Qualitative research, doesn't tell us what is going on, at best it gives us some ideas about what might be happening. And it does this in a way that may help to trigger a new way to define or crack a problem in the planner's mind but is laughable as a means for making critical business decisions.
I don't often come across posts that make me splutter and mutter at the screen but this post from Adlierate (via The Art of Conversation) had just that affect on me. Has Richard looked at the differences between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies? Is he a subscriber to the adage that if you can't count it, it doesn't count? A central concern of a quantitative approach is the generation of findings which are generalised, replicable, test theory and privilege objectivity. A qualitative approach to research views data as emergent; privileges primacy of interpretation; facilitates hypothesising in the service of theory building and seeks to generate theory from data.
I'm currently researching a Doctorate using the principles of Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) a research method in which theory is arrived at through the data. The data I'm generating are very different from and yet aligned with those collected by quantitative researchers in the same area. I'm interested in looking at the meaning that is made of the phenomenon in business life, not only an academic definition of a theoretical concept. In my mind there's no competition when it comes to which methodology works best for the task at hand. My approach is conversational, semi-structured, flexible in order to include as many types of data as possible and most importantly reflexive - I take account of my intrusion into and impact on the study by virtue of asking the questions.
So from now on I am going to reserve the name research for the real deal - actual data that reports on reality.
In a comment on this post Richard says
I should explain that my issue is not with qualitative research though, in a sense it got caught in the cross fire - think of it as polemic collateral damage.
Well I don't think this is acceptable - too often qualitative is thrown around like it's some subservient methodology and as a short hand for "not good enough"...Of course it's not good enough if you don't really know what you're talking about in the first place. Perhaps the issue here is with good and bad research not quantitative and qualitative. In scapegoating the latter what's really being avoided is poor research conducted from a quantitative perspective. Could I respectfully suggest that Richard's post may be suffering from a little of that itself?
The tide is slowly turning in the mainstream media vs blogging debate. The trend is not unlike that which other industry sectors like music and journalism have experienced in the recent past. As blogging has shifted from the realm of quirky early adopters to a mainstream social networking force, the powers that be have also had to adapt their perspectives on the phenomena. This often results in a full circle shift from overt disapproval (it has no credibility, it is all about copyright infringement, it will pass, etc) to warm embrace. The story of a blog post about a scientific paper on how alcohol augments the antioxidant properties of fruit is a great illustration of this trend.
Over at Blogscholar there's a great post about the impact social media is having on publishing in the academic world and how bloggers are pushing back against the somewhat restrictive copyright requirements of the formal academic publishing world. The short version is a PhD student wrote about an academic article, used charts from the article (appropriately credited), journal got stroppy, bloggers pushed back, PhD student reproduced the content in her own graphs, publisher backed down on legal action etc..Read the whole piece because it contains some great links to blogs discussing the wider issues.
In a second article on the same site there's an even more interesting piece on the "dangers" of publishing academic work on social networking sites due to the fact that your material effectively belongs to those sites once it's published, even when it's removed and remains in the archives.
After three startling discussions with academics in the past week it is time to set the record straight about facebook and academic work. The level of naivity in the academic community about the business models behind "free" social networking tools represents a very real danger to the integrity of the publishing process. Blogscholar recommends never using facebook for any academic work (or any other activity for that matter) unless you are completely satisfied that there is no need for any of the data or discussions to be private AND you are satisfied to give up any claim to ownership over any of the intellectual property (words, images, documents, etc) you post on your facebook site or group. There is nothing private about anything you say or do on facebook and everything you post becomes the property of facebook to do with as they please.
These are both fascinating pieces and very relevant for any writer who wants to work across platforms. This issue came up in our workshop on blogging, podcasting and the arts on Tuesday and requires a lot more attention - how can you give stuff away and at the same time make sure that in sharing information you are not excluding the possibility of publishing opportunities in academic journals? In my own case I have made a decision not to publish any of my research findings in this space or online to ensure that my copyright is protected and to ensure future publishing opportunities in academic journals remain open to me.
I seem to remember Simon doing something on copyright in social networking spaces? If someone has a link to that post I'll gladly update this entry and link to it.
I've just returned from Stockholm where I attended the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations annual symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for those of us working in a psychoanalytic way with organisations to meet and share knowledge about this area of practice.
There were numerous interesting papers and one in particular on a group relations conference conducted via the internet caught my attention. I have to admit to being mystified by how a group relations conference that didn't deal with the territory (i.e. cyberspace) would work. The consultant presenting the case paper bravely stepped into the project and fed back his experiences of how it was managed and conducted. The detail of that isn't of particular interest here. But what did interest me is how systems-psychodynamics needs to be applied to working on the web. There is a whole body of literature at this stage (particularly from psychology and systems thinking) about operating and working on line which I think systems-psychodynamics needs to attend to and build on, not merely replicate. Working on the web seemed to be a very new idea to many people who were at the conference and to some extent mirrors my experience of therapists and consultants who work psychoanalytically, many of whom have a sometimes neurotic attachment to being "in the room" and privilege this as the primary way of generating the transference. (As an interesting aside, of the 14 people who attended this workshop only 2 of us were women...I'm not sure what that means but the gender imbalance was more pronounced here than at any other event I attended).
