Suggestions for additional levels of contextual methodological information

In addition to the documentation detailed above, we suggest the following as important dimensions of qualitative methodology that also need to be documented:

I. Nature and evolution of researcher-participant relationships and interaction;
II. Epistemological, ontological and political frameworks of the project, and how these worked out in practice;
III. Processes of arriving at the interpretation of meaning, and the type of approach(es) utilised in data-analysis.

Let’s take each of these in turn, and illustrate them with exemplars from our own dataset.

I. Nature and evolution of researcher-participant relationships and interaction;

It is clear that data generated in interview, for example, does not simply get ‘elicited’. It is also, in an important sense, co-constructed. The interview situation is a particular kind of conversational event that is contrived by the interviewer according to his/her own agenda; it is not an everyday naturally occurring interaction, but an artificial construct. Take this interview with one of the staff members, Claire, at the science centre we studied. Claire is the centre’s joint ‘primary schools programme manager’, responsible for organising the educational school trips to the science centre. She has little to do with the exhibits hall, and mostly concentrates on creating and designing educational shows to be performed to visiting schoolchildren in the Centre’s science theatre. Let’s look at an interview extract:

BS: I'm going to move on - to ask some general questions about Techniquest. First a very broad question. How would you describe Techniquest?
CW: […]
I think, I think our main, our main role is trying to enthuse. I mean, I know from my, from my standpoint I've got to make sure that we're covering the curriculum and all this sort of thing. And, and there are obviously some people here who are - very much wanting to make everything fun and everything, you know - exciting and sometimes I have to say to them well it's great to get the kids all hyped up but on the other hand, sometimes the teachers want, want them to actually listen to what they're - you know, what the content is and go away with some knowledge as, you know as well, in the shows and that sort of thing. So, I suppose in my role I have to make sure that there's a certain degree of - serious content that goes in ºsometimes as wellº. But that's where it's nice doing the primary side of things cause there's always, light-hearted stuff you can put into the shows as well, so, that's good.

This extract is fairly typical of the interview in that it shows Claire presenting herself as aware of and responsive to the demands of teachers: that the Centre should not be open to the accusation of being just for ‘fun’ but should also be ‘serious’. Some of this alerts us to the traces of the wider social and political-economic context of the centre and its mission to be seen as an educational resource and not just a fun day out [link to end sub-section]. But it also bears traces of the ways in which Claire is trying to position herself as the person who knows and understands what teachers want. This expertise is crucial to her ability to legitimise her professional position in the Centre vis a vis other staff members, and in the context of the interview, to demonstrate this expertise to us.

This concern also comes through in her interactions with us as researchers in the phase of the fieldwork where we are trying to get in contact with a school in order to observe a school trip to the centre. The webpage here comes from our Methods Trail and shows a series of email exchanges that illustrate well the ways in which Claire manages to position herself as the gatekeeper to schools and as someone who will maintain control over the school-access negotiations (and not cede it to us). In the top right hand window of the screen, click through the series of emails using the ‘next’ link at the bottom of the window. You will see that Claire makes considerable efforts to maintain control over how we approach the school and how we present both ourselves and the science centre itself. We suggest that providing such behind the scenes data and also providing reflexive comment on it is a good way of conveying some, at least, of the complexity of the research relationships to subsequent re-users.

To II and III-->