Producción de virus recombinantes 1 Baculovirus

4.1 Research Methodology: A Qualitative Approach

Creswell’s (2007) insights pertaining to the need for a complex and detailed understanding of a particular issue provides reassurance that I have made the correct choice when I selected a qualitative research paradigm for this study.

“We also conduct qualitative research because we need a complex, detailed understanding of the issue. … We conduct qualitative research because we want to understand the contexts or settings in which participants in a study address a problem or issue. We cannot separate what people say from the context in which they say it – whether this context is their home, family or work” (Creswell, 2007, p.40).

The decision to locate this study within the field of qualitative research has been informed by the work of Denzin and Lincoln (2008), in which the qualitative researcher has the choice of being one of many kinds of bricoleur: interpretive, narrative, theoretical, political, and methodological, and as such qualitative research is ‘inherently multimethod in focus’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, p.7). The image of a fiddler or tinker invoked by Denzin and Lincoln was appropriate methodologically in guiding the document analysis processes in this study:

“The product of the interpretive bricoleur’s labour is a complex, quilt-like bricolage, a reflexive collage or montage - a set of fluid, interconnected images and representations. This interpretive structure is like a quilt, a performance text, a sequence of representations connecting the parts to the whole” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, p.9).

Discussion in Chapters Five and Six attest to the suitability of adopting a qualitative paradigm for answering my research question, and why orientations associated with postmodernism, poststructuralism and deconstructionism - “what Lather (2007) called postcritical theories” (Jones, Torres, & Arminio, 2014, p 14) are good facilitators of a discussion around my research findings. Particularly in relation to

16 the multiplicity of notions for ‘nontraditional’ students, I believe the chosen orientations allow for an open engagement and differing perspectives in this study.

4.2 Research Method: A Case Study

Case study research involves the study of an issue explored through one or more cases within a bounded system (i.e., a setting, a context) (Creswell, 2007, p. 73). At the same time, case study research is not a methodology but a choice of what is to be studied, (i.e., a case within a bounded system), others present it as a strategy of inquiry, a methodology, or a comprehensive research strategy, according to Stake (2005).

Selecting the University of the Western Cape (UWC) as the case study has highlighted distinct institutional understandings of ‘nontraditional’ students in higher education. And this would be with reference to the ways in ‘traditionality’ and ‘nontraditionality’ are interpreted in higher education presently. Positioning my case study in this way also serves to address a methodological concern in case study research identified by Hyett et al (2014, p.6), who support earlier observations made by Thomas (2011) that numerous case study descriptions “were often not adequate to ascertain why the case was selected, or whether it was a particular exemplar or outlier.”

The main reason for selecting UWC as the case study is that UWC’s own experiences of non- traditionality - as an historically marginalised higher institution clearing its own path to academic excellence - is in itself a significant factor in influencing types of student constructs on its campus. That is to say, in this particular period of South Africa’s history, it would seem that students at the University actively and uniquely constructed much of their own student identities and roles in relation to their studies and university governance; therefore, in the early period of the University’s history, students might be regarded as discoursing subjects in creating a particular kind of nontraditionality. Research findings have also pointed to the University’s exceptional institutional legacy of part-time provision and lifelong learning.

From the overview of the types of case study indicated in Table 3, this study is best characterised as an intrinsic case study.

17 Table 3

Types of Case Study

Instrumental Case Study Collective Case Study Intrinsic Case Study The researcher focuses on

an issue or concern, and then selects one bounded case to illustrate the issue.

In a collective case study (or multiple case study), the one issue or concern is again selected, but the inquirer selects multiple case studies to illustrate the issue.

In an intrinsic case study the focus is on the case itself (eg. Evaluating a programme, or a student having difficulty…) because the case presents an unusual or unique situation. Adapted from (Creswell, 2007:74)

This research has taken the form of an intrinsic case study, which focuses on the case itself, (Creswell 2007). The case of the University of the Western Cape presents the institutional environment for this study, and the researcher has attempted to identify and understand institutional portrayals of ‘nontraditional’ students at the University. Because the research focused on how these discourses had been developed at the University, the fullest possible spectrum of institutional depiction of ‘nontraditional’ students could be accommodated within this research method.

