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.

Of elephants and ants (Part 2)

My elephant (PhD thesis) is breaking down nicely into its parts.

I have a structure for the thesis, and a narrative thread that is probably strong enough to hold the weight of the thesis. I've done first drafts of parts of it. I'm knuckling under this week to tackle my first full scale chapter - The Ethics Divide - which means rounding of a chunk of data analysis, deciding where to draw the line on the literature work (and naturally doing more reading because more has been published since I did my last search), then creating a coherent chapter.

My current problem is that the ants keep crawling everywhere.

Give yourself a whole 14 days to work on Chapter 9, I said.
Clear the decks from family and work responsibilities, I said.
Start early in the morning and remain focused, I said.

When will I learn????

• Two non-negotiable, non-Chapter 9 deadlines have landed for this Friday.
• I've got decisions to make about family matters.
• My character means when I panic easily when I can't work out how the elephant fits together - which means I end up blogging, or tweeting, or on Facebook to distract myself [progress though, I'm not also compulsively eating sweet food]
• And the influx of emails, oh the emails.

The reality of life, especially as a mature student, is that there will never be a whole 14 days to focus on one thing. I don't even get that on holiday.

What I can do is set up barriers for the ants to shield the elephant while the ants accumulate and then go eat the lot of them - at a prearranged time each day.

And I can try to discourage the ants from crawling towards my elephant in the first place (things like telling everyone in my life that I won't be playing my usual roles for 14 days then negotiate with them what roles they will pick up and what will be left undone).

I can give myself procrastination time-limits when stuck. [five minutes and I'm off twitter and blogger and back to the grindstone]

I can use the range of techniques I've got for de-panicking so I can restart focused work on Chapter 9. And today that means ignoring the elephant and enjoying the simple, effective elegance of Quirkos to re-analyse the data before tomorrow tackling the literature.

Decision made = focus restored - for now.

Welcoming myself home

It's a long time since I blogged.

This time a year ago, I didn't honestly think I would ever come back to my PhD. A lot has happened since then.

Here's the quick version:

• moved to Swansea
• husband (newly redundant) started exploring botanical papermaking. Quick plug for his Etsy shop and Twitter account
• have new supervisors and a new approach to the PhD
• work part time in Barod and study PhD part time
• just starting to regain confidence and find my feet

We've given me until the end of September to get back to having fun with theory, enjoy getting to know and think with new people, and play with concepts.

1st October is time enough to start thinking about the shape of the PhD and what information I will need. For now, I am happy, creative and (ironically perhaps) enjoying the freedom to make the connections that lead to long term research impact.

Along the way, and believe it or not, it's part of the playing, I'm going to have a go at consulting on a topic using three methods. To play fair, I'm reading up on how to do them so I can try to use the methods in the way they are intended. The terms Focus Group and World Cafe are banded around so loosely that it's been an eye-opener going back to literature about them. My third method is Barod's Coffee Shop Conversations. It's almost time for a blog about them - but not quite! I'm still working out quite how to explain them clearly. Let's just say for now that the Coffee Shop Conversations method is a world apart from other public consultation methods, but not a million miles from what some ethnographers get up to down the pub.

So, I'm back home. Back where I love. Back where I'm relaxed. Back using a blog to help me think aloud and letting me stash that thinking in a place where even I find it again.

'Giving voice'

I’ve been struggling with the concept of a PhD. So I decided to go back to basics and re-lay some foundations.

In the process I found I really helpful chart to match purpose for doing research with a research strategy (original from Martyn Denscombe’s The Good Research Guide), which I played around with slightly (based on John Hughes'. and Michael Crotty’s work):

Do I want a strategy to:

• Understand the complex relationship between factors in a particular social setting? – case study
• Describe cultural practices, and interpret social interaction within a culture? – ethnography
• Understand things through someone else’s eyes; describe the essence of a personal experience? Phenomenology
• Clarify concepts or produce new theories – grounded theory
• Explore a new topic and provide new insights – grounded theory
• Solve a practical problem – action research
• Produce guidelines for best practice – action research
• Give voice to individuals’ lives and their stories - narrative research

I was contemplating which was the right approach for me (personally) and which was the right approach for the research question (which would need to change if it didn’t lead to an approach that was right for me!!).

It got me thinking about the whole area of ‘giving voice”’. 

• Yes, I want people to have their voices, and have their voices heard.
• But do I want to be someone with the responsibility to ‘give voice’?
• Who am I to be giving people what is already theirs by right?

