This article was downloaded by [New York University]On 02 September 2013 At 0116Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number 1072954Registered office Mortimer House 37-41 Mortimer Street London W1T 3JHUK

Reflective PracticeInternational andMultidisciplinary PerspectivesPublication details including instructions for authorsand subscription informationhttpwwwtandfonlinecomloicrep20

A Journey Through an EmergentDesign and its Path forUnderstandingAlice Horton MerzPublished online 18 Aug 2010

To cite this article Alice Horton Merz (2002) A Journey Through an Emergent Designand its Path for Understanding Reflective Practice International and MultidisciplinaryPerspectives 32 141-152 DOI 10108014623940220142299

To link to this article httpdxdoiorg10108014623940220142299

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor amp Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the ldquoContentrdquo) contained in the publications on our platformHowever Taylor amp Francis our agents and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy completenessor suitability for any purpose of the Content Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor amp Francis The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses actions claims proceedings demands costs expenses damagesand other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent

This article may be used for research teaching and private study purposesAny substantial or systematic reproduction redistribution reselling loansub-licensing systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is

expressly forbidden Terms amp Conditions of access and use can be found athttpwwwtandfonlinecompageterms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

Re ective Practice Vol 3 No 2 2002

A Journey Through an Emergent Designand its Path for UnderstandingALICE HORTON MERZIdaho State University College of Education Pocatello Idaho 83209 USAe-mail amerzisuedu

ABSTRACT This paper re ects on an emergent research design where the researcherrsquosre ections on the paradigm methodology and methods played an important role in theemergence One of the unique features of the study was that the researcher was working ona paradigm shift during the study This meant that in order for this emergence to occursensibly the researcher continually had to re ect on the meaningfulness and consistency ofthe study As a result of the design a number of insights emerged however two insights wereparticularly important One of those insights was about the importance of going beyond theresearch agenda in order to capture the essences of the participant as a way of understandingand respecting the data The second was about the importance of developing onersquos ownresearch voice or way of thinking that is not bound by tradition but instead by themeaningfulness of the study

Introduction

In many circumstances re ection plays a minimal role in the design of a researchstudy ie it is usually limited to the design of the study before the study even beginsThis role may be something that we need to rethink One way to rethink it is toexamine the in uence of paradigms in our research designs For instance one reasonfor the minimal role of re ection in the research design can be linked to thepositivistic in uence where the research design is determined a priori Morespeci cally under the positivistic in uence if one of the design elements (such as themethodology methods or subjects) changed during a study then the study wouldmost likely be abandoned andor reconstructed as a new study Or if the researcherthought that heshe might need to make some revisions or re nements on a designthen at least one pilot study could precede an actual study (Borg amp Gall 1983)

While the above design procedure can also be utilized in non-positivisticparadigms other possibilities exist For instance in non-positivistic paradigmschanges can be made as part of an emergent design Speci cally Schwandt (1997)states

Fieldworkers routinely adjust their inquiry plans and strategies in responseto what they are learning in the eld site hellip By both allowing for andanticipating changes in strategies procedures ways of generating data and

ISSN 1462-3943 print 1470-1103 online02020141-11 Oacute 2002 Taylor amp Francis LtdDOI 10108014623940220142299

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

142 A Horton Merz

so on the eldworker seeks to make her or his plans (ie lsquodesignrsquo)responsive to the circumstances of the particular study (p 34ndash35)

On the other hand if an adjustment is made because a path is not being fruitful theneed for an alteration may be described as a lsquostumblingmissteprsquo (Ely et al 1997)Whether it is an emergent design or a stumbling the process needs to be re ectedupon and documented for the reader (Berg 2001)

However many researchers still do not use or report much on an emergent designprocess For example even though a study may be couched under a non-positivisticparadigm it may still utilize a static design keeping it the norm Another reason maybe related to paradigms some paradigms perceive changes in a design as notknowing onersquos research well enough Another reason that focuses less on thepolitical and paradigmatic aspects concerns the story that is to be told Theresearcher has to be careful that reporting on the design process does not distractfrom the story that is being told Despite these possible reasons the need for usingand reporting on emergent designs may change This may also mean that the roleof re ection in the design process may change

In a recent issue of the Educational Researcher Young (2001) calls forlsquoresearchers to use multiple methodologies and to work from different perspectivesrsquo(p 3) In fact some researchers and graduate programs have been working towardsthis kind of learning (Metz 2001 Page 2001 Pallas 2001) One implication fromthis is that we are likely to see an increase in emergent designs as researchers exploreincorporating multiple perspectives into single research projects If utilizing multipleperspectives and methodologies is to be a preferred way of working then we all needto think about what this could look like for our own research In beginning mytransition for this way of doing research there have been some interesting twists andturns that I think are worth sharing The following highlights some of theseexperiences along with how my re ections were instrumental in the process

