RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

PLANNING NATURALISTIC RESEARCH 171
documents and field notes
accounts
notes and memos.
Planning naturalistic research
In many ways the issues in naturalistic research
are not exclusive; they apply to other forms of
research, for example identifying the problem and
research purposes; deciding the focus of the study;
selecting the research design and instrumentation;
addressing validity and reliability; ethical issues;
approaching data analysis and interpretation.
These are common to all research. More specifically
Wolcott (1992: 19) suggests that naturalistic
researchers should address the stages of watching,
asking and reviewing, or, as he puts it, experiencing,
enquiring and examining. In naturalistic
inquiry it is possible to formulate a more detailed
set of stages that can be followed (Hitchcock
and Hughes 1989: 57–71; Bogdan and Biklen
1992; LeCompte and Preissle 1993). These eleven
stages are presented below and are subsequently
dealt with later on in this chapter (see http://
www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415368780 –
Chapter 7, file 7.2. ppt):
1 Locating afieldof study.
2 Addressing ethical issues.
3 Decidingthe sampling.
4 Finding a role and managing entry into the
context.
5 Finding informants.
6 Developing and maintaining relations in the
field.
7 Datacollectionin situ.
8 Datacollection outside the field.
9 Dataanalysis.
10 Leaving the field.
11 Writing the report.
These stages are shot through with a range of issues
that will affect the research:
Personal issues: the disciplinary sympathies of
the researcher, researcher subjectivities and
characteristics. Hitchcock and Hughes (1989:
56) indicate that there are several serious
strains in conducting fieldwork because the
researcher’s own emotions, attitudes, beliefs,
values, characteristics enter the research;
indeed, the more this happens the less will
be the likelihood of gaining the participants’
perspectives and meanings.
The kinds of participation that the researcher
will undertake.
Issues of advocacy: where the researcher may be
expected to identify with the same emotions,
concerns and crises as the members of the
group being studied and wishes to advance
their cause, often a feature that arises at the
beginning and the end of the research when
the researcher is considered to be a legitimate
spokesperson for the group.
Role relationships.
Boundary maintenance in the research.
The maintenance of the balance between
distance and involvement.
Ethical issues.
Reflexivity.
Reflexivity recognizes that researchers are inescapably
part of the social world that they are
researching (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 14)
and, indeed, that this social world is an already
interpreted world by the actors, undermining the
notion of objective reality. Researchers are in the
world and of the world. They bring their own
biographies to the research situation and participants
behave in particular ways in their presence.
Reflexivity suggests that researchers should acknowledge
and disclose their own selves in the
research, seeking to understand their part in, or
influence on, the research. Rather than trying to
eliminate researcher effects (which is impossible,
as researchers are part of the world that they are
investigating), researchers should hold themselves
up to the light, echoing Cooley’s (1902) notion
of the ‘looking glass self’. As Hammersley and
Atkinson (1983) say:
He or she [the researcher] is the research instrument
par excellence. Thefactthatbehaviourandattitudes
are often not stable across contexts and that the
researcher may play a part in shaping the context
becomes central to the analysis....Thetheorieswe
Chapter 7