Background: In our Activity Theory meeting, the difference between theory, model, method, framework, paradigm, conceptualisation was raised as an issue. In writing my thesis, I've created a diagram that tries to represent some of these differences. This meeting was held in order to try to flesh out these issues and identify new ones that will need to be addressed.
My diagram has five levels:
Philosophy/Paradigm
Perspective
Framework
Approach
Data Type/Method
It is viewable internally here:
internal.itee.uq.edu.au/~pig/docs/taxonomy.pdf
Issues that I brought to the meeting to discuss were concerned with categorisation, granularity, and assumptions, and how/where/why not these things could fit on to my pretty picture.
By categorisation, I want to critically look at the way that I've separated issues ( into my taxonomy of five ), and try to find examples that do not fit neatly inside them.
By granularity I mean the timespan that the data must reflect in order to have significance. Video analysis can take shortsegments ( ~15 seconds ) of video as indicative of important patterns. Interview data admits the interviewee's historical stream of experience as evidence. These data bits are of differing granularity.
By assumptions, I'm asking what a particular choice at one level of abstraction commits a researcher to assumptions made at other levels of abstraction. For example, if I claim to be a phenomenologist, what implications does that have for what data I can accept as evidence of the thing I'm looking at? What choice of analytical perspectives or frameworks might I have? If I choose ethnomethodology, what does that mean for philosophical commitments? What does that mean for data collection?
The meeting lasted about twenty minutes. We talked about the relationships between levels ( partcularly from the upper levels to the data collection level ) not being transparent.
Ben McGarry mentioned that in most cases, researchers start with a question, and then look for a philosophy, perspective or approach that will help them illuminate their question. That perspective and/or approach comes bundled with philosophical assumptions. Very few actually start at the top of the diagram and work their way down.
Brett sat mute for most of the meeting, visibly awestruck by the beautiful simplicity of the diagram.
We debated where Situated Action belonged on the diagram, without coming to a conclusion.
We tried to fit other things on the pretty picture, like deductive hypothesis testing and grounded theory.
We discussed the differences between the levels. I had originally split the five levels up by distinguishing the question
s that they asked and/or that they provided answers to, like this:
Philosophy: What is real? How can we know it? What is knowledge?
Perspective: What questions should we ask of the field in order to find things out about what is real? How should we ask them?
Framework: How do we make sense of what we find? What do we look for in the field in order to relate it to our sense-making framework?
Approach: How do we interrogate or discover something from the field? ( Implies some analysis )
Data Type: What do we collect from the field?
We also talked about different types of data looking for evidence of different things. For example, interviews tend to be getting at people's perceptions, whereas video data tends to be about people's activities and interactions. So what it is you want to know about has vital implications for what data types you're going to collect. The research question must determine many of these decisions.
|
[ListAllPages] |