In terms of the British Olympic Association, Great Britain and Northern Ireland might be regarded as being a ‘good Olympian’, particularly in the way that it has been fully
committed to Olympism and has conformed in the past to the amateur ideal, particularly in football. It is questionable though as to whether this enthusiasm has been shared with the broader public at all times, particularly in periods of history where the Olympic Games were not subject to the media saturation characteristic of the last thirty years or so. In terms of Olympic football specifically, it is also arguable as to whether public interest in a combined Great Britain team has ever gone beyond that which characterised general attitudes to the Olympic Games before 1948. As we have seen, the importance of football in the four component parts of the UK is more than significant and not to be underestimated. The relative disinterest historically afforded Olympic football on these islands cannot ordinarily be attributed to a lack of interest in the game itself.
Looking at the overall picture, one of the more interesting aspects of this analysis has been the lack of any acknowledgement of the distinctions between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales within a British, Olympic context. However, one need only remember the names of just a few of the sporting heroes from Britain’s Olympic history, for instance Mary Peters and Wendy Houvenaghel (Northern Ireland), Allan Wells, Eric Liddell and Sir Chris Hoy (Scotland) and Colin Jackson and Lynn Davies (Wales), to see that the Olympic Games has been an important arena for the expression of a particular form of British identity. This particular form of identity enables a balance to be struck between Britishness and the residual forms of identity that exist within Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, though the question of the relationship between Britishness and Englishness is in some ways more blurred. It is interesting however that English medal winners are celebrated as British too, yet it is in a way in which their Englishness is referred to implicitly rather than explicitly.
Although further research and analysis is required to consider British national identity and its relationship with Olympic competition more directly, it is clear that the Olympic Games allows for the celebration and expression of a unique British sporting identity. It is the uniqueness of this identity that makes the history of Great Britain’s participation in Olympic football all the more intriguing and interesting sociologically. But how can it best be researched?
Chapter Six: Methodology and Methods
The aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, it attempts to identify and discuss some of the key methodological and philosophical issues relating to discourses of nationalism and national identity, specifically those associated with the proposed inclusion of combined Great Britain and Northern Ireland football teams at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Secondly, it seeks to provide a framework for the inquiry to proceed satisfactorily. The arguments will thus be structured sequentially, and will start by considering the relevance to the research of the recurrent struggles between the concepts of positivism and interpretivism. Leading on from this will be an assessment of the pertinent ontological and epistemological perspectives that might inform an approach to the research. Finally, the chapter will move to a discussion of the research methods employed and offer a reassessment of their suitability for the specific research question.
6.1 Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches to Research
Discussions concerning the persistent conflicts between positivist and interpretivist approaches to the social sciences are endemic in discussions of methodology but are necessarily revisited in order to facilitate a full understanding of the specific challenges of research methodology and philosophy. The positivist tradition of research in the social sciences is informed by concepts of empiricism and naturalism, and insists that ‘only scientific methods produce knowledge’ (Lazar, 2004: 8). This reflects the belief that to successfully gain insight into social life, the research methods employed in the social sciences should be modelled on those employed within the natural sciences, with the specified aim being to ‘discover “laws” of
society that operate in a similar manner to the laws of nature’ (Filmer, Jenks, Seale, Thoburn and Walsh, 2004: 35). Positivism is also primarily concerned with the establishment of causal relationships between entities (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 8).
In contrast, interpretivism is concerned with identifying explanations and understandings rather than causal relationships, and recognises implicitly that
the social world is complex, that researchers and subjects are fundamentally and subjectively attached to the world, and that people define their own realities (Silk, Andrews and Mason, 2005: 7).
In these terms then, interpretivism concentrates on capturing and understanding ‘the particular behaviours, meanings and realities of individuals within particular social settings’ (ibid.). It is perhaps this conscious and concerted search for (subjective) meanings that sets interpretivism apart from positivism more than anything else. The disputes between positivist and interpretivist approaches are fundamental, although they remain of critical importance to the understanding, development and advancement of social scientific research. Interpretivists are referred to disdainfully by positivists as ‘journalists, or soft scientists’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 7) and their work is regarded to be profoundly ‘unscientific, or only exploratory, or subjective’ (ibid.: 8). Secondly, positivists contend that their own work is superior to that of qualitative researchers because it is undertaken within an objective and value- free research context (ibid.). Thirdly, positivists maintain that qualitative, interpretivist researchers have no way of verifying the claims to truth that they make (ibid.).
In an effort to deliver a theoretical riposte to these criticisms, a qualitative, interpretivist researcher would insist that it is not possible to ‘deal with phenomena in
the social world as we do with phenomena belonging to the natural sphere’ (Schutz, 1970: 110). Lazar reasons that
the interpretive tradition contends that the meaningfulness of the social world makes the application of scientific methods such as explanation by laws and causes inappropriate64 (2004: 18).
