Session Information
Session 7A, Educational Research Methodology (Part 3)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
09:00-10:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Volker Kraft
Contribution
Along with the narrative turn in the social sciences, the quality of research has become a more and more intricate issue. Action research reports are often narrative in nature and located in the context of the evolving experiences of those involved. In this paper, the problem of quality in action research narratives is addressed, and some principles for assessing the trustworthiness of narrative research reports are proposed. The issue is studied both at a theoretical-conceptual level and through a number of practical cases from our narrative-biographical research project "TeacherLife". As narrative researchers, we are not willing to accept an extreme relativistic stand, where everything is reduced to the level of language. In our view, the validity of a narrative cannot be established at the level of the text only, despite the fact that we always have to take the reader's contribution to the meaning into account. Still, we need some alternative concepts for discussing the problem of quality of narratives other than the traditional concepts of validity and reliability, which hold strongly positivistic connotations. We accept the two principles recently proposed by Richard Winter: he introduced the dialectical principle and the reflexive principle as alternative concepts for narrative action research. But in order to avoid relativism, we feel we still need something more. In this paper, we introduce two more principles to supplement Winter's proposal, which we call the historical continuity principle and the workability principle. The former emphasises the consciousness of the socio-historical frame of any action research project, and the latter is rooted in the pragmatist background of action research. According to these principles, a good action research narrative includes the following four perspectives. Firstly, the narrative acknowledges the past course of events that have shaped the present practices (the historical continuity principle). Secondly and thirdly, we agree with Winter about the reflexive nature of a good research narrative (the reflexive principle) and the dialectical way of elaborating the story so that the personal voices or "small narratives" of the participants are expressed as authentically as possible, even without any need for a closure, a fixed consensus or a "grand narrative" (the dialectical principle). Moreover, as the fourth principle, we propose a decisive criterion for successful action research, namely whether such research produces some useable practices which, in one way or another, are regarded as useful (workability principle). We are not proposing these criteria as an established checklist, and we are clearly aware of the contradictions between some of the principles. Still, in our everyday life as supervisors of action research projects, we have found these principles useful in evaluating narrative reports and encouraging people to write authentic narratives of their research work.
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