Research - fourteen points towards rationalisation
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Research - fourteen points towards rationalisation
Ralph Ruddock, University of Manchester
The purpose of research is to discover the questions to the answers we are faced with.
This paper offers one line of arguments with implications for decision-making and co-ordination in research activity. It is summarised in the statements below, and briefly developed in the correspondingly numbered paragraphs which follow.
1.Applications to work for higher degrees by thesis commonly exhibit a limited and pragmatic appreciation of processes in Adult Education;
2.and a still narrower appreciation of the range of possible research techniques.
3.The naive approach that identifies research with measurement has been particularly damaging.
4.The great issues escape measurement, and have in consequence been neglected.
5.It is conceded that measurement has a certain short-run administrative utility.
6.Adult Education can make uniquely valuable contributions to the debate on fundamental issues in education.
7.The great issues can be approached by the use of non-metric qualitative research techniques, which are available in great variety.
8.The great issues are bound up with philosophic, religious, ideological, social and political systems: this needs to be recognised in research.
9.Research in education has concentrated on methodology at the expense of theory.
10.One-shot designs should be substituted by strategies promoting the progressive inter-play and modification of theory, method and empirical ‘reality’;
11.‘reality’ being carefully distinguished from reality by a phenomenological scepticism which should inform all research, and may itself constitute a method of enquiry.
12.These considerations suggest that research assistants or students should be invited to view their proposals in relation to major issues and possibly in wider theoretical and methodological perspectives.
13.Staff appointed to lecture in Adult Education cannot be expected to have supervisory competence across all areas of enquiry and of method. Some specialisation and reciprocity between Departments might be considered.
14.A further possibility might be to develop within Departments longer-term projects to which students might contribute by their research.
1.Mature applicants commonly perceive problems to be resolved in Adult Education in terms of their recent teaching experience. They tend to propose such topics as ‘What kind of people come/do not come to my Centre’, ‘What kind of liberal studies are acceptable to my craft apprentices?’, ‘How do extra-mural classes fare in my part of Britain/Africa/Asia?’. Even those who take wider views tend to identify AE with AE-as-we-have-it, as if the task of research were to provide data for the administration of what now exists.
2.Applicants seem to think first of surveys, and second of psychological methods such as attitude testing. (Historians are excepted from this generalisation). There seems to be little knowledge of such research methods as critical incident analysis, biographical analysis, case studies and comparative case studies, ethnomethodology, participant observation, unstructured interviewing, content analysis, action research, systems analysis, model-building, phenomenological analysis or ‘the discovery of grounded theory’.
3.While some of the methods listed above can yield quantitative data, they tend towards theory, interpretation, intelligibility, the recognition of processes, adequacy of descriptions subjective significance and semantic clarification. A methodology aiming solely at measurement and the statistical processing of measures obtained tends towards mathematical generalisation rather than explanation. It is also demanding and strewn with traps and pitfalls - especially the survey method. The consequence has been for researchers to become absorbed in the problems of methodology, at the cost of some naiveté with regard to their field of study, and often it appears, a total absence of theory. Furthermore, the generality claimed for quantitative research in Adult Education is usually low, and its predictive value lower. It would seem appropriate at the present time to discourage the use of sophisticated measurement techniques in AE research.
4.The great issues relating to personal fulfilment, social values, power, government, religion - the list can be extended - are at the same time the issues of our society and of Adult Education. They cannot be more than peripherally grasped by quantification. Even if some significant factors can be identified and measured, empirically they can never be isolated. Furthermore, it becomes evident that social processes involve a multiplicity of interdependent factors, hundreds or even thousands of variables, any one of which may be crucial in influencing the course of events. Quantitative analysis is as impotent in predicting significant events as in predicting the outcome of a football match, and will remain so. A consequence is that quantitative research concerns itself with the lesser problems. The claims for measurement in research must be assessed in relation to the possibility of measuring how good a great work of art is, or how significant a religious doctrine is, or what the meaning of the French Revolution was.
5.Sociologists who hold the view that measurement is useless for the development of sociology do not wish to deny its utility for many practical purposes. It is assigned a service function.
6.Much of AE enjoys an unparalleled freedom from externally imposed constraints of syllabus and assessment. Its method encourages cross-disciplinary speculation and free-ranging enquiry. It is freely sought by individual citizens who find their experience of it significant. It is therefore uniquely placed for the investigation and public affirmation of central educational values relating to the individual. There is no practitioner of AE who needs to be persuaded of this, but there are research workers who might well be reminded of it.
