Stormy seas and rocky outcrops: In search of a paradigm for investigating practice disciplines.
Doctoral Workshop
Jackson, Peter
Key words: coaching research; multiparadigm enquiry; complex realism; phenomenology; narrative.
Abstract
This paper seeks to explore with the research community the experience of finding an appropriate research paradigm; in this case the most effective approach to investigate a complex practice situation such as coaching practice. The discussion is based around a metaphoric narrative of the researcher as allegorical traveller. This narrative was initially produced in an attempt to explain the author’s own epistemological stance, but has since been used with colleagues to explore possible research paradigmsand to discuss how researchers come to develop their own stance. In the case in point, it facilitates thinking around multiparadigm enquiry (Lewis & Kelemen, 2002) and complex realist case-based approaches (Byrne, 2009; Harvey, 2009). The use of narrative itself is presented as evidence of researchers’ willingness to engage with epistemological stratification (Harvey, 2009;Lewis & Kelemen, 2002).
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to explore with doctoral colleagues the experience of finding an appropriate research paradigm. I use, as a case, my own experience of exploring possible methods of investigating coaching practice. Coaching practice is a situation which has certain structural characteristics in common with other practice situations in HRD and management(researchers in these fields may recognise some of the complexities and challenges). I had therefore expected the alignment between my own research topic and other similar interventions to provide me with a ready methodology, or at least to find some clear guidance in methodology text books. In fact, this ‘exercise of best fit’ has become something of a research experience in its own right; and a slightly perplexing one. Moreover, as I have moved around and reflected on this central problem - that of finding an appropriate research paradigm - to explore it in different ways, to reflect on it from different perspectives, to test my ideas with colleagues through telling my story, the thought has grown that this very enquiry has features in common with the ‘real’ research project. Can we therefore learn something about research from the very confusion that we might experience as researchers? After all, I cannot be the first doctoral student to find himself confused or perplexed by methodology and I assume I will not be the last.
The paper therefore has three interlinked elements: the ‘case’ of my own exploration (as doctoral researcher); the ‘case’ of coaching research (as a research context); and the experience of using narrative (as an epistemology). It is, then, a very individual account; in this respect, I make appeal to the value of idiographic research as the detailed study of the individual situation which enlightens us to possibilities and complexities (discussed in detail by Tsoukas, 1989). In the meantime, researchers who are not inclined towards idiographic research are asked simply to suspend their disbelief and allow themselves to participate in the experience.
Organisation of the paper
In the following section I describe the context of my own research in coaching and suggest some features it shares with other investigations of practice.
I have then given a more narrative insight into the experience of how I started to deal with the problem of finding an appropriate approach. I have conceptualised that experience as an allegorical journey which reflects some of my sense of powerlessness and uncertainty. The reader is invited to reflect on their own reactions to the story before, in subsequent sections, I describe how workshop discussions with doctoral colleagues have raised questions of whether epistemology represents an a priori position, the difficulties of answering complex questions through ‘mono-theoretical’ methodologies (those inherently tied to a single theoretical stance), and some possible alternatives.
Possible connections to other contexts are suggested in a brief conclusion.
Some notes about coaching
The field of HRD generally, in common with other fields concerned with the direction and management of human behaviour, is shot through with complex personal interactions. People want things; people plan things; and other influences outside their purview mean that outcomes are unpredictable and surprising. This is the very stuff of ‘work’. My own research concerns one such area: the effect of interactions in one-to-one coaching dialogues.
Coaching is an approach aimed at “helping people increase their sense of self-direction, self-esteem, efficacy and achievement” (Cox & Ledgerwood, 2003, p.4). It is in its relative infancy in terms of the building of a body of knowledge, discipline-specific theory, and strong evidence to guide practice. So research questions concerned with “what is going on here”, or “what are the features of this activity”, are unusually available to the researcher.
The specific topic of my own research is an investigation of the use of embodied practices in coaching. In effect, this may include any form of influence brought by the coach on the client’s experience of themselves as embodied, specific reference to such things as the bodily experience of the coaching client (such as in Gestalt practices), physical or situated activities that enable the coach-client interaction (sitting, standing, meeting, walking together), or embodied modes of self-expression to facilitate changed behaviours (art, exercise). The intention of the research is to highlight the possibilities of such practices and to begin to theorise their use.
Knowing what you want to look at is one thing, but early in the research process I am faced with the challenge of finding an appropriate research paradigm.[1] From where I was at the outset, I saw this as an exercise of ‘best fit’: an essentially logical and systematic decision-making process. The focus of my study could be expected to have similarities to research questions in fields ranging from psychotherapy to management, where two parties interact with the purpose of changing the attitudes, beliefs, behaviours or performance of one of them (a scenario which we might term generically ‘intervention’). Consequently, I did not expect a difficult search.