Lazar goes on to argue that instead, ‘the social sciences should seek to grasp the meanings that individuals and social groups give to their actions and institutions’ (ibid.). The essence of what Lazar is arguing here is that the interpretivist tradition of social research is founded upon the very subjectivities of which positivist approaches are so critical. Subjectivity and the meanings that social actors make of themselves and their social actions are of critical importance to interpretivists in explaining the social world.
Qualitative research is critical of the essentialist nature of positivist research, and its latent inability to gather rich and substantive research data, not least because of its reliance upon ‘more remote, inferential and empirical methods and materials’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 10). It can be argued effectively that positivist approaches to social science do not gather a sufficient depth of data to allow for an adequate attempt at understanding the social world. In his work on the nature of ethnography and cultural and sociological analyses, Clifford Geertz (1993) termed this ‘thick description’ (14). By contrast, quantitative, positivist inquiry is ‘deliberately unconcerned with rich description as such detail interrupts the process of developing generalisations’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 10).
In relation to values, it is clear that the interpretivist research approach acknowledges
the role that values play in the inquiry process (Guba and Lincoln, 2005: 197-8). This is not to say that this role is necessarily disregarded, ignored or interpreted recklessly. Moreover interpretivists recognise the role that values play on two levels, in determining firstly, the selection and design of the research process, and secondly, in relation to the impact of values on the lives and social actions of their subjects. Thus, interpretivist researchers
emphasize the value-laden nature of inquiry. They seek answers to questions that stress
how social experience is created and given meaning65 (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 8). The significance of this is that the analysis and interpretation of gathered data should be undertaken as much as possible in a value-free manner to maintain the credibility, reliability and validity of the work. In contrast, positivists emphasise the objectivity and empirical robustness of their work, which seeks to eradicate values wherever possible. One suspects, however, that at least in relation to the selection and development of a research agenda, the elimination of values and value judgements is a hard task for even the most committed of positivist researchers.
We shall go on to look at issues of truth and reality in the discussion of ontology below, but it is worth mentioning at this stage that positivists seek facts and causal relationships ‘that can be objectively obtained through the rigorous testing of hypotheses’ (Silk, Andrews and Mason, 2005: 6). This reflects not only that positivism is concerned with the discovery of truth but also that it is informed by empiricism and ‘a belief in the importance of observation and the collection of facts, assumed to exist prior to theories’ (Filmer et al, 2004: 35). This insistence that knowledge or theories can only be obtained from observation was criticised by Karl Popper, who stated that ‘theories can never be inferred from observation statements,
or rationally justified by them’ (1963: 42). In fact, Popper went on to argue his belief that theory exists prior to facts (ibid.).
Popper’s criticism of the inductive logic of empiricism was informed by his rejection of the notion that theories generated from observation can be generalised to include all instances of the phenomena being studied: ‘only the falsity of the theory can be inferred from empirical evidence, and this inference is purely a deductive one’66 (ibid.: 55). His view is summarised by Williams and May thus: ‘although any number of observations can never conclusively prove a theory, one disconfirming observation is sufficient to refute it’ (1996: 29). This view is suggestive of the potential pitfalls that positivists may face in relating empirical work to generalisable truths and serves to highlight an important conceptual problem evident within the positivist, empiricist tradition.
Before proceeding further, it would seem appropriate to summarise the arguments to date within the terms of the research to be undertaken. To reiterate, the intention is to uncover and examine discourses of nationalisms and national identity in relation to a Great Britain and Northern Ireland UK Olympic football team. In this respect, there remain numerous philosophical objections to the employment of a positivist sociological methodology. Nationalism and the nation are concepts and discourses that are constructed, reproduced, reconstructed and transformed by social action, and the interaction and intervention of people as social actors. Özkirimli (2005) is highly persuasive on this point when he concludes that ‘nations and nationalism may be socially constructed but they are not easily deconstructed’ (166). Smith (1998) is also
significant in this respect when he argues that
the nation has no reality independent of its images and representations. But, such a perspective undermines the sociological reality of the nation, the bonds of allegiance and belonging which so many people feel (137).
Consequently, the intention is to gain an in-depth understanding of the way that these concepts are felt and experienced by people, the meanings that they produce and the way that ideas about nationalism and national identity in these islands may be informed, represented, reinforced or transformed by the existence and/or absence thereof of a combined Great Britain Olympic football team at the London 2012 Olympic Games. In this case, agreement can be found with the assertion that ‘researchers find that people’s words provide greater access to their subjective meaning than do statistical trends’ (Lazar, 2004: 14). An interpretive framework can thus be said to be of vital relevance to the sociological and cultural study of sport and to this research in particular.