Fallas que implican a la tarjeta T-CON

Grainger states:

‘Many things can and frequently do prevent the research process from flowing … even researchers with years of experience make false starts, discover circumstances they had overlooked and have to refocus, even admit the part played in their

research by sheer luck or other kinds of circumstance for which they can find no good scientific explanation’. (1999:34)

Grainger acknowledges the need to critically evaluate where processes have changed and alternatives have been considered due to pragmatic and other circumstances and the impact that this has had. This Chapter will describe

empirically the approaches used within this research, and reasons for this based on the theoretical issues discussed in the last chapter. I will critically describe the processes sequentially and explain how they were applied procedurally and practically. I will refer to appropriate literature as necessary which will connect to theories outlined in the previous chapter.

Context

Before describing the process further it is important to place the research into context (O’Toole:2006:73). I am working full time as a dramatherapy professional.

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My decision to begin a part-time PhD over five years at the University of Warwick was based upon my own an empirical experience and inter-disciplinary experiences after working as a drama educator for over twenty years, which led to work with many and varied groups of people (often with disabilities) using drama. This ultimately led to my training as a dramatherapist and I had a ten year career as a dramatherapist before commencing this research. As O’Toole emphasises, no researcher comes to their work from a neutral perspective (2006:33), and we each have to acknowledge our personal position in research. By embedding this research in a non dramatherapy university department which has a strong drama education research base, I feel I am able to address this balance and challenge my assumptions as a dramatherapist. I purposefully decided to self-fund so that I would not be beholden to any funding organisation or employer. O’Toole says that:

‘the basic tasks of all formal research are time consuming and labour intensive ... our research capacity will depend on our level of passion combined with our ingenuity in finding direct ways to poach time ... but we can’t just fit it in with what we are doing – in our own time. Sacrifices must be made’ (2006:10).

I made the decision to drop from working five days a week to four in order to accommodate this work. The way in which I carried out the field work, as I will describe later, has had to be done within the context of having one day a week, over a relatively short period of time. All decisions made throughout the research process have had to acknowledge the finite time and resources that I have been able to

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make available and this has ultimately impacted upon the size and scope of the research.

Chronological Overview of Research

Table 2 below gives an overall chronological overview of the research. I shall then discuss aspects in more detail and refer to appropriate methodological literature.

Table 2: Chronological Overview

Date Research Activity

April 2006 MPhil / PhD Commenced Sept 2007 Conference & author interviews Sep – Dec 2007 On-line survey

Autumn 2007 Initial Approach to Schools April 2008 University Upgrade to PhD

June 2008 Working paper published with response received June 2008 Commencement of primary log

Sep 2008 University ethical approval granted Dec 2008 Introductory session in schools Jan – April 2009 Field research in schools

April 2009 Interviews with teachers and student April 2009 Student survey

May 2009 Cleaver interview

June 2009 Dramatherapy midland interview June 2010 Commencement of secondary log

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June 2010 Video observation

Sept 2010 Critical observers view tapes Oct 2010 Analysis of data

Jan - Sep 2011 Completion of dissertation.

September 2007: Conference and Interviews

In September 2007 I delivered a workshop at the Annual Conference of the British Association of Dramatherapists entitled ‘Metaphor of The Sacrificial Body within Dramatherapy.’ As a therapist I was also acknowledging the sacrifices I was making in commencing a PhD. This was an early exploration of themes around dramatherapy in which I looked at the idea of Saint Genesius (discussed earlier) as suggested to me by Italian Dramatherapist, Salvo Pitzurella. I was also interested in the historical development of drama and its connection with ritual, religion and therapy. I was fortunate that leading dramatherapist Dr Roger Grainger took part in this workshop and gave his thoughts and views on religion, ritual, and dramatherapy. I felt at the time this was not simply a linear development (Appendix 1) but had more of a fluid liminal quality to it (Appendix 2). This early development assisted me in my later thinking which is reflected in the analysis section of this research.

I was also fortunate that two of America’s leading dramatherapists were attending the conference and I had an opportunity to carry out brief interviews with both David Read Johnson and Robert Landy. The questions were semi-structured and based around my developing research question, the differences and overlap

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between drama and dramatherapy. Read Johnson’s idea of a ‘bivariate approach’48, mentioned in the introduction, is one I shall return to later.

I was very fortunate to be able to speak with several leading figures in the field and this conference is a good example of the pragmatic and practical approach I had to take in this research. With limited time, resources and budget I had to ‘poach’ time as O’Toole has stated. At every step on this research journey I had to review critically where best to place my time and energy in order to achieve results.

September 2007 Onwards: Initial School Approach

In the autumn term of 2007 I began to approach schools in order to find appropriate case studies that would assist me with this project. My initial intention was to begin this work in the spring of 2008. However in reality it took 12 months. Having been let down by one school which did not respond to my approaches, the work in schools did not begin until the end of 2008 with the majority of the field work being carried out in the Spring of 2009, which I shall discuss shortly.

