3.1.1 Research objectives and questions
This chapter describes the main study in the thesis by presenting its objectives, key questions and approach to the research. It details the study’s epistemology, phenomenographic methodological design, data collection methods and researcher positionality. The chapter incorporates how the study selected the PV practitioner participants, and provides their backgrounds. It also explains how the research approach is positioned through an ethical frame of care. The chapter concludes by describing the analytical approach used to meet the study objectives.
The research for this thesis investigated: How can participatory video practitioners
enable valued citizen voice in international development contexts? To this end, the
study set three objectives for the research, as presented in Chapter 1. For each objective, the study relied on a key question or questions to guide the research:
Objective 1: To explore the phenomenon of using participatory video to raise citizen voice in international development contexts from PV practitioner perspectives.
o How do PV practitioners in the study conceptualise the phenomenon of using participatory video to raise citizen voice in international development contexts?
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Objective 2: To develop a principle-driven, conceptual framing for participatory video practice for valuing citizen voice.
o Building on the findings of how PV practitioners conceptualise the phenomenon of using participatory video to raise citizen voice in international development contexts, what key principles emerge for a conceptual framework for practice?
Objective 3: To offer insight on enabling environments for participatory video praxis to raise valued citizen voice in international development contexts.
o What key institutional views cause PV practitioners tension when raising citizen voice in international development contexts?
o What potential do these key institutional views hold for enabling or constraining efforts to raise citizen voice through PV activities?
This chapter describes the research methodology in depth before presenting the findings and analysis to address each research objective in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.
3.1.2 Social constructivism epistemology
The research in this thesis is grounded in a social constructivism epistemology, which focuses on the “unique experience of the individual” in relationship with “social and natural systems” (Ireland, Tambyah, Neofa, & Harding, 2008, p. 6). The epistemology supported the study’s focus on PV practitioner conceptualisations of raising citizen voice with PV. As described in Chapter 1, PV practitioners overall embrace a common goal of using filmmaking for social change. Therefore, on one hand the study assumed they would share similar storylines from working in “Aidland,” a term coined by David Mosse (2011) for the international development field (p. 1). On the other hand, the study also expected compelling differences since practitioners apply PV through varying conceptual lenses across practice (Low et al., 2012, p. 50). In this way, their particular ideals and frames of seeing likely evolved through experiential learning with others (Hales & Walkins, 2004, p. 3). Because participatory video is a practice influenced by understandings of its meaning and application, the description of social constructivism by Robert Hales and Mike Watkins (2004) is fitting to describe this epistemological choice for the study:
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Social constructivism posits that communities, institutions and groups play a major role in the making of knowledge. In particular, the interaction of people within social situations mediates the construction of knowledge through participation in social practices that convey meaning. In this view of learning, interaction is related to the desire to fit in with socially appropriate forms of practice. (p. 3)
The research interprets constructivism through Kenneth Gergen’s (1999) definition as a “view in which an individual mind constructs reality but within a systematic relationship to the external world” (as cited in Talja, Tuominen, & Savolainen, 2005, p. 81). Social constructivism is a cognitive process that explains the way people develop meaning and ways of knowing (Young & Collin, 2004, p. 375). The construction of knowledge evolves through a “social process involving collaboration and negotiation among groups of learners” (Richardson, 1999, p. 65). For this study, the group of learners were the individual PV practitioners selected as the key informants, as described in Section 3.2. Social constructivism fits with how and where the PV practitioners are likely to apply their knowledge in practice. That is, in complex development contexts where they are constantly navigating their altruistic intentions (Hoggett et al., 2009, pp. 1, 78). This resonates with how Rosalind Eyben (2014) described her career in international development (p. 164). She explained that the theories she often worked through were— from moment-to-moment in differing contexts—influenced by her “relationships, observations, ideology, values and feasibility for realisation” (p. 164). Her description related to PV in that practice is often both fluid and pragmatic. PV practitioners’ knowledge and meaning are thus ever evolving through social constructs.
The design paradigm for this study was based on phenomenography, which complements the view that learning emerges through an individual’s “relational awareness of being in the world” (Hales & Watkins, 2004, p. 6). The phenomenography research methodology guided the study to understand better perceptions of a phenomenon. In this case, the phenomenon of using PV to raise citizen voice in international development contexts. Phenomenography linked to the social constructivism epistemology through the study’s interpretive lens (Ireland et al., 2008, p. 4). Here, individual PV practitioners gain knowledge and meaning about raising citizen voice through their aspirations for, and experiences of using PV in international development contexts. What this means is that the study, through constructivism, aimed to better understand how their “ideas, concepts
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and experiences result in a common understanding of a construct” (Sullivan, 2009, p. 107). To such ends, exploring and analysing PV practitioner perceptions through a phenomenographic approach connected with social constructivism. It did so in how the process illuminated the “unique understanding and experience of the research participants in relation to a phenomenon” (Ireland et al., 2008, p. 6). The following section provides more detail on the phenomenographic approach guiding the research design.
3.1.3 Phenomenographic design framework
Phenomenography is a “relational, experiential, content-oriented and qualitative” research methodology that originated through the Department of Education at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in the 1970s (see Richardson, 1999, p. 59). It was founded on the argument that people “learn to conceptualise their own reality” and that one cannot “separate the structure and the content of experience from one another” (Marton, 1981, p. 177). Phenomenography is often confused with the more commonly known methodology of phenomenology. However, they are inherently distinct. The critical difference is that phenomenology aims to make explicit a phenomenon’s essential structure and meaning (Larsson & Holmström, 2007, p. 55). Phenomenography, in contrast, aims to describe differing ways people conceptualise a particular phenomenon as a way to discover multiple meanings (p. 55). To this end, phenomenography prioritises the collective categorical description of a particular phenomenon over the thick description of personal occurrence (Svensson, 1997, p. 161; Trigwell, 2006, p. 367). In essence, rather than focus on individual experience—that in itself is inherently messy—the categorical process of description and analysis helps identify “critical qualitative similarities and differences” through discriminating categories (Akerlind, Bowden, & Green, 2005, p. 77).
