In this chapter, I articulate the methods and procedures I utilized for this research project. First, I offer important considerations for the methodology of this work and its significance for research in education. Additionally, after the methods and procedures are delineated and some research challenges are reviewed, I offer insights about the researcher and his experience that enhances the methodologies employed in this project. My experience with this project offers key insights for other qualitative researchers who may conduct similar work about race. Finally, I present a brief summary of the chapter.
My interest in this study was to explore how students make meaning of the object-
“race.” I was particularly interested in how they assign meanings to race, how they make various gestures about race to one another, how they have interpreted the gestures made by others to them about race, and how the constructions and negotiations of these meanings interact, and specifically within the context of a multiracial yet predominantly white university. Hence, I was interested in conducting a qualitative research project that would uncover these meanings. I did not remove myself from this process of meaning making and recognized that meaning would be made during the course of my research as well. My social location was important to this process.
49 CONSIDERATIONS FOR MY WORK
According to Bogdan and Biklen (1998), qualitative research involves five essential characteristics: 1. it is naturalistic, having an actual setting where the data is found; 2. it is descriptive; 3. there is a focus on process rather than outcomes; 4. data analysis is inductive; 5. “meaning” is the essential concern. Hence, as a qualitative researcher, I was concerned with how people (and in this case, students) make sense of their experiences. These perspectives, the meaning participants make of their lives, were central to the analysis and interpreted results of this study. While all research involves some imposition of the researcher’s interpretations on the researched, understanding the research participants’ point of view offers the least distortion and privileges the informants’ perspectives. Context was also critical. I desired to capture the perspectives of the students themselves within their social context.
Much of the development of qualitative research was influenced by George Herbert Mead’s conception of symbolic interaction in Mind, Self, and Society (1934). This contribution was important for my project that was primarily concerned with meaning making within the context of the college/university. In Blumer’s discussion of symbolic interactionism (1969), he summarizes three premises of the concept. First, human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they have assigned to these things. Second, the meanings of things are derived from the social interaction between human beings. Third, the meanings are modified or
otherwise managed in an interpretive process used by the person who interacts with these things. In summary, symbolic interactionism sees meaning as a derivative of social processes, rather
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than being inherent in an object itself or only in the mind of an individual (psychological perspective).
Meanings have material manifestations as they determine action and reaction in the world that human beings share, interpret, shape and are shaped by. Symbolic interactionism, then, is highlighted by “gestures” and response to the meaning of those gestures. A gesture is “any part or aspect of an ongoing action that signifies the larger act of which it is a part” (Blumer, 1969, p.9). Thus, speech and the vocabulary one chooses to use is a gesture. Symbolic interaction involves interpreting the action of another. Mead (1934) offers a “triadic nature of meaning” that: 1. signifies what the person to whom it is directed should do; 2. signifies what the person making the gesture will do; and 3. signifies the joint action that will be produced by the acts of both parties. In the context of my research, I wanted to understand how students would express the interpretations they made of race from their experiences on a college campus, how they would respond to those experiences based on their interpretations, and how they would make meaning together from their articulations of those meanings in focus groups. Qualitative
methods are particularly useful for my project, which draws on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its support for storytelling to “analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race” (Delgado, 1995, p.xiv). CRT’s view of race as a product of social relations and social thinking provides a lens by which I could view the process of race “construction” in my research and analyze the data through that lens. Leaning on CRT and other theories helped me to think critically about my analyses and make important
connections between individual thought and action, and larger social phenomena; specifically the persistence of race in our society.
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My work is also informed by a post-positivist philosophy of research which guided me to explore the world constructed by my informants rather than discovering a world fixed in any particular set of facts (Lather, 2001). My critical inquiry into higher education through this project, while not a feminist project, draws on feminist approaches to research practice. For example, I approached my work with a strong sense of the complexity involved, the various angles to consider, and with constant questioning or reflection about my place as a subject in the research. In other words, I drew on feminist methodology within my research even though I did not undertake a feminist project or employ feminist methods necessarily. Harding (1987)
distinguishes method as techniques for gathering empirical data while methodology describes the theory and interpretive framework that directs the project. My methodology reflected frames and lenses through which I approached and viewed the procedures and methods of my own project.