Month: March 2022

Data Dreaming

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Inspired by my last post on ‘What is data?‘, a researcher – who needs to remain anonymous – has written this guest post for my blog.

As an interdisciplinary researcher working in arts/health/humanities contexts, I am interested in the language used to discuss data: terms such as ‘rich’ and ‘noisy’ refer to ‘evidence’ that is complex or messy. Data can take many forms as Helen Kara’s blog (and books) articulate, and can also carry different values. The power practices played out between qualitative and quantitative research paradigms are also evident in the history of arts-based practice research as a poor relation to written outputs. We are on a long journey towards recognition and understanding of arts paradigms in terms of audits, funding and, most importantly, knowledge.

Last Thursday (17 March 2022), academics in receipt of grants from UK research councils were busy submitting their annual outputs to ‘Research Fish’, a reporting system for the outputs of grant funded projects. The research leads are required to complete online forms with details of all the material that has been produced that is associated with the grant. Reports are required while the research is ongoing and for five years after funding has ended. For arts-based researchers, this exercise can feel like a process of putting a square peg in a round hole due to the scientific bias of the reporting format and categories. Even the section on the impact narrative seems to offer limited opportunity to discuss how research can positively impact on individuals; I found myself ticking the ‘other’ box rather too frequently after wrestling with the different categories offered on the form. I even wondered whether the timing of the Helen Kara’s blog addressing the vexed issue of ‘What is data?’ had been deliberate or a happy/unhappy accident in view of the deadline that day for the Research Fish audit.

Fishing completed, I returned to my emails to find an urgent message about one of the funded projects I’d just reported on. This research grant was in its final year and involved a team of arts practitioners facilitating creative workshops to explore questions about adolescent identities and mental health. A query had been raised by the funder during an audit of expenditure and I was informed that a consumables cost had been removed as it was deemed ineligible due to not being ‘directly related to the research being carried out’. The items identified were tote bags and their contents: journals, badges, craft materials and sensory tools (fidget toys).

The justification we provided was that the items were being used to support the practical workshops in schools and were part of the data collection. Participants used the journals during the workshop, responding to prompts and tasks through writing or drawing (giving us insights into their thoughts, feelings, experiences through creative processes); hence these were an important source of data contributing to our analysis. The bags contained pens, badges (used for communication preferences as well as names), arts materials for making activities and what are known as ‘fidget or stim toys’ (for sensory play/stimming). These ensured participants had access to the same set of resources, which is important for parity and inclusion. The stim toys were particularly valuable and popular with our neurodivergent participants, enabling the researchers and teachers to understand more about the role of stimming for this population (regulating emotion, facilitating focus, supporting processing). This was also important to creating a sense of group identity as the stim tools were something the participants used to interact with each other as well as individually. One participant described the resource as ‘my little bag of heaven’. The impact narrative for this project referred to a headteacher describing it as ‘changing lives’ due to the impact on individuals and the school as a whole.

There is pleasure and joy through the learning co-produced in these rich interdisciplinary research environments; the activities can produce tacit knowledge and felt understanding, the ‘moments of being’ Virginia Woolf describes, in which we perceive a new reality working in the arts/science interface. However, the query about the research rationale for these materials (and their relevance to the data) reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s fishing analogy in her essay ‘Professions for Women’ and her description of a young girl writing in contexts where a dominant authority stifles the work of an/other:

‘The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.’

Arts practices are embodied research approaches, requiring arts materials to ‘probe the dark places where the largest fish slumber’. I can only dream of a future heaven where this is no longer ‘unfitting’ for us as researchers to say, but instead is understood and valued as data.

What Is Data?

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Last week, in the context of some work I’m doing for a client, I was trying to find something someone had written in answer to the question: what is data? I looked around online, and in my library of methods books, and I couldn’t find anything except some definitions.

The definitions included:

  • Factual information used as a basis for reasoning or calculation (Merriam-Webster)
  • Information, especially facts or numbers, collected to be used to help with making decisions (Cambridge English Dictionary)
  • Individual facts, statistics, or items of information, often numeric (Wikipedia)

Data is also, demonstrably, a word, and a character in Star Trek. So far, so inconclusive. Yet people talk and write about data all the time: in the media, in books and journals, in conversations and meetings. And they use it to refer to many other things than facts or numbers. Data may be anything from a piece of human tissue to the movement of the stars.

Euro-Western researchers conventionally speak and write of ‘collecting’ data. And indeed some data can be collected. If you want to research beach littering, you can go and collect all the litter from one or more beaches, and then use that litter as data for analysis. If you want to know what differences there may be in how print media describes people of different genders, you can collect relevant extracts from a bunch of articles and then use those extracts as data for analysis. So this is valid in some cases. However, if you plan to research lived experience by collecting data, you are effectively viewing people as repositories of data which can be transferred to researchers on request, and viewing researchers as people who possess no data themselves so need to take it from others. Clearly neither of these positions are accurate.

Some Euro-Western researchers speak and write of ‘constructing’ data. This refers to the generation of data as a creative act, such as through keeping a diary for a specified length of time, taking photographs during a walking interview, or making a collective collage in a focus group. Even conventional interview or focus group data can be viewed as being constructed by researcher and participant(s) together.

Autoethnographers and embodiment researchers privilege data from their own lived experience, though often they also use data collected from, or constructed with, others. But for these researchers, their own sensory experiences, thoughts, emotions, memories and desires are all potential data.