The Beginning Stance

If the paradigm is constructivist the writer will present a text that stressesemergent designs and emergent understandings (Denzin 1994 p 502)

Emergent Design Assumptions

One unique aspect of my study is that I did not make the assumption that theemergence would be uni-directional or linear Instead I assumed that it would bebi-directional and non-sequential In a linear unidirectional model a paradigm isthought to inform the methodology (or research strategy) which informs themethods (or data collection and analysis) and presentation (See Fig 1)

In fact Guba and Lincoln (1994) contend that lsquoparadigm issues are crucial noinquirer we maintain ought to go about the business of inquiry without being clearabout just what paradigm informs and guides his or her approachrsquo (p 116) So itmakes sense to infer from Guba and Lincoln that a paradigm should be determined

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 143

FIG 1 Uni-directional linear research design model

a priori and utilized in a linear manner This also implies that any emergence will belimited to the last phases the methods or presentation phase

However if the emergent process is bi-directional and non-sequential (as is theassumption in this study) then the methods of data collection and analysis may alsoin uence the methodology (or research strategies) as well as the paradigm for thestudy (see Fig 2)

In addition this could mean that the paradigm methodology and methods donot have to be determined a priori It also implies that the emergence could occurat any point However it does not mean that the design should be whimsical

FIG 2 Bi-directional non-linear research design model

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

144 A Horton Merz

non-sensical or out of lsquoplumbrsquo (Chenail 1997) Schwandt (1997) speci callyaddresses some of these issues through the following statements

As a modi er for lsquodesignrsquo however the term lsquoemergentrsquo can suggest thatthe design itself arises unexpectedly or that the eldworker has no designor plan at all at the outset of the study This kind of complete laissez-faireattitude of seeing lsquowhat happensrsquo is ill advised The eldworker seeks tounderstand and portray some problem even issue concept life and so onand should have given careful thought in advance of undertaking the eldwork how that understanding can be developed and how claims madeabout a social phenomenon can be warranted (Schwandt 1997 p 35)

Paradigm History and Shifting

Another unique aspect of this studyrsquos emergent design is that it included a paradigmshift-ing In my study I began working towards a non-positivistic paradigmHowever like many researchers I was rst trained under the positivistic paradigmwith some history about its presence and with no current alternatives being offeredin comparison However as I became aware of non-positivistic paradigms (inparticular constructivism) I began to work towards an understanding of theconstructivist paradigm The lsquotowardsrsquo part is important because I like researchersbefore me on this paradigm-shifting journey found myself vacillating betweendifferent paradigms (even though this is not necessarily onersquos intention) In factthe journey in this study was not even limited to positivism and constructivismInstead as I began to explore constructivism I encountered other paradigms alongthe way So I had to begin understanding how the paradigms were similar anddifferent from each other in addition to evaluating them in relation to what I waswanting

This should not be surprising if one agrees with Denzin and Lincoln (1994)that the in uence of a paradigm is not necessarily a straight-forward process orinteraction In fact they contend that lsquothe researcher-as-bricoleur1-theorist worksbetween and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigmsrsquo(pp 2ndash3) I certainly experienced those competition and overlapping aspectssuch that the shifting was indeed affected in a non-sequential bi-directional wayBecause of this I had to check and re ect continually on the paradigm that I wasshifting to

Methodology or Research Strategies2

By starting with a constructivist paradigm I was not restricted to a particularmethodology so it started somewhat eclectically While being eclectic has its owndif culties it also gave me the freedom to explore and understand several strategiesHowever my rst step towards a methodology actually took me into a speci cmethodology ie a grounded theory methodology

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 145

Methods of Collecting Wading Through the Data and Analyzing It

In this study the data collection methods remained fairly static in this studyAccording to Schwandt (1997) and Janesick (1994) the data collection phase is oneplace where the research design could have some exibility for emerging One reasonthat my studyrsquos data remained unchanged was that it was mostly historical in natureIn addition I think it was the least different and least removed from the positivisticparadigm so it offered little contention for me in my paradigm-shifting

The decision about which data to target and use though varied slightly InitiallyI began examining excerpts that consisted of a segment resembling multi-sentencequotes from the data However I knew that I eventually wanted to develop and workwith some cases based on the data So I also identi ed one story in order to see ifother stories could be compiled for a later analysis and presentation In this instancea story represented a compilation of segments that have been assembled in a storyform that is more readable while keeping as much of the language and avor of thedata as possible

