INTRODUCTION – CHOOSING THE TOPIC AND AN APROPRIATE RESEARCH METHOD

1 INTRODUCTION – CHOOSING THE TOPIC AND AN APROPRIATE RESEARCH METHOD

It is not easy to decide on a research topic relating to the organiza- tion and management of your own school, particularly if you hope your study will be of use to the school and of interest to your col- leagues. I began by discussing possible topics informally and made one formal proposal to the Pastoral Committee for a study of rela- tionships between the school and parents: for various reasons, this was abandoned. In the end, the one topic that seemed to interest everyone I consulted was ‘Power and Decision-making’.

I was very aware of the problems of conducting research on such

a wide topic, involving so many individuals who together com- prise a complex institution. Philosophically, I subscribe to the phenomenological view of reality as described by Greenfield (1981). As I see it, this leaves the researcher of an institution with two related problems:

(1) The institution has no objective reality: its reality exits only in the interpretations of its members.

(2) The researcher cannot make any inquiries without affecting

the reality of the institution: any questions or discussions will cause all the different interpretations of reality to shift and change; even the knowledge that the research is being under- taken will have an effect on the actions and perceptions of the participants.

Researching within one’s own school, the metaphor of the eye of the fly seems particularly apt: every individual (single facet of the eye) has a different perspective and the researcher is herself only one of these facets; the true picture is perceived by the eye as a whole from the combined perceptions of all the individual facets; Researching within one’s own school, the metaphor of the eye of the fly seems particularly apt: every individual (single facet of the eye) has a different perspective and the researcher is herself only one of these facets; the true picture is perceived by the eye as a whole from the combined perceptions of all the individual facets;

To some extent I could overcome these problems by using the ‘grounded theory’ approach described by Glaser and Strauss (1967), and by adopting a technique of ‘progressive focussing’ as described by Dearden and Laurillard (1976). In this way I could hope to ensure that the focus of my study arose from the real con- cerns of my colleagues rather than being imposed by my own interests. However, I also had to find a way of giving validity to my interpretations of the data, as well as ensuring that I did not do vio- lence to the delicate balances of power and relationships within the institution.

The problem was stated most succinctly by the Head of Maths at a later stage of the study when I hoped I had already identified a way of coping with it:

I’ve mixed feelings about this being for any purpose other than your research. It is interesting and might well be useful to bring it into Parkside, rather than just keeping it to yourself but it is biased. By bringing it to the faculty heads as you have done it has now become a piece of Parkside. (He questions the rightness of this.)

I explained the precautions I was taking but I do not think I satis- fied his anxieties, mainly because to preclude bias he was looking for a piece of research which could be replicated as in the scientific paradigm. Within the parameters of qualitative research, a solution did, however, seem possible. It lay in Habermas’s linked concepts of the ‘ideal speech situation’ and the ‘communicative commu- nity’ as described by Winter (1984). If I could allow staff members to participate in analysing my data, so that I and they became ‘active partners’ in ‘authenticating’ the interpretations, then my study would have a validity in terms of the reality of the fly’s eyes. In other words, I wanted a method of achieving the ‘communica- tive validation’ described by Terhart (1982), in which ‘a research result can be regarded as being valid, if a consensus is reached among the participants in the research process’. I was not, however, interested in a study that was purely descriptive, and I was aware of the danger of producing a piece of very dull research if I allowed the search for consensus to guide my research methods from an early stage. These are the procedures I adopted:

78 ACTION RESEARCH

ACTION RESEARCH FROM THE INSIDE: A TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE

I began with a series of 13 interviews with members of staff at all levels in the school’s formal structure, from the caretaker to the Acting Head. I used the following schedule of open ended questions: