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Tools and MethodsUnderstanding Media

StudiesSeptember 22, 2014

My cart o’ tools at the National Archives and

Records Administration

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METHODS: the techniques or procedures used to gather and analyze data related to some research question or hypotheses

METHODOLOGY: the strategy, plan of action, process or design lying behind the choice and use of particular methods and linking the choice and use of methods to the desired outcomes

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE: perspective: the philosophical stance informing the methodology and thus providing a context for the process and grounding its logic and criteria

EPISTEMOLOGY: the theory of knowledge embedded in the theoretical perspective and thereby in the methodology

(Michael Crotty, The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998): 3)

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Epistemologies•Objectivism•Subjectivism•Constructionism

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Theoretical Perspectives•Positivist•Post-Positivist•Pragmatist•Interpretivist•Participatory•Postmodern

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“Inevitably, we bring a number of assumptions to our chosen methodology. We need, as best we can, to state what those assumptions are… How, then, do we take account of these assumptions and justify them? By expounding our theoretical perspective, that is, our view of the human world and social life within that world, wherein such assumptions are grounded.”

(Crotty 7)

7(Crotty 5)

8(Crotty 5)

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Via Tempo Ético: http://www.tempoetico.com/temethodology.html

10Via Fletcher

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12Johnson & Christensen

2004

13Via Creswell

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Via Reboot: http://bit.ly/eipkbR

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Practice / Production is research…

“if and only if it is (1) a systematic investigation, (2) conducted intentionally, (3) to acquire new knowledge, understanding, insights, etc., (4) justified, and (5) communicated, (6) about a subject” (71)

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Design / Creative Practice as Research:

“the method or methodology must always include an explicit understanding of how the practice contributes to the inquiry and research is distinguished from other forms of practice by that explicit understanding”

(quoted on Scrivener 74)

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19Via Fletcher

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Why bother studying methodology? Why not “just sit down and work out for ourselves how we go about it?

In the end, that is precisely what we have to do. Yet a study of how other people have gone about the task of human inquiry serves us well and is surely indispensable. Attending to recognized research designs and their various theoretical underpinnings exercises a formative influence upon us. It awakens us to ways of research we would never otherwise have conceived of. It makes us much more aware of what is possible in research...

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…Even so, it is by no means a matter of plucking a methodology off the shelf. We acquaint ourselves with the various methodologies. We evaluate their presuppositions. We weight their strengths and weaknesses. Having done all that and more besides, we still have to forge a methodology that will meet our particular purposes in this research. One of the established methodologies may suit the task that confronts us. Or perhaps none of them do and we find ourselves drawing on several methodologies, molding them into a way of proceeding that achieves the outcomes we look to. Perhaps we need to be more inventive still and create a methodology that in many respects is quite new.”

(Crotty 14)

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Methodolatry (n): common form of academic idolatry; glorification of the god Method; boxing knowledge into prefabricated fields, thereby hiding threads of connectedness, hindering New Discoveries, preventing the raising of New Questions, erasing ideas that do not fit into Respectable Categories of Questions and Answers

(Daly 1987)

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“I use multiple methods to give greater rigor, reliability and depth to the work I do. Each element is designed both to test and to complement the findings of other elements. The different methods add layers of information but also provide a means of identifying inconsistencies and weaknesses.”(Bicknell 283-4)

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Sarah Bicknell, “Here to Help: Evaluation and Effectiveness” In Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Ed., Museum, Media, Message (Museum Meanings) (Routledge, 1999): 283-4.

Virginia Crisco, Chris W. Gallagher, Deborah Minter, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker & John Talbird, “Graduate Education As Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 3:3 (2003): 359-376.

Michael Crotty, The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).

Mary Daly, Webster’s First Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1987).

Michael D. Gunzenhauser & Cynthia I. Gerstl-Pepin, “Engaging Graduate Education: A Pedagogy for Epistemological and Theoretical Diversity” The Review of Higher Education 29:3 (Spring 2006): 319-346.

Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).