Reflection is central to all action research endeavors and I thought that since
I have taken up the challenge to address barriers to qualitative research for
diverse body minds,
I thought it would be prudent to briefly contextualize how I understand
qualitative research method and the process of action research. First,
I understand qualitative method to be that which strives for thick descriptors
of phenomena,
essentially an explanation of the why of being and doing in the world and how
this meaning of why provides an informed understanding of the human
dynamics.
Denson and Lincoln suggest that the experience focus of qualitative research,
uh, demands multifaceted, observable data, which may be case study,
personal experience, introspectives life story interview,
observational historical interactional and visual text that describe routine
and problematic moments and meanings in individuals' lives.
So how does action research situate with this type of method?
Action research involves human dynamics of the personal or professional with the
power of dynamics of systems,
whether social or political exerting influences over practices In some areas,
action research seems to invite honest introspective correction, two,
wicked problems at the local and systems levels exerting of its participants.
Collaboration, communication, and practical problem solving.
Action research seeks to bring sustained participant informed correction to the
status quo. As a as stated interdependence among norms, rules,
skills and values creates a pattern called the status quo that becomes so
omnipresent so as to be taken for granted and to go unchallenged.
With the qualities of purposeful engagement and dynamic responsiveness to
problems and action plans,
action research can invite new learning and enduring change efforts.
How does action research apply to the critical examination I have taken with
respect to qualitative inquiry,
accessibility and equitability for diverse body minds?
Emancipatory action research according to Mertens can claim an origin
in the disability rights movement which sought to hold accountable social,
political and economic structures and systems that were disabling seeking
equal rights and representation.
One aim of the movement was to have equal voice and representation in research.
The disability rights movement sought to advocate that research not be done on
the community, but instead with the community in a way that promotes tangible,
positive and enduring changes in disability and accurately reflects the lived
experience of disability.
Emancipatory action research is a type of critical inquiry that seeks to
influence transmute actions through emboldening a person-centered contextualize
And issue salient investigative approach to research as a means of peaceably and
with rationality exposing and destabilizing systems and structures that
legitimize repressive inequalities towards those on the societal periphery
because they do not conform to the dominant group. In turn,
the non-dominant unrepresented groups are relegated to delimited space,
restrictive access and exclusion.
Emancipatory action research is aimed at offering transformative action against
power disparities. With this as the framework,
what were the articulated purposes of the study?
There were four explicit aims of the study. One,
to provide a means of situating the dynamics of disability experience
appropriately through qualitative methods that are individually
centering and validating. Two,
demonstrating that multimodality in qualitative research process can
enhance the inclusivity of disability in the discrete component.
Parts of action research which are planning, acting,
developing and reflecting. Three,
demonstrate that multimodality and research is one mode by which one can remove
physical and intellectual access barriers and in an emancipatory way displace
the norm. Eight standardizations of qualitative research,
which Lester and Nusbaum clarify is the composite identity status held
by those who are not stigmatized by identifiers of disability or other
devalued identities. Number four,
research produced by a diverse body mind is both reasonable and rigorous in that
it withstands common tests of qualitative rigor,
but more importantly it turns a critically introspective lens onto the goals
of qualitative research. Those goals, as I have stated,
are to understand why and how this knowing and meaning of why
helps us to better understand the human condition.
If this is true of qualitative inquiry,
then the factor of reasonable would be twofold. One,
space for diversity in design, discharge,
dissection and distillation of meaning and dissemination of qualitative inquiry
naturally invites a more complete understanding of the diverse and individual
ways in which we perceive,
receive and interact with the world and in turn how this influences the manner
in which we operate and interact with the world around us,
making up what we know as our negotiated reality. Two,
it situates creatively contrasting ways that a diverse body mind might create
and produce knowledge and the representational power within that.
What specific actions did I take to accomplish these aims,
which at their core were intended to unsettle in a
constructively critical way,
taken for granted norms and prescriptions of qualitative research that
unless processed through a diverse body mind may go unnoticed,
these barriers may come in the form of physical and intellectual access ones and
likely others not considered in the scope of this action research.
How was I able to construct a convincing case that there is indeed an
imperative for diverse and inclusive methodological innovations to ensure
that there are more complete representations of the dynamics of disability in
qualitative inquiry? First,
I designed an emancipatory spirited study intently focused on making
engagement with and the end products of it centering and validating
for participants and myself.
My model was led with conceptualization of emancipatory action research,
which stated briefly is realized through a five-step process of being
problematizing, colonization, action and making sense.
How did I use these as a guidance being?
What does being involve and how did it apply?