The most variation in the method appeared in the data analysis phase because Iwas working with the assumption that I would pursue multiple perspectives or layersof understanding (Ely et al 1997) This meant that I not only would exploredifferent pieces of data but I would explore some of them using different methodsI saw this strategy as part of an additive process (Miller amp Crabtree 1994) I alsosaw it as part of a crystallization process which included multiple perspectives in away that was different from the idea of triangulation which has been the moretraditional bridge from a positivistic design to a non-positivist one (Denzin ampLincoln 1994 Ely et al 1997) This crystallization of perspectives was meant toprovide different ways of seeing and understanding the data etc When using thesame data with different methods I thought of it as being similar to the metaphorof shining a light on an object By using different kinds of lights it may be possibleto highlight different aspects of the object so that different kinds of detail could beseen To carry the metaphor further hellip when a light is shown on one aspect of anobject you see more detail in that one highlighted area Similarly when the light ismoved around the object you see different things however it is still the same objectthat is being viewed With each viewing you understand the object differentlybecause of what is highlighted rather than strictly con rming that it is the sameobject

I think it will become clear in the following pages that the multiple perspectiveapproach was particular in uential in leading me back to the examination of mymethodology and paradigm shifts and in the emergence of my research design

Set of Questions

The danger in entering the eld with a very narrow focus is that theresearcher may have closed off the possibility of being surprised by what-ever else is there to be noticed hellip a ner focus will emerge only as the studyprogresses (Ely et al 1997 p 237)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

146 A Horton Merz

My set of questions and how I perceived them played a key role in my researchdesign As with any paradigm the questions indicate to the researcher some of whatneeds to be done and how However I was particularly in uenced by one of Morsersquos(1994) recommendations It was quite different from what I knew about thepositivistic approach to research questions Because there seemed to be someintuitive sense to it I wanted to understand it by using it According to JM Morse(1994)

As qualitative inquiry is often tenuous in the early stages hellip the researchershould make the question[s] as broad as possible rather than prematurelydelimit the study with a narrow question Narrowness distracts theresearcher from seeing the whole picture (Morse 1994 p 226)

In my case I took Morsersquos idea of questioning in two different directions The rstdirection focused more on what I think Morse intended In other words I generatedsome questions that were narrow enough for a focus but not too constraining of thelsquowhole picturersquo The second direction that I took with Morsersquos idea is different fromwhat I believe Morse intended but I think it is still related

The second direction was geared towards the questions method and design of thestudy It functioned under the assumption that the method and questions wereinextricably linked ie that one drove the other So when one changed the othercould change also This seems to be true no matter what paradigm this is associatedwith However there is usually no question or examination to see if the methodologyand paradigm shifted But as the bi-directional non-sequential diagram showed andas Guba and Lincolnrsquos (1994) idea that the methods must relate to the methodol-ogy then there should be at least a con rmation that the methodology and paradigmare still intact if something changes This becomes particularly important forresearchers who are in the midst of changing paradigms and are working with thepossibility of emerging designs

Re ections on the Journey of an Emergent Design

Exploring a Grounded Theory Approach

The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows over thequalitative researcher project (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994 p 5)

Since my data was mostly historical in nature I quickly moved into the data analysisphase and I was ready to move further into a non-positivistic approach Onealternative to a positivistic methodology was the grounded theory methodology Inparticular the grounded theory approach had the potential to allow a nice transitionfrom one paradigm to the next (ie from positivistic to non-positivistic) with itssystematic qualities (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994) One area of concern quickly becameapparent My model building process began to feel more like my old positivisticroots rather than the non-positivistic roots that I was trying to cultivate

I began to question if I was imposing my research agenda onto the study as ispossible in a positivistic study Did I have a type of bias that made me think that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

142 A Horton Merz

so on the eldworker seeks to make her or his plans (ie lsquodesignrsquo)responsive to the circumstances of the particular study (p 34ndash35)

On the other hand if an adjustment is made because a path is not being fruitful theneed for an alteration may be described as a lsquostumblingmissteprsquo (Ely et al 1997)Whether it is an emergent design or a stumbling the process needs to be re ectedupon and documented for the reader (Berg 2001)

However many researchers still do not use or report much on an emergent designprocess For example even though a study may be couched under a non-positivisticparadigm it may still utilize a static design keeping it the norm Another reason maybe related to paradigms some paradigms perceive changes in a design as notknowing onersquos research well enough Another reason that focuses less on thepolitical and paradigmatic aspects concerns the story that is to be told Theresearcher has to be careful that reporting on the design process does not distractfrom the story that is being told Despite these possible reasons the need for usingand reporting on emergent designs may change This may also mean that the roleof re ection in the design process may change

