). The interpretive emphasis on the agency of those studied along with its understanding of field interactions as relational (both discussed in Chapter 4) means that consideration and contemplation of research ethics needs to be integrated into designs. Unfortunately, as we take up in Chapter 7, the contemporary ethics review environment (at least in the US) means that interpretive researchers’ energies are often absorbed in trying to show why ethics issues are different for these forms of research and how IRB policies are, at times, ill-suited and may even be harmful to its stated goals. We look forward to a time when research proposal outlines include ethics discussions rather than marginalizing them.⁴

But wait! What was that object with which we began? It is commonly known, in English, in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and perhaps elsewhere), as a glove stretcher. This one, made of mahogany, was purchased at a flea market in Amsterdam in 2009; non-wooden ones can be found in ivory or bone. But now that you know its name—albeit in one language and several national settings—what do you know about it? Or, to put the point more bluntly, as physicist Richard Feynman learned from his father on a walk in the Catskill mountains:

“See that bird?” he says. “It's a Spencer's warbler.” (I knew he didn't know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom de Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing—that's what counts.”

(Feynman 1988: 13–14)

And Feynman adds, parenthetically: “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something” (1988: 14).

In interpretive research, we seek to understand what a thing “is” by learning what it does, how particular people use it, in particular contexts. That is, interpretive research focuses on context-specific meanings, rather than seeking generalized meaning abstracted from particular contexts. Glove stretchers were used in Victorian times—late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries—to stretch the fingers of cotton, lace, or kid gloves when new or after they had been washed and dried, to make it easier to get the glove on, especially given the custom of wearing gloves a size smaller than the hand, because of contemporaneous notions of fashion and beauty. But more than that: understanding how a word or an object, a ritual, ceremony or other act is used, in context, potentially reveals (or raises questions about) assumed, unspoken or taken-for-granted ideas about a range of values, beliefs, and/or feelings. In this example, knowing more about this wooden object and its intended uses at the time of its creation raises questions about contemporaneous ideas concerning such values as modesty, dignity, and respectability, or about beliefs concerning what constitutes “proper” dress and what it means to cover the hands and to cover them properly, or about feelings concerning going out in public with bare hands, rather than covered ones, in terms of status, social class, femininity, and so on. That is, understanding what an object is can tell us a lot about the world of which it is a part.⁵ And the point holds for words, phrases, images, and other human artifacts, as well as for acts.

Could that object depicted at the beginning of the chapter “be” something else? Of course—but by that statement, an interpretive researcher does not mean to suggest that the object (or word, or act, etc.) has an essential, timeless, universal meaning. Its identity—its meaning-in-use, as it were—is seen as context-specific (to both time and place). To know the answer to that question, we would need to observe its use in situ, by users “native” to that setting, to talk to them about that usage and perhaps to use it ourselves, or to find a primary text that details such adaptive reuse (or a secondary one that rests on primary sources). That purchased glove stretcher in the photo, for instance, serves one of the authors very well as a book mark, at some times, and at others as a large paper clip. These are the sorts of issues that interpretive research designs engage.