Being involves the contemplative awareness of a condition or happening that
requires some critical attention. Within the scope of this action research,
the being stage was rendered with three emancipatory exercises. One,
my recognition through professional practice that conceptualization of assistive
technology should encompass more than the functional return of use and instead
considered the embodied negotiated experience of assistive technology usage and
that an individual using assistive technology contends with a revised manner of
being in the world as a result of impairment and reliance on assistive
technologies for inde, uh, for negotiating life independently. Two,
multimodality and methodological approach aligned with principles of universal
design for learning and to advocate increased accessibility and equitability
concerning critical qualitative research. Three,
the inclusion of disability reclamation statements as a part of action research.
Problematizing, what does problematizing involve and how did it?
How did it apply? It means using some medium, whether audio,
visual or et cetera to raise issue salience and social consciousness
depicting the issue in context and real time to generate interest and evoke
feelings.
A generative theme by manner of the research design participants were afforded a
safe centering space to allow them to reflect on their own experiences with
dyslexia and assistive technology, as well as an emergence of new awareness
consensusization. What does consensusization involve and how did it apply?
The issue that has been problematized will at this stage be contextualized
against social and political systems and structures to identify and meaningfully
engage with actionable steps of correction to that problem.
In this stage,
the dominant narratives and their incongruencies with the reality of the
marginalized are placed into critical questioning. Pre-discussion,
informal conversations with participants were facilitated discussing
for example, how social and political systems and structures create disability.
In addition,
I aided participants in a basal level understanding of life world and each
fraction of experience, which included selfhood, sociality,
embodiment, temporality, spatiality, project and discourse,
as well as moodedness so as to allow them to begin thinking about how
considering their experiences from a life world perspective may challenge
dominant narratives that they have perhaps internalized about their experience
without really considering how they describe and adapt to a negotiated
experience with and through dyslexia and as an assistive technology user and
what that means for them. Action.
What does action involve and how did I apply it?
This stage invites co-engagement and participation with the community
in tangible production of change products and in turn centers the
counter narratives of the issue.
The action was the creation of a documentary of sorts using a storytelling
narrative interview style with analysis through deep listening and video
editing,
working cooperatively together to use as a context how
post-secondary students with dyslexia describe and adapt to a negotiated
existence with and through dyslexia and assistive technology from a life world
perspective with specific focus on the fractions of experience
including selfhood, sociality, embodiment, temporality,
spatiality, project, discourse and moodedness. Making sense.
What is making sense in how did I apply it?
This stage involves translating punctuating experiences and individual or group
centered meaning makings into comprehensible,
practicable and actionable steps towards critical conscious consciousness
raising so that there is an empathic understanding of systematic issues and in
turn a natural continuance of inquiry and meaningful progress.
What were the co-created products of the research that helped in the making of
sense.
The co-created products from this research were one a two-part video
series as proving ground for the fact that the dynamics of disability
experience can be more appropriately situated in qualitative research
through purposeful consideration of centering and validation in the research
space through accessible and equitable methodological approaches. Two,
An edited book perspectives to extend the critical conversation about accessible
and equitable means of engagement With qualitative inquiry. Three, two,
professional development discussion guides to work towards the co-created
products of this action research.
What specific methodological steps did I take and why?
First I considered the access needs I brought to the research as well as that of
my participants.
What were some of the access need considerations
for me?
I have always felt that I don't belong in research spaces and that the way my
voice expresses itself is somehow inferior to others in the research space
because I do not perceive, receive,
or interact with information in a normative or standard way as the result of
learning disabilities and information processing disorders secondary to cerebral
palsy for example. While I can make connections,
visualize patterns of convergence,
emergence and divergence in the data and deal with graduated abstraction and
meaning making,
it does not come without pronounced difficulty and inordinate amounts of
processing time. To be successful,
I must engage in a multimodal manner. For my participants,
I considered the fact that perhaps like me,
they may present with processing or other similar expression difficulties and
equally so a narrative interview on the topic may be complex and nuanced
to engage with. So to counter this,
I designed the study so that there was maximal flexibility with respect to a
advanced discussion preparation time. B, selection of interview style,
whether semi-structured or unstructured C. interview pacing
and D. the mode of follow-up and the like.
What are some of the analytic tools and strategies that I used?
First and foremost,
video data with a narrative storytelling style of interviewing.
Why? Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff argue that video data has contained within
an illustrative detail that can provide analytically stimulating and engrossing
meaning-making production forged from an intermix of subtlety and explicitness
derived from the fact that there is a preservation of visible actions,
spoken words, and nonverbal detail. However,
Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff suggest that even with this noticeable richness and
preserved depth of video data,
such data sources are relatively underutilized in the social sciences.
