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.