What do Easy Read and qualitative data analysis have in common?

I'm going to assume you know what Easy Read is. If you don't, check out Planet Easy Read. 

Easy Read relies on images and words. A good rule of thumb is that if a sentence needs two images, then it should be two sentences. If one image covers more than one sentence, you may be able to condense what you are writing.

Some words and phrases hide so much. Those two words 'qualitative data'. What image would you use? If there isn't a single image, then what is being masked from everyday view by the phrase? If a conference full of qualitative researchers were asked to submit a single image, there'd be quite a variety of images. Perhaps someone has done that! If not, perhaps they should. 

The sort of qualitative data I'm picturing as I write this blog is one familiar to many researchers: a set of transcripts from conversations, interviews and focus groups. 

A standard (pre-software days) approach would be to read, re-read, make some notes and then take highlighters to the text. You stare at the highlighted parts. Sometimes a word or phrase leaps to mind that sums up the essence of why you highlighted it. These words and phrases become 'provisional codes'.  

In my semi-techie way, I copy & paste my highlighted fragments into Excel, so each fragment has its own row in a worksheet, together with a column to identify which transcript it came from, and a column for its provisional code. 

I look at my provisional codes, and the text associated with them. Does some of the text need moving to a different provisional code because as I look at all the fragments of text, I realise I've mis-allocated text. Do I need to change the name of the code because everything seems to hang together but only if I change the word or phrase used as the code? Have I conflated different ideas under one code and need to split that provisional code into two or more? 

This is almost identical to how I produce Easy Read, except when I produce Easy Read I don't have to do it by myself; I always co-produce it with someone who relies on Easy Read as a way to access information. You can no more plonk a pretty picture and expect it to make the text more 'accessible' than you can plonk a nice-sounding code and expect it to make what the data is saying to you more 'accessible' to you. And yet that is often what happens in Easy Read - and sadly can happen in qualitative research too.

Both Easy Read and this type of qualitative data analysis involve taking large volumes of words and making meaning with and from them. In both, the starting point is a highlighter pen to identify what (in your eyes) is important. In one, the meaning-making moves on to adding a provisional image before shuffling back & forward between image and text until satisfied that the image means the words, and the words mean the image - or near enough! In the other, the meaning-making moves to adding a summarising word before shuffling back and forward between code and text fragment (or free node - or whatever terminology you use) until satisfied that the code fits the words, and the words fit the code.

There's going to be more I need to say - but for now I must dive back into qualitative data analysis because this doctoral thesis is not going to write itself!

Applying sociology

Sociology is too useful to be allowed to hide in universities.

Social theories of culture: we create meaning as we interact. That means we can learn and choose to interact in ways that create different meanings from the social norms. Is that a lever for changing social norms? Still not sure, but it makes it easier to work as equal colleagues in a world that says we cannot be when we know meanings aren't fixed.

 

Membership categorisation: if membership categories exist, can we play with the signifiers for categories to get ourselves put into a different category? Conclusion: yes. We call it 'wearing the right shoes'

 

Ethnomethodological disruption experiments: knowing about these takes the sting out of situations where we think we are acting normally but others act as if we are conducting a disruption experiment. It makes us proud to be naturally disruptive, rather than scared or angry at what had been incomprehensible or offensive reactions to us.

 

Wittgenstein: why do we end up in meetings where people are using the same words but seem to be talking at cross-purposes? Probably because we are picturing different things as we say the word. So let's go round the room and check what we are picturing. Job done. We know why we are talking at cross-purposes and can do something about it.

 

Goffman: front stage/backstage, framing, Othering. These concepts and language give us tools to understand and communicate effectively about how life works and in doing that, it makes it easier for everyone to see ways to play the game differently.  

 

Post-structuralism: the relief that dividing things into two groups (binary thinking) is an idea not a reality. This means we can escape the binary thinking that has stymied our attempts to be ourselves in a world that wants to divide us into 'disabled' and 'normal'. 

Becoming Welshflier

We all have a personal identity - how we see ourselves.

And then we have a social identity - how we are seen and the roles we play in relation to others.

If we are very lucky, there is a good deal of overlap. 

I'm one of the Women's Equality Network (WEN) mentees for 2020, and I've been taking the opportunity to try to develop a professional identity that sits comfortably with who I am and what I want to achieve.

It's been a bit of a Goldilocks experience. First I was too focused on how I want others to see me. Then I was too focused on how I see myself. And - finally - I think I've got it just right. 

I am me. Being me is enough. I do not need to try to develop a 'not-me' persona for the sake of making others more comfortable around me, or getting public appointments. Who I am is enough for me, and it is the best that I can offer others.

It comes down to silly things, superficial things. 

• I knew I wanted to change how I dress and present myself, because I wasn't feeling the confident, professional person I wanted to be. And that was a good judgement call on my part. But... I thought that meant a suit and makeup. It doesn't. For me, it means a shaved head and rainbow stitched soft leather Doc Martins, with whatever clothing is suitable for the weather hanging comfortably and confidently in between. It's my Welshflier identity. 