In a recent issue of the Educational Researcher Young (2001) calls forlsquoresearchers to use multiple methodologies and to work from different perspectivesrsquo(p 3) In fact some researchers and graduate programs have been working towardsthis kind of learning (Metz 2001 Page 2001 Pallas 2001) One implication fromthis is that we are likely to see an increase in emergent designs as researchers exploreincorporating multiple perspectives into single research projects If utilizing multipleperspectives and methodologies is to be a preferred way of working then we all needto think about what this could look like for our own research In beginning mytransition for this way of doing research there have been some interesting twists andturns that I think are worth sharing The following highlights some of theseexperiences along with how my re ections were instrumental in the process

The Beginning Stance

If the paradigm is constructivist the writer will present a text that stressesemergent designs and emergent understandings (Denzin 1994 p 502)

Emergent Design Assumptions

One unique aspect of my study is that I did not make the assumption that theemergence would be uni-directional or linear Instead I assumed that it would bebi-directional and non-sequential In a linear unidirectional model a paradigm isthought to inform the methodology (or research strategy) which informs themethods (or data collection and analysis) and presentation (See Fig 1)

In fact Guba and Lincoln (1994) contend that lsquoparadigm issues are crucial noinquirer we maintain ought to go about the business of inquiry without being clearabout just what paradigm informs and guides his or her approachrsquo (p 116) So itmakes sense to infer from Guba and Lincoln that a paradigm should be determined

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 143

FIG 1 Uni-directional linear research design model

a priori and utilized in a linear manner This also implies that any emergence will belimited to the last phases the methods or presentation phase

However if the emergent process is bi-directional and non-sequential (as is theassumption in this study) then the methods of data collection and analysis may alsoin uence the methodology (or research strategies) as well as the paradigm for thestudy (see Fig 2)

In addition this could mean that the paradigm methodology and methods donot have to be determined a priori It also implies that the emergence could occurat any point However it does not mean that the design should be whimsical

FIG 2 Bi-directional non-linear research design model

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

144 A Horton Merz

non-sensical or out of lsquoplumbrsquo (Chenail 1997) Schwandt (1997) speci callyaddresses some of these issues through the following statements

As a modi er for lsquodesignrsquo however the term lsquoemergentrsquo can suggest thatthe design itself arises unexpectedly or that the eldworker has no designor plan at all at the outset of the study This kind of complete laissez-faireattitude of seeing lsquowhat happensrsquo is ill advised The eldworker seeks tounderstand and portray some problem even issue concept life and so onand should have given careful thought in advance of undertaking the eldwork how that understanding can be developed and how claims madeabout a social phenomenon can be warranted (Schwandt 1997 p 35)

Paradigm History and Shifting

Another unique aspect of this studyrsquos emergent design is that it included a paradigmshift-ing In my study I began working towards a non-positivistic paradigmHowever like many researchers I was rst trained under the positivistic paradigmwith some history about its presence and with no current alternatives being offeredin comparison However as I became aware of non-positivistic paradigms (inparticular constructivism) I began to work towards an understanding of theconstructivist paradigm The lsquotowardsrsquo part is important because I like researchersbefore me on this paradigm-shifting journey found myself vacillating betweendifferent paradigms (even though this is not necessarily onersquos intention) In factthe journey in this study was not even limited to positivism and constructivismInstead as I began to explore constructivism I encountered other paradigms alongthe way So I had to begin understanding how the paradigms were similar anddifferent from each other in addition to evaluating them in relation to what I waswanting

This should not be surprising if one agrees with Denzin and Lincoln (1994)that the in uence of a paradigm is not necessarily a straight-forward process orinteraction In fact they contend that lsquothe researcher-as-bricoleur1-theorist worksbetween and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigmsrsquo(pp 2ndash3) I certainly experienced those competition and overlapping aspectssuch that the shifting was indeed affected in a non-sequential bi-directional wayBecause of this I had to check and re ect continually on the paradigm that I wasshifting to

Methodology or Research Strategies2

By starting with a constructivist paradigm I was not restricted to a particularmethodology so it started somewhat eclectically While being eclectic has its owndif culties it also gave me the freedom to explore and understand several strategiesHowever my rst step towards a methodology actually took me into a speci cmethodology ie a grounded theory methodology

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 145

Methods of Collecting Wading Through the Data and Analyzing It

In this study the data collection methods remained fairly static in this studyAccording to Schwandt (1997) and Janesick (1994) the data collection phase is oneplace where the research design could have some exibility for emerging One reasonthat my studyrsquos data remained unchanged was that it was mostly historical in natureIn addition I think it was the least different and least removed from the positivisticparadigm so it offered little contention for me in my paradigm-shifting

The decision about which data to target and use though varied slightly InitiallyI began examining excerpts that consisted of a segment resembling multi-sentencequotes from the data However I knew that I eventually wanted to develop and workwith some cases based on the data So I also identi ed one story in order to see ifother stories could be compiled for a later analysis and presentation In this instancea story represented a compilation of segments that have been assembled in a storyform that is more readable while keeping as much of the language and avor of thedata as possible