Despite their significant potential,
they argue that video-based studies can provide the practical and
methodological resources through which we can begin to counter the linguistic
turn and to take seriously the ways in which social action is produced
as intelligible by virtue of the interplay of the spoken,
the visible and the material. In a similar vein,
other researchers maintain that methodology involving digital audio visual
components allows the researcher to situate as an unobtrusive observer and
liberates the data in a sense by allowing a depth and breadth to its
presentation and dynamic preservation in a way that is absent from transcripts
alone. It is my contention that multimodal data,
whether by or some other mode when utilized in a study that seeks to
completely and contextually represent as well as dynamically situate the
experience of disability in a manner that promotes principles of centering
validation and co-partnership in the knowledge production of disability.
Multimodal means of engagement are of critical importance
through such an approach physical and intellectual access.
Barriers are not only lessened but acknowledged on an individual basis and the
flexibility to the research approach can be used as a means of accessible
equitable inclusion in the research process.
I believe that such an approach practically extends the argument of Lester
and Nusbaum in centering diverse body minds in critical qualitative inquiry
that diverse body minds should not be sidelined as illegible because they do not
conform to the normate or ways of engaging with and producing
knowledge. Why should someone be excluded from the research process
because they do not receive,
perceive or interact in a normatively patterned way.
Just because the inquiry may look different and feel different does not discount
it or its process as reasonable and valid. In fact,
if the intention of qualitative inquiry is to arrive at the why of being in
doing in the world and the meaning that can be taken from that why to better
understand the dynamics of the human condition,
then wouldn't it be valid and reasonable to invite diverse body minds of all
kinds into the research space.
For it is then that we can completely understand the nuances of negotiated
existences.
Multimodality and research is a way to practically invite the
exercise of an exchange from qualitative research as well as situate those with
diverse body minds to create and produce it.
Kuntz convincingly articulated a notion of spaces of possibility in qualitative
research to which he claims often,
which such spaces of possibility extend from the recognition that
previously legitimized forms of knowing and being whether
epistemological and ontological assumptions respectively misrepresent
others' lived realities.
It is through my own navigation of these spaces of possibility that I was able
to design what I believe to be an an inclusive, accessible,
and equitable study. Secondly,
I used post-interview memos as a part of the analytic technique.
I took time to openly and critically reflect on the strength of rapport building
established with the participant.
The post-interview memos were evidence of tangible and intangible situational
factors
And tone in conjunction with the meaningfulness of the bond and mutuality
of an interaction between two embodied individuals and how that affected the
outcome of the interview. Thirdly, to analyze the video data,
I used a program called Transana.
Transana was used to analyze the data in the following ways a life
world video library was constructed consisting of all of the video data from all
six participants,
and then I imported professionally produced verbatim transcripts and that
transcript and video data was then time coded for nsync navigational control of
all of the, uh, the video and audio and textual elements of,
uh, the data.
And then I began a targeted analysis of specific aspects of the data.
Next,
I began with creation of keyword groups and keywords that were identified during
deep listening. Next,
I created a collection of 17 video collections topically organized
and then rendered the data into compelling segments that aligned with the
research frame. Simply stated,
Transana is dynamically responsive to the analytical needs of the researcher,
and equally important provides basic scaffolding to the analytical process to
ensure that all of the thematic connections, patterns of convergence,
emergence and divergence and abstracted meaning making, uh, that is intended,
is accounted for to the level that you intend as the researcher given the
uniqueness of multimedia data. For example,
data can be organized into collections and then categorized
rather than confining analysis to traditional methods of coding.
Fourthly, deep listening,
a type of intensively layered attentiveness to what is being said by their
participant and how it is being said.
Deep listening is about more than hearing what participants say,
but emphasizing relational connectedness through which comes openness and
vulnerability. To arrive at an empathic understanding of what is being said,
law suggested that this type of listening is the researcher's ability to
acknowledge the uncertainties and complexities in the participant's words
in effort to disentangle their messes of reality.
In my research this meant as Ledwith suggested helping participants come
to a new awareness.
Step one, a deep listen to each individual participant interview.
The start and stop time of each topic was noted.
Key takeaways were noted by each topic for each individual participant.
Step two,
a deep re-listening by topic of each individual participant using keywords from
the previous list.
Time codes were marked for the individual key takeaways in transana.
Step three, compiling of the topic with key takeaways.
I began to think about how I would organize the video clips. Each topic was
Watched about seven times in total per topic. Uh,
with each deep listening at this stage,
I began to hear patterns that told the story.