• I thought my welshflier@ email address looked childish and would put off anyone recruiting for strategic professional roles. So I created a new 'proper professional adult' one. That wasn't a success. I *am* my digital identity - I *am* Welshflier. So if the name doesn't fit, it's a good indication that neither would I. 

I poured everything into trying to construct a professional persona that I thought would get me where I want to be.  It sucked the life out of my soul, which I am sure showed through in the applications which were not successful. 

This is where being on the WEN mentoring scheme helped. I have learned to own my identity as Welshflier. It means I can be confidently me, knowing that 'me' is an incredible patchwork of strengths and flaws, all woven together. 

And so I applied for another public appointment, but this time as myself. As I thought how to present 'the real me' in the application, I might as well have been singing along to 'This is me' with the cast of The Greatest Showman. 

The days of being an unhappy chameleon, unsuccessfully trying to adapt myself to make others comfortable are over. Long live Welshflier!

Fortunately, part of 'me being me' is a desire for others to shine and grow, so I like to think I won't do too much damage by being me. If anything, I may be less socially inept than when I was trying to be what I'm not.

I needed a head and shoulders shot for someone. Can't say why yet! But let's just say that being me paid off and my application as myself was successful. I almost rushed round the house looking for a smart jacket so I'd 'look the part'. Fortunately I caught myself in time. And so, this is me. 

Thinking about thinking

 

Much is written and said in sociology about ‘reflecting’ and ‘being reflexive’. It is something I am told I do instinctively and habitually. However it is not something I recognise in myself.

I observe. I’ve always observed. I went on training about ‘Most Significant Change method of process evaluation.

In English, the Most Significant Change method of process evaluation is a way to working out, while a new policy or public service is being tried out, what people affected think is the most significant change that they personally would attribute to the new policy or service. The significance for me is that you get an early warning of unintended consequences. You also get the information needed to fine-tune the policy or public service while it is still in process rather than waiting until it’s all over and looking back to see what worked and what didn’t.

During the training, we were asked to test out one part of the method. I asked if I could observe and make notes of my observations because I was uncomfortable about my ability to learn what I wanted to learn about the method by being immersed.

I have two things I always do after observing.

I consciously relax my face and body and shut my eyes. I slow my breathing and when I feel relaxed I start to gently probe and feel whether anything seems to have fallen into a pattern.  Sometimes I begin to write or draw and as I do, my brain catches up and I look at what I’ve produced and realise that I am putting what I was feeling into thoughts on paper.

And I puzzle. Sometimes I puzzle before relaxing. Sometimes I puzzle immediately after as I look at what I have put on paper. Sometimes it is a completely different time. I puzzle away with a furrowed brow, usually leaning forward, elbows on table, hands together and index fingers tapping each other and gliding against my lips. Or elbows on table, hands in a loose fist, base of thumbs against chin, tips of thumbs by lips, rhythmically and rapidly rocking from my elbows so I get gentle repeated pressure on my chin. Then the deep breath out, pause in movement, deeper furrow, and either repeat the rocking process or start to draw or write. Or I decide I have tried the puzzling route and it isn’t working. I make coffee. I go for a sauna. I lift heavy weights. An answer that satisfies me or at least moves my thinking forward may come – or it may not.

I can recognise what I do when I relax as the process other people describe when they say they are being reflexive. And I guess that the outputs of my relaxing are similar to the outputs of people who have talked about being reflexive.

But my dominant method of thinking is puzzling. I can be quite the dog with a juicy bone as I puzzle. I am unsocial, impatient, demanding and cannot bear to be interrupted. There is none of the gentle, dare I say hippy, connotation I have of ‘reflecting’. And there is none of the feelings that I associate with ‘being reflexive’ which for me at least is a far more consciously cerebral activity. When I puzzle, I am rooted in trying to make sense of what I am observing. The closest representation I have ever seen of what I do is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FSKTndbwVo, down to Sherlock’s shaking the rapid stream of thoughts out of his head as he finds them lacking. If you watch the clip, you will see why I describe myself as unsocial etc when I am in puzzling mode.

So what of this piece of writing? It is not me relaxing. It is not me puzzling. It is me typing out something that doesn’t need puzzling but did need me to put into words so I can see it at a glance rather than keep it in my head. Sometimes it’s easier to think when it is in words on a screen – or on paper. Maybe this is my bit of reflecting and being reflexive. Who knows? I really can’t work out how non-autistic people think, so I find it hard to connect with their words for thinking. 

Feedback, as always, most welcome.

This and this and this

I have a very bad habit of saying 'this or that'. I have that habit with humans, particularly myself. It is a habit that makes it difficult for me to accept everything about me all at the same time. It is the habit at the heart of my categorising things and people until I feel I have made sufficient sense of life.

So I am either good or bad. I am reliable or unreliable. I am on a diet or off a diet. 

