Research approach

3.2 Research design

3.3 Analysis and synthesis of data 3.4 Ethical considerations

The chapter culminates with a brief summary.

3.1 Research approach

Qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 24)

Qualitative research approaches ensure that flexibility will be maintained and that experiences that are not shared by all participants will be taken into account. By its very nature qualitative research is a time intensive process which can become very messy and convoluted (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2013). However, the time taken to collect and analyse data qualitatively is necessary if the finer details and unique features of events such as the relationships that develop over time between academic leaders and their staff groups, are to be investigated and understood (Yin, 2011).

Methodological positioning

For this research project I adopted an interpretive lens within a constructivist paradigm to examine the personal experiences of sixteen academic leaders who identified as academic immigrants. Constructivist epistemology embraces flexibility and maintains a heightened sense of how information could be hypothesised by the researcher and the participant as well as the subjective nature of individual realities as the investigation proceeded. The interpretive lens further blurs the distinction between researcher and researched by placing more emphasis on the interpretations of the informant (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011).

Working within a qualitative, broadly interpretivist theoretical perspective, this study is located in a constructivist paradigm where the ontology is driven by the investigation of local and specific constructed realities, none of which are more or less true than others. In this way I am recognising that identity is a socially and symbolically constructed notion intended to lend meaning to experience. This approach understands meaningful reality as something that can be constructed rather than discovered (Quigley, 2011). As Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba (2011) describe it:

A goodly portion of social phenomena consists of the meaning- making activities of groups and individuals around those phenomena. The meaning-making activities themselves are of central interest to social constructionists and constructivists simply because it is the meaning-making, sense-making, attributional activities that shape action (or inaction). (p. 183)

Supported by relativist ontology, this constructivist approach recognises that while participants may share similar experiences or common characteristics of a phenomenon, individual realities are contextually specific (Lincoln & Guba, 2013), thereby suggesting that no two experiences are exactly alike. Instead, concentrating on local understanding through exploring alternative forms of representation can more accurately illuminate and describe questions that we strive to understand (Cooper & White, 2012).

To assist in framing the use of an interpretive framework, it was useful to confirm the underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions linked to this paradigm and relate these to the research aim and research questions of this study. Guba and Lincoln (1994) have clearly identified these and I have presented them and mapped them to the aim and research questions in table 3.1 below.

Table 3.1 Paradigm justification [Adapted from Guba and Lincoln (1994, p. 111)]

Constructionism/Interpretivism Links to research aims and questions

On

to

lo

g

y

Relativist - Realities are apprehendable in the form of multiple, intangible mental

constructions, socially and experientially based, local and specific in nature, and dependent for their form and content on the individual persons or groups holding the constructions.

The study investigates the academic identity of individuals and their relationship with their colleagues and the institutions in which they are employed by interpreting the subjective experiences of the research participants.

Ep is te m o lo g

y Transactional and subjectivist. The investigator and the object of investigation are assumed to be interactively linked so that the ‘findings’ are literally created as the investigation proceeds.

The specific research questions are all based around perceived (subjective) experiences of the participants and can only be answered by constant interaction between the researcher and the participant.

Me th o d o lo g y

Hermeneutical and dialectical. The variable and personal (intramental) nature of social constructions suggests that individual constructions can be elicited and refined only through interaction between and among investigator and respondents. These varying constructions are interpreted using

conventional hermeneutical techniques, and are compared and contrasted through a dialectical interchange. The final aim is to distil a consensus construction that is more

informed and sophisticated than any of the predecessor constructions (including, of course, the etic construction of the investigator).

The research presented here is

hermeneutical (deriving from the mythological

Hermes, the messenger in his role as

interpreter of messages) in that I was seeking to find meaning in the respondents’ narratives of academic immigrant identity and their relationships with their staff, and dialectical (made popular by Plato to establish the truth of the matter guided by reasoned arguments) since respondents’ constructions of these phenomena were “elicited and refined only through interaction between and among investigator and respondent” (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 207)

Schwandt (1998) argues that truth according to the constructivist “is the result of perspective” and that “we invent concepts, models, and schemes to make sense of experience in the light of new experience” (p. 236). From a constructivist orientation, explicit exploration of professional perspectives could play an important role for the organisation members as, according to

Kelly’s (1963) experience corollary, “a person’s construction system varies as he [sic] successively construes the replications of events” (p. 50). Robinson and Aronica (2009) similarly suggest that no one sees the world directly, rather it is perceived through frameworks of ideas and beliefs (constructs), which act as filters on what is seen and how it is seen. The term construct is particularly effective, because it reflects the concept’s dual role. On the one hand, a person’s constructs represent the view that a person has constructed about the world as they experienced it. On the other hand, a person’s constructs indicate how they are likely to construe the world as they continue to experience it (Smith & Boyd, 2012). A person’s construct system is their history and their predisposition to perceive (Stewart, 2010).

Construct approaches are epistemologically and ontologically consistent with qualitative research methods that focus on the interpretation of meanings (Hardison & Neimeyer, 2012). Meanings cannot be disconnected from their context, and must be understood in terms of both the similarities and the differences between people (Viney & Nagy, 2012). A constructivist approach recognises that each individual account of the phenomena, once endowed with meaning and context, will become meaningful and predictable, and will allow intelligent choices about its use(s) to be explored by a wider audience (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). With this in mind I selected a qualitative research approach to ensure that flexibility was maintained and that experiences that were not shared by all participants were taken into account.

The information gathered here about the phenomena following this constructivist paradigm was an individual perspective which is grounded in practice (Lincoln et al., 2011). Both the flexibility of this approach and the emphasis on the individual experience enables the reader to interpret the similarities and differences of the personal experiences as they add to a collective understanding of the phenomena in the defined context. To assist in the development of an integrated theory of the phenomenon within its specific context, I have employed an approach that is recognised as an inductive qualitative research method (Birks & Mills, 2011), which has allowed theoretical concepts to emerge from the data that was initially collected in the

field (Zhou & Shalley, 2008). In this regard, any generated theory has actually been ‘grounded’ in the data (Johnson, McGowan, & Turner, 2010) and therefore the reality of the participants’ practice.