Complete thesis - Murdoch University

• the increased importance of the provision of circumstances for participants to act andreact in the context of their environment• the acceptance that changing boundaries for the study are determined by the problemunder investigation (adapted from Lincoln (1985))• the dependence of outcomes on the researcher’s perspective of the selection and definitionof the research domain; the selection and rendition of existing theory; the definitionof the research question; the design of the research framework; the selection, definitionand operationalisation of variables; and the measurement of variables (Clarke, 2000)which leads to a requirement that multiple interpretations of the same phenomena must beallowed for.Clarke (2000) suggests strategies of choice can be unequivocally interpretivist in their style:• descriptive/interpretive research – empirical observation is subjected to limited formalrigour. Controls over the researcher’s intuition include self-examination of theresearcher’s own pre-suppositions and biases, cycles of additional data collection andanalysis, and peer review• focus group research – involves the gathering of a group of people, commonly membersof the public affected by a technology or application, to discuss a topic. Its purpose isto surface aspects, impacts and implications that are of concern• action research – the researcher plays an active role in the object of study (eg by actingas a change-agent in relation to the process being researched). While accepted as a validresearch method in applied fields such as organisation development and education, ithas been largely ignored within IS (except for the work of people like Checkland (1991))• ethnographic research – applies insights from social and cultural anthropology to thedirect observation of behaviour and seeks to place the phenomena studied in their socialand cultural context. Ethnography has become widely used in the study of informationsystems in organisations and is seen as a method whereby multiple perspectives can beincorporated (Myers, 1997)• grounded theory – seeks to develop theory that is grounded in data systematically gatheredand analysed. It suggests that there should be a continuous interplay between datacollection and analysis to enable the disciplined extraction of a theory-based descriptionof behaviour, to be based on empirical observations. Myers (1997) suggests that, since182