My philosophical position in conducting this research can be considered in terms of both epistemological and ontological assumptions (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, pp. 19-22). From an epistemological perspective I am concerned what constitutes truth and how it is constructed and hence, what claims to truth or knowledge can be made? This position is based on my ontological assumptions about the nature of existence, of being, of reality (Grbich, 2007, pp. 4-5).
The study uses a thematic analysis of the transcripts from semi-structured interviews with school leaders and falls within a generic qualitative research paradigm rather than a particular qualitative research tradition such as Ethnography or Case Study. However, from a methodological viewpoint, we could argue that the semi-structured interview, between
professional peers, is more akin to participant observation seen in ethnographic studies, than the interviews (Platt, 1981, p. 75) used in other qualitative studies.
Qualitative research methodologies can be considered within the constructivist and interpretivist paradigms, which have very much informed the way the research has been conducted. This means that there is ‘an interpretative, naturalistic approach to the world’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 3). The research has a focus on ‘…what individual actors say and do’ (Hitchcock and Hughes 1995:12) where ‘social reality is constructed out of a plurality of subjective meanings.’ (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p.95; see also Schwandt, 2000, p.193 and Lincoln and Guba, 2000, p.165). Qualitative research is therefore ‘constructivist’ in that reality is constructed rather than discovered. It is also ‘relativistic’, in that knowledge is both experiential and personal (Stake 1995, see also Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p.165). There is a ‘transactional’ and ‘subjectivist’ epistemology in this paradigm which implies that the researcher and the object of the research are ‘interactively linked’ so that findings are ‘literally created’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p.111; see also Coghlan & Brannick, 2005, p.5; Cohen & Manion, 1989, pp.32-38) or co-constructed (Simons, 2009, p. 23). There is also an acknowledgement of the researcher’s subjectivity and the fact that life experience frames the interpretation of events by the researcher (Grbich, 2007, p. 8). This then leads to a need for a reflexive position, as discussed, where I, as researcher, must be both reflective and self-critical (Grbich, 2007, p. 10).
The interview is the main research method in this study which is interpretivist and constructivist in both the interview event and in terms of data analysis. During the interview, participants are telling their story of their experience. This ‘story’ metaphor reminds us that participants create order from experience in the form of the story to make sense of their lived experience, and that they make decisions about what is included or excluded and hence this is both a creative and interpretive (Riessman, 1993, pp. 1-3). In analysing the data, any abstractions from the study are essentially inductive, in that they ‘come up’ from the data, attempting to capture the meanings given by participants in trying to make sense of the world (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007, pp. 4-8).
A critique of a qualitative stance
Having established that this is a qualitative study and acknowledged my position, in terms of the nature of truth and knowledge as constructivist, subjectivist, interpretivist and naturalistic, some critiques of this position should be noted. In terms of a post-modernist critique, we would consider the author’s authority and linguistic writing style portraying ‘reality’ in a specific way. It is both contextual and rhetorical in that the writing is situated in a view of society and its norms and that the writing has certain expressive conventions which guide it (Alvesson &
Sköldberg, 2009, p. 219). A further criticism would be that if we only focus on a few participants in research rather than multiple voices, it is then hard to represent the multiple realities and ambiguities of all individuals. However, although accounting for many different views can provide a ‘common immunity’ against criticism, this additional focus on social construction can have an anti-theory tendency (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009, pp. 36-39) and hence the work is in danger of losing its research purpose.
A further criticism concerns the issue of intersubjectivity. Here, the researcher attempts to reconstruct the views of participants from research data. This becomes problematic because we must ask if I have truly accessed the understanding of participants. Are we also in danger of concentrating too heavily on the smaller details in the data as opposed to the ‘bigger picture’? This could then result in the research giving a superficial account of participants actions(Grbich, 2007, p. 9). Conversely, to not attempt this reconstruction will lead to a methodological approach which is less true to its core epistemological and ontological assumptions. Hence, we return to the need for transparency and reflexivity.
One last consideration in this study is the notion of generalisability and how this applies to qualitative research. Generalisations can be described as ‘assertions of enduring value that are context-free’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000b, p.27). These general conclusions can give a sense of external validity if generalizations are possible when applying the findings of one study to others (Merriam, 1998, p. 207). This is very much a way of viewing the conclusions from a study used in quantitative research paradigms. However, this is not possible in a smaller scale qualitative study, given that the interviews with headteachers create ‘unique, particularized knowledge’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000b, p.27 see also Merriam, 1998, pp.207-12).