The irony is that I know intellectually that binaries suck. Life is not binary. Humans cannot be reduced to being this or that. And yet I still use binaries as a stick to beat myself. When I make a mistake, I'm not competent and incompetent, I must switch my mental image of myself to being fundamentally incompetent. It is exhausting, damaging and unnecessary.

Enter Deleuze. Life is a series of 'and'. I am this and this and this and this. As my beloved Buzz Lightyear might say, I can continue those ands 'to infinity and beyond'. 

How different might my life and self-identity - and my ability to complete a doctoral thesis (!) - be if I allowed myself to be competent and incompetent and clever and inadequate and resistant to being self-categorised into binary boxes and making use of binary boxes in everyday life and ...

Even thinking about is is freeing. And scary. It feels as if the space I inhabit in this social world is increasing with each and that I add. As a woman who was been taught from early childhood not to take up too much space - psychologically, audibly, physically, relationally - that is powerfully liberating. 

If I do not try to constrict myself and make myself small by squeezing me into boxes, I fear I will become like the giant Alice of Lewis Carroll's creation, and trample and break all that is in my path. I also smile inwardly at the thought of seeing what shape and size I become when I allow myself to be and and and and and. 

And I remember the words of Marianne Williamson...

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And I wonder what the next few years will hold.

The Wife of Bath, authority and the autoethnographer

Prologue

I did S level English. Yep, it really did exist once upon a time but was already dying out by the time I sat it in 1983. I think the S stood for 'Special', but it might have been 'Scholarship' or 'Supplementary' or - who knows? It was an extra and different type of paper you could sit if you were doing the A level. It was a chance to do something more like the old-style university-style intellectualising. 

And the fact I did S level, learned Latin and went to an independent school probably explains why studying Canterbury Tales for A-level led to my taking part in a philosophical debate about the authority of experience versus the authority of books. To my intense frustration, I can't remember the Latin terms used for the two ways of arguing - the argument from real life, and the argument settled by quoting 'an authority'. 

The Wife of Bath and authority

Canterbury Tales is a mischievous book, with the fictitious accounts of a number of pilgrims heading together to Canterbury. To keep themselves amused along the way, each tells a story. And before the story, each pilgrim got to say something about themselves and the reason for their choice of tale. I think it's only know that I'm realising quite how subversive Chaucer was. His subversion and mischief is no-where more evident than in the Wife of Bath's prologue. 

She begins:

"Experience, though noon auctoritee

were in this world, is right ynogh for me"

or - "experience, though there were no authorities in this world, is quite enough for me"

or- "What I know from what I've lived through is enough (evidence) for me. I don't need established authorities or texts." - but she does then proceed to use authorities to back up her lived experience of sex and marriage. A lived experience that runs counter to anything sanctioned by the accepted authorities on sex and marriage. 

I have sympathy with the Wife of Bath, particularly given the authorities that were currently in vogue. I think I too reject authorities written by and for a repressive patriarchal system having any authority over my experience. But experience without authorities is not quite enough for me. I may not need established authorities as a starting point, but I do need them as mirrors to show my experience in different lights.  

Autoethnography and authority

I think of ethnography as the study of people's social interactions in their natural habitat.  Auto is about the self. So, to me, autoethnography is studying your own social interactions in your natural habitat. 

There is a tendancy in social science to begin with the authorities, and use them to examine experience. The authorities frame what can be seen and what can be asked of experience. Even ethnography, which looks as if it should start with people and their lives can become less a study of people's social interactions and more a study of what the ethnographer notices. What the ethnographer notices is a product of what they expect to see, and what they expect depends on which authorities they favour. 

Autoethnography makes it easier to begin with experience. Experience is allowed to frame what authorities you see as relevant and how you interact with those authorities. 

How one then uses those authorities is central. As a baby autoethnographer, it would be very easy for me to do a 'Wife of Bath' and simply look for authorities that I can argue agree with how I interpret my own experiences. As she continues her prologue, she draws on authorities to bolster her argument from experience. She is highly selective, and doesn't always use an authority in a way that it is intended to be used. I could use authorities with the intention of bolstering an argument that I would argue even if "noon authorities were in this world". But I believe that does my experience and autoethnography a dis-service. 

So. I don't want to begin with book-authority or theory. I want to begin with experience. But I do then want to use book-authorities as mirrors on my experience. And I want to use what I see to help me reflect on what I experience. I think this gives appropriate respect to both ways of knowing - knowing from living through something, and knowing from theorising.

I have noticed that autoethnography tends to go hand-in-hand with inability to sit within an academic discipline or school of thought. I guess that is an unsurprising consequence of starting with experience and moving out to see what light academic authorities can shed on that experience. 

And I guess that my starting with experience and wanting support to reflect on and find ways of framing my experience in a way that would make me more effective at changing the world is what led me both to autoethnography and inability to sit within an academic discipline.

Who'd have thought Middle Ages poetry is still be relevant?

Why am I fat?

Why am I fat?

