Читать книгу Conducting Qualitative Research of Learning in Online Spaces - Hannah R. Gerber - Страница 15

Questions of learning and education often cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and demand complex data collection and analyses. As such, it is possible and frequently useful for researchers in these areas to adopt, develop, and mix methodologies that draw from a variety of traditions. This tradition began with mixed methods scholars who initially sought to escape the “paradigm wars” of earlier generations. (An excellent history can be found in Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998.)

Initially, it was most common to combine qualitative and quantitative measures. One definition of mixed methods describes it as “research in which the investigator collects and analyzes data, integrates the findings, and draws inferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods in a single study or program of inquiry” (Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007, p. 4). In current research, however, multiple combinations of methods, known as multimethod research, are possible and support the emergence of new descriptions and insights.

When beginning an investigation, researchers must hone their ideas for the study’s focus. For example, rather than collecting all possible data in an online setting for learning, are particular kinds of interactions more interesting? Do online interactions suggest another relevant avenue to pursue? A number of different analyses or data sources might be investigated as ways to examine particular areas of the online spaces, or they could be used to tease out certain kinds of learning processes that become more evident as the researcher enters the space.

As educational research has evolved, the field has become more willing to accept mixed, open-ended, and naturalistic frameworks. In past years, many studies of learning environments were planned as deliberate experiments, and as such, frameworks for data collection and analysis were often seen as immutable contracts in which the researcher promised to study definite research questions in established, specific ways. This particular image of the analytical framework does not work as well in qualitative studies where interpretation and mapping are central activities to a study’s development. For example, many ethnographers first engage in mapping field sites to inform their foci and early interpretations. Such activities are central to a study’s development. Some mixed methods researchers have presented pragmatic frameworks that are particularly useful in new and evolving environments—that is, encouraging fellow researchers to choose philosophical stances, methods, and designs that speak most directly to their research questions (e.g., Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004).

This kind of eclectic “alternative paradigm” (Greene, 2007, p. 82) design is both practical and somewhat controversial, in that some researchers (e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 2000, 2002) believe that initial paradigmatic assumptions are central to the way inquiry unfolds. In other words, if a researcher believes that social aspects of meaning making are central to learning, these ideas deeply influence the resulting settings chosen for study, data collected, and analyses undertaken. Despite this intertwined nature of philosophy and method, advocates for a pragmatic stance, including Burke Johnson and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie (2004), claim that basing research in practical choices makes sense for many studies, and “taking a non-purist, or compatibilist or mixed position, allows researchers to mix and match design components that offer the best chance of answering their specific research questions” (p. 15).

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that foundational mixed methods work typically assumes that researchers will define a single research site and approaches to its study from the beginning of the inquiry and will include the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data sources (Creswell, 2015). Today, many online learning spaces are spread across several resources, websites, and social media. In the remainder of this book, we will theorize such environments as networked field sites to describe this multiplicity. In such environments, it may be difficult accurately to map a line of online inquiry at the inception of study, much less to devise hypotheses or clear directions for data collection. Online researchers often discover new artifacts, ideas, or ways of sharing meaning in the course of their inhabitation—information perhaps unconsidered in the initial study design or analysis plan. In such situations, practicalities may be even more central in completing a successful inquiry. Multiple methods and methodologies may become useful to a researcher’s theorized understanding of a space, and a pragmatic frame allows for this kind of evolution to occur.

Jennifer C. Greene (2007) has noted that these ideas and decisions are complex ones. On one hand, researchers may make nominally pragmatic choices in response to a particular happening. On the other, researchers’ actions are guided by their mental models of and assumptions about their inquiry, regardless of whether they explicitly state or interrogate these beliefs. Extending the ideas of Phillips (1996) and Smith (1997), Greene explained that mental models are borne from many aspects of a researcher’s education, experience, and context, and they can profoundly affect how inquiry is carried out. Reflecting actively on these choices and evolving ideas strengthens the study overall, making it “more generative and defensible” (p. 59). Mental models, in other words, are tools for developing and staying true to a study’s logic of inquiry. Periodically considering and interrogating expectations for how various data sources and analyses will contribute to meaning making in an ongoing way, researchers can consider such models as statements of philosophical and field-based commitments (Morgan, 2007). As Bloome (2012) has reminded the field, “The meaningfulness of any set of research methods and techniques must, after all, be derived from the principles in which they are embedded” (p. 8). While Bloome’s discussion focused on classroom ethnography, the statement holds true across methodological traditions.