The most variation in the method appeared in the data analysis phase because Iwas working with the assumption that I would pursue multiple perspectives or layersof understanding (Ely et al 1997) This meant that I not only would exploredifferent pieces of data but I would explore some of them using different methodsI saw this strategy as part of an additive process (Miller amp Crabtree 1994) I alsosaw it as part of a crystallization process which included multiple perspectives in away that was different from the idea of triangulation which has been the moretraditional bridge from a positivistic design to a non-positivist one (Denzin ampLincoln 1994 Ely et al 1997) This crystallization of perspectives was meant toprovide different ways of seeing and understanding the data etc When using thesame data with different methods I thought of it as being similar to the metaphorof shining a light on an object By using different kinds of lights it may be possibleto highlight different aspects of the object so that different kinds of detail could beseen To carry the metaphor further hellip when a light is shown on one aspect of anobject you see more detail in that one highlighted area Similarly when the light ismoved around the object you see different things however it is still the same objectthat is being viewed With each viewing you understand the object differentlybecause of what is highlighted rather than strictly con rming that it is the sameobject

I think it will become clear in the following pages that the multiple perspectiveapproach was particular in uential in leading me back to the examination of mymethodology and paradigm shifts and in the emergence of my research design

Set of Questions

The danger in entering the eld with a very narrow focus is that theresearcher may have closed off the possibility of being surprised by what-ever else is there to be noticed hellip a ner focus will emerge only as the studyprogresses (Ely et al 1997 p 237)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

146 A Horton Merz

My set of questions and how I perceived them played a key role in my researchdesign As with any paradigm the questions indicate to the researcher some of whatneeds to be done and how However I was particularly in uenced by one of Morsersquos(1994) recommendations It was quite different from what I knew about thepositivistic approach to research questions Because there seemed to be someintuitive sense to it I wanted to understand it by using it According to JM Morse(1994)

As qualitative inquiry is often tenuous in the early stages hellip the researchershould make the question[s] as broad as possible rather than prematurelydelimit the study with a narrow question Narrowness distracts theresearcher from seeing the whole picture (Morse 1994 p 226)

In my case I took Morsersquos idea of questioning in two different directions The rstdirection focused more on what I think Morse intended In other words I generatedsome questions that were narrow enough for a focus but not too constraining of thelsquowhole picturersquo The second direction that I took with Morsersquos idea is different fromwhat I believe Morse intended but I think it is still related

The second direction was geared towards the questions method and design of thestudy It functioned under the assumption that the method and questions wereinextricably linked ie that one drove the other So when one changed the othercould change also This seems to be true no matter what paradigm this is associatedwith However there is usually no question or examination to see if the methodologyand paradigm shifted But as the bi-directional non-sequential diagram showed andas Guba and Lincolnrsquos (1994) idea that the methods must relate to the methodol-ogy then there should be at least a con rmation that the methodology and paradigmare still intact if something changes This becomes particularly important forresearchers who are in the midst of changing paradigms and are working with thepossibility of emerging designs

Re ections on the Journey of an Emergent Design

Exploring a Grounded Theory Approach

The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows over thequalitative researcher project (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994 p 5)

Since my data was mostly historical in nature I quickly moved into the data analysisphase and I was ready to move further into a non-positivistic approach Onealternative to a positivistic methodology was the grounded theory methodology Inparticular the grounded theory approach had the potential to allow a nice transitionfrom one paradigm to the next (ie from positivistic to non-positivistic) with itssystematic qualities (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994) One area of concern quickly becameapparent My model building process began to feel more like my old positivisticroots rather than the non-positivistic roots that I was trying to cultivate

I began to question if I was imposing my research agenda onto the study as ispossible in a positivistic study Did I have a type of bias that made me think that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 143

FIG 1 Uni-directional linear research design model

a priori and utilized in a linear manner This also implies that any emergence will belimited to the last phases the methods or presentation phase

However if the emergent process is bi-directional and non-sequential (as is theassumption in this study) then the methods of data collection and analysis may alsoin uence the methodology (or research strategies) as well as the paradigm for thestudy (see Fig 2)

In addition this could mean that the paradigm methodology and methods donot have to be determined a priori It also implies that the emergence could occurat any point However it does not mean that the design should be whimsical

FIG 2 Bi-directional non-linear research design model

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

144 A Horton Merz

non-sensical or out of lsquoplumbrsquo (Chenail 1997) Schwandt (1997) speci callyaddresses some of these issues through the following statements