From a practical point of view in conjunction with my supervisor, it was decided I needed two schools in which the pupils would be broadly demographically similar in age, population and location. To choose one school in a leafy middle class or more rural location and another in an inner city would add additional contextual layers; choosing two schools in broadly similar urban areas would allow the focus, though

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never removed from contextual factors, to be more squarely on the differences in the content. I shall describe these schools from an ethnographic perspective later and refer to them as school ‘A’ where I was to carry out the drama teaching work and school ‘B’ where I was to carry out the dramatherapy group.

Hammersley (1990) in ‘Classroom Ethnography’ proposes that we need to be careful not to make assumptions about urban schools – suggesting that middle class

teachers are at war with working class or ethnic working class groups, as he intimates has been proposed in the past in ‘culture conflict theory’ (1990: 72). Hammersley concludes that there is no evidence that there is a perceived break down of order between working class students and teachers, but an avoidance of discussion around this issue is not helpful. Gallagher agrees, arguing that there is growing academic research to demonstrate that urban youth and ethnic urban youth in particular are not academically disengaged (2007:156). From the perspective of my research, choosing two urban schools was a contextual issue, as pupils who live and go to school in urban areas share broadly similar experiences of living in modern urban conurbations.

Gallagher (2007) discusses the idea of ‘the discursive spaces that mark schools (codes of conduct, profiles, mission statements philosophies)’ (2007: 26). She also adds that ‘in some cases, school spaces become purveyors of ideologies in overt and disturbing ways’ (2007:27). I shall discuss later (chapter 9) the impact of the social and philosophical positioning of each school and how it impacted on my research.

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I decided that students engaged in the research should have higher level abilities as they would potentially find it easier to articulate their thoughts and feelings both verbally and in written form. Class size was another issue that had to be revisited on a number of occasions. It was my intention originally to work with two groups of about 12 – 15 pupils as a maximum. In actual fact the reality was very different due to practical constraints in the two schools and in hindsight reflected a specific difference that does occur between a drama class and a dramatherapy group. I will discuss this later and throughout the data analysis as appropriate.

September to December 2007: Quantifiable Survey Practical Approach & Theoretical Under-Pinning.

I shall now describe the reasons for creating and using a quantifiable survey, explain how I did this procedurally and refer to appropriate literature and the impact that this had upon my thinking in preparing for the field work.

The teacher and therapist surveys (see appendix 4 and 5) were built and conducted on-line using a specialist on-line provider49. The surveys ran from September to December, 2007, and were the first practical elements to my research. I was able to use both a drama teachers’ website50 and two dramatherapy research websites51 to advertise these two surveys, one specifically for drama teachers in which sixty-eight responded and one specifically for dramatherapists in which one hundred and eight

49 www.qualtrics.com 50 [email protected] (U.K) 51

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responded. I also advertised the survey at the Dramatherapy conference 2007 (See Appendix 3).

As has already been stated by Grainger (1999) and O’Toole (2006) those involved in the arts and arts therapies tend to veer away from the notion of quantitative

research and fall into the latter part of the ‘trap’ described by Gorard as ‘numbers are rubbish’ (2001:5). However, an on-line survey could be targeted at a specific audience and this was an attractive, cost and time effective option. Additionally as stated earlier Cresswell and colleagues (Tashakkori:2003) have reminded us that a blending of quantitative and qualitative approaches is useful in that it adds to validity and Grainger (1999) has also stated the need for a variety of ‘languages’ within the research which uses both approaches.

Muijs (2004) describes two different kinds of quantitative research: experimental, which relates to research under controlled conditions, such as a random control trial; and non-experimental, which relates to surveys where the trial is not under

controlled conditions (2004:11)52. Muijs explains that this latter kind of survey is the most popular form in social science research because it is highly flexible and easier to generalise findings to real world settings (2004:39). This is the approach, for practical and economic reasons, that I used here as an addition to the main research

methodology of case study. Cresswell states:

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I have discussed in the last chapter my reasons for not opting for a random control trials approach in this research.

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‘A survey design provides a quantitative or numeric description of trends, attitudes, or opinions of a population by studying a sample of that population. From sample results, the researcher generalises or makes claims about that population.’ (2003:153).

This process, therefore, includes explaining numerical phenomena by using statistical models to analyse it. Creswell describes ‘the economy of the survey design and the rapid turnaround in data collection’ (2003:154) as being particularly helpful. Nesbary (2000) discusses the use of the internet as a way of being able easily and

economically to access and target potential respondents.

