Quality of the Research

Qualitative research can involve potential problems of credibility (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) arising from its interpretive paradigm (Hammersley, 1998). Measures taken in this study to mitigate against possible limitations of validity or credibility included my personal immersion and ‘insider’ status in the field, member checking, triangulation of research methods, principled and transparent analysis enacting concepts from LCT, and peer feedback.

My background as an experienced jazz musician and teacher afforded three benefits in terms of research credibility. First, my prolonged and continuing professional involvement in the field allowed for reflexively confirming interpretations through conversation with the teachers. My cultivated gaze allowed me to see nuanced meanings in discourse and practices that might have been invisible to outsiders. Second, I used member checking to confirm my interpretations of interview responses, inviting teachers to give feedback on my account of their beliefs. Third, the subtleties of my status as a peer of the teachers countered power differentials that can be

problematic in interviews (Mertens, 2018). As performers, the teachers all were senior to me but were peers in the field of jazz pedagogy. Such social hierarchies are important among jazz players and musicians tend to be confident commentators who see themselves as authorities by virtue of their experience and performing status (Martin, 2016 ). This seniority makes it unlikely that the teachers felt a need to be selective in their responses due to any perceived power

imbalance. That they were my peers reduced the likelihood of their omitting ‘insider’

perspectives or language. Together, the affordances of my background experience with member checking reduced the potential for erroneous inferences or misinterpreting participants’

meanings. There were also potential limitations arising from my background, specifically my ‘insider’ status.

There was potential for me to take for granted what is known within the field, to make assumptions or neglect important issues in my analysis. Merriam (1998) identifies peer

examination as one of six strategies for strengthening internal reliability of qualitative case-study research and in this case, this limitation was overcome by presenting my work to others at least two or three times each semester including: ‘Roundtable’ seminars hosted by the LCT Centre for Knowledge Building at the University of Sydney for an audience of academics and other

postgraduate students with an interest in LCT and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), including an audience in-person and remotely online; at a weekly problem-solving workshop ‘S- Club’ attended by doctoral students using LCT in diverse research projects, my supervisor, and visiting scholars in which we shared our research in progress and worked together to solve problems and discuss analyses; a weekly LCT discussion and reading group for postgraduate colleagues ‘LCT-OG’, and papers at LCT international conferences. Another potential issue was the possibility for a conflict of interest in that the participants and I were all professional jazz performers who may work together and potentially rely on one another for work. However, none of the teachers were people I played with, they being ‘above’ me, nor realistically had any prospect of working with. Similarly, there was potential for me to wish to cast my peers in a positive or negative light based on personal relationships. This issue was also addressed by the regular sharing of my interim analyses with peers.

The issue of observer distortion (Sarantakos, 1993) was addressed by my staying on-site at the jazz camp as a resident visitor for the duration of the camp. My research assistant did not sleep at the venue, but stayed from the students’ breakfast time until the early evening so became a familiar sight to staff and students, as did I. We made efforts to keep the video camera and filming as unobtrusive as possible, for instance setting the cameras away from where the students were rehearsing, not moving the camera, keeping camera-operator movements to a minimum, and not speaking unless spoken to.

I dealt with the potential limitation of single-method research bias by using multiple data gathering strategies and sources for triangulation (Flick, 1992, 2014; Webb, 1970). Sources included teachers, lessons, artefacts, and public documents. Methods included interviews, analysis of classroom video, and documentary analysis.

Developing a translation device for relating data to LCT concepts made explicit the basis of my analysis, contributing to analytical transparency. In the analysis of classroom video, the focus was on pedagogy and the Specialisation basis of what was said. The principled coding of data

feedback: through participation in the aforementioned weekly ‘S-Club’ workshop for sharing research work and joint problem-solving with fellow doctoral students, my supervisor, and visiting scholars; presentations at ‘Roundtable’ seminars at the University of Sydney LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building; and by presenting preliminary analyses in conference papers

(Richardson, 2015, 2017, 2019). This peer feedback additionally aided in confirming the validity of my translation device and research conclusions.

3.11 Conclusion

This chapter has explained how the study addressed the methodological and theoretical

implications, arising from the literature review, for the research questions and focus. Guided by the theoretical framework of LCT and enacting concepts from its analytical toolkit I explained how the study comprises a staged research strategy comprising documentary analysis of a corpus of literature to access public portrayals of jazz education, followed by a qualitative case study approach to see beliefs and teaching practices of four jazz educators. Multiple collection methods and sources of data enabled the study to see beliefs and pedagogy. LCT made it possible for analysis to see knowledge and knowers and ways of knowing and afforded the potential to theorise from the illustrative cases. The following substantive chapters report the findings of the study. Drawing on the first collection stage, Chapter 4 is an analysis of the field enacting

specialisation codes and conceptualising a ‘public face’ and an obscured ‘private reality’ of jazz education. Chapters 5 to 7 draw on the illustrative case studies, ‘Drew’, ‘Julian’, and ‘Pascal’.