Post grads as legitimate peripheral participants

Legitimate peripheral participants are participants in an activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991), but on the edge of the activity, hence peripheral. They are legitimate when they are meant to be there, involved and usually learning. Post grads are in training in research so are legitimate and peripheral, but I'm not sure that they get to participate in research activities.
Research activities include:

• teaching,
  
• analysis,
  
• coding,
  
• perhaps interviewing and transcribing.

Open University post grads don't get training or any opportunity to teach, as I've previously mentioned.

The doctoral training workshop (DTW) sessions provide some training, but not learning by doing. For example, the DTW includes a session on interviewing, but not on transcription, or on coding of qualitative data. It's up to the PG to read up. And if you don't realise the issues, then you don't deliberately read up on the skills. Until I read Kvale (1996), and then Tilley (2003), I had considered transcription a chore, not a skill that required reflection. I believed I could create an objective representation of the dialogue that had taken place. But now I'm not so sure and have questions:

• where do I punctuate?
• was that remark a query or a statement?
• which transcript is more accurate - mine or that of the paid transcriber? For example, one of us heard "certain reviews" and the other heard "similar views".

As a legitimate peripheral participant, post grads could be learning from skilled teachers and researchers. For teaching, each PG should be assigned to an OU course with requirements to research relevant literature including web links and current news for the course team, perhaps also proof reading tutor marked assignment (TMA) questions and tutor notes. PGs could be trained on electronic asynchronous forums where they could moderate and be web masters for the course, They could learn about teaching through giving electronic tutorials - the OU uses Elluminate.

For PGs doing qualitative research, they need the chance to shadow experienced interviewers, observing how it's done. They could transcribe someone else's research, and then discuss issues arising from it, so having the experience to reflect on their own transcriptions.

I don't have enough experience to think yet what "sitting next to Nellie" experience a post grad following a quantitative approach would benefit from.

I suspect other universities not just the OU, fail their post grads on these skills, but if the PhD is really a training in research, then post grads must participate in research, and as trainees, they are peripheral. Universities that espouse learning, must legitimate that participation.

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LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing
TILLEY, S. A. (2003) "Challenging" Research Practices: Turning a Critical Lens on the Work of Transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 9.

Detective novels and writing social science

I've been reading stuff relating to qualitative methods, especially social constructionist and enjoying reading this small book from Czarniawska. She writes about other than the traditional interview, stuff like shadowing (both people and objects), doing diary studies and observant participation. She has written heaps and heaps of stuff - look at this list. No wonder she's an honorary academic at Copenhagen and Gothenburg.

She's interested in:

• organisational studies
• constructionism
• narratology

In Shadowing (2001), she describes her embarrassment when following an FD in Warsaw she is told that the FD is busy or "these matters are not intended for the ear of strangers". So she knows the practical difficulties of research.

The last section of the book is about writing up research and it is here that she compares writing about research with detective fiction. I hadn't seen the genres as similar, but I enjoy detective novels, like Dexter's Morse, and P.D James' Dalgleish, or Sara Paretsky's VI Warshawski. Czarniawska compares approaches:

• inductive
• deductive
• abductive

which were mentioned in the doctoral training workshop last autumn, and on the B852 business research methods in a paper by Thorpe & Moscarola. Different detectives have different approaches, as do researchers. When it comes to reporting findings convention might be flouted and she gives an example of chapter headings, some taking a dramaturgical approach and others framing activity as cyclical in character. She illustrates the influence on her own reports.

She also writes about people using multimedia, like cameras and videos. I want to use a camera to record where people meet and work, but think video will be too much intrusion, especially in the public sector. What clues will photos add that other methods would miss?

And then, wouldn't it be fun to be able write a detective story from the research data!

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Czarniawska, B. (2001) Shadowing: and other techniques for doing field work in modern societies. 815

New doctoral training workshop site

I'm pleased to see that at last they've updated the DTW web site. See here.

Writing as inquiry: an experiential workshop

The last session I got to at BAM was on writing, run by Daniel Doherty. It was called an experiential workshop, which seems a bit of a tautology to me, as I assume that workshops will involve gaining a bit of experience - hence the work bit of workshop. He started by quoting

"How can I know what I think until I read what I write"

or something like that, perhaps from Richardson. I understand this and that's why I need to talk to people about my research because otherwise I don't know what I'm thinking. I don't know what I'm thinking until I hear what I say.

Then he gave us a 10-minute free writing exercise with a starter of

"My writing garden of Eden is when ..."

Free writing is when you just write, and keep writing for a predetermined time, disregarding spelling, grammar, punctuation and legibility. You write, even if you get stuck and have to write, "I'm stuck, stuck, stuck and don't know what to write, and why is everyone else writing so much and I'm just dribbling on and on and on".

