What is Your Voice in Your Research?

Positivistic paradigm maintains objectivity as one of the the most venerable rules in research. However, phenomenological perspective sets to use subjectivity as its strenght, referring to what Kuhn suggests that there is no objectivity in any human enterprise. In reality, however, knowing the position of objectivity - subjectivity continuum is much more compelling rather than keeping the single belief. This is what I understood from the neverending debate over positivistic vs phenomenological perspectives. It thus remains our own interpretation: as far as we can maintain our warranted claims and rigor, it is going to be fine.

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Facing the complexity of issues in the field of education, researchers are not only required to develop their investigation skills in their inquiries, but they also are expected to nurture their agency roles they are playing. In addition to getting more cognizant and knowledgeable in the subject area, the researchers are also required to be more politically involved to bring a change – a role that makes social research a more dynamically complex enterprise. Dimitriadis (2001), as a White researcher of pop-culture among Black youth, firstly kept himself apart from social and behavioral intricacies among Black youth he was dealing with. However, his five-month involvement in the community ended up making him committed to playing a more political role. Reflecting upon what Johnny did to the community, Dimitriadis kept questioning his own basic assumptions, the mistakes that he made during his interaction with the Black youth, and the increasing responsibility that he held – from a researcher to a volunteer, and later to a staff member of the community. When he was a researcher and then a volunteer, it was fine for him to stay away from being authoritative – such as reprimanding aggressive kids. However, when he turned to be a staff, his role changed and he was expected to be authoritative, such as solving Black youth’s conflicts. It was not easy for him to change his role, and many times he made mistakes, and young kids did not hear him. He learned how Johnny – a respected figure in the community – built rapport and trust among the community members. Dimitriadis learned to hold his tongue – not to use common Black expressions used among themselves, such as “you’re on the way to jail if you behave that way”, since that would be considered racist. He also learned one important lesson from Johnny’s acceptability in the community. Being a strict disciplinarian, Johnny was well respected, since he was “being strict with the young people but in ways that make sense of them” (Dimitriadis, 2001, p. 590).

Dimitriadis’ interactions and research with the Black community serve a good example for an important method of ethnomethodology called reflexivity – as “a process of critical self-reflection on one’s biases, theoretical predispositions, preferences, and so forth” (Schwandt, 2007, p. 260). As a method, reflectivity becomes a means “for critically inspecting the entire reseach process … for examining one’s personal and theoretical commitments … for behaving inparticular ways vis-à-vis respondents, and for developing particular interpretations” (p. 260). The conceptual readings by Phillips and Burbules (2000), help me engage in such reflexivity – although not as dramatic as Dimitriadis did in his study with a Black community. At the intellectual level, the reflexivity brings an incremental growth, extending my understanding and comprehension about my epistemologies.

Self-reflexivity seems to play a major role in non-foundationalism post-positivistic inquiries.By constantly questioning our own belief system and assumptions, we allow ourselves open for further scrutiny. Such a basic attitude demonstrates Karl Popper’s “regulative ideal”, in which researchers “raise their sights a little higher than expressing their fervent beliefs or feelings of personal enlightenment, no matter how compelling these beliefs are felt to be” (Phillips and Burbules, 2000, p. 3). To do so, the beliefs worth pursuing are those generated through rigorous inquiry and are likely to be true.

References

Dimitriadis, Greg. (2001). Coming clean at the hyphen: Ethics and dialogue at a local community center, Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 578-597.

Phillips, Denis C. and Burbules, Nicholas. (2000). Postpositivism and Educational Research. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield.

Schwandt, Thomas A. (2007). The Sage Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.