Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
5.1 Research Design
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Chapter 5
Methodological Considerations and Research Process
The preceding chapter concluded with the argument that an exploration of the implications of cross-border migration for social work’s commitment to social justice would benefit from a situated, critical and emotionally reflexive account of how structural processes of injustice worked within and through cross-border migrants, their social workers, other caring practitioners and members of the receiving community as they positioned themselves and related to one another in the context of this study. In this chapter, I present the study’s key methodological considerations and an overview of the research process by which I sought to achieve this purpose. This includes an explication of the research design, the units of observation and analysis, sampling sites and strategies, the different methods of data collection and analysis employed, as well as a discussion of the main ethical concerns, issues of trustworthiness, and the study’s limitations. Some methodological questions are addressed in the empirical chapters (Chapters 6 to 10, in Part 2 of the thesis). However, as each of these chapters focuses on a specific objective and draws on a specific sample and data set, the main aim here is to show how these fit within an overarching methodological framework.
Furthermore, my understanding of important methodological questions changed along with my evolving perceptions and interpretations of the study’s subject matter and my own embeddedness therein. Hence, the chapter’s second aim is to trace my methodological journey through the study’s planning, data collection, analysis, and completion phases.
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inquiry to produce historically, politically, and personally situated accounts, descriptions, interpretations and representations of human lives.
Drawing on Earl Babbie and Johann Mouton (2001), Tedlock (2003), Robert Lee Miller (2000) and later on Giampietro Gobo (2008), I designed my research initially as a case study which I was going to conduct while working as a participant observer with a local services provider in the field of social work with cross-border migrants (see Chapter 1.1.3). In the course of 2007, I negotiated entry with the service provider’s director, and indeed practiced there as a social worker from 4 August to 31 October 2008. Here, I intended to take field notes, conduct depth individual interviews with colleagues, and collect life stories from cross-border migrants. For the life stories, I also recruited prospective participants through my workplace, at a local shopping mall, and through friends (see Chapter 1.1.3). These interviews took place between 31 May 2008 and 13 June 2009. Finally, in the aftermath of the May 2008 xenophobic violence in the course of which a group of foreign nationals came to stay at my local church, I included the church as an additional research site (see Chapter 1.1.3). On 17 June 2008, I began collecting field notes on my work at the church. My last diary record from this site is dated 31 October 2009. In effect therefore, what was intended to be a place- and time-limited study (Gobo 2008) turned into what Adele Clarke (2005:165) describes as ‘multisite research’, that is, an effort to –
Capture the increasingly complex, diffuse, geographically, discursively and/or otherwise dispersed aspects of research topics, [thus contributing to] both a broad and deeply empirically grounded understanding of the phenomenon of interest.
My understanding of what it means to be involved as participant observer in an ethnographic study changed profoundly during the course of this study. Using standard research texts, I planned for my study to be ‘naturalistic’ (Terre Blanche and Kelly 1999:135), and my role to be that of a ‘full’ and ‘genuine participant’ (Babbie and Mouton 2001:295, 296). I saw no need to deceive colleagues, peers or service users regarding my dual roles of practitioner and researcher (Terre Blanche and Kelly, 1999). I was also aware of Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Blochner’s (2003:240) suggestion that researchers should seek out both their ‘participants’
and ‘their own … understandings’ of the research matter. In particular, I was intrigued by Tedlock’s (2003:180) discussion of recent shifts from ‘participant observation’ to ‘the observation of participation’ in ethnographic research, as I was by Ellis and Bochner’s (2003:209) contentions regarding the depths of insight attainable through autoethnography:
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Concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality and self-consciousness are featured … as relational and institutional stories [that are] affected by history, social structure and culture, which themselves are dialectically revealed through action, feeling, thought and language (cited in Hölscher, Bozalek and Zembylas 2014:191; see Chapter 10).
However, my understanding of the autoethnographic component of my study evolved considerably over the years. When I completed my proposal in October 2007, I was aware that being able to move in and out of particular settings would be important in a study of social injustice, even though I had no way of imagining the ways in which it was important. I declared:
Being an active participant in the rendering of social work services to cross-border migrants will allow me to experience the ethical tensions I seek to explore myself, rather than relying solely on accounts from others. In addition, my ability as a researcher to intermittently disengage from the context will enable me to reflect more critically upon my experiences than social workers might do who … earn a living by participating in the said practices’ (Hölscher 2007:21).
