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Chapter Eleven – A Critical Reflection on the Study – Page 327
made my life easier and more worthwhile, but did they achieve more than this, and did
they limit what I might otherwise have done?
I consider that the research methodology, one product of this constellation of factors,
has contributed a great deal to the study. From clinical and consulting experience, I
know that the dynamics of consultation groups in a range of fields will be influenced in
their operation (either positively or oppositionally) by the dominance of theorisations of
the field where they have a role. Again, as noted above, it was the frustration that I
experienced in a research consultation group with a very different theoretical orientation
which led me to look for a methodology consonant with the field under study. This
allowed me to reflect the nature of the task of the group which I am studying (as in the
Task focus in Chapter Seven) in my approach to the research question and to the
analysis of the data. It would have been possible, say, to carry out an Applied Behaviour
Analysis (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968) of the data on the group in the project, but this
would do a kind of violence to the understanding of the phenomena that I have worked
to elaborate.
Pulling back to take a wider view of the design, there are many other ways in which the
same research question, namely, how does the learning group operate, how might it
contribute to the primary task of the teaching and learning, how it might be stopped
from hindering the primary task of the teaching and learning, and how might the
answering of these questions might have application outside of the field in question,
could have been answered. As noted above in ‘Multiple modes of data collection’, the
range of possible approaches includes: observation; surveying of participants by
questionnaire; interviewing of participants as individuals, as sub-groups and as a whole
group; and a range of forms of participant observation, from almost complete