‘Research strategy’ is the term used by Bryman (2012: 715) to describe ‘a general orientation to the conduct of social research’, particularly with respect to the use of qualitative or quantitative approaches. To show how the research strategy for this study was determined, this section will consider the characteristics of the answers required by the research questions first set out in section 2.4, and discuss research approaches that are required to furnish appropriate responses.
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Research question 1 asks: ‘How do domestic energy bill-payers in Britain interpret
“control” in the context of home energy use and demand-side response?’ As noted by Hargreaves et al. (2015: 1022), while control is often a ‘side-issue’ in research in the area of home energy use and automation, it is rarely the primary focus of research. For that reason, while there are many attempts to understand the role played by perception of control in satisfaction and technology acceptance (e.g. see Hellwig (2015)), no systematic attempt has been made to understand what people (in this case energy bill-payers) understand by the term. As such, an inductive approach is required, which identifies data and aggregates them into taxonomies and structures (LeCompte & Schensul, 2010: 18). While the review conducted in section 2.2.2 attempted to identify different motivations, antecedents and understandings of control, the approach taken here is not primarily to test these findings but to generate new data with ‘control’ as the focus of study and then compare these new findings to those of the review. This new data must necessarily be descriptive in nature. The characteristics determined as necessary to answer the question are most consistent with a qualitative approach to research.
Research questions 2, 3, and to an extent 4, focus more on exploring associations (if any), for example between control expectations and acceptability of DSR. As set out in section 2.3, there are theoretical grounds to expect such a link, and the Technology Acceptance Model has been determined as a suitable frame in which to investigate this. Research question 3 calls for similar links to be tested. In this context theory allows predictions (or hypotheses) to be made about possible links between expectations of control (and other factors) and acceptability. As such a deductive approach is required, which begins with general statements (or theory) and, through a process of logical reasoning, comes to a conclusion (Walliman, 2006). The question is put in the context of the research population defined above.
As such whatever findings are generated must be to some extent generalizable to this population. The characteristics of deduction and generalizability are primarily consistent with a quantitative approach to research.
The requirement for both qualitative and quantitative approaches in a single programme of study means that, by most definitions, a mixed methods approach is called for (Creswell & Clark, 2011). Such approaches have been criticized for attempting to reconcile incompatible (or ‘incommensurable’) ontological stances (e.g. Sale et al., 2002). For example, the requirement for generalizability reveals an important ontological assumption – that is, that ‘social objects’ exist in reality and could theoretically be known. This is consistent with a positivist, empiricist
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epistemology. Conversely, many social researchers hold that we cannot ‘find out’
knowledge about social objects as separate from us – rather, all knowledge is constructed (or created) by people, including in the process of research. This has led to what some see as fundamental incompatibilities between quantitative and qualitative approaches to research.
According to Hall (2013), researchers have addressed this incompatibility in a number of ways. Firstly these paradigmatic differences can be ignored. Secondly, different paradigms or world views can be held simultaneously and applied to different aspects of the research. Thirdly, researchers can attempt to unify their approach in a single paradigm which is compatible with the various approaches to research that they employ. Two paradigms which explicitly attempt this reconciliation are pragmatism and realism. Pragmatism holds that a proposition can be considered true if it is perceived to ‘work’ in reality – it ‘sidesteps the contentious issues of truth and reality, accepts, philosophically, that there are singular and multiple realities that are open to empirical inquiry’ (Feilzer, 2010: 8). Realism, on the other hand, posits a single knowable reality, but which can be interpreted in multiple ways (Krauss, 2005).
This research is broadly pragmatic in approach in that it starts from the belief that eliciting people’s views regarding control and the acceptability of different approaches to DSR can provide useful insights for designing and communicating more acceptable DSR offerings. However, working towards this end, it accepts certain tenets of a realist paradigm. For example, as will become clear through the remainder of this and in subsequent chapters, concepts such as ‘perceived control’
are treated as if they have some independent existence. Such constructs are treated as latent variables which ‘cause’ people’s responses to, for example, Likert-type items which are used to measure them. Borsboom et al. (2003) have argued that such a treatment implicitly requires a realist approach, although they acknowledge the tension that exists between this and the empirical tradition in disciplines such as psychology (p217):
… we would probably like latent variables models to yield conclusions of a causal nature (the model should at the very least allow for the formulation of such relations). But we cannot defend any sort of causal structure invoking latent variables if we are not realists about these latent variables, in the sense that they exist independent of our measurements: One cannot claim that A causes B, and at the same time maintain that A is constructed out of B.
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While realism and pragmatism have themselves often been viewed as incommensurable (Slater, 2008), arguments have been put in support of the usefulness of a ‘realist pragmatism’ (Lipscomb, 2011; Slater, 2008). Issues connected to the mixed-methods approach taken are discussed further in chapter 7 in light of the findings.