Some of the thoughts that occurred to me about this..
1. The web doesn't exist - it is a wonderful manifestation of the collective unconscious - everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
2. The web is a boundary less space and many of the conversations (particularly in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident) about placing boundaries on it have resulted in strong reaction and an acknowledgement that formal rules simply won’t work in this space which means it’s ripe for persescutory experiences and a regression to primitive drives.
3. The only thing that stops any of us committing an “offence” online is our own conscience or sense of what is right and wrong. So our internalised boundaries and how those boundaries are negotiated and made meaning of, are of primary importance in this space.
4. The absence of the social clues that assist us make meaning of, and interpret, relationships offline are absent online so this heightens the transference and counter-transference in a way that can be persecutory. This is why I’m mystified as to how a group relations conference that doesn’t address the territory can operate with integrity in this space.
5. When a conference finishes we have our experiences of the people who attended and how we entered into relationship. When contact online ends we have that, minus the physical presence of people but we also have the written correspondence. What happens to the text afterwards? And how are boundaries around text negotiated? We all know that once something is out there in cyberspace it is never coming back so the archiving function of the web is something that has to be looked at?
I'd love to hear from any psychodynamically informed practitioners working online about their own experiences of this area..
What happens when you combine Mindmapping with Wikipedia? You get WikiMindMap a tool that presents the information you are looking for in Mindmap form. I searched for information on "psychoanalysis" and got this series of branches.
Clicking on any of the branches then brings up more detail which means you can keep all of the information in one place. I love this "whole system in the room" approach to managing information and this is one gadget I'll be coming back to again and again.
Hat tip to Eclectic Bill
Arguing for the value of the arts is a full time, headache inducing activity that most arts organisations and policy makers know only too well. Unfortunately, many of the indicators reached for are quantitative and economic, making the intrinsic value of the arts for their own sake more difficult to articulate. Liverpool is hosting the European City of Culture title in 2006 and there's an interesting project under way there to broaden out the indicators for precisely this measurement exercise.
Impacts 08 – The Liverpool Model, is a joint research initiative of the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University, which will evaluate the social, cultural, economic and environmental effects of Liverpool’s hosting the European Capital of Culture title in 2008. The research programme, commissioned by Liverpool City Council, will examine the progress and impact of this experience on the city and its people.
This is a five year study organised around "indicator clusters" which include:
* Economic Impacts and Processes
* The City's Cultural System
* Cultural Access and Participation
* Identity, Image and Place
* Physical Infrastructure and Sustainability of the City
* The Philosophy and Management of the Process
More details about the research framework are available here. This is going to be a very interesting project to watch and I hope that it will go some way to offering a more creative framework in which to have conversations about why the arts matter and how we demonstrate more effectively (in a qualitative way) that they do.
Hat tip The Artful Manager
Doing a PhD is the equivalent of someone giving you carte blanche to convene your perfect dinner party. There's nothing like picking up the phone to complete strangers whose work you've admired; telling them you are doing a PhD and inviting them into a conversation for them to say "yes". In fact, nobody I have called has said "no" - people have given very generously of their time and expertise and I'm hoping our discussions have been as interesting to them as they have been to me. So the question then arises as to why it's taken me this long to find an "excuse" to have extraordinary conversations around a topic of interest to me. Do I really need an "excuse" or would an invitation to explore something in common have been enough?
Of course this is about authority - and the way in which we authorise and de-authorise ourselves when it comes to taking a step into the unknown. If we hang around waiting for someone else to make the suggestion then chances are it's not going to happen. So now I'm in the process of having the ideal dinner party conversation for real in my head. Who are the next 6 people I would love to be in a room with to talk about my topic of research? What kinds of conversations would keep me awake at night; head processing the discussion and generating all kinds of fascinating connections?
If you were to authorise yourself to make those calls - who would you want to talk with?
There are times when qualitative data are more powerful, valid, and useful for guiding action than quantitative data
Shawn points us in the direction of a terrific post by Bob Sutton blogger and author of Hard Facts: Dangerous Half-truths & Total Nonsense, (I haven’t read the book but it’s now on my list).
Sutton is writing about the difference between quantitative and qualitative data generation and the assumption in business that the former is always better than the latter. I come across this assumption regularly and it’s particularly prevalent when you work in an area that’s about emotion and unconscious processes in the workplace
Sutton gives three examples of when qualitative is better than quantitative:
1. When you don’t know what to count. Unstructured observation of people at work, open-ended conversation, and other so-called ethnographic methods are especially useful when you don’t know, for example, what matters most to customers, employees, or a company. Just hanging around and watching can have a huge effect.