We all have our own story. It will have a unique combination of elements from the complex obesity system. This is the Government’s own 2012 attempt to map the system: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/296290/obesity-map-full-hi-res.pdf

Here’s my story, in so far as I can make sense of it.

Number 1. I faced a lot of trauma from an early age with no support to find healthy ways to process it. Things filling my mouth soothed me. Sugar rush relaxed me. Fatty food made me feel comforted and full.

Number 2. I was treated with oral steroids for eczema as a child as a hospital inpatient for a month. I went in slightly overweight. I came out morbidly obese and still covered with infected eczema.

Number 3. My first diet (under GP supervision) was at age 7. It solely consisted of restriction. It was enforced rigidly and harshly (they did it ‘for my own good’, and didn’t see the harm). I began stealing food.

Number 4. I was ridiculed and bullied for my size and physical lack of coordination and learned to hate PE and hate my body. I stopped doing anything active. I was 8.

Number 5. I was fed the message by media and family that I was unloveable unless I was slim. That didn’t help me feel loved or repair other trauma.

Number 6. I was offered diets in teenage girl magazines. My slimmer-than-me friends were always on diets. Females in my family were always on diets. A female relative died young - because she was fat because she wouldn’t go on a diet. So I tried every diet. I failed. I binged. I starved. My self-loathing grew.

Number 7. I believed the myth that failing to lose weight was my personal fault and I was just too weak and pathetic to stick to a diet. Because it was simple science. All that was required was: calories in must be lower than calories used.

Number 8. Social life revolves around food. To choose to restrict meant to watch others eat freely or to stay at home. Or go, eat everything I could, then hate myself.

Number 9. Foods became ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Eating ‘bad’ foods became an act of rebellion - against what, I’m no longer sure. But it was definitely a feminist issue.

Number 10. Rape meant I felt safer with a thick physical barrier of fat between me and other people. I could hide inside it. They couldn’t touch ‘the real me’. So I self-sabotaged. Once I’d lost enough weight for people to comment how nice I looked, I’d panic and eat as fast as I could to stop attracting attention.

Number 11. When skint, I couldn’t afford lean protein or lovely herbs and spices. Fat is cheaper. And tastier.

Number 12. (And I’m still learning to forgive myself for this) After a few years of successfully improving my relationship with my body and with eating, I panicked about making a weight category for a sporting competition, and after making weight I couldn’t stop over eating. The patterns of over 40 years of disordered eating can reappear when you least expect :(

And if you look at one of the complexity maps about obesity, my 12 reasons hardly scratch the surface of the complexity that creates and sustains someone’s obesity.

All fat people have their own story to tell about why they are fat.

So don’t tell me that it is as simple as move more, eat less, or change advertising, or use willpower.

*My story has a happy ending and I have an increasingly healthy life. My happy ending is because the reasons I am fat have been addressed. Other people’s happy endings will come when their reasons are addressed. No one gets a happy ending from being blamed for being fat.

What matters, what's researched, what's measured

I've been thrown into the world of the 'validation of research instruments'. Or what you and I might call 'surveys and questionnaires that we are told can be trusted to do the job they say they will do'.

My whole self dislikes and distrusts any tool that says it's been scientifically validated, but is then used by humans on humans to find out about things that can't be observed - like wellbeing or health.

My visionary self has a dream of a different way of living together as humans, and my top priority is thinking how to get from the currently reality to something closer to this dream. Dreams usually take lifetimes or more, however hard and however strategically you fumble and work towards them.

My pragmatic self accepts that within the way things currently happen in the policy, practice and research world of health and social care, it is impossible to escape validated research instruments as they have power and credibility with those in power. Validated research tools are therefore key to improving things within the social and public service systems we currently have. It matters to people's lives now that things improve now within systems. We have to live in our present, not just dream for the future.

For validated research tools, therefore, the questions become ones of harm reduction, and opening up the debate about these tools.

I am very grateful to an academic* for linking me to a great 'primer' on the validation of research tools, as I've never really known what validation involves. For a published paper with so much information about such an obscure topic, I found it immensely readable https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6004510/
*She's nameless only because I'm writing this early on a Saturday morning and want to get this blog up before coproduction week finishes, ie before I can show it to her and check if she'd like to be named

Reading that paper made it clear that developing a validated research instrument is not a task to be undertaken lightly. It is time, brain and cost intensive.

But - some research funders for some types of research require the use of validated research instruments. So if there isn't a suitable validated research instrument, you can't get the funding, so can't do the research. Or to put it another way, you can only research something if there is already a research instrument that has been through the validation process. No instrument, no research.

It took a while for the significance of that to sink in for me. Some things that really matter to people's lives cannot be researched because the research cannot be funded because there is no suitable validated research instrument.

And then, add in another two layers of challenge.

1. I have yet to see a validated research instrument that can be used inclusively, across the diversity of people who experience whatever it is that is being researched. If used in line with the validation, this means research will perpetuate the exclusion of people who are already unheard, or heard but ignored when decisions are made that affect their lives. If used outside of the validation, for example by rephrasing and reframing questions or changing the response options in order to allow a more diverse group of people to take part, the tool is no longer validated.