After ten minutes, we stopped and discussed. I've never read my writing out to people before and no one else in there had done free writing before. I think the exercise surprised some of us. Some were initially shy, but eventually more of us volunteered to read our work. It revealed an insecurity that seemed surprising for such competent academics. They described earlier experiences of literature and teacher expectations. One said that at school she'd been reading a novel, when a teacher told her:

"You won't need novels where you're going!"

Another, going through some difficult times at home was reading "Grapes of Wrath" and realised that it spoke to him, despite being decades earlier in the 1930s, resounded with his experiences of mines closing and unemployment in his town in the 1980s.

We had a few minutes for another exercise, starting from

"As I write my physical/emotional responses..."

I found this harder, perhaps because I couldn't visualise in the same way as with the first starter, but also when we read back, I discovered that people responded better depending on their styles. One wrote how the feel of the pencil and its sound going over the paper mattered. And that initiated some discussion on preferences for hand writing or typing at the computer. There's advice here on using the computer for free writing.

Dan gave us what he promised - an experiential workshop.

Perhaps readers of this blog could try their own 10 minute responses to these two prompts. I'll put mine up another day.

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(Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth St. Pierre). 2005. Pp. 959-978 in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Third Edition).
Also see Richardson's book here.

NVivo difficulties

I'm trying to find out how to use this NVivo to record and code my thoughts on the literature review. It should be a good tool. After all, a literature review is a qualitative analysis, isn't it? But I can't work out the best way to use externals, create memos, link to the Word documents I already have written for reviews.

And there isn't an NVivo course till September, which is one I can't go on because it's the day after the BAM conference. So I have to wait longer to get the training, and carry on self-training - no problem because I've taught myself lots of technical programs for years.

Working with people

I’m particularly interested in the practical issues of working with people, about "making sense of others’ worlds" and finding out who "are immersed in those worlds of others". Those people must be public sector clients in projects that involve external IT consultants and suppliers. Public sector project management is particularly complex, so I anticipate problems of going beyond discourse to gain insight through observation, interviews, perhaps focus groups with clients of different types, consultants and suppliers.

Research question: How do public sector managers evaluate the IT consultants and suppliers that they manage?

I’m sure that I will need to work with people because of what the literature says about relationships, so what are the issues?

Working with people involves issues of:

• place,
  
• philosophical and
  
• practical issues and
  
• analysis of data.
  

Primarily I think practical issues will be about access.

Issues of setting up and doing field work

• of locating a role and managing entry, creating an identity for my self - not being a threat to my interviewees to gain confidence trust support and agreement beforehand
• locating key informants and how they are seen by others, with background and perceptions of informants, developing field relationships
• Send material to key people in the organisation to check there are no transgressions of any boundaries.
• I shall reword what I present to my informants to avoid the word 'accountability' with its connotations of blame and fault.

Ethical issues
Who is going to benefit from the research?

How does someone get public sector clients to manage strategic risk, change and the IT consultants that bring change. Answers to that question will benefit clients, consultants and ministers.

Practical – initial thoughts on design
I might want to interview a number of clients in the public sector, e.g. on 3-5 different IT projects, in 2-3 different government departments or councils or NHS. I want to know how they manage, what they manage, their perceptions of the project, its organisation, its successes, stage of the project (background) control of the project. So I'm looking for successful project management. Ask clients how they effectively manage and evaluate consultants and suppliers on the projects that they manage.

Intellectual Property Rights

Richard McCracken lead the latest doctoral training workshop, on a research student's guide to intellectual property rights.
Intellectual property covers:

• patents
• trademarks
• copyright
• know-how
  

and elabaorated on the distinctions, with an example of how they all combine in sometimes, e.g in CocaCola.

Patents - you can only patent something that has not been made public. There was the case of the LED, first presented at an academic conference, before the patent was applied for, and then couldn't be patented because it was already in the public arena.

Copyright rests with the author though there are circumstances in which you can relinquish it.

You need to be careful when signing journal contracts that you don't assign copyright to the journal because then you won't be able to use your own material without paying the journal. For instance, you couldn't photocopy your own article to distribute it to a class. So if you get a contract to be published in a journal, check and delete the clause that assigns copyright to the journal.

McCracken's advice on copyright came up again only a few hours later when I received an email explaining that I could not directly access some material from a web site because of copyright reasons.

There are restricted acts and permitted acts.

Photographs - you are permitted to take photos in public places, though it differs between countries. In France in the fifties Robert Doisneau took a photo called "Kiss" of two people kissing in the street. Every now and then, someone would turn up, saying that they are one of the couple and demanding money.