4.3 Strategies of Inquiry: Foucault and Smith

As strategies of inquiry, this study has drawn upon on two research approaches, as inspired largely by Michel Foucault and also Dorothy E Smith, respectively, in exploring the research question in the fullest possible way. Derived approaches from the work of Foucault (History of the Present) and Smith (Institutional Ethnography), respectively, have been successfully combined by scholars of a recent study, and their insights are noted accordingly:

“Useful and challenging as this mode of inquiry is, the use of archaeology and genealogy limits one to the exploration of the construction and relations between discourses and discursive practices. If the researcher wishes to bring into the picture the view of situated agents … in a particular social setting in time and place, it requires alternative methodological tools such as those developed by Smith and her followers” (Satka & Skehill, 2011:4).

18 With reference to Foucault’s method, firstly, and drawing on methodological reflections offered by Fejes (2006) of the advantages of a Foucauldian-inspired genealogical approach for his own research, this study has adopted a similar approach and argues that it would be an appropriate form of research inquiry to understand institutional constructions of nontraditional students at the University of the Western Cape in this way:

“What I have done is to analyse a history containing ruptures and irregularities, not progress. … The discourse of lifelong learning, where everyone should learn all the time, might seem to be the only way to reason about the adult learner today. However, I would argue that there are always several discourses present with some becoming the dominating ones and others are being marginalized” (Fejes, 2006:81).

Similarly, this study uses an adaptation of Foucault’s genealogical method to facilitate a flexible, open and iterative probing that places the emergence of any possible contingencies and unintended consequences at the core of an unfolding institutional story of ways in which nontraditional students are currently being constructed at the University of the Western Cape.

The second strategy of inquiry is with reference to D E Smith’s institutional ethnography, and this study has been enriched by this approach that values the experiences of people as important data sources, as noted from Deveau (2008).

Within this case study, I drew on selected concepts from Foucault’s works, and most notably, a ‘history of the present’ approach is used as well as the tools of ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ as an appropriate and effective way of understanding the constructions of nontraditional students at the University of the Western Cape.

In her own research on the history of social work in the Republic of Ireland, Skehill (2007) contends that Foucault’s methods offer “the possibility that history can be done in a way where the past is not constructed in simplistic terms of progress or decline” (Skehill, 2007, p.450) and it is meaningful “to use history as a means of critique of taken-for-granted ‘truth’ in the construction of practices and discourses” (Skehill, 2007, p.451).

19 Similarly, May (2005, p.66) suggests that we return to Foucault’s writings “… not to discover, for instance, whether the penal regime of torture ever overlapped with that of rehabilitation, but to recall the contingencies of our own history … . We return to his writings because he speaks to us, from out of our past - … - of who we have been and who we are, and he does so in ways that allow us to imagine who we might become. …Our task, the task that remains to us, is to live those possibilities.”

The selected concepts and methods derived from Foucault’s works has provided interesting and imaginative ways towards understanding current constructions of nontraditional students at the University of the Western Cape, and exploring what the future possibilities may be.

4.4 Guiding questions: Bacchi

Within the case study, the following kinds of documents comprised the largest part of the documentary analysis: the official records, policies and annual reports of the University, as well its news bulletins and other media intended for the campus community and beyond. Similarly, the official records, policies and reports of selected Departments within the University.

To guide my reading of these documents, the questions for policy analysis, as presented by Bacchi (2009, p. xii), served as important reference points :

● What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be in a specific policy?

● What presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’? ● How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?

● What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought about differently?

● What effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

● How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? ● How could it be questioned, disrupted and replaced?

4.5 Summary

As a case study, a Foucauldian-inspired genealogy and elements of an institutional ethnography as inspired by D E Smith come together as an approach towards optimal engagement with patterns in institutional data. The researcher’s own positionality, over the years as a part-time and full-time

20 nontraditional higher education student and also a university worker, has also been taken into account as part of this study.