2. Step 1 of developing a validated research instrument, according to Boateng and the rest of his research team (ie the people who wrote the paper that I found so helpful), is having a clear conceptual grasp of the topic. Say the topic is 'quality of life'. Whose conceptual grasp of the topic should provide the conceptual framework for the tool? I will always prioritise the conceptual framework of the potential participants whose lives will be affected by any decisions made on the basis of the research. And it is possible to do that. But it is also possible to use pre-existing academic conceptual frameworks. Yep, you can design a new tool based on the frameworks that are based on research that is shaped by what could be done using a previously validated research instrument. I suspect that route is more common, as it is much cheaper and easier to do a literature review than brand new qualitative research with people recruited from your pool of potential future participants.

So what?

So those of us who would prefer to avoid validated research instruments need to engage with the creation of validated research instruments if we are to avoid the perpetuation of exclusion and silencing of some groups of people from the kind of research that policy makers and governments listen to.

And it would be doable. But it is a big investment of effort. So it would be important to make sure that the effort is being invested in developing a tool that would allow research to be carried out on a topic of crucial or strategic importance to those who are usually excluded or silenced.

And that means starting with the research on 'what matters', so we know what is worth that investment.

And that is where coproduction comes in.

Doing research to identify 'what matters' cannot be done just by academic researchers, or just by people with lived experience, or just by think tanks, or just by government research teams. Doing this research needs the skills of academics, the skills of people with lived experience who are already involved in policy or practice work, the skills of policy makers, the skills of people responsible for providing public services, the skills of members of the public. What everyone in that list has in common is possessing a set of expertise, experience and perspective that others on that list do not have, but that are needed for top quality health and social care research. In other words, to do top quality health and social care research means developing our skills as research coproducers. And by 'our skills', I mean the skills of everyone in that list.

I would argue that everyone involved in coproducing research needs to learn the skills that are needed to be research coproducers. It does not come naturally to any of us. For those of us with professional training, it won't have been part of that training so we need training. For those of us without professional training, we need training too.

And I would argue that we need the same training, a training that helps us work out for ourselves how to apply the principles of coproduction to the professional training or lived experience we bring. And a training that helps us see other people's skill sets and ways that the skill sets work together to make us and our research stronger.

Where do we go from here?

I don't know!

I'm putting this out in Coproduction Week, because it is probably the best week of the year to wave a flag saying 'over here!' about something that I've not seen discussed. PLEASE come and find me if you are already grappling with this. I won't be doing anything practical about any of this until I've submitted my doctoral thesis. But this is something that would benefit from a long brew on the back burner. Here's to Coproduction Week 2021 when I will hold myself accountable for what I have (or haven't) done to start developing these rough ideas into actual life changing research changing work.

Telling tales (The Unconventional Doing of a Doctorate)

If you haven't heard of 'complexity theory', this may not make sense. Check out the fabulous Noreen Blanuet and Dr Toby Lowe for versions that may make sense to you.

If you haven't heard of Wittgenstein, and French philosophy isn't your thing, skip the bit in italics. You don't need to read it to make sense of the rest!

So rarely have I lived out the truth that the language and conceptual framework are the story and not just a vehicle for communicating a story. I have told many stories of the last five years. This no more true or false than the other stories I have told about doing my doctorate. This telling of the story does not falsify other tellings, nor does it mean I am lying now by changing 'the truth' of what has happened in the last five years. What I have done is try for size different language and conceptual frameworks as I try to make sense of the story for myself. I have finally found one that fits me.  

  

Starting point 

Start with a real world problem that is ‘wicked’, where it feels as if there is something missing from my real world understanding of the problem which – if only I could lay my finger on the 'something' – would deepen my understanding of ‘the problem’ in a way that would enable real world people to reframe what the problem is and in so doing either solutions become self-evident to those involved, or the reframing opens new avenues for exploring possible solutions.  

My starting problem: public involvement in policy making excludes so many people, either because they choose not to get involved or because the way it's done excludes them. 

  

Complicated 

The usual doctoral approach would be classed as ‘complicated’. I would pick an academic lens from within one or possible two academic disciplines through which to inspect the problem. 

I tried that. It was called trying to use social policy ideas and standard social research methods to create a new method or technique that would deal with the problem of exclusion. 

It failed. 

Restarting

I restarted, having realised it was a bit more complex and would need some sociological thinking to work out a way to understand and explain why just producing a better method wouldn't solve the problem.

That didn't work fantastically well either. 

Chaos 

Instead my approach became to pluck ideas, facts, research findings and language from across academia as they seem relevant or potentially relevant to informing my understanding of a real world problem. 

