2.3 Methods, Methodologies and Conceptual Frameworks – Considered and Rejected Ethnography, participatory action, hermeneutics, psychology and critical discourse analysis are all qualitative research methodologies that study human social and behavioural constructs. These and many other methodologies were examined to determine their viability for this study, with particular focus on hermeneutics,
Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This section includes a discussion of the methodologies considered and the reasons they were rejected.
Hermeneutics, which seeks to understand human linguistic and non-linguistic expression,116 was identified as a potential theoretical framework for the research. Of particular interest was objective hermeneutics.117 Objective hermeneutics research studies texts to understand not the context of their creation but rather the context in which they are interpreted, identifying any latent structures (i.e. personal biases, cultural and social constructs) held by the reader that may influence their
interpretation.118 This methodology might have potential for studying the relevance of TDR standards by having East African practitioners and digital repository operators read standards texts in advance of data collection interviews. This approach would have elucidated any personal biases they brought to their reading of the standards; however, it presented several problems.
Firstly, it would have required interviewees to read OAIS and RAC, about 150 pages in total. Most interviewees would likely not have wanted to read such a large
116 Ramberg and Kristin Gjesdal, ‘Hermeneutics’, in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2009, accessed 3 March 2012, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/hermeneutics/.
117 Uwe Flick, Ernst Von Kardoff, and Ines Steinke, eds., A Companion to Qualitative Research (California: SAGE Publications, 2005)., 205.
118 Flick et al., A Companion to Qualitative Research., 204. See also Uwe Flick, An Introduction to Qualitative Research 5ed. (California: SAGE Publications, 2014)., 330.
amount, due to other commitments and time constraints. This requirement, therefore, would have severely truncated the sample set. Secondly, such an approach would not have enabled the research to answer the research questions effectively or test the research hypothesis because it would focus entirely on user interpretation of texts, not on the impetus behind the creation of those texts and how this would affect both their contents and their interpretation by readers.
Another methodology considered was Participatory Action Research (PAR). PAR requires the researcher to expose explicit and implicit biases in organisational structures where there may be marked power imbalances or problematic situations.119 For
example, this method has been used successfully to study issues such as the nature of government AIDS policies and programmes and their effects on AIDS patients. The PAR process requires the researcher to directly and knowingly engage with research subjects in order to create pragmatic and actionable results, ideally leading to social change, including a correction in power imbalances. Participants in PAR are invited to actively engage in data collection and interpretation, assisting the researcher in producing practical results. This approach encourages participants to have a vested interest in overseeing and ensuring the implementation of research findings once the research is completed.
Employing the PAR methodology might have yielded interesting results by encouraging participants at data collection sites, and other archival practitioners in East Africa, to engage with the development of standards. Part of this process might also have included the identification and redressing of problems that would have prevented the transferability of TDR standards. Nevertheless, this research methodology was not
119 All the information from this paragraph from: Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain, and Mike Kesby, eds., Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participants and Place (London: Routledge, 2009)., 1-3.
practical for a number of reasons. Firstly, the level of participant involvement would have been unsustainable and unmanageable given the scope of this study: the process of collecting input and feedback from East African Community (EAC) participants would have been too onerous for the researcher. Secondly, given the highly politicised and polarised environment in some study countries, participant input could have potentially skewed research findings, by reflecting overarching ideological interests rather than identifying actual obstacles in the transferability of standards. Finally, given the aims and objectives of this research, PAR would not have produced the data needed to answer the overarching research questions. The focus of this research methodology is on correcting power imbalances, and the aims of this research are to understand how TDR standards were created in order to identify whether any biases have been built into standards and how those biases might affect their interpretation and usefulness in an East African context. Thus, it was concluded that PAR would not be appropriate.
A third research methodology considered was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
CDA seeks to examine underlying power structures and inequalities latently constructed into texts.120 CDA research has focused on language use in the political sphere and in the media, specifically in the creation and use of propaganda.121 One type of CDA method considered for this thesis was the discourse-historical research approach, which seeks to examine the historical impetuses that influence text creation and looks for mitigating extra-linguistic factors.122 For example CDA has been used to study the anti-immigration
120 Ruth Wodak Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse, Critical Theory: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language, Discourse and Ideology 7 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989)., xi. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (London, Thousand Oak, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2001)., 10.
121Wodak and Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis.,6. Florian Menz, ‘Manipulation Strategies in Newspapers:
A Program for Critical Linguistics’, in Language, Power, and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989), 227–49.
122 Titschler et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis., 24.
stance taken in Austria in the early 1990s with the ‘Austria First Petition’.123 Using the CDA method, the study provided a history of Austria’s immigration policies to
contextualise and then deconstruct and explain the propaganda surrounding the petition.124
CDA as a form of text interrogation, although valuable, would not have enabled the research into TDR standards to examine the research questions. The methodology seeks only to deconstruct the texts and their context of creation; it does not assist in understanding a reader’s perspective of the texts and how they are received. As such this methodology was not considered suitable.