Research Methods in Practice

Identify the research methods you use in your practice or have used in a specific research project.

I am not a scientist, in any way, shape or form. I find it hard to adopt a positivist approach to research as it all seems too pedantic and requires far too much replication and quantification. (That is not to say that I cannot be analytical, or critical, it is just that my methods seem to be more fluid and intuitive than those required by scientific research.)

The research questions I have posed in the past have all lent themselves to qualitative methods of data collection and analysis: interviews, questionnaires, video observation and transcript, case-study and so on. Lack of hard, replicable and scaleable evidence does not represent failure or inadequacy to me. Coming as I do from a teaching/advisory background, I prefer my research to be used as a means of challenging existing practices and encouraging the exploration of new teaching strategies - this is best achieved if the outcome of the research is pragmatic and of direct, immediate relevance to teachers in the classroom (or whatever the context).

So, action-research, done by teachers and supported by me, or, in a different context, action research undertaken by me as a means of exploring my own practice, is my preferred modus operandi.

Research skills and how well I think I do them:

questioning - I am a fairly good questioner but often find other people's questions far more perceptive than my own.
reading - I read well and have a wide vocabulary. I have good scanning skills but need to read something several times before feeling confident about the overall meaning.
listening - I used to be a good listener, but impatience has come with middle age and now I find I have to consciously stop myself from interrupting. I am much better at listening to someone whom I do not consider to be an intellectual equal - I am more likely to come back too hastily at a peer (in the spirit of debate) rather than sit back and listen.
observing - I have sharp people-watching skills, something I use to good effect in my photographic practice as well as in research.
selecting - I am not good at selecting (shoes, chocolate, research questions...) as I usually want them all. I can, however, prioritise well, so having made my indiscriminate selection I can then impose a hierarchy according to importance, deadline or desirability.
visualising - I can model in my head the way something is going to be, for example knowing how a renovation project is going to turn out, how an exhibition is going to hang, how a training session is going to work. I do this instinctively and it is not a laborious task. This then allows me to formalise what I want to do knowing that I have an overall vision already in place. This vision is organic; it changes and grows as the formalisation take place, but it rarely ends up as a different beast entirely.
writing - I can write fluently, to deadlines. I am not good at concise, word-counted writing at first attempt but am able to precis and edit when required to do so. I have proof-read professionally in the past and am fanatically intolerant of poor grammar, syntax and spelling in presentations and published works. Lynne Truss is a goddess.
organising - I have become increasingly poor at this. Since leaving teaching many years ago and working freelance, I have adopted a scatter-brained approach to organising my life, my workflow and my desk. I do, however, know where everything is and am able to locate 'things' which are ostensibly lost: files on a computer, books on a shelf, thoughts in my head. I use IT to help me plan and organise several aspects of my professional and personal life, which helps enormously when it comes to information retrieval.
summarising - once I have grasped the key points of an issue (which might take some time) I can summarise effectively on paper, less well verbally due to my inability to speak without waffling.
presenting - I have had years of expertise in presenting to large and small audiences in numerous contexts, talking about my own work and that of others. I was always undaunted by this but, in recent years, the difficulties I have with my hearing have forced me to reconsider my ability to interact with an audience in the way I used to, (I can no longer 'work a room') and this has caused no small amount of panic on one or two occasions. As far as presenting work in concrete form goes, I think I can do this quite well and make considerable use of IT to produce single and multi-media ways of presenting work.
evaluating - I am much better at evaluating the work of peers and those under my tutelage than I am my own. I do this thoughtfully and constructively, but am not afraid to raise negative points where valid. With my own work, I am either too easily satisfied or fail to see the merits of what I produce - two contradictory statements - and of the two, I think the former is more often the case. (School report, 1967: "Helen is too easily satisfied with her work, she must learn to think about what she has done and how it could be improved by taking more time." No change there then...)

Identify key stages in your creative process - does it make sense to think of this as a journey? What shape is this process?

It might start with an idea... triggered by something I've read, or seen, or simply imagined. Or it might be a specific brief, such as photographs on a theme for an exhibition or competition. Quite often it will be as a result of travel, either locally or abroad.

By way of example, this is how I responded to a project to hang photographs in a local restaurant.

Take Three is a loose affiliation of three local photographers including me. We were invited to hang an exhibition in a local restaurant: the theme required by the owner was 'Norwich'.

Click here to see how the project panned out

Alternatives:

To see this is PowerPoint click here

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