For Indigenous researchers, all of these and more can be used as data, which is often co-constructed with the researcher and all participants working together in a group. This is done in whatever way is appropriate for the researcher’s and participants’ culture. Māori research data is co-constructed through reflective self-aware seminars. In the Mmogo method from southern Africa, objects with symbolic and socially constructed meanings are co-constructed from familiar cultural items such as clay, grass stalks, cloth and colourful buttons, during the research process, to serve as data (Chilisa 2020: 223-4,243). Indigenous researchers in America, Canada and Australia use oral history, stories and artworks as data (Lambert 2014:29-35).

All of this tells us that data is not purely facts and numbers, as the definitions would have us believe. Conversely, we could conclude from the examples above that pretty much anything can be data. This does not mean anything can be data for any research project. You’re not likely to find a cure for disease by collecting bus timetables, or identify the best way to plan a new town by making inukshuk. But bus timetables could be very useful for research into public transport systems, and making inukshuk could be integral to Indigenous research into the knowledge and belief systems of Arctic peoples.

Data can be documents or tattoos, poems or maps, artefacts or photographs – the list is very, very long. And of course a research project may use different kinds of data, which could be collected, or constructed, or some of each. The question we need to ask ourselves, at the start of any research project, is: what kind(s) of data are most likely to help us answer our research question, within its unique context including any constraints of budget and/or timescale? In the end, for some projects, the answer will be facts, or numbers, or both. But if we assume this from the start, we close off all sorts of potentially interesting and useful options.

This blog, the monthly #CRMethodsChat on Twitter, and the videos on my YouTube channel, are funded by my beloved Patrons. Patrons receive exclusive content and various rewards, depending on their level of support, such as access to my special private Patreon-only blog posts, bi-monthly Q&A sessions on Zoom, free e-book downloads and signed copies of my books. Patrons can also suggest topics for my blogs and videos. If you want to support me by becoming a Patron click here. Whilst ongoing support would be fantastic you can make a one-time donation instead, through the PayPal button on this blog, if that works better for you. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!

Qualitative Research for Quantitative Researchers

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My new book on Qualitative Research for Quantitative Researchers was published last week. It came about in an odd kind of way. Some conversations online, mostly with members of the Women in Academia Support Network, plus various comments in client meetings, and a few things I’d read, coalesced in my head into an idea. Then it just so happened that I was at a meeting for the PRO-RES project, in London, in November 2019, and also present was Katie Metzler, a vice-president of SAGE Publishing. I had met Katie before and we had chatted on Twitter. While we were catching up over pre-meeting coffee, I told her of my idea. The next thing I knew, she had whipped out her phone and asked a commissioning editor to work with me on the book.

It was an interesting book to write, tracing a journey I had made myself – if I hadn’t, I don’t think I could have written the book. My first degree, a BSc in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s, was pure quantitative research. One of the things I most enjoyed was following reference trails down interesting paths in the library, and during one of these intellectual expeditions I found out about qualitative research. It fascinated me even then, and I asked if I could do a qualitative dissertation in my third year, but the answer was a resounding, rather shocked, and very firm ‘no’.

That seemed illogical to me, and slightly annoying, but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t realise I had been caught up in the paradigm wars until I learned about them, much later, when I was doing an MSc in Social Research Methods in the early 2000s. The MSc covered both quant and qual methods, and you could specialise in either or both. It also taught social theory and the relationship of theory to research and research to practice. This time, my dissertation was qualitative, and I am still in touch with my wonderful dissertation supervisor Maggie O’Neill.

My PhD was mostly qualitative though I sneaked in a few bits of quant – my doctoral supervisors weren’t keen, but I have never seen the point of sticking to one or the other exclusively when some of both could work better. In the early 2000s I regularly met methodological opposition in my commissioned research. My own non-disciplinary and pragmatic approach to methods and theory is to use what is likely to work best to help me answer my research question, within the constraints of budget, timescale and so on. But some people are attached to specific methods or theories, whether through disciplinary or individual preference. I have long thought it is unnecessary and unhelpful to limit your options in that way.

In the later 2000s and early 2010s I observed little increases in flexibility here and there, such as some clinical researchers becoming more amenable to the occasional qualitative element, and some qualitative evaluators conceding that numbers could come in handy now and again. Further into the 2010s this began to pick up pace, and towards the end of the decade I noticed quantitative researchers discussing how difficult they found some aspects of qualitative research. Some comments I saved from online discussions included:

“As a medic, I found some challenges personally conducting quali research – I come from a more quant background.”

“I’m a biomed scientist who wants to learn and do mixed methods research. We’re not bad people but (gasp) have never been told any other method than the scientific method exists.“

“I was trained a positivist marine biologist and am now a marine social scientist… the field of social science has multiple philosophies that as natural scientists we rarely get to hear of, let alone understand.”

“I am also biomedical by background and have just started to use mixed methods/qual stuff. I am STRUGGLING it is really hard to wrap your head around if you’re just used to p values.”

I thought I could write a book to help people in these kinds of situations. So I did. And I’m delighted to say the finished book has already had some very good reviews. I am proud of what I have achieved with this book, and I hope it will help a lot of researchers.

By the way, if you’re interested in this subject you might want to join my Qualitative Research for Quantitative Researchers course at the Methods at Manchester summer school in June.

This blog, the monthly #CRMethodsChat on Twitter, and the videos on my YouTube channel, are funded by my beloved Patrons. Patrons receive exclusive content and various rewards, depending on their level of support, such as access to my special private Patreon-only blog posts, bi-monthly Q&A sessions on Zoom, free e-book downloads and signed copies of my books. Patrons can also suggest topics for my blogs and videos. If you want to support me by becoming a Patron click here. Whilst ongoing support would be fantastic you can make a one-time donation instead, through the PayPal button on this blog, if that works better for you. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!