As a modi er for lsquodesignrsquo however the term lsquoemergentrsquo can suggest thatthe design itself arises unexpectedly or that the eldworker has no designor plan at all at the outset of the study This kind of complete laissez-faireattitude of seeing lsquowhat happensrsquo is ill advised The eldworker seeks tounderstand and portray some problem even issue concept life and so onand should have given careful thought in advance of undertaking the eldwork how that understanding can be developed and how claims madeabout a social phenomenon can be warranted (Schwandt 1997 p 35)

Paradigm History and Shifting

Another unique aspect of this studyrsquos emergent design is that it included a paradigmshift-ing In my study I began working towards a non-positivistic paradigmHowever like many researchers I was rst trained under the positivistic paradigmwith some history about its presence and with no current alternatives being offeredin comparison However as I became aware of non-positivistic paradigms (inparticular constructivism) I began to work towards an understanding of theconstructivist paradigm The lsquotowardsrsquo part is important because I like researchersbefore me on this paradigm-shifting journey found myself vacillating betweendifferent paradigms (even though this is not necessarily onersquos intention) In factthe journey in this study was not even limited to positivism and constructivismInstead as I began to explore constructivism I encountered other paradigms alongthe way So I had to begin understanding how the paradigms were similar anddifferent from each other in addition to evaluating them in relation to what I waswanting

This should not be surprising if one agrees with Denzin and Lincoln (1994)that the in uence of a paradigm is not necessarily a straight-forward process orinteraction In fact they contend that lsquothe researcher-as-bricoleur1-theorist worksbetween and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigmsrsquo(pp 2ndash3) I certainly experienced those competition and overlapping aspectssuch that the shifting was indeed affected in a non-sequential bi-directional wayBecause of this I had to check and re ect continually on the paradigm that I wasshifting to

Methodology or Research Strategies2

By starting with a constructivist paradigm I was not restricted to a particularmethodology so it started somewhat eclectically While being eclectic has its owndif culties it also gave me the freedom to explore and understand several strategiesHowever my rst step towards a methodology actually took me into a speci cmethodology ie a grounded theory methodology

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 145

Methods of Collecting Wading Through the Data and Analyzing It

In this study the data collection methods remained fairly static in this studyAccording to Schwandt (1997) and Janesick (1994) the data collection phase is oneplace where the research design could have some exibility for emerging One reasonthat my studyrsquos data remained unchanged was that it was mostly historical in natureIn addition I think it was the least different and least removed from the positivisticparadigm so it offered little contention for me in my paradigm-shifting

The decision about which data to target and use though varied slightly InitiallyI began examining excerpts that consisted of a segment resembling multi-sentencequotes from the data However I knew that I eventually wanted to develop and workwith some cases based on the data So I also identi ed one story in order to see ifother stories could be compiled for a later analysis and presentation In this instancea story represented a compilation of segments that have been assembled in a storyform that is more readable while keeping as much of the language and avor of thedata as possible

The most variation in the method appeared in the data analysis phase because Iwas working with the assumption that I would pursue multiple perspectives or layersof understanding (Ely et al 1997) This meant that I not only would exploredifferent pieces of data but I would explore some of them using different methodsI saw this strategy as part of an additive process (Miller amp Crabtree 1994) I alsosaw it as part of a crystallization process which included multiple perspectives in away that was different from the idea of triangulation which has been the moretraditional bridge from a positivistic design to a non-positivist one (Denzin ampLincoln 1994 Ely et al 1997) This crystallization of perspectives was meant toprovide different ways of seeing and understanding the data etc When using thesame data with different methods I thought of it as being similar to the metaphorof shining a light on an object By using different kinds of lights it may be possibleto highlight different aspects of the object so that different kinds of detail could beseen To carry the metaphor further hellip when a light is shown on one aspect of anobject you see more detail in that one highlighted area Similarly when the light ismoved around the object you see different things however it is still the same objectthat is being viewed With each viewing you understand the object differentlybecause of what is highlighted rather than strictly con rming that it is the sameobject

I think it will become clear in the following pages that the multiple perspectiveapproach was particular in uential in leading me back to the examination of mymethodology and paradigm shifts and in the emergence of my research design

Set of Questions

The danger in entering the eld with a very narrow focus is that theresearcher may have closed off the possibility of being surprised by what-ever else is there to be noticed hellip a ner focus will emerge only as the studyprogresses (Ely et al 1997 p 237)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

146 A Horton Merz

My set of questions and how I perceived them played a key role in my researchdesign As with any paradigm the questions indicate to the researcher some of whatneeds to be done and how However I was particularly in uenced by one of Morsersquos(1994) recommendations It was quite different from what I knew about thepositivistic approach to research questions Because there seemed to be someintuitive sense to it I wanted to understand it by using it According to JM Morse(1994)