I marked the specific time codes where I saw convergence divergence and
emergence among narratives. Step four,
I reflected using my notes and what I had heard during the seven times of deep
listening to each topic and wove the story of the topic by editing the video
into clips that cohesively told the story not only by topic,
but also the broader life world perspective of describing and adapting to a
negotiated existence with and through dyslexia and as an assistive technology
user. Next,
as part of the analytic process to help me reach thematic connections and deeper
levels of abstraction, I used a mix of voice memos, written notes,
color coded keyword notes organized by question with each participant assigned
a color. Through a strategic and intermixed use of the modalities,
I was able to design a study that was not only accessible and equitable for my
participants, but equally so for me,
allowing me to see interconnections and arrive at meaningful conclusions from
the data to a degree that I might not have otherwise.
As I reflect on the efforts of this action research study,
did I accomplish its aims situating disability and confronting
physical and intellectual access barriers in qualitative research?
From my perspective, the design,
implementation and analytical process of sense making or the uncovering of
underlying meaning as well as the creation of multimodality in products from the
data naturally allowed for centering and validation,
as well as the representation of individual experience of disability,
both for myself and my participants. How did it allow for this?
For me,
this allowed for engagement with research in ways meaningful
to the way that I perceive, receive, and interact with information,
allowing a flexible research space for me to allow my disabilities
not only to be accounted for in the research process but also from an
asset based perspective positively accentuate my disabilities through the entire
process and the power that they have in sharing a different perspective of
diversity in the human condition and why that matters.
Without my disabilities in play, throughout the research process,
perhaps such sensitivity to centering and validating and situating
disability and allowing the individual experience to come through would not have
happened to the same degree.
Given the way that the study was designed and carried out,
it made me and my diverse body mind legible. For
the participants,
while I could summarize how the research situated them and made the process
accessible and equitable,
I will instead share the exact words of the participants
when asked to reflect on this point. Analy states,
"I find this research to be a centering experience because it is giving those
who might feel forgotten or unnoticed a chance to feel heard.
Everyone has a different perspective on things,
so it is important to learn more about the differences and
similarities so there can be a positive and effective change.
Personally,
I felt validated because no one wants to talk about disabilities because
it might make them uncomfortable or they don't care.
Since it might not affect them directly,
even if it does not affect people directly,
they should still see the importance of it because it is something that
influences society in the way it might operate or the way that
we engage with each other.
This research will help to show a complete representation of the dynamics of
the disability experience because it will be those who actually have the
disabilities explaining their point of view instead of someone telling them what
they need,
it will give insight into the different kinds of disabilities and how they Im
can impact everyone differently.
Everyone is different and might need different things and if we are able to know
what needs to be changed,
then we are able to help a broader group of individuals."
And Sarah, I commented.
It helped me to think about my own disabilities and how I relate to the world
and how I talk about my disabilities and needs.
I feel like the questions asked were very thoughtful and I hope that the dataset
will be a wide group of diverse experiences.
Trevor mentioned the fact that the research involved video.
It allowed the experience of dyslexia to be seen from a first person perspective
with detail into how an individual's emotions are seen through
the experience and how they interpret it.
Increased inclusivity in action research.
I believe I was able to accomplish this by an active demonstration of
emancipatory action research.
Of course guided by the transformative tones of Mertens and the anchor points of
Ledwith being problematizing, consensusization, action
making sense proving that the cyclical and it iterative nature of
action research can account for disability at all turns of the process.
And it is an appropriate style of research because it brings solutions to the
abrus, making them more tractable,
which in this case would be accessibility and equitability of the
qualitative method.
Demonstrate that research produced by a diverse body mind is both reasonable and
rigorous.
I believe that the research did in fact make a convincing
Case that research produced by a diverse body mind is both reasonable and
rigorous.
I believe that the research method attends to the needs for
credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability.
But more importantly in this context, the question of reasonable is,
as I've stated before, one space for diversity in design,
discharge,
dissection and distillation of meaning and dissemination of qualitative inquiry
naturally invites a more complete understanding of the diverse
and individual ways in which we perceive,
receive and interact with the world and in turn how this influences the
manner in which we operate in and react to the world around us,
making up what we know as our negotiated reality. And two,
it situates creatively contrasting ways that a diverse body mind might
create and produce knowledge and the representational power within that.
The specific actions I took to accomplish the aims of the research
were at their core intended to unsettle in a constructively critical way,
the taken for granted norms and prescriptions of qualitative research that
unless pro processed through a diverse body mind might have gone unnoticed.