Some case notes
I start this account somewhat outside it. This section that follows is based on work I produced in response to a request to write an essay in preparation for a doctoral workshop. The title was‘The development of the epistemological and methodological framework for my research’[2]. The title itself seemed to trigger certain assumptions for me. First, I inferred a point of arrival; second, I inferred that I should arrive there as the result of some explicitly logical process; third I inferred that I should be the ‘developer’ and the methodology the ‘developed’. In fact, my experience to date has been a very different story. It has more been a story of diving into a world of methodological literature, being thrown hither and thither by the language of methodology and its underlying philosophical concepts, and gradually changing my views of those methodologies, my own desires as a researcher, and ultimately what it might be to come to ‘know’ something about my research topic. Like an allegorical voyager, it is I who is in the process of development while epistemology stands watching my struggles, waiting, indifferently, for me to ‘get it’. It is a journey that is only part-complete: a work in progress. For the time being I am clinging onto a rock which might be called hermeneutic phenomenology but it might also be called comparative case study, or complex realism. On this rock it is the joining of concepts as narratives that makes sense. So that is how I decided to present my journey thus far: as a metaphorical or even allegorical narrative.
The following account has been slightly extended since that workshop preparation. In it there are many voices. In some sense, all of them mine.
The journey begins
At the start of my story I am something of a positivist[3]. I was trained in statistical methods and was taught their value (MSc Organizational Behaviour, Birkbeck). Despite a second masters dissertation using Grounded Theory (MA Coaching & Mentoring Practice, Oxford Brookes) and subsequent involvement in qualitative research, I still admired the clarity of Popper’s principle of falsifiability of hypotheses (Popper, 1959; Popper, 1972), enjoy Goldacre's (2009) demolition of anything much short of controlled double-blind experimental research designs, and started the doctoral process looking for insight into the objective world if not, necessarily, through objective truth. Knowing my central focus – the use of embodied practices in coaching – I set out to match my personal urge to see a realist object with a method of discovery that acknowledged the complexities of social worlds and processes.
I was aware that I could take a fresh look at the problem methodologically. I was already persuaded that, although I loved the logic, I wanted to understand something richer than I would have access through quantitative approaches. At this point we move into the frame of the story.
What vessel would take me where I wanted to go? I looked at a ship called Grounded Theory, sturdy, tall and reassuring. It felt familiar to me as I’d been on it before. But some thinkers standing on the quay argued that Grounded Theory is a positivist vessel (Johnson et al., 2006), and others that it could only sail certain waters where I would not find understanding of psychological processes (Willig, 2008). I remembered my last experience of Grounded Theory and how on such a grand ship I had suffered delusions that I could see all before me. A sense of invincibility that people would be able and willing to share with me what was really there. Now I had a greater sense that interview data must be seen as a construction itself, that people might say what they hoped to believe, that they might be wrong, that they might even be wrong about themselves (Silverman, 2007).
Try phenomenology some of the thinkers shouted.[4] I was quickly persuaded to board a boat called The Phenomenologist. It looked less certain, more open to the sea - a good thing said the thinkers, all the better to take me to where I would see and feel how things worked. In terms of the rigging, this looked very much like Grounded Theory anyway. In good spirits, I left the quayside of Realism and set sail.
Dreaming of objectivity
Not long after, as I admired the open seas, a world-weary character approached me sidelong where I stood. “You know,” he muttered, “this ship is not what it once was.” I begged him to tell me more, had I made a mistake? He told me it had been built by Husserl, who was a Realist like me. It had been designed to discover real things by the impressions left on us. But he said it had been taken over by the Subjectivists who were interested only in the impressions (Crotty, 1998). He pointed out the same things I’d noticed on the quayside and suddenly it looked less sure of itself and vulnerable. The man disappeared leaving me confused. If a storm hit us, I feared I could be in the water. I wanted to understand the immediacy of the experience, but in this boat, I could easily end up overboard. That would give me the immediacy of experience, but what could I do to avoid drowning in a sea of impressions? I slept fitfully.
The next day the sun shone and my worries melted away. Why was I worried? The ship was chock full of sailors who can tell me what it was like at sea in the worst weathers without me having to go there myself. I’d get interviewing and get back on dry land as soon as I possibly could. I settled comfortably in the sunshine with a book (Silverman, 2007) and dozed off.
