far been undertaken. Whether all this is a sufficient guide to the specific matter of practice with alcoholics must remain an open question for the moment. (1980, pp. 27–8)
I am inclined to agree with Strong’s version. For me, an interview or focus group study that only uses participants’ accounts to understand people’s day-to-day practices seems problematic.
The interview or focus group may be an economical means, in the sense of time and money, of getting access to an ‘issue’. It may also be an economical means of getting access to issues that are not easily available for analysis, to get people to ‘think out loud’ about certain topics. However, having said this, most topics are ‘freely available’ for analysis. As Holstein and Gubrium (1995) note, to understand the topic ‘family’ we do not need to interview people or enter people’s homes. We can see how ‘family’ is organized, produced and negotiated on the bus, in supermarkets, in newspapers, in talk-shows, in legislation, and so on. The point is, whether it is an interview, a focus group, or an observation of an office or supermarket, you should be sensitive that people’s actions and interactions are contextually situated. By contextually situated I simply mean that we massively shape our actions and interactions to ‘fit with’ (and so reproduce) the, often unspoken, norms, rules and expectations of the specific context we find ourselves in. You only have to think of how you behave differently in a church or classroom from in a pub or at a friend’s house, or how you recount the same story in different ways to different friends or different members of your family, to get a sense of what contextually situated might mean. Also, you just know at a glance when someone is behaving ‘oddly’ in a situation; this sense of oddness may in part emerge from their breaching the expectations of what is appropriate conduct for that context.
It is important to note what people mean when they say that they prefer to focus on ‘naturally occurring’ interaction. Some people take it to mean that you should only use data that is not researcher-led or researcher-prompted. With this reading you would not be interested in working with interview or focus group data, but rather only be interested in recording and analyzing occasions that would take place if you were not present. With this line of argument the Holy Grail is to use only video and audio data that is (reasonably) untainted by any researcher’s actions. Short of using hidden cameras or microphones and never being present at the scene, this is an impossible dream. The rise of ubiquitous computing may alter this, as wearable recording devices become more miniaturized and routine features of life. Lifebloggers, people who wear recording devices to capture and distribute all aspects of their unfolding lives are at the forefront of this. However, as numerous studies of interaction have shown, the emergent properties of an encounter are intimately related to a whole range of facets of that scene and this includes the presence of ‘silent witnesses’, like cameras or microphones (see, for example, Speer and Hutchby, 2003).
However, what I take a focus on naturally occurring activity to mean is that you should try to discover how some action or interaction – be it a police interrogation or a qualitative interview – occurs as ‘natural’, normal or routine. So, rather than only asking a focus group moderator about how they run focus groups, you can gain a good understanding of ‘how they run focus groups’ through some form of recordings of them actually running focus groups. Equally, rather than asking counsellors about how they counsel, you may want to base many of your observations on recordings of them actually doing some counselling. From this perspective, researcher-led information – from interviews or other sources – is still of use in trying to describe how counsellors do counselling, or how focus group moderators run focus groups. However, the primary source of data would often be audio or video recordings of what they actually do as they do it. When analyzing both the recordings of counsellors in action and the interviews with them about their specific practice, you would obviously take into account how your actions and any recording equipment impacted on the ongoing encounters.
So the call for naturally occurring interaction in this sense means that, no matter what sources of data you are relying on, your main interest would be generating a sense of how the specific thing you are interested in routinely occurs or ‘comes off’ as it does. As such, researchers interested in these types of studies have focused on a vast range of practices, from how Tibetan monks discuss logic, how neurobiologists dissect rats, how qualitative interviewers ask questions, to how people disagree when talking to friends. All this work is, at the very least, based around observations and/or audio or video recordings of these practices as they occur. And in the chapters that follow, I will further unpack how to generate and work with audio- and video-based data.
Some closing comments
Hopefully you have gained just a few ideas about the potential sources of materials you could work with and are not too overwhelmed by the sheer number of options you have available to you. Ideally, what you need to do is get a very general sense of what the focus of your research is, what approach you are going to take, and therefore you will be in a position to make a decision about what materials you are going to generate your findings and conclusions from.
Key points
You should generate an archive – a diverse collection of materials that enable you to engage with and think about the specific research problem or questions. Your archive could contain document-based sources as well as audio- and visual-based sources.
Read other academic work on your specific topic and find out what research materials they used and how they collected them.
Rather than solely relying on researcher-initiated audio- and visual-based materials – for example, interviews or focus groups – some academics argue that you should focus on ‘naturally occurring’ data.
Further reading
These sources explore in a little more detail the methods I addressed in this chapter:
Barbour, R. (2018) Doing Focus Groups (Book 4 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit, 2nd ed.). London: Sage.
Brinkmann, S. and Kvale, S. (2018) Doing Interviews (Book 2 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit, 2nd ed.). London: Sage.
Gidley, B. (2012) ‘Doing historical and archival research’, in C. Seale (ed.), Researching Society and Culture, 3rd ed. London: Sage, pp. 263–82.
Scott, J. (1990) A Matter of Record: Documentary Sources in Social Research. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Taylor, S. (2001) ‘Locating and conducting discourse analytic research’, in M. Wetherell, S. Taylor and S.J. Yates (eds), Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis. London: Sage, in association with The Open University, pp. 5–48.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal,