As qualitative inquiry is often tenuous in the early stages hellip the researchershould make the question[s] as broad as possible rather than prematurelydelimit the study with a narrow question Narrowness distracts theresearcher from seeing the whole picture (Morse 1994 p 226)

In my case I took Morsersquos idea of questioning in two different directions The rstdirection focused more on what I think Morse intended In other words I generatedsome questions that were narrow enough for a focus but not too constraining of thelsquowhole picturersquo The second direction that I took with Morsersquos idea is different fromwhat I believe Morse intended but I think it is still related

The second direction was geared towards the questions method and design of thestudy It functioned under the assumption that the method and questions wereinextricably linked ie that one drove the other So when one changed the othercould change also This seems to be true no matter what paradigm this is associatedwith However there is usually no question or examination to see if the methodologyand paradigm shifted But as the bi-directional non-sequential diagram showed andas Guba and Lincolnrsquos (1994) idea that the methods must relate to the methodol-ogy then there should be at least a con rmation that the methodology and paradigmare still intact if something changes This becomes particularly important forresearchers who are in the midst of changing paradigms and are working with thepossibility of emerging designs

Re ections on the Journey of an Emergent Design

Exploring a Grounded Theory Approach

The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows over thequalitative researcher project (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994 p 5)

Since my data was mostly historical in nature I quickly moved into the data analysisphase and I was ready to move further into a non-positivistic approach Onealternative to a positivistic methodology was the grounded theory methodology Inparticular the grounded theory approach had the potential to allow a nice transitionfrom one paradigm to the next (ie from positivistic to non-positivistic) with itssystematic qualities (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994) One area of concern quickly becameapparent My model building process began to feel more like my old positivisticroots rather than the non-positivistic roots that I was trying to cultivate

I began to question if I was imposing my research agenda onto the study as ispossible in a positivistic study Did I have a type of bias that made me think that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

144 A Horton Merz

non-sensical or out of lsquoplumbrsquo (Chenail 1997) Schwandt (1997) speci callyaddresses some of these issues through the following statements

As a modi er for lsquodesignrsquo however the term lsquoemergentrsquo can suggest thatthe design itself arises unexpectedly or that the eldworker has no designor plan at all at the outset of the study This kind of complete laissez-faireattitude of seeing lsquowhat happensrsquo is ill advised The eldworker seeks tounderstand and portray some problem even issue concept life and so onand should have given careful thought in advance of undertaking the eldwork how that understanding can be developed and how claims madeabout a social phenomenon can be warranted (Schwandt 1997 p 35)

Paradigm History and Shifting

Another unique aspect of this studyrsquos emergent design is that it included a paradigmshift-ing In my study I began working towards a non-positivistic paradigmHowever like many researchers I was rst trained under the positivistic paradigmwith some history about its presence and with no current alternatives being offeredin comparison However as I became aware of non-positivistic paradigms (inparticular constructivism) I began to work towards an understanding of theconstructivist paradigm The lsquotowardsrsquo part is important because I like researchersbefore me on this paradigm-shifting journey found myself vacillating betweendifferent paradigms (even though this is not necessarily onersquos intention) In factthe journey in this study was not even limited to positivism and constructivismInstead as I began to explore constructivism I encountered other paradigms alongthe way So I had to begin understanding how the paradigms were similar anddifferent from each other in addition to evaluating them in relation to what I waswanting

This should not be surprising if one agrees with Denzin and Lincoln (1994)that the in uence of a paradigm is not necessarily a straight-forward process orinteraction In fact they contend that lsquothe researcher-as-bricoleur1-theorist worksbetween and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigmsrsquo(pp 2ndash3) I certainly experienced those competition and overlapping aspectssuch that the shifting was indeed affected in a non-sequential bi-directional wayBecause of this I had to check and re ect continually on the paradigm that I wasshifting to

Methodology or Research Strategies2

By starting with a constructivist paradigm I was not restricted to a particularmethodology so it started somewhat eclectically While being eclectic has its owndif culties it also gave me the freedom to explore and understand several strategiesHowever my rst step towards a methodology actually took me into a speci cmethodology ie a grounded theory methodology

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 145

Methods of Collecting Wading Through the Data and Analyzing It

In this study the data collection methods remained fairly static in this studyAccording to Schwandt (1997) and Janesick (1994) the data collection phase is oneplace where the research design could have some exibility for emerging One reasonthat my studyrsquos data remained unchanged was that it was mostly historical in natureIn addition I think it was the least different and least removed from the positivisticparadigm so it offered little contention for me in my paradigm-shifting

The decision about which data to target and use though varied slightly InitiallyI began examining excerpts that consisted of a segment resembling multi-sentencequotes from the data However I knew that I eventually wanted to develop and workwith some cases based on the data So I also identi ed one story in order to see ifother stories could be compiled for a later analysis and presentation In this instancea story represented a compilation of segments that have been assembled in a storyform that is more readable while keeping as much of the language and avor of thedata as possible