7.The greater issues must be grasped by historical method, and by social theory. Several highly elaborated theoretical systems are available, each of them having advantages for research design of one kind or other. To design a research project without a theoretical basis is to commit a nonsense. Many researches rest upon an undeclared positivist, natural scientific, determinist foundation, although hardly any theoretician or social philosopher supports this position. Almost any other system offers much greater returns in understanding - structural/functional, symbolic interactionist, conflict theory, system theory, Marxism or Tavistock-style socio-dynamics. During two centuries or more of sociological theorising, no major concept has been reached by measurement - not even those of Durkheim.
8.Unlike research in the natural sciences, research into social and educational processes is always value-laden. Values should be explicit, and preferably articulated within a recognised system. We need to break with the inert ‘abstracted empiricism’ of the Anglo-American research traditions and to invoke the great interpretative philosophies originated on the continent of Europe. Our understanding of Adult Education in Britain would be invigorated if it were subjected to a thorough-going Marxist analysis, a Thomist analysis, an existential or a Freudian analysis.
9.As the metric has usurped the non-metric methodology, methodology overall has usurped theory in research design. We need to remind our applicants ‘nothing is so practical as a good theory’. (Lewin)
10.Armed with an explicit, if simple, scale of values, and a few operationalised theoretical concepts, a coherent research design can be developed. Our experience is however that such designs are regarded too rigidly. Research workers seem to feel obligated to push their original plans to completion, regardless of new perspectives reached in the course of the work. A more fruitful approach, much more interesting to work with (and in the end, to read), is to regard the research process as a dialectical one, in which ideas change as evidence is gathered, requiring the gathering of different evidence by other methods, which lead to further modifications of the original concepts and so on. The thesis becomes an honest account of an explanatory process, rather than a touched-up snapshot enlargement. One approach of this kind is the ‘grounded theory’ of Glaser and Strauss. Can we assume that external examiners will appreciate the twists and -turns that might be documented in such a thesis?
11.Research has concentrated on what is rather than on what might be. Adult Education however is best envisaged as a system of infinite possibilities. Which of these perspectives shows us the reality? The system we have is a gesture towards the infinite, and to regard it as constituting ‘AE’ is to invite the charge that we enquire into a ‘crack-pot reality’, a transient phenomenon that changes or disintegrates as we examine it. How often, reading a newly published research report, does one react with a stirring of memory - ‘Yes, that is exactly how it was in 1969’. Surveys that address themselves to what are felt to be real issues, turn out to be excellent contributions to local history.
12.What we take to be ‘real issues’ change quickly, in the historical perspective. It is a matter of the ‘social construction of reality’ (Berger). We need to develop a phenomenological sophistication. We should encourage studies of the changing perceptions of educational ‘realities’. Marx’s concept of ‘ideology’, the over-arching canopy of rationalised legitimations, the selective distribution of knowledge and of its increase, the sanctioning and support of research, offer a favourable starting point. It is, as the Marxists say, a question of ‘problematics’. One man’s solution is another man’s problem. What does one take to be the main problems in Adult Education? Does one select problems from a position within the systems or from a detached critical standpoint? How far can detachment from the past, from contemporary culture and current contingency ever be achieved?. Such questions are posed by phenomenological analysis.
13.If research projects are to be planned with some regard to philosophic, theoretical, methodological and substantive considerations, many fields of specialised scholarship become relevant. This poses problems for supervision. Ideally, specialist consultants would be available to supervisors, and perhaps research students. Failing this, it would seem proper for a Department to declare the areas of scholarship within which some resources can be made available. An interchange of staff between Departments to provide a few days of consultancy might be found useful. Information could be circulated round Departments on staff resources in specific areas of theory and social philosophy, methodology, metric and non-metric substantive fields of enquiry (e.g. community work, college management, literacy, overseas countries).
14.The availability of costly apparatus usually requires a Ph.D. student in physics to join a team, where his research will be planned as part of an on-going departmental research project. This is one possible model for the co-ordination of M.Ed. and Ph.D. research in Departments of Adult Education. Such a system need not in any way lead to the exclusion of a good candidate who has the will and the competence to make progress in a field where the Department has little resource to offer.
Some examples based on proposals put forward by applicants for admission
From: A study of classes in comparative religion / To: AE in the perspective of existentialist theology; the selection of identity and the structuring of time.From: A survey of women in handwork courses / To: The significance of FE in the biographies of six women class members
From: Trenaman updated; social class, distribution in AE / To: Liberal AE as an instrument of repression; an analysis in terms of Marcuse’s theory of ‘Repressive tolerance’.
From: Materials for adults in literacy classes / To: The phenomenology of literacy teaching; a review of the system of Paolo Freire in the light of English experience
Reproduced from 1972 Conference Proceedings, pp. 1-7 SCUTREA 1997