In order to reflect effectively on a project and its meaning, a researcher has to give some thought to the personal values that guide the study and guide their research in general. It is those values that we use to determine what the “strengths” of a study were, or what its “limitations” were and what the overall value of the project is.
Joseph Maxwell describes qualitative research as an “interactive” model, whose strengths “derive primarily from its inductive approach, its focus on specific situations or people, and its emphasis on words rather than numbers” (14, 22). The strengths of qualitative research (or anything, for that matter) can also function as weaknesses. Inductive conclusions are not
deductive, they are not “scientistic” in the sense that they are not necessarily replicable, especially when they are drawn from specific situations involving people, who can change their mind with their mood. Furthermore, the emphasis on words means that much of what counts as evidence is flexible, in how the participant intended something to be understood, in how the researcher understands it, how the researcher chooses to describe it.
I have suffered all of the same self-doubt and doubt about qualitative research that anyone else might have. I question the value of the things that I do, their relevance, their capacity to be meaningful or to change others, their intellectual contribution. I go through periods of doubt, but I always come back to three central, articulable values that motivate me back toward teaching, students, and my research questions.
-I value people’s stories, because they reveal that people are singular and important, unique and situated. I value people, and I value their words
-I value being connected to other people who value words, stories, and relationships. I like teaching because I found that it placed me in a community with a preponderance of other word-valuing people.
-I value questions: I think it is important to ask questions about meaning, about others, about experiences. I do not like to feel that I am content with my own answers, and I like to be challenged by people who make meaning very differently from myself. I am drawn to qualitative work and interviewing in particular because it supports and even encourages these personal values. Like other researchers I admire, from Seidman to Geertz to Hunt, I feel privileged when I listen to other people, and I find that the stories of others provide endless challenges to our notions of meaning. Like education researchers I admire, from William Perry to Sheridan Blau, I think that good teaching means thinking reflectively and
questioning ourselves and what we do. Keeping these values central gives my work direction and purpose, and provides the reasoning that directs my curiosity and quest to understand others. It also places me in a community of people I admire, from other teachers and writers to my participants.
When I look back at my story of conceptualizing the study in Chapter One, I see that these are the values that motivated my process of coming to my research questions and formulating the idea for the study in the first place. Throughout the study and the writing of this project, they are the values that I relied on when making choices about what to present and how to present it. They are also the values that ground the way I personally evaluate the degree to which the study was a success. I wanted to learn the stories of an instructor group that was different from myself, and connect their stories to the larger fields of writing studies and composition theory. I wanted to feel connected into a larger community of teachers, and I wanted to connect them to my community of composition instructors. I wanted to ask worthwhile questions about what writing means to instructors and students in a context different from my own. I wanted the questions and answers to challenge my own sense of what writing was and what the teaching of writing meant.
In many ways, this project was a personal journey for me. I grew in my confidence that qualitative, interdisciplinary work matters to the field of writing, that outside perspectives are important to developing our field’s relevance and ability to make an impact for students, and in my personal confidence that I can make a unique contribution to our field, as a researcher, a writer, and a writing teacher.
When I asked LTC Parks what he hoped his cadets got out of reading The Alchemist, he responded:
The biggest thing is to realize that they want to know what is on the other side, without going through the journey. [Santiago, the main character,] would never have gained everything he gained if he hadn’t gone on the journey. So stop asking me what is on the other side of the wall, and make the journey to the other side of the wall. You’re going to need all of [your own experiences] to get to where you’re supposed to be. If I tell you what is on the other side of the wall, and you don’t like it, you might not go. But if you go for yourself, you might [like it].
Throughout my graduate work (and even before), I have admired the work of researchers who wanted to “know what is on the other side,” and were willing to take the journey and see for themselves. I wondered several times if I could do it, too. An important insight in LTC Parks’ comment above is that Santiago needed his own perspectives and history with him on the journey, in order to determine what it would mean. Another person cannot tell you what a journey will mean for you, because they are traveling with a different set of experiences. LTC Parks was relating Santiago’s journey to the journey of military service, but the same principles are at work in a variety of experiential “journeys” that we take in life. Throughout the journey of doing my research (and really, throughout the journey of my entire graduate education) the values that have guided me and helped me over the walls were the qualitative ones, the values that simply argue for the intrinsic value of human beings: stories are important, words create meaning, being connected to others is how you make both knowledge and community, and asking questions is the way to grow a disciplinary field and to serve our students and communities. Concentrating on these has always encouraged me to feel that what I was doing was meaningful and that, like Santiago, I was traveling to where I was “supposed to be.”