Even though with hindsight, this claim sounds high-minded, it was nonetheless important to anticipate my overlapping roles as researcher, practitioner, and later as a member of a receiving community. However, it was naïve to assume that it would be possible to separate the processes of engaging with the different sites and samples of my study; that I could move in and out of my different roles and different contexts in neat, sequential steps; or that I would be able to assume ‘distinct roles either as a researcher … or as a colleague’ (Hölscher 2007:19;
highlights added). My changing conceptualisation of the study’s autoethnographic component and what it meant to observe my own participation hinged around my evolving understanding of what it meant to ‘experience ethical tensions … myself’ and the extent to which exploring this tension entailed exploring the implication of my ‘self’ in structural processes of social injustice. The impossibility of moving in and out of different roles became apparent early on in the data collection phase of the study. This realisation imposed itself through a deep sense of discomfort, or in the words of Hemmings (2012), affective dissonance:
I arrive at the [refugees support group] meeting [at the church] a bit late, rushed, but most of all, beginning to feel terribly exhausted from my daily, even hourly, border-hopping between Them and Us. And still, unfortunately, without feedback on any of the issues where we as a group depend on third parties to make progress. I fear that this is the beginning of a pattern and think that, ‘These are the frustrating details of what it means in our day-to-day lives that
“we cannot change South Africa”’, as I had said in the group just two weeks ago. How different it is to observe and describe the lines of exclusion and injustice which frame our society, than
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to experience them daily, tangibly, financially, as the members of this group do, or to jump across this society’s dividing lines, back and forth, as I am doing daily, and hourly, at this point in my life (Diary Record, 25.09.08).
It is like being in and out of a movie screen. Sometimes I am the spectator, at other times I am an actor. Still, even then, I do not know which is my part, and from which script I should read.
When I look at my different lives at [the social services provider], at [the church], and my private life as a parent, as a friend, with my ordinary ‘self’ spanning across the other two sets of experiences from before to after, I feel like I am seeing myself in a broken mirror, assembled like a cubic piece of art. Distance, alienation and participation are sometimes only moments apart … Who am I? (Diary Record 10.09.08).
However, it was only during the data analysis phase that I began to appreciate the extent to which the reflexive engagement with my various roles, relationships, interactions, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, images and so on enabled me to gain at least some of that hoped-for, ‘situated, critical and emotionally reflective account’ of what it meant to be, relate, and practice within contexts of structural injustice. Following the transcription of data in 2009 and in order to make better sense of the material, I began engaging increasingly with feminist relational/ethics of care and anti-oppressive literature (in 2010). By March 2011 when Vivienne Bozalek and I started working on the first draft of Encountering the Other (Chapter 8), I realised that my understanding of the study’s autoethnographic component had changed considerably since its initial conceptualisation. And in October 2012, when finalising the manuscript for my Reflections on Misframing (Chapter 9), I wrote to the editor indicating that I wanted to make one final set of changes:
I decided to rephrase three sentences … I don’t want to sound judgemental … My suggestions are … to make sure that I … include myself in the critical evaluation of the project (Personal email correspondence, 12.10.12).
Over time, it became both easier and seemed increasingly important to be explicit in acknowledging the extent of my implication in the very structural processes I wanted to research. Thus, the methodology section of Assuming Responsibility for Justice (Chapter 10) on which Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas and I worked between December 2012 and October 2013, now included the following upfront statement:
Insofar as Dorothee was one of several care workers who participated in the ‘normal’
organisational discourses and practices, she experienced, did and said in many ways what was commonly experienced, done and said in her host organisation and beyond: such is the nature of structural processes (Hölscher, Bozalek and Zembylas 2014:192).
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Finally at the beginning of 2014, when all publications were done and I re-engaged with the paradigmatic questions surrounding the study, I went out to search for literature that would help me theorise my growing awareness of ‘being woven into’ what I had intended to ‘dip in and out of’, and theorise around the ways in which the apparent ‘inward turn’ of my research interest was an important factor in achieving the aim of the study. Accordingly, the theorists considered in Chapter 4 enabled, within the limited context of the study, my efforts to –
Reconceptualise the changing nature of ‘the social’ in a context in which ‘politics, economy and culture’ are ‘being reconfigured … across various regions of the world’ … [and] ‘to explore
… [these changes] as changes in ourselves’ (Clough, cited in Pedwell and Whitehead 2012:117).
Apart from this ‘observation of participation’–‘autoethnography’ continuum, the study also entailed other ethnographic research strategies, including of course the observation of organisational rules and practices, and of relationships and interactions between other research participants; holding formal interviews and informal conversations with other social workers, practitioners of care and members of the receiving community; as well as collecting life stories and having informal conversations with the cross-border migrants at the different research sites. I discuss the interlinking of these different methods in conjunction with the sampling, data collection and analysis choices made in the course of the study (Sections 5.3 to 5.4) and illustrated in Figure 5.4. First however, I explicate the relationship between the study’s units of observation and analysis.