The basis for creating “hierarchical categories of description of the variation” in the phenomenon is through a secondary perspective of reality (Lamb, Sandberg, & Liesch, 2011, p. 688; Trigwell, 2006, p. 368). Here, a researcher examines a phenomenon through the description of others; i.e. a “second-order” approach (Trigwell, 2006, p. 370). This is in contrast to a description of how the researcher perceives the phenomenon; i.e. a “first- order” approach (p. 370). In doing so, phenomenographic research ultimately aims to describe “multiple realities…as existing in the relationship between the perceiver and the phenomenon perceived, between the research and the data analysed” (Akerlind et al.,
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2005, p. 75). The resulting categorisation of such experiences becomes knowledge about the phenomenon for further analysis and discussion (Lucas & Ashworth, 1998, p. 416; Svensson, 1997, p. 162).
With an interest in PV practitioners’ conceptualisations of PV praxis, phenomenography fitted the research design and implementation in four ways. First, the phenomenographic approach provided qualitative insight into the differing ways PV practitioners perceive raising citizen voice, and how such assumptions might link to behaviour (Lucas & Ashworth, 1998, p. 415; Marton, 1981, p. 180; Pherali, 2011, p. 7). Second, the methodology made explicit the “relation between the experiences of individuals” (Ireland et al., 2008, p. 7). This was the study’s intention over gaining knowledge from specific PV case studies. Third, the phenomenographic analysis, as described in Section 3.4, identified categories as a means to address the study objectives. It did so by interpreting and sorting the research data’s meaning into manageable, representative forms of the greater, organisational whole (Svensson, 1997, p. 168). Fourth, it used the collective categorisation of meanings for developing the principle-driven conceptual framework for PV practice described in Chapter 5.
3.1.4 Researcher positionality
The overall research design was driven by the ethos of development studies, a branch of social science that often prioritises a “commitment to social justice and the prevailing levels of global poverty and inequality” (see Sumner & Tribe, 2008, p. 31). Through development studies, generating knowledge is rarely in itself an endpoint, but rather a process that focuses on solving troubling contemporary problems (Molteberg, Haug, & Bergstrøm, 2000, p. 7). Based on this active relationship between knowledge and impact, scholars argue that development studies researchers should acknowledge their own positionality in relation to the research (Sumner & Tribe, 2008, p. 117). Accordingly, as the thesis author and researcher, I note that my personal views align with the ethical frame of social justice in development studies. I ascribe to the view that PV practice holds an emancipative potential for raising diminished or denied citizen voice. I developed this axiology through my professional background as a PV practitioner international development (Plush, 2009a, 2012, 2013, 2015b).
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I also acknowledge that my experience in the PV field benefitted the research process. I could empathically relate and respond to the “life world” being conveyed by the participants in the study (Hales & Watkins, 2004, p. 8). Nevertheless, such actions also required caution. Being an experienced PV practitioner meant I had my own unique conceptualisation of the phenomenon of using PV to raise citizen voice in international development contexts. The background created potential for bias in regards to the complex relation between the “processes of knowledge” and the “involvement of the knowledge producer” (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009, p. 8). Hence, I approached the study through the principle of critical reflection, which is a reflexive process aimed to filter out personal bias and assumptions throughout the research process (Eyben, 2014, p. 20). The approach was especially valuable when data from the findings confronted or conflicted with my own experiences. The principle of reflexivity in such cases supported Eyben’s meaning of “being alert to different perspectives, giving such differences the space to show themselves, and in the process of paying attention, gaining pragmatic clarity about action” (p. 20).
I specifically addressed potential bias in the data-gathering process. For example, I asked the study participants to engage with the visual method of storyboarding for sharing their ideal practice, as described in Section 3.3.2. The fact that the drawings occurred prior to each interview helped address any taken-for-granted assumptions I might have had during the interview process. In this way, the visual data fostered what Dawn Manny (2014) calls “subject-led dialogue,” which helped to “limit the propensity for participant’s accounts to be overshadowed by the enclosed, self-contained world of common understanding” (p. 138). Through maintaining an awareness of my positionality, I drew on my subjectivity in the PV field to constructive ends. For example, I was able to locate a diverse and experienced group of study participants through my personal knowledge of and connections in the field. Section 3.2 describes the recruitment process. Additionally, my background in PV practice provided pragmatic knowledge to draw from when exploring the links between theory and practice through Norman Long’s concept of an “encounter at the interface” (see Bastiaensen & De Herdt, 2004, p. 879). The concept promotes the value of understanding the “critical point of intersection between life worlds, social fields, or levels of social organisation, where social discontinuities, based on discrepancies in values, interests, knowledge and power are most likely to be located” (p. 879). As a researcher, my intention
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in the study was thus to act as an “interface expert” in gathering and analysing the research data (p. 879). Doing so aligned with the intentionality of a development studies pathway to evoke positive change through influencing policy or practice (Sumner & Tribe, 2008, p. 117). To such ends, this chapter now turns to an overview of who was involved in the study, and why.