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Chapter Three – Research methods and their use - Page 92
interest to contrast the picture that this methodology can draw with one that takes a
more neo-realist perspective and obtains triangulating data, but that task was beyond the
scope of this project.
As I registered my draft proposal at AUT and began to work towards my candidature, I
already had a significant volume of data and permission to use it. Since this had been
collected relatively unobtrusively (that is, alongside normal professional practice as a
trainer), and since I had by then decided that the design of the study would be emergent
and indeed that the methodology would be one product of the study, it had not been
necessary in order for the study to commence that I should articulate the research
methodology in detail beyond that it would be a qualitative study (and indeed, that it
was important to allow a methodology to emerge). The methodology that did emerge
was elaborated in Chapter Two Part Two: here it remains to articulate the principles of
that methodology into methods. Since this methodology has had to be discovered in
Chapter Two Part Two and fleshed out here, the work in this chapter is another part of
the original contributions of the thesis.
Research methods - The contribution of Alex Stewart’s model
In a way that I suspect is familiar to anthropologists, I only began to be fully clear about
my research methods towards the end of my study. After I had finally articulated my
methodology and spelled out my methods of collection and transformation of data, I
came across the monograph by Alex Stewart (1998), The Ethnographer’s Method. I
have made considerable use of this text since, and in particular, I have used it to review
my own approach. I will elaborate something of Stewart’s model here.