Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences by edited by Kathleen deMarrais & Stephen D. Lapan

Author:edited by Kathleen deMarrais & Stephen D. Lapan [DeMarrais, Kathleen Bennett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Education, Research, Methodology, Educational Studies, Education - Research - Methodology, Social sciences - Research - Methodology, Social sciences
ISBN: 9780805836509
Publisher: Mahwah, N.J. : L. Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
Published: 2004-01-15T09:08:52.315000+00:00

12. CRITICAL INQUIRY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

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of fruitful interruptions that demonstrate the multiplicity of meaning-making and interpretation” (p. 94).

In analyzing interview data, Woodbrooks (1991) made extensive use of two familiar qualitative practices of validity: member checks and peer debriefing (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Using both to purposefully locate herself in the contradictory borderland between feminist emancipatory and poststructural positions, she attempted to interrupt her role as the Great Interpreter, “to shake, disrupt, and shift” her feminist critical investments (Woodbrooks, 1991, p. 103). Peer debriefing and member checks were used to critique her initial analysis of the data, her “perceptions of some broadly defined themes that emerged as I coded the transcripts”(p. 132). After reanalyzing the data and her original analysis, Woodbrooks sent a second draft out to participants and phoned for responses. This resulted in a textual strategy that juxtaposed the voices of the White female researcher with those of the African American female participants.

In her textual strategy, Woodbrooks first tells “a realist tale” (Van Maanen, 1988) that backgrounds the researcher’s shaping influence and foregrounds participant voices. Here the voices of the women she interviewed are presented, organized around the emergent themes of assertiveness, cultural diversity, identity construction, and the double jeopardy for women of color. Each “realist tale” is interrupted with “a critical tale” that reads the data according to Woodbrooks’

theoretical investments. Here Woodbrooks used feminist and critical theory to

“say what things mean”as she theorized out of the words of the African American women research participants presented in the realist tale. Finally, in a third-person voice, she tells “a deconstructive tale” that draws on participant reactions to the critical tale. Here, she probed her own desire, “suspicious of . . . the hegemony

[of] feminism” (p. 140) in her analysis. Her feminist analysis marginalized both African American identity as a source of pride and strength (ascribing it totally to gender) and participant concerns with male/female relations. “This strategy

[of feminist consciousness-raising] perpetuates feminism as a white middle class project and trivializes the deep emotional ties that black women share with black men” (p. 200). In sum, holding up to scrutiny her own complicity, Woodbrooks created a research design that moves her toward unlearning her own privilege and decentering the researcher as the master of truth and justice via her expanded use of the familiar techniques of member checks and peer debriefing.

How might you use Woodbrooks’ strategies of presenting a realist, critical, and deconstructive tale in your own work?

A third example of feminist poststructural work is that of an Australian dissertation student, Erica Lenore McWilliam. In a study of how students talk about their needs in preservice teacher education, McWilliam (1992a, 1992b) developed a research design that elaborated three research moments. First, researcher TLFeBOOK

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