This has led to my sitting in an uncomfortable but essential extended chaotic phase, as the fragments grew from multiple branches of academia as apparently disparate as quantum physics, socio-linguistics, creative media studies and social policy. Each attempt to grasp and organise the fragments into something recognisable as a complex system failed, until I was stopped in my tracks by an expression of complexity theory that made sense to me and gave me a vocabulary to communicate with those inside and outside academic. I found I could use complexity theory to make sense of the original real world problem and the academic problems I had created for myself by trying to made academia revolve around the ‘real world’ whilst being located within the academic world.   

  

Complexity 

And thus, as predicted by complexity theory (and physical chemistry!), my chaotic fragments of knowledge are beginning to align and self-organised themselves into something approximating a complex system. 

In other words, I am at a stage of assembling everything into a form that makes sense (in my mind) of the original problem, and which I think I can use to explain the original problem in a way that will make sense to at least some of those involved in the practical tasks of policy making.

One principle with qualitative data analysis is checking that the participants, or an advisory group of those sharing characteristics with the participants, can recognise the academic’s interpretation of their knowledge as being a valid way of interpreting the phenomenon. It does not require the participants to agree with the interpretation, merely to be able to recognise their knowledge of the phenomenon after their knowledge has been analysed and written.   For me, this approach is currently providing an essential check for how I have used the academic knowledge plucked from across disciplines. I need to ask myself “Do academics from within those disciplines I have ‘raided’ recognise that my interpretation of their knowledge has legitimacy?”. 

Receiving the answer 'No' was a significant personal fear - until I added the work of Deleuze and Guattari into my complex system.  They took from what is rightly the academic property of botany (a rhizome and a tree) and used what they took in a way that would never be recognised as legitimate by an academic botanist. I acknowledge to fellow academics that I may have done the same in the course of my doctorate. By going broad, I have not been able to go as deep as I would have wished in relation to some of the concepts I have assimilated. It may be that I have mis-used them in relation to their original academic discipline. However what I have done with them all is doing great service in making sense a problem in a way that makes sense to the people who are living with the problem.

  

End point 

(or, as Deleuze might call it, the InterMezzo, a kind of pause where things are sufficiently in place to attempt to communicate them)The end of a doctorate is a thesis that meets the assessment criteria required to earn the writer a doctorate and the right to be known as Dr Collis.
What I will seek to present as my thesis is an example of what can be done when the deeply significant and vital expert work of academics within their specialised disciplines is laid out and put at the disposal of a real world approach to solving a real world wicked problem.  

And to underline that, the right hand page of my printed thesis will be written for an academic audience. The left hand page will be a version of what it says on the right hand side that is written for that proverbial 'man on the street' - in my case, for my colleagues at Barod, for The Women (four lovely middle aged women who gamely got involved in my research) and for all those people who might get roped into the public involvement activities of universities and policy makers. 

Oh, and there's a modern art assemblage too. But that's a story for another day.

I will always fail

[prompted by a discussion about wanting/failing to be a White ally, by thinking about the impossibility of achieving what I want with my thesis - because it is actually impossible (maybe), and thinking with love of the people who keep believing in me when I don't believe in myself]

The fact I will always fail does not mean I have failed. There is no need to give up. There is no need to feel guilt.

By tackling that which is impossible, I highlight a problem. The problem is that what I am doing should not be impossible. I highlight it by noticing something that is so deeply woven into the current reality that in general no-one notices it. If I point out, I get comments like 'but that's just how things are' or 'that's life' or 'just accept it' or 'there's nothing you can do'.

Defiance in the face of that is a powerful weapon. "Hold my beer" or "Watch me!" followed by failure. Followed by failure. Followed by failure.

And so I continue to attempt the impossible. Perhaps it makes others see the problem. Perhaps it makes them wonder if the current reality is the only reality.

Do you know what keeps me going? It is those who tell me that they see what I am doing. That they could not do it. That if anyone can, it's me. That they are relieved and grateful and quietly (or loudly) cheering me on.

I know they mean it. They are there for me when I am broken. They never tell me I should get back up and get into the fight. But when I do, they shout or whisper encouragement.

And I wonder. They talk about me 'giving them a voice' in places they don't want to try to go but where they want what they say to me to be heard. There's an entire research literature about the rights and wrongs and impossibility and moral necessity and methods and reasons and contested meanings of speaking for and giving a voice. But maybe the reality is that they give me a voice. They patch me up. They actively support my healing and mental stability. Without them, I have no voice because I give up. They trust that, when I speak in places they cannot or will not go, what I say will be as full of them as it is full of me.

As Michelle Fine puts it, I'm not a ventriloquist, and I am not a tape recorder replaying their literal voices (page 12, Just Research in Contentious Times, 2018. If you can't pop to a university library, on Amazon you can search in her book for 'voice'. It's worth doing that). Maybe I am someone they have heard speak out about things *they* have put in my head, and who they choose to speak to, so I can speak of more things.

Will I fail in the impossible challenges I set myself? Undoubtedly.

Will that keep me from trying? Hold my beer.

Courage! (or Game On part 2)

With thanks to Womens Equality Network for accepting me on the 2020 Mentoring programme. 
It's working (!)

