Barbara Grant

Making sense of methodologies: A paradigm framework for the novice researcher

Abstract Methodologies abound in the field of health and social science research, making a confusing terrain for new researchers. In this article, we offer order out of confusion. Drawing on our work as postgraduate teachers, we outline a paradigm framework which proposes that methodologies are similar or different because of their underlying assumptions and values. We identify four major paradigms, explain the distinctive assumptions which underpin them, and show how each figures the researcher and the researcher-researched relationship. Along the way, we place a variety of methodologies into their paradigm of origin and offer some illustrative examples of health research.

Mapping the Pleasures and Risks of Supervision

Good supervision is central to successful graduate research, yet it is a pedagogy that is poorly understood. This may be one reason why it is often experienced as problematic, especially by students. To address these concerns, in this paper I delineate a map of supervision which is informed by contemporary theories of education. As I describe the layers of the map, I will attempt to show traces of each layer in some texts from the supervision of a masters student. The fruit of my analysis is a view of supervision as a complex and unstable process, one filled with pleasures and risks. This view is potentially useful for informing the practices of supervisors, students and the academic advisors who work with them.

A Trojan horse for positivism?: a critique of mixed methods research.

Mixed methods research is captured by a pragmatically inflected form of postpositivism. Although it passes for an alternative methodological movement that purports to breach the divide between qualitative and quantitative research, most mixed methods studies favor the forms of analysis and truth finding associated with positivism. We anticipate a move away from exploring more philosophical questions or undertaking modes of enquiry that challenge the status quo. At the same time, we recognize that mixed methods research offers particular strengths and that, although it serves as a Trojan Horse for positivism, it may productively carry other paradigmatic passengers.

Disciplining Students: the construction of student subjectivities

Abstract While we usually think of higher education as a process through which every able individuals potential may be realised more fully, it can also be seen as one of arbitrarily disciplining the student to particular ends. One of these ends is the production of the ‘good’, or docile and useful, student subject. A Foucauldian analysis of the university as a disciplinary block, an institution saturated with relations of power, points to the ways in which students are disciplined by both the technologies of domination, which originate in the institution, and those of the self. The latter are the many practices that students adopt, producing themselves as the good student, at times to the detriment of their other interests. However, because power relations are only present between those who are ‘acting subjects’, possibilities for resistance and struggle against the normalising tendencies of the university to find other, more satisfying, forms of student subjectivity are ever present

Flights of imagination: Academic women be(com)ing writers

For many academic women, making space in our daily lives to write is an ongoing struggle. We struggle, too, to make imaginative space in which we are central as writing subjects. It is important to find ways to intervene in this struggle, to make writing practices more personally pleasurable as well as more productive. Here two such interventions are described - a week-long writing retreat for women from several universities in New Zealand and an ongoing writing group in one university in Australia. While the interventions partly focus on practical matters like getting started on writing, increasing productivity and satisfaction, and getting published, we are particularly interested in exploring how women do and do not understand ourselves to be academic writers and the implications of this for our practices. In the first part of the paper, we explore the writing dilemmas that face many academic women. Then we go on to describe the interventions we are involved in and the positive outcomes reported by participants. We close with a brief discussion of the academic developers role in enhancing the experience of writing for academic women.

Mixed methods research for the novice researcher

Abstract Mixed methods research is becoming increasingly popular in the health and social science disciplines. The aim of this article is to give an overview of the varieties of mixed methods designs. We begin by situating mixed methods research in the context of a paradigmatic framework which assists a researcher in making decisions concerning the design of their study. Although the most commonly used mixed methods designs are underpinned by positivist/postpositivist assumptions, the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods can be used within any research paradigm.

Writing in the company of other women: exceeding the boundaries

In academic life, writing for publication is a significant responsibility. It can also be a rewarding private pleasure. This article reports on the effects of attending week‐long writing retreats for a group of academic women in Aotearoa New Zealand. The residential retreats have been held twice a year since 1997, and attract women from different institutions, disciplines and at different stages in their careers. Through examining data gathered by open‐ended questionnaires, the author explores the effects of attending the retreats on the participants’ academic writing productivity and pleasure, and on their sense of themselves as academics and writers.

Why history? Why now? Multiple accounts of the emergence of academic development

More than 40 years after its beginnings, academic development stands uncertainly on the threshold of becoming a profession or discipline in its own right. While it remains marginal to the dominant stories of the university, it has become central to the institutions contemporary business. This Research Note describes an enquiry that uses a multiple histories approach to explore the emergence of academic development in three national sites. Our intention is to provoke a more critical engagement with academic developments current forms and future possibilities.

The Mourning After: Academic development in a time of doubt

Academic developers work in zones marked by uncertainty and ambiguity. One response to the uncertainties about who we are and our place in the academy is to assert and defend a particular identity. I critically engage with such a response from a “mourning after” standpoint that values an unsettled identity. There I find the possibility for a less defensive, even more productive, basis for relations with ourselves as academic developers and with the colleagues alongside whom we work. I illustrate this possibility with reference to working with graduate research supervisors. Les conseillers pédagogiques oeuvrent à l’intérieur de zones marquées par l’incertitude et l’ambiguïté. Une façon de répondre aux incertitudes reliées à qui nous sommes et à notre place en milieu universitaire est d’affirmer et de défendre une identité particulière. J’aborde une telle réponse de façon critique et d’un point de vue « mourning after », lequel valorise une identité instable. C’est là que je trouve une base possible, moins défensive et davantage productive, pour les relations avec nous‐mêmes en tant que conseillers pédagogiques, ainsi qu’avec les collègues avec lesquels nous travaillons. J’illustre cette possibilité en faisant référence au travail effectué auprès des superviseurs de recherche aux cycles supérieurs.

‘The spirit of research has changed’: reverberations from researcher identities in managerial times

Five poetic transcriptions lie at the heart of this article. We intend that they will convey something of what it means and feels like to be an academic researcher in neoliberal universities such that we begin to notice this condition and its effects more acutely. Our poetic texts began their existence as fast-written prose responses to the question: ‘If you say to yourself, “I am a researcher”, how do you feel, what do you think about and what associations do you make?’ In this article, we foreground an exploration of the poetic mode of representing research data through example and exegesis. We argue this kind of interpretive work is effective because it strikes a different kind of relationship between empirical data and reader, one that encourages ‘reverberation’ – a resounding way of noticing that draws upon our bodily and emotional reactions to a text as well as our intellectual ones. Hence, a methodology of poetic transcriptions may be especially capable of evoking for the reader some of the problematic, although variable, effects of the Anglo-Western neoliberal – or ‘managerialist’ – university on the hearts and minds of its beleaguered academic subjects.