[There’s also the small philosophical issue of how anyone can ‘give voice’ accurately to someone else’s story, even when the stories are told by them using their own words and transcribed from an audio recording – but that’s for another blog]

And that got me thinking about disability and ‘inspiration porn’, and the ‘poverty porn’ that is little more than voyeurism under the cloak of being caring and compassionate.  That is often done with the intention of 'giving voice' to people, but is just telling stories about them.

If you aren’t sure what I mean by inspiration and poverty porn, it’s the kind of stories and research you see that objectifies people (hence the ‘porn’) while holding them up as objects of pity or inspiration. It makes the people who aren’t being objectified feel good about themselves, without calling for any change to an oppressive status quo.

Well, I’ve come to at least one decision from going back to basics.

I've done enough ‘giving voice’ to people who tell their stories, spill their guts, expose raw places, all in the hope that something will change for others (or themselves) as a result. I’ve done for almost 25 years as part of policy consultation work. I’ve done it on and off as part of social research. And I’ve read other people’s social research and consultation reports.  And I can count on one hand the times that people’s hopes of change have been realised.

So 2016 is the year I stop ‘giving voice’ to people. I refuse to be complicit in a game where people spill their guts to me in the usually fruitless hope of change.

2016 will be the year I work my socks off to find ways people can find and use their own voices, directly and effectively, have influence, create change and generally unsettle institutions that need unsettling.

I’m not sure that solves the problem of what strategy to use for my PhD research, but it has helped me work out what I don't want to do - and that's a good start.

It could be an interesting 2016.

Research questions and rivers

In the recent flooding, more than one river burst its banks so thoroughly that it lost any sense of having banks, and certainly no traces of the banks are visible to an observer. At this point, it is more a mass of water than anything identifiable as a river.

I can play for hours in water and I enjoy getting to understand the currents, the feel, the properties of that untrammelled water. But eventually, for the sake of the countryside, and in particular for the sake of making sure the water gets from A to B, we need that river back. In places, the water will find its own new channels through which to flow. In places, I will need to rebuild, channel and trammel the water into a river that flows where I want it to flow.

As with water, so with research questions. There’s a time for flooding – after all, the land can be much richer and productive after a good flood. As academics, we need space to let our brains overflow if we are going to be creative, imaginative researchers. But there’s also a time for safe, well-contained rivers. And crafting a research question is definitely one of those times.

It’s been a hard and frustrating couple of months with the PhD. I’ve felt as if I was getting somewhere, only to discover I was going round in overlapping circles. In the last few days, I think I’ve worked out both the source of the problem and a way to conceptualise the solution.

I have been filling my head with epistemology, ontology, ethics, standpoints, theoretical perspectives, methodologies, approaches, ways of seeing the world, ethical stances for a long time now. For a while, my river held as the water levels rose. Then it burst its banks – not hard as I tend not to build high flood defences. But then I continued adding a deluge of not-terribly-critical-but-highly-creative thinking to the swirling and increasingly murky water. I’ve been paddling around in the flood – sometimes swimming, sometimes half-drowning – for the last few months.

And yesterday I began to realise that this is why I cannot define my all-important research question.  I’d worked out over the last few weeks that the water was getting very murky and that my thinking might be creative but wasn’t very “researcher-like”.  But it was only in the last week, thanks to an amazingly perceptive (and patient) supervisor, that I caught sight of the serious threat posed by the flood and remembered I was supposed to be navigating a river. In practical terms, the realisation came via reflecting on a set of immensely helpful questions from my supervisor that she had sent to help me think through why I was going round in circles.  

The source of the problem, and the germ of the solution is this: If a research question acts as the river banks that determine the edge and course of the river, then it is impossible to craft a research question while still splashing and half-drowning on a flood plain.

So, back to basics. Yesterday, force myself to use a flow chart/table to funnel my thinking from an overarching topic down to a specific question, and from that the questions I will need to be able to ask of my data to answer that specific question. That really helped me work out the direction the river should be flowing. It also showed me that I’d been forgetting my overarching topic in the hunt for a workable research question. Simply looking wider broke through the blockage to focusing my sight more narrowly.

Today, I’ve gone back to a rigorous and focused overview of epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology to remind myself where the river banks could lie. Next challenge is to work out where the banks need to be to get the river flowing in the direction I want – in other words to pick a suitable way of seeing the world and stick to it. In the process, I accept that I may realise I need the river to flow in a slightly different direction because of where I feel the need to put the banks.

Tomorrow, it’s time to double check that my methods suit the data I will need in order to answer the questions that my theoretical perspective allow me to ask. And if I manage that, then I reckon that’s the research question sewn up and I can knock off happily for the Christmas break. The challenge in the new year will be to reduce the volume of water (new ideas, creative stimuli) that fill up the river so it doesn’t go into flood again.