CHALLENGING METHODOLOGIES
4.7. LEGITIMATION WITHIN MIXED METHODS RESEARCH
Within a complex and ever shifting realities of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, toward that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible (cited in Fine, 1994, p. 71).
I found my subconscious positioning of myself on the side of the “colonizing mentality” in relation to my PhD writing process exceedingly ironical given my claimed identity as a critical theorist and my standpoint on the power of teacher leadership to bring teachers from the margins into the process of leadership. It therefore came as a relief to me to read Richardson’s work and be reminded that one is allowed “to know ‘something’ without claiming to know everything” (1994, p.
518). I did not have to have ‘all the answers’ on teacher leadership and neither was there one ‘right’ way of synthesising the chronicles. It was up to me to own the synthesis process and insert myself – my voice- into my work as I re-interpreted the chronicles and organised them into a coherent whole. I came across Govender’s (2009) use of the term ‘logic of discernment’ which assisted me in finding a way forward. For her, ‘logic’ denotes reasoned thought while ‘discernment’ implies good judgement. Govender explains how her ‘logic of discernment’ draws from “the authoritative guidance of scholars (external guiding logic) and my total (both sub- conscious and conscious) imprints of my own experiences and intuitive sense (an internal guiding logic)” (2009, p. 113). Claiming my own ‘logic of discernment’, the liberty was mine to discern the way forward and I had to trust my own insights and perceptions in weaving the chronicles together in a creative and imaginative way. In doing so, however, I had to remember that my purpose was not to homogenize and suppress individual voices (Richardson, 1994) but rather to extend, in a trustworthy manner, the scope, breadth, and range of inquiry into teacher leadership through the eight chronicles in the search for multi-nodal dialogic explanations. It is to issues of trustworthiness in relation to my study, that I now turn.
Trustworthiness is central to qualitative research. In this section I explore issues of validity or trustworthiness in relation to my study. However, in line with the view of Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, I use the term ‘legitimation’ which offers the mixed methods researcher “a bilingual nomenclature that can be used by both quantitative and qualitative researchers” (2006, p. 60). They are of the view that “legitimation in mixed research should be seen as a continuous process rather than as a fixed attribute of a specific research study” (Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2006, p. 56). Here legitimation involves “a cyclical, recursive, and interactional process” (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004, p. 21) in an attempt towards “inference closure (i.e. being able to make definitive statements about the quality of inferences made)” (Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2006, p. 56) but which might never be fully reached.
Given the multi-strand design of my synthesis study and the dominance of qualitative research underpinning it, the study did not aspire to reliability or generalisability but to trustworthiness and completeness. In line with post-modernist thinking, and instead of triangulation, Richardson proposes that the central image for validity or trustworthiness is the crystal which “combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach. Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous” (1994, p.
522). The size of my multidimensional study with its six research strands and its eight chronicles expanded and crystallized my understanding of teacher leadership and provided me with “a deepened, complex, thoroughly partial, understanding of the topic” (Richardson, 2004, p. 522). In a similar vein, Greene (2006) argues that while convergence in the service of stronger validity is important in mixed methods inquiry, so too is “divergence, dissonance, and difference” (p. 97).
In extending their work on legitimation further, Onwuegbuzie and Johnson (2006) outline a typology of nine legitimation types in mixed methods research, three of which are pertinent to my study. These include inside-outside legitimation, weakness minimization legitimation and multiple validities legitimation and I discuss each of these briefly as they applied to my study.
4.7.1. Inside-outside legitimation
As mentioned in an earlier section, by electing to do a predominantly qualitative mixed methods inquiry, I was aware of my subjective role as ‘instrument’
(Richardson, 1994) in the research process. As principal data collection instrument, I was responsible for collecting the data in the six strands of my study and it was imperative that I attempted to understand and interpret the social reality I was studying in ways that were trustworthy. In my research, I was not attempting to articulate what Lather (1993) calls “the voice from nowhere” – the “pure essence” of representation (in Lincoln and Guba, 2000, p. 183). Instead I wanted to acknowledge and capture the multiple voices of teachers on the topic of teacher leadership. This meant that, as researcher, I had to make a deliberate attempt to put myself in the shoes of the people I was studying, and try and understand their “actions, decisions, behaviour, practices, rituals and so on, from their perspective” (Babbie and Mouton, 1998, p. 271). In other words, I wanted to capture the emic viewpoint, the viewpoint of the participant in the group, the insider.
At the same time I was also conscious of my own voice in the research process. This etic viewpoint is that of “the ‘objective’ outsider looking at and studying the group”
(Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2006, p. 58). I had to continually guard against imposing my voice onto the voices of the teachers. I first attempted to understand teacher leadership through the eyes of the teachers and then only did I place their understanding within my own conceptual framework in order to “reconsider the participants’ perspective with the goal of trying to define, unravel, reveal or explain their world” (Anderson, 1998, p. 125). It was initially difficult to accurately present and utilise “the insider’s view and the observer’s view (original emphasis)”
(Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2006, p. 58). However, as my involvement in the different research strands progressed, I became more and more aware of my own growth and development in this role and my experience supported the view that the human instrument is infinitely adaptable and “can be developed and continuously refined” (Lincoln and Guba, 1985, p. 250).
4.7.2. Weakness minimization legitimation
In my synthesis study I was aware that while the five qualitative strands presented rich and at times nuanced data, they were all small studies. I therefore consciously
and compensate for the depth-only perspective of the qualitative strands. This weakness minimization legitimation process, I argue, led to “a superior or high quality meta-inference” (Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2006, p. 58). However, while the quantitative strand afforded the study breadth, the data collected was in the form of numbers and could not respond to the ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions, a limitation of quantitative methods. Thus the combining of the qualitative strands with the quantitative strand ensured different ways of knowing in order to chronicle a more comprehensive picture of teacher leadership within the South African schooling context.
4.7.3. Multiple validities legitimation
This refers to the extent to which “all relevant research strategies are utilised and the research can be considered high on the multiple relevant ‘validities’” (Onwuegbuzie and Johnson, 2006, p. 59). In the five qualitative strands of my study the relevant qualitative validities were addressed and achieved while the relevant quantitative validities were addressed during the sixth quantitative strand of the study (see individual chronicles in Chapters Five to Seven for this detail). During the linking and meshing phase of the study, mixed legitimation types were addressed to ensure strong meta-inference quality and I argue, that my theoretical sample was adequate. The adequate theoretical sample, according to Glaser and Strauss, is “judged on the basis of how widely and diversely the analyst chose his groups for saturation categories according to the type of theory he wished to develop” (1999, p. 63). My study covered a diverse range of research projects which assisted with my understanding of the situatedness of social experience and contributed to theoretical saturation and the possibility of what Mason (2006) calls “cross-contextual generalisations”. These cross-contextual generalisations emerge out of a process of meshing or weaving which adopts a “comparative logic to move across different contexts or settings, to enhance the scope and generalisability of the explanation” (Mason, 2006, p. 17).
Mason argues for “dialogic explanations which are multi-nodal” (p. 20) to assist us in understanding our multi-dimensional social world.
In summary, I argue that my study was legitimate in so far as the theoretical sample was adequate and worked towards ‘inference closure’ (Onwuegbuzie and Johnson,
picture of teacher leadership in South African mainstream schools. The study was also conducted in an ethical manner and it is to this discussion that I now turn.