Thursday, October 4, 2012

Dissertation on shame. Chapter 12.3 The co-construction of reality

12.3 The co-construction of reality

Holstein and Gubrium (1995) reject the idea that clear answers are given by a respondent if the researcher is clear enough with regards to the grounds of the interview and they offer an alternative form of inquiry which they call the active interview. They say that interviews are social productions, where the researcher and respondent (storyteller) construct a story and give it a meaning together. Lincoln and Guba (1985) claim that the active interview is a constructional activity and that this not only has consequences for the production of scientific knowledge, but also for the way researchers collect data when they are conducting interviews. Flyvebjerg (2004) emphasizes the importance of the researcher’s knowledge of the context that is being studied.

If one thus assumes that the goal of the researcher’s work is to understand and learn about the phenomena being studied, then research is simply a form of learning…the most advanced form for understanding is achieved when researchers place themselves within the context being studied (Flyvebjerg 2004: 429).

Holstein and Gubrium (1995) describe the active interview as a reality-constructing and meaning-making occasion. In their opinion, all interviews are active interviews. Knowledge can be seen as a social construction and the active interview sets the stage for a co-construction of meaning between researcher and informant. The researcher and informant create meaning and knowledge together in a dialog with each other. Interviewing is not just a neutral exchange of questions and answers, but a collaborative effort. The more traditional perspective is that the researcher is an objective, neutral expert, and the informant is seen as a passive container filled with information. If the researcher asks the right questions in the right way, then the answers will also have a high validity. The informant has a truth that the researcher tries to unveil in a methodologically correct fashion. This is the conventional, positivistic perspective of interviewing that misjudges how complex, exclusive and uncertain each interview really is.

Kaare T. Pettersen

Reference:

Pettersen,Kaare Torgny, 2009: An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shamewithin the Context of Child Sexual Abuse. An Existential-Dialogical Perspectiveof Social Work within the Settings of a Norwegian Incest Centre. PhD 2009 Department of Social Work and HealthScience Faculty of Social Sciences and Technology Management. NorwegianUniversity of Science and Technology, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. Doctoral theses 2009: 184

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Dissertation on shame. Chapter 12.2 Practical wisdom

12.2 Practical wisdom

Ramírez (1995) discusses how we attain a clear reflective form of knowledge, scientific knowledge (Greek: episteme), through theoretical activity, and practical wisdom (knowledge) (Greek: phronesis) through long-term reflective action (which can be understood as co-constructing meaning together with others). We gain competence and skills (Greek: techne) by doing something productive, by working with something creative in an existing reality. Acting is not the same as doing, but it is through what we do that our actions can be seen and understood. Our skills (e.g. the skill of interviewing) differ from scientific knowledge, but at the same time they are a form of scientific knowledge, because they can explain, and help us in a productive activity. Explaining what one does can also be viewed as scientific knowledge. Theory and scientific knowledge are both activities and thereby capabilities which can be learned. Theory and scientific knowledge are forms of productive activity. According to Aristotle, the most important ability we need in order to live a good life is the ability to act using practical wisdom (Ramírez 1995).

One of the participants gives a good illustration of what practical wisdom means for her in conversations with sexually abused users of the incest centre.

Sally: I believe that when one has one’s own experience, then one can go so much further (.). Umm, so I really think that one can stand there in quite a different manner than someone who has never been there. That’s something I believe our users also notice. And that’s why they choose to use us, because we can use our experience. I can only speak for myself, but the fact that I have my experience and can use it in my conversations with others, and the fact that they might not have spoken to me about their experiences of shame if they hadn’t known about my experience, takes something negative and turns (.) it upside down so that one can use it in a positive way.

Sally has gained her experience through a lived life and built up the capacity to use it in specific situations; this demonstrates how practical wisdom can be used. Scientific knowledge can also be viewed as the ability to know, while skills are the ability to carry out productive activity. It is the concept of action (an understanding-creative activity) which leads to the practical wisdom that brings forth both the knowledge and skills needed to create a meaningful life. Gubrium and Holstein (1997) argue that the art of scientific research has to do with “the adroitness of practical reasoning” (Gubrium and Holstein 1997: 135). Practical wisdom does not dictate the outcome of a dialog with others, but appeals to outside rhetorical resources; participants become story telling and creative subjects, linking “together aspects of experience and thereby meaningfully articulate the stories they tell…Meaning, in other words, is a linkage” (Gubrium and Holstein 1997: 148). Latour (1987) also recommends that “if you want to understand what draws things together, then look at what draws things together” (Latour 1987: 60). Denzin (2002) writes that the search for meaning should be made in the stories people tell about themselves, because meaning is felt in the streams of experience of the individual.

Kaare T. Pettersen

Reference:

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Dissertation on shame. Chapther 12.1 Theory and practice

12.1 Theory and practice

I will first reflect upon the traditional dichotomy between theory and practice (which can be illustrated by a theoretical researcher investigating the field of practice) and discus an alternative perspective using Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 1984) as a starting point for bringing the fields of theory and practice closer together (Ramírez 1995). Then I wish to reflect upon active interviewing and grounded theory in a constructivist perspective, before I discuss how I have used this in the methodology and design of my exploratory study of the concept of shame.