I have a problem.

I over-think.

And I am over-critical of my self (and everyone else!)

And my instinct is always to assume something is my fault until proven otherwise.

Nothing makes that problem kick in like saying something you think is self-evident or a non-issue, and it being received as something jaw-droppingly serious.

Normally I'd be straight down that overthinking spiral with nothing solid to grasp and stop my fall.

But recently this has begun to change.

I have reached the point in learning to be an academic where I know the strength of the evidence behind what I say (or lack of) and the courage to stand, and either hold my ground or gracefully acknowledge that I misspoke without it affecting my self-worth. And I can explain why personal experience has a strength of its own that demands the right to be treated seriously independent of research evidence. I no longer accept the dismissive 'Oh, that's just you', and I am learning to refute it calmly and strongly when I hear it.

Yesterday. I said something casually. It was received as a serious issue needing action by someone with power to take action. Adrenalin and the familiar 'argh! What have I done?!' kicked in almost immediately.

I scanned my memory to imagine evidencing what I had said to my satisfaction. Had I exaggerated? Misled? Nope. Was I relying on heresay? Nope. Could I assemble a written evidenced answer swiftly if needed? Yep.

I checked with others how what I had said might affect them. And, to be honest, I was looking for a bit of external reassurance too.

I started this blog with the title 'courage' because it felt as if I'd needed courage to own what I'd said yesterday. Courage is the ability to 'feel the fear and do it anyway'. It has certainly taken all my courage in the past to come through situations like this. But not today.

Unpacking it, perhaps it's less a case of needing courage, and more a new-found confidence. Who I am is enough. Not perfect. Enough. What I know is not perfect. It is enough.

Perhaps it is time to stop hiding and start taking a stand.

Writing like Douglas Adams

I accidentally caught part of a retrospective on Douglas Adams on Radio 4, my guilty middle aged middle class vice (Radio 4 that is, not Douglas Adams).

To have written what he did, he had to be an unusual person. The ideas and stories and phrases that came from him could only have come from him. 

What I didn't realise was that he and I share a trait or two. 

When he wrote, what a script editor might think needed a minor tweak would send Douglas Adams back to square one and result in a complete re-write as if the entire document had fallen apart. Because it had. Because everything is interwoven and to change one thing is to disturb the whole. In Doctor Who terms, one tiny change - such as Donna Noble saving her dad from death - can rip a hole in the space-time continuum and bring the universe to an end unless there is a dramatic intervention. 

Listening to Douglas Adam's past colleagues and collaborators - and his poor script editors - talk about this trait made me see that his scripts really had only needed a minor tweak to make them suitable for their purpose, which was to be broadcast as a radio show. They had not needed complete rewriting for any audience other than Douglas Adams himself. He was compelled to do those rewrites because even one tiny tweak created such cognitive discomfort. 

I write like Douglas Adams. I am not claiming to have his flair, wit, originality or skill. I lay claim to the same trait whereby what someone might perceive as suggesting a minor tweak is received by me as a need to return to square one, in order to reconstruct from the foundations up something that 'feels comfortable' and incorporates that tweak. 

But you can't do that with a doctoral thesis. At least, not for a doctoral thesis that you intend to submit. 

I need to learn a two-fold art, and I need to learn it rapidly. I need to learn how to spot when what to others seems a minor tweak does require a return to square one, and I need to learn to live with cognitive discomfort when it does not. 

The power of three

I was brought up believing you MUST triangulate if you wanted your qualitative research to be taken seriously. A rough guide to triangulation is that if you research something using three different methods and combine what you learn, your results are more trustworthy than if you use just one method.

In my way of making sense of the world, that's like looking at something from three different vantage points in order to get a clearer picture of it. That's where the elephant in my blog title comes in. Five people use the sense of touch to describe an elephant. Each describes it completely differently because each is touching a different part of the elephant. They can either fight over who is right, or try to work out how their stories fit together. Or I guess they could simply say 'this is my truth, and that's your truth', but to me that seems a waste of an opportunity to learn.

What interests me right now is how rarely triangulation is used to communicate triangulated research findings. Communication is not a simple transaction of 'this is in my head; I put it in words; you read my words; I have communicated what was in my head', any more than research is a simple 'this is what I want to study; I used a method; I can now describe the thing I studied'.

I've come across using different communication methods used for different audiences. I have seen experimental and alternative communication methods, particularly in autoethnography and participatory research - art works, drama, poetry - and sometimes these are published or performed alongside accounts using traditional academic words and language.

What I haven't found, I'm guessing because I haven't found the right places to look, is anything explaining the importance of triangulation for communicating your research findings to those researchers who routine use triangulation to create their research findings.

We know that most communication between two humans is non-verbal. And yet when it comes to communicating research findings we routinely rely not just on words but the specialised words, language and culture of our chosen discipline.

What of my own research?