According to Babbie (1990) it is not only how the data is collected that matters but identifying the purpose of the survey. Hughes & Hayhoe (2007:97) feel that

considerable time needs to be given to constructing the survey, which should include an appropriate introduction as well as appropriate question formats. The range of question styles may include simple closed questions which require ‘yes’ or ‘no’ tick box responses; contingency questions, which filter respondents to questions that relate specifically to them; and multiple choice or scaled questions, which ask for a graded response using a Likert scale (Aday & Cornelius: 2006). Different formats will need to take on board, according to Hughes and Hayhoe, ‘questions that reveal attitudes … and questions that determine how much time the respondent spends on the internet’ (2007:96). A brief time should also be spent piloting the survey to make sure the questions flow appropriately. I asked several therapy colleagues to trial my on-line surveys before going live. I used a variety of the question styles

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within my on-line surveys in order to gain both closed and graded responses (See Appendix 4 and 5).

There is a range of simple and more complex approaches that can be used in order to analyse and describe the data. Moore (2009) states ‘the proper choice of graph depends on the nature of the variable’ (2009:7). He further describes how pie charts are useful to show the relationship of each category to the whole, whereas bar graphs are quick and easy to understand as the greater the percentage, the higher the bar. I have used both these approaches as ways of aiding data analysis in both the on-line survey and the student survey as a way of adding descriptive analysis (see chapter 8).

Muijs explains further that validity, reliability and generalizability are key concepts to quantitative measurement (2004:64). He states further that it is important to get the ‘right measurement instrument with the right manifest measures’ (2004:65). The measure of statistical significance or p-value, which I have discussed briefly in the last chapter, can be measured using an appropriate programme such as SPSS53 which can automatically carry out complex mathematical calculations. If the p-value is a figure below 0.05 then there is a 95% confidence level that the statistics are significant (Mujis: 2004:122).

O’Toole reminds us; a survey not only collects quantitative data but also can connect to qualitative elements at the same time. Using the Likert Scale (Aday & Cornelius:

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2006) was useful as questions could be asked quickly and I could easily gage the strength of opinion both quantitatively and qualitatively. As an example: one

anomaly which became of interest to me in the initial analysis of the survey was that whilst 73% of the drama teachers thought they had a basic understanding of

dramatherapy only 36% of them had ever read any dramatherapy literature, only 27% had ever spoken to a dramatherapist and only 11% had been part of a

dramatherapy group (See Chapter 8). This is an interesting mismatch in what drama teachers are saying they know about dramatherapy and how they have come to the position about what they think they know.

At this initial stage this led me to think that there might be issues around communication, on how dramatherapists communicate to teachers and how teachers understand the work of therapists; and that this might in some way relate to the differing contexts in which the two professions work and the actual languages they use. Practically these areas became two key chapters in my field work, chapters 9 and 10, in which I shall discuss the key concepts of context and discourse.54The survey and its results, and this specific quantitative methodological approach, impacted on my thinking at the time and therefore had a major impact on the direction of the research in its entirety.

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The final survey I carried out was much later (April 2009) with the students who attended the dramatherapy group and drama teaching class, asking them a short series of questions about their views on their enjoyment and effectiveness of the group or class they had attended. This survey only involved very small numbers of 18 in the teaching class and 10 in the therapy group; this was the number of students present on the day I carried out the survey. By carrying out an independent ‘t’ test we are able to see whether the mean (or average) between two samples differs (Mujis: 2004:131). The results (Appendix 7 question 2) show there is no statistical significance between the two sample groups. It is more difficult to draw conclusions from small and uneven samples such as these without using appropriate additional statistical analysis.

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April 2008: Upgrade & Methodological Approach: Some Changes & Impact upon Research Development.

At my upgrade I presented a paper soon to be published as part of Warwick’s ‘Working Papers’ (Holmwood: 2008). As part of this publication students were requested to ask a colleague or appropriate academic to comment on the proposed research. Phil Jones observed that I had written:

‘As this is a research project it will be essential to keep the drama/dramatherapy split in the two schools separate. Two separate school environments means less chance of ‘seepage’. Therefore the drama group will be aware ‘work’ is going on in another school but will not be made fully aware that it is specifically ‘dramatherapy’ and vice versa. Without this limitation there is potential for final results to be distorted’ (Holmwood 2008:66).

Jones argued in response to my paper that this was not necessary and that I should ‘engage the children critically with the task’ (Holmwood: 2008:73). He further stated:

‘To me, the idea that the children should not be made aware of each other seems not so useful … I want to argue that the work would be more powerful if the children were empowered and let in on the act of the research. The idea that the research will give a 'truer' picture if the children are left out of the reflective and research frame is hard to justify, I propose’ (Holmwood:2008:73).

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I agreed with Jones’s premise. The idea that each case study would be somehow ‘purer’ with one group being kept in the dark over the exact nature of the other is misplaced. This research was based primarily on case study with mixed methods approaches (Cresswell: 2003) so there is no control group. I have stated earlier that control groups were not an approach I intended to use due to both their complexity in setting up and in regard to ethical issues relating to who would be offered therapy and who would not. I could not govern the exact edges of influence on either group to be studied but this need not necessarily be seen as a weakness within the

research. This view of children as active researchers who are fully involved in the