Fontana and Frey (2005) argue that although interviewing others implies asking questions and getting answers, this task is much more difficult than it may seem at first. Russell Bishop (2005) writes that

Much qualitative research has dismissed, marginalized, or maintained control over the voice of others by insistence on the imposition of researcher-determined positivist and neo-positivist evaluative criteria, internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity ( Fontana and Frey 2005: 129).

Such a view maintains the distance between the objective, theory-seeking researcher (theory) and the subjective respondent who is the source of the empirical data (practice) that can be given to the researcher if the correct scientific methodology is used. Holstein and Gubrium (1995) say that the subjects being studied are usually seen as passive vessels containing answers to the experimental questions put to respondents by interviewers and that validity results from the successful application of the traditional interviewing procedure. Active interviewing represents an alternative perspective by being:

A form of interpretative practice involving respondent and interviewer as they articulate ongoing interpretative structures, resources, and orientations with what Garfinkel (1967) calls “practical reasoning” [1] (Holstein and Gubrium 1995: 16)

Ramírez (1995) speaks of theory and practice as two of our most common dichotomies. We spontaneously associate theory with thinking or knowledge, and practice with doing. The first sits in our head and the other in our hands. The question is whether one can think without doing, or do anything without thinking. Ramírez explains that we are responsible for our actions, because we are conscious of them. Thinking can therefore be considered a form of action.

Knowledge, Ramírez (1995) explains, is a problematic word, because we often use it to denote an objective result or a product. To know something is to have something inside one’s head, but also to manage or to cope with something. Knowing something is first and foremost an activity and involves the competence this activity forms in the individual. Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) writes about theory as a way of living. The Ancient Greek word for theory (Greek: theoria) does not mean the same thing as the word theory means as we use it today. We most often think of knowledge as an objective result (passive) while the Ancient Greeks were inclined to think of it as an activity (active). In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle did not see theory as the product of scientific activity, manifested in compositions and stored in texts or other information media. Aristotle used theory to refer to the activity that is produced when we investigate the world around us.

Scientific knowledge must not, according to Aristotle, be seen as the scientific product which is attained, or the objective result, but the subjective capacity to attain such results, through theoretical activity. Theory can thus be understood as a verb: a productive and creative activity, a form of doing. If doing means building a house, composing melodies, or caring for the sick, then theory is an activity concerned with using words in different situations in order to describe, codify and store these descriptions as knowledge which can be used by others.

Kaare T. Pettersen

Reference:

[1] Aristotle explains in Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, that practical reasoning or wisdom (Greek: phronesis or Latin: prudential), is about collecting experience over time and building up a capability to act in specific human situations.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Dissertation on shame. Chapter 12.0 Active interviewing

12.0 Active interviewing

The study which my PhD dissertation is based upon consists of an exploration of the concept and phenomenon of shame carried out by interviewing 16 women and three men from the Incest Centre in Vestfold, most of who were sexually abused as children. They were interviewed in five focus groups (Bloor et al 2001; Litosseliti 2003) and four of the respondents were also interviewed in in-depth interviews (Lincoln and Guba 1985) after the interviews in the focus groups were completed. All the interviews were conducted using the techniques of active interviewing (Holstein and Gubrium 1995). The intention of this section is to reflect upon the process and results of active interviewing from a constructivist perspective, using the group conversation mentioned above as an illustration.

The theme of this exploration is the concept and phenomenon of shame. I am concerned with how the concept is used and understood and how it manifests itself as a phenomenon. Shame can be investigated in many other ways, which I have not included in my exploration. A few of these possible research alternatives are; the functional anatomy of shame in the human brain through neuroscience (Franks 2006), the relationship between shame and evolution as described in evolutionary biology and social evolution (Darwin 1872/2007; Wilson 1975/2000; Hammond 2006), shame as a biological affect (Buck 1999), the role of shame in psychological disorders (Freud and Breuer 1895/2004; Tompkins 1963/2008; Lewis 1971), the relationship between shame and sex, gender, power and status (Kaufman and Raphael 1996; Shields, Garner, Leone and Hadley 2006), the relationship between shame and other self-conscious affects like guilt and pride (Tangney and Dearing 2002), the connection between shame and violence in destructive conflicts (Scheff and Retzinger 1991), shame and racial discrimination (Harvey and Oswald 2000), shame and culture (Lutwak, Razziono and Ferrari 1998; Bedford 2004; Ho, Fu and Ng 2004; Thonney, Kanachi, Sasaki and Hatayama 2006), shame and socialization (Cole, Tamang and Shrestha 2006), and shame as a political, existential and emotional state (Seu 2006).

These examples illustrate the large variation in the field of shame research. Guba and Lincoln (1989) have characterized the different forms of scientific research by using four methods of evaluation; measurement (first generation evaluation), description (second generation evaluation) and judgement (third generation evaluation). The above mentioned examples are all objectively oriented descriptive approaches. I intend to focus on an alternative approach which Guba and Lincoln (1989) call a responsive constructivist evaluation (fourth generation evaluation). It is responsive because the approach is an interactive and negotiated process between the researcher and the respondents, and constructivist because it is concerned with interpretation and hermeneutics (Guba and Lincoln 1989: 38-39). The responsive constructivist paradigm is therefore rather different from the scientific mode which is characterized by measurement, description and judgement. This alternative approach is also called a naturalistic perspective and the method used in the interactive and negotiated process is often called a naturalistic inquiry (Lincoln and Guba 1985).

Kaare T. Pettersen

Reference: