Marie L. Hoskins

Fear of offending: disclosing researcher discomfort when engaging in analysis:

In this article we take up the issue of transcript analysis within a collaborative researcher/participant relationship. We specifically focus on the challenges and ethical dilemmas that researchers face when engaging in analysis. As researchers who use constructivist psychological theory to study the narratives of peoples lives, we are particularly interested in inviting dialogues about what is involved when we engage in analysis of our participants’ renditions of experience. By conversing with colleagues and students, and reflecting on previous research projects, we use research experiences to shape our discussion.

Worlds Apart and Lives Together: Developing Cultural Attunement

This article describes the principles of what the author refers to as cultural attunement. These principles arise from the authors own experience of working across differences with ethnic and cultural diversity. The context for the discussion is a post secondary institution which prepares students to work in the field of Child and Youth Care; however, the ideas are also applicable to other contexts. Front line practitioners, administrators, and program developers will also understand the relevance of cultural attunement for their own professional roles and particular work environments.

LIVING RESEARCH: THE EXPERIENCE OF RESEARCHING SELF, OTHER, AND DISCOURSE

Although there is widespread agreement among psychologists that the self needs to be studied in context, how to actually study the interconnections between the self and environment can be challenging. This article describes a process of engaging in socially-embedded research by providing an inside view of the researchers experience of working with such abstract concepts as culture, discourse, and the self. The background study consisted of three main layers of analysis, including (a) a narrative of one womans reconstitution of self while recovering from anorexia nervosa, (b) an analysis of dominant discourses surrounding the discourse of recovery and treatment, and (c) a narrative of the research process including the discursive relationships of the researcher. This article focuses on this last phase and discusses the difficulties encountered when attempting to understand ones own relationship to various discourses. The researcher builds on constructivist conceptualizations of the self as the foundation for interpreting the texts selected as the data.

Relational Inquiry: Generating New Knowledge With Adolescent Girls Who Use Crystal Meth

Qualitative research is continuously evolving and expanding as researchers seek methodologies that reflect the intersubjective nature of experience. Relational inquiry is an approach which considers the relationships (a) between researchers and participants, (b) among multiple dimensions of the participant’s lived experience, and (c) between the subjectivity of the participant and the phenomenon under study. In this article, the authors present a study in which the experiences of adolescent girls who use methamphetamines are explored through the use of photograph elicitation. The authors demonstrate how engagement with photographs can bring forth narratives from which researchers, teachers, practitioners, and, indeed, adolescent girls can learn.

True Grit and the New Frontier: Cultivating New Ground for Psychological Research

This article describes the experience of a qualitative researcher grappling with the tensions between traditional positivist research and “new paradigm research.” Personal experiences, critiques, and theory are woven together to create a holistic and contextualized account of working in new paradigm research modalities within the field of psychology. The author proposes that what is needed is an expanded discourse of what constitutes discipline within the context of interpretive research. Once discourse can be expanded and understood, new ground (or frontiers) can continue to be cultivated. Psychological research has much to gain from understanding what is required to engage in disciplined interpretive research. The parallels between interpretive research and clinical practice are highlighted.

What Unites Us, What Divides Us? A Multicultural Agenda Within Child and Youth Care

Many educators have taken seriously the issue of multicultural education and what it means to deliver an inclusive curriculum. In this article, I discuss some of the complexities of integrating culture within the overall educational goals of a school or faculty. I also highlight the challenges of working with ethnic diversity within the classroom, while designing courses, and when teaching students how to engage in practice. In particular, I raise issues that are specific to human service practice. Recommendations for how to position issues within the overall educational mandate of schools and faculties are included.

Relational Inquiries and the Research Interview Mentoring Future Researchers

In this article we describe some of the challenges and constraints that students face when they engage in qualitative research interviews. We borrow extensively from Ron Pelias’ in-depth description of leaning in during everyday life encounters. Although he refers to other kinds of relationships, we believe that the similarities are too important to overlook when it comes to the qualitative research interview. We begin the discussion by identifying what we believe are the main challenges facing novice qualitative researchers. Issues of professional identities, objectivity, relational engagement, and inherited understandings of what counts as research are highlighted. This article will be useful for graduate students engaged in narrative, ethnographic, and auto-ethnographic methodologies as well as other inquiries that require deeply relational processes. Recommendations for the kinds of supervisory conversations that may be helpful are included.

Making Meaning in Context: The Puzzling Relationship Between Image and Metaphor

Using both images and metaphor proved an effective qualitative method in our study with adolescent girls who use crystal methamphetamine. The combination increased the depth of learning by inviting less calculated responses and the breadth of learning by allowing for consideration of societal and contextual dimensions of experience. In this article, we demonstrate how combining images and metaphors in qualitative inquiry can enable researchers to resist the tendency to distill complex experiences down to manageable forms. In so doing, we offer a contextualized perspective of how change may occur, thus reconceptualizing our roles as practitioners.

Women's Lived Experience of Conceptualizing the Self: Implications for Health Care Practice

In this article we describe a unique qualitative research design in which we used our own lived experiences as the basis for understanding theories of the self. Our purpose in this study was to (a) broaden current understandings of self theory, (b) juxtapose theories of the self with lived experiences of selfhood, and (c) use these new understandings to inform health care practice. The participants were four Canadian middle-aged female academic and health care practitioners. We conducted unstructured, open-ended interviews. Through a collaborative, interpretive process, four recurring themes emerged from the womens narratives: struggling for authenticity, inner knowing, changing over time, and the contextual self. We address the need for practitioners to understand theories of the self--their own and their clients--and how these theories impact their clinical practice.

Quality and Day Care: What do Children Have to Say?

The subjective experience of children seldomly appears in day care research because of a variety of methodological concerns, yet without these subjective accounts, an essential part of an overall understanding of the experience of day care is missing. This article provides descriptive data taken from a longitudinal study (Pence & Goleman, 1984) that includes the voices of children who recall early childhood memories at ages 11‐12 and again, at ages 17‐18. We have purposefully selected four female participants, 2 considered to be from the “high risk” category and 2 from the “low risk” category. The included segments of the narratives of these young women focus on their memories of day care in relation to other events in their lives. Implications for early childhood educators are derived from the stories told by the children themselves.