The bulk of my doctoral research involves five women all considering the same phenomena from their own perspective. I am one of the five. We all have dual researcher-participant status and roles. I am the only one trying to belong in the academic world. I stumbled into researching ways of knowing and ways of communicating, via an intention to research the practical task of improving public involvement in public service policy making. I have worked with a mosaic artist to produce a mosaic that shows me what I hadn't realised I was thinking. Photos of parts of the mosaic will appear throughout the printed thesis. The left pages will be an 'everyday' summary using everyday words and pictures. The right pages will have the traditional academic account. I've provisionally allocated 20,000 to the summary and 80,000 to the academic account. And I am just grateful that photographs and diagrams may speak a thousand words but none of those words for part of my word count.

Will a combination of the three 'speak' louder and communicate something different from one or two? I have no idea if it will to anyone else. But for me, it helps me work out what is 'going on in my head' in a way that words alone cannot.

Game on

Here’s a traditional academic thesis.

1. Start with what the academics know. [even if that’s not how your research interest started, this is where you must start]
2. Formulate aims and questions that are permissible to be asked within the academic school, discipline or approach you have chosen.
3. Explain the background
4. Review the academic literature to establish what academics know that is relevant to your question(s). Depending on the discipline, you may also review practice literature or ‘grey’ literature generated by professionals who are not academics but who have a professional expertise in whatever you are researching.
5. Collect data, and write about your data.
6. Work out what you can add to the existing academic knowledge. Do this by seeing where your findings add to or contradict or suggest new approaches to the existing academic knowledge.
7. Conclude that you will do the research better next time, and list ‘more research is needed’.

That is reasonable, given the function of an academic thesis is to attempt to prove you are worthy of admission into the status of ‘an academic’.

It is also an exceedingly good way to replicate the cultural and institutional norms of academia.

But what if…

What if your thesis is about knowing and valuing knowledges?

What if you want to argue as your central thesis (academic) argument that everyone wins if we find a way for academics and non-academics to value their knowledges equally and value the differences between their ways of knowing?

Game on

I spent several years trying to work out how to take a variety of academic ways of knowing, create a suitably academic rationale for my work and then interpret and discuss data co-generated with members of the public using a transdisciplinary academic framework I created.

I wouldn’t recommend that approach. It broke me.

Game over

I decided to settle for second prize and just ‘get a doctorate’ by following the traditional format and keeping my head down. I reasoned that I could write what I really wanted to write at a future date. 

Even that was a struggle. I had such rich data, and any academic approach meant I would have to close my eyes to so much of that richness. 

I couldn’t work out how to justify academically some of the assertions I made, such as the ‘leap’ from saying that what I had learned about public involvement in policy making applied equally to public involvement in research.

Or was it game over?

My happiest time had been in 2019, where three of the four other women and I met for a whole day in a beautiful café in the middle of Snowdonia, to reflect together about having done the research together and for me to pour out my woes at my inability to produce a thesis. Technically it was ‘the final reflective workshop’ and counted as data collection as I had ethical approval for the day and had audio recorded it.  

My second happiest time was a fortnight ago, when all four women graciously and warmly agreed to individual ‘lockdown’ phone or video calls.

From reminiscing while looking over transcripts, I realised that there was thread that could be traced back to the very first workshop in 2015 and crystallised in 2020 as a set of four questions about public involvement:

• How will ‘they’ value my knowledge? [where ‘they’ refers to any institution seeking to ‘do’ public involvement]
• On whose terms would I be getting involved?
• Why should I get involved?
• How can I get involved?

That triggered a new ‘what if?’

What if the reason I couldn’t make my thesis work was because I was starting with the wrong sort of questions? What would happen if I started with these four questions? The answer was clear. Everything falls into place.

My current ‘what if?’

What if instead of the traditional starting point of what academics know, I began with the four questions from the five women. What would that look like? Would it be do-able? And would it get me a doctorate?

The non-traditional thesis.

1. Start with what the women know.
2. Formulate aims and questions that would make sense to the different members of the public I have met over the decades who I’ve engaged with around the topic of public involvement (in research or something to do with health and social care).
3. Accept that, if the purpose of the Background chapter is to help locate the research in a way that is meaningful to the reader, what needs to be in the Background depends the your reader’s starting point. So if I intend to write for more than one ‘sort’ of reader, then I need to use the Background to lead each from their starting point to the starting point for this thesis journey.
4. Begin with what the women knew – ie begin with the findings.
5. Add the academic and practice literatures that are relevant to the findings.
6. Synthesise the different sets of knowledge to create new knowledge, by putting the academic literature at the service of the findings, and the findings at the service of the academic literature.
7. Communicate the ‘something new’ using methods of communication associated with different ways of knowing, while trying to make the communication accessible to academics, other professionals whose role includes ‘public involvement’ and at least some groupings of members of the public.  
8. Conclude that I will do research better in the future, describe a vision for a new way of researching that combines academic and outside-of-academic ways of knowing in epistemically just ways, and list ‘more research is needed’.

I don’t know the answer to the ‘what if?’

But I do know the game is back on.