2. When you can count it, but it doesn’t stick. ..people are swayed by stories , not statistics.
3. When What You Can Count Doesn’t Count. Researchers are always looking for things that are easy to count, so they can get numbers that are amenable to statistical analysis. There are times when these numbers do matter. Sales, numbers of defects, and so on can be valuable. But in the hunt for and obsession with what can be counted, the most important evidence is sometimes overlooked. As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Quantitative data collection will give you the “what”– what has worked, what needs to work and what actions should be taken next. What it won’t give you is the “why” and very often the “how”. Why it happened, why it hasn’t and how action is sometimes stifled by other processes. Knowing what needs to happen and making the leap to making it happen requires a different kind of data generation and management which is why so many change processes aren’t as successful as they might be. How many organisations do you know that spend a fortune making sure the IT system communicates properly but leaves the human communication to the bottom of the “to do” list?
Ryan Tubridy asked ‘is it ever right to show emotion in the workplace” on last Wednesday’s show. While I was glad to see this issue discussed on national radio I was really disheartened that the show didn’t appear to take the opportunity to challenge the most basic of myths about emotion i.e. women cry and men get angry; emotion has to be ‘controlled’; emotion is ‘personal’; emotional behaviour has to be taken out of the work environment. Hopes for a more sophisticated discussion that might have included reference to work as an emotional and emotion generating environment; the difference between feelings and emotions in the workplace; emotion as systemic intelligence about what is going on in the workplace and the fact that there’s no such thing as an emotion free environment (well maybe in the case of extreme bureaucracies) and the ‘rules’ about emotion were quickly dashed. The increasing body of research into this area wasn’t referenced even in passing.
Yes, if only we could get those pesky emotional people out of the workplace then all would be well eh?
I spent a great evening at the White Institute last night where I shared some of my research on disappointment with a fantastic group of people who in turn, shared their experiences of disappointment in organisational settings. This was the first time I’d spoken about my work and I was very nervous and also very excited to see how my thinking would be received. As ever with psychodynamically informed practitioners, the conversations were rich, pregnant and enormously satisfying – I took away more than I contributed and I’m grateful to everyone who participated in the conversation for their generosity and indeed for the welcome I received.
Apart from the rich learning around my research topic I learned (again) that I speak too quickly when I am nervous and I really need to address this for future presentations. I get in my own way sometimes in my rush to get out of my own way (if that makes sense) and I’m much more comfortable in conversational spaces than I am in formal presentation ones – but perhaps that’s just another thing to think about and add to the mix. So thanks to everyone who contributed to my thinking and thanks to the White organisation programme for the invitation to share some of that thinking in such welcoming surroundings.
When is enough enough? San Francisco based Psychoanalyst Dr Owen Renik says
The profession is in a great decline, and I predict the decline will continue. The reason for it, and the reason a corrective is needed now, is that although psychoanalysis began in a spirit of open-ended inquiry, with an orientation above all to be helpful to the patient, it took on a self-perpetuating guild mentality that was its ruin. The possibility is still open to reverse the decline, but it will be necessary to escape the clutches of an establishment that, unhappily, has increasingly gotten away from the original scientific enterprise.
He goes on to say
There is a tendency among psychoanalysts to pursue self-awareness as a goal in itself, rather than a means to an end. Originally, the idea was that the self-understanding that arose as a result of psychoanalysis was unique and impressive and valid because it afforded relief from symptoms that were otherwise impossible to treat.
If you don’t require that self-awareness be validated by symptom relief, there are two destructive consequences. The first is scientific. You have no independent variable to track; you set up a circular situation in which it’s the analyst’s theory that determines what is found in analysis. Many critics of psychoanalysis have recognized this.
The points he raises are interesting in themselves, but they also relate to any kind of inter-personal and professional relationship – when is enough enough? And what kind of methodologies do you use to determine if you your intervention is (a) appropriate? (b) working? or (c) past its sell by date? There is always the temptation to keep clients wanting more. I don’t see coaching in particular as an endless process. There comes a time when you have to say goodbye – often times it’s the coach who has to determine that if a client appears to be too reliant on their coaching process and reluctant to move on and it's sometimes the case that a client is ready to move on long before a coach or consultant is willing to let go.
Renik goes on to say
You should have a criterion for judging whether the outcome is satisfactory, which leaves you free to judge by trial and error. If the treatment seems sufficient, you stop. You can always resume the therapy when and if there’s a need. What might also happen along the way, you might become aware of other things that then you define as symptoms, and you want to address those. Let’s say you have trouble dating, for example. We discover when we look into it that you have trouble asserting yourself, and that applies in a number of areas, including your work life. So we go on, until you are able to make progress there. If you’re not having symptom trouble after that, there’s no reason to keep analyzing stuff. That’s it. You’re done.
I think the same is true of any kind of coaching or consulting, particularly if it’s a one to one relationship and where the identity of the consultant gets tied up with the assignment. If the job is done, it’s done and it’s time to move on – dealing with the personal nature of ending and rejection is something that consultants need to integrate into their practice. I know when I was working as a therapist I had regular supervision where I addressed endings and beginnings on a regular basis. Now that I’m consulting I try to build in some kind of formal ending process with clients – be that a review or other – to mark the transition.
But as Renik says –
there’s no reason to keep analyzing stuff. That’s it. You’re done.