I had a dream where a sailor came to me and told me tales of giant squid and how he had single-handedly saved a fishing village from a marauding sea monster. I wrote it all down in detail. Another came to me and told me of how he had swum underwater for several hours to recover a child snatched by sea spirits. I wrote as much as I could but couldn’t keep up. The third sailor’s tales were told too fast and were too extraordinary to follow. I woke up sweating in a panic. I opened my book to try to put the nightmare to rest.
Epistemology - a demi-god - looks on. A server comments:
“Silverman argues that people asked to explain events will impose speculative meanings and causalities on events. It is only by direct observation that we can investigate what is really there. Interview data is constructed and while this in itself may be interesting to investigate in terms of how people use language, it cannot be relied upon to reflect a reality which transcends the individual perspective.
A different servant:
“Here is an argument our subject can follow clearly; it is coherent and speaks to his hankering for the objective. But what are the implications of this?”
The first resumes:
“Silverman suggests asking a different question: that is, one that either relies on naturally occurring data; or one that overtly investigates discourse as a phenomenon. To put it another way: investigate either visible behaviour or social processes through direct observation; or investigate discourse.”
“Let us see how he responds”, says the demi-god.
At this stage, I am about as confused as I can get, trying to juggle a number of paradoxes, beliefs and motivations that seem to be in conflict. Silverman’s arguments (summarized by the server) led me to consider more closely in what ways a coaching intervention (or action) might be a psychological or a social process. I had entered the topic both with an underlying motivation to find out what works and why, and, in this respect, probably conceptualised psychology as cognitive and positivist. In this light, Silverman’s argument for naturally occurring data would lead me to direct observation. Observation of the coaching intervention would be feasible, but the true meaning of that intervention is, in effect, expressed in the rest of the coaching client’s life outside the coaching sessions. Furthermore, I held a view as regards my topic that is more or less in opposition to the objectivist implications of this (and, indeed, to my own hankering for objectivism): that is, that coaching has been over-characterised as an intellectual process, and that the unconscious, tacit, non-linguistic aspects of coaching required closer investigation. It is potentially about the ways in which coaching clients find their modes of action changed in ways that do not fit their existing cognitive paradigms. Yet an investigation into the coaching clients’ reported (that is, their beliefs about their) cognitive structures would seem to be unusually open to Silverman’s critique.
The whole idea of investigating real psychological interactions through interview data seems to evaporate into the hot midday sun and Silverman’s insistence of natural data rather than holing the boat had led me to discover that it was already holed. My boat was sinking and I was going nowhere. I had to think differently. Soon the ship has gone. I’m adrift clinging to flotsam. After hours and hours adrift I come to a small rocky outcrop and clamber ashore.
A shepherd speaks. “Now you have known the experience. But no single ship was going to take you where you wanted to go. For now you are here. Climb to the top of this rock and look back to see where you were before.”
I climbed up as I was told and looked back. Have I found what I was looking for? Was it ever somewhere else? Or was it everything and everywhere at once?
Reflecting on the story
For me this story raises a lot of points and a lot of questions. I have shared it, or something like it, with colleagues through a number of seminars and workshops and the responses are enlightening. When I do so, though, I am always interested to see what my colleagues draw from it.
Does it pose questions for you?
Does it help you to understand your own experience?
Does it mean something for you?
I urge the reader to take a moment to answer those questions for him/herself before moving on. We could perhaps consider it an experiment.
In the next few paragraphs I will describe some of the questions it has helped raise for me.
Before or after the question: When do we decide on epistemology?
One thing I have noticed in working with this story in workshops and seminars is that an audience has a more relaxed, fuller, more personal engagement with storytelling than with more formal argumentation. In the discussion that follows when I present my story, people feel free to contribute their own stories, new analyses and insights. While the narrative format may carry concrete information less efficiently, many people experience a stronger sense of relationship with the content. I would ask readers to pause again at this point and reflect on whether my story had meanings for them. These are questions I have also asked in presentations.
Did you find some of the symbolic or metaphorical elements helped you to reflect on your own research?
Did you perhaps find that you ‘disagreed’ with some of the metaphors.
In a recent workshop, before giving my presentation, I asked doctoral colleagues to indicate whether they were actively engaged in using narrative in their methodology. None were. Many of these colleagues, regardless of the epistemological stance selected for their research, enjoyed and engaged with the story in the kinds of ways I described above. Perhaps some readers of this paper might describe themselves, as I did earlier, as “something of a positivist”; perhaps some of these same readers have answers with personal meaning and value to the reflective questions I posed above. (Perhaps some readers skipped answering the questions and are now convincing themselves that it’s of no consequence - to which I would say, “on what evidence”?)