The most variation in the method appeared in the data analysis phase because Iwas working with the assumption that I would pursue multiple perspectives or layersof understanding (Ely et al 1997) This meant that I not only would exploredifferent pieces of data but I would explore some of them using different methodsI saw this strategy as part of an additive process (Miller amp Crabtree 1994) I alsosaw it as part of a crystallization process which included multiple perspectives in away that was different from the idea of triangulation which has been the moretraditional bridge from a positivistic design to a non-positivist one (Denzin ampLincoln 1994 Ely et al 1997) This crystallization of perspectives was meant toprovide different ways of seeing and understanding the data etc When using thesame data with different methods I thought of it as being similar to the metaphorof shining a light on an object By using different kinds of lights it may be possibleto highlight different aspects of the object so that different kinds of detail could beseen To carry the metaphor further hellip when a light is shown on one aspect of anobject you see more detail in that one highlighted area Similarly when the light ismoved around the object you see different things however it is still the same objectthat is being viewed With each viewing you understand the object differentlybecause of what is highlighted rather than strictly con rming that it is the sameobject

I think it will become clear in the following pages that the multiple perspectiveapproach was particular in uential in leading me back to the examination of mymethodology and paradigm shifts and in the emergence of my research design

Set of Questions

The danger in entering the eld with a very narrow focus is that theresearcher may have closed off the possibility of being surprised by what-ever else is there to be noticed hellip a ner focus will emerge only as the studyprogresses (Ely et al 1997 p 237)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

146 A Horton Merz

My set of questions and how I perceived them played a key role in my researchdesign As with any paradigm the questions indicate to the researcher some of whatneeds to be done and how However I was particularly in uenced by one of Morsersquos(1994) recommendations It was quite different from what I knew about thepositivistic approach to research questions Because there seemed to be someintuitive sense to it I wanted to understand it by using it According to JM Morse(1994)

As qualitative inquiry is often tenuous in the early stages hellip the researchershould make the question[s] as broad as possible rather than prematurelydelimit the study with a narrow question Narrowness distracts theresearcher from seeing the whole picture (Morse 1994 p 226)

In my case I took Morsersquos idea of questioning in two different directions The rstdirection focused more on what I think Morse intended In other words I generatedsome questions that were narrow enough for a focus but not too constraining of thelsquowhole picturersquo The second direction that I took with Morsersquos idea is different fromwhat I believe Morse intended but I think it is still related

The second direction was geared towards the questions method and design of thestudy It functioned under the assumption that the method and questions wereinextricably linked ie that one drove the other So when one changed the othercould change also This seems to be true no matter what paradigm this is associatedwith However there is usually no question or examination to see if the methodologyand paradigm shifted But as the bi-directional non-sequential diagram showed andas Guba and Lincolnrsquos (1994) idea that the methods must relate to the methodol-ogy then there should be at least a con rmation that the methodology and paradigmare still intact if something changes This becomes particularly important forresearchers who are in the midst of changing paradigms and are working with thepossibility of emerging designs

Re ections on the Journey of an Emergent Design

Exploring a Grounded Theory Approach

The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows over thequalitative researcher project (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994 p 5)

Since my data was mostly historical in nature I quickly moved into the data analysisphase and I was ready to move further into a non-positivistic approach Onealternative to a positivistic methodology was the grounded theory methodology Inparticular the grounded theory approach had the potential to allow a nice transitionfrom one paradigm to the next (ie from positivistic to non-positivistic) with itssystematic qualities (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994) One area of concern quickly becameapparent My model building process began to feel more like my old positivisticroots rather than the non-positivistic roots that I was trying to cultivate

I began to question if I was imposing my research agenda onto the study as ispossible in a positivistic study Did I have a type of bias that made me think that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 145

Methods of Collecting Wading Through the Data and Analyzing It

In this study the data collection methods remained fairly static in this studyAccording to Schwandt (1997) and Janesick (1994) the data collection phase is oneplace where the research design could have some exibility for emerging One reasonthat my studyrsquos data remained unchanged was that it was mostly historical in natureIn addition I think it was the least different and least removed from the positivisticparadigm so it offered little contention for me in my paradigm-shifting

The decision about which data to target and use though varied slightly InitiallyI began examining excerpts that consisted of a segment resembling multi-sentencequotes from the data However I knew that I eventually wanted to develop and workwith some cases based on the data So I also identi ed one story in order to see ifother stories could be compiled for a later analysis and presentation In this instancea story represented a compilation of segments that have been assembled in a storyform that is more readable while keeping as much of the language and avor of thedata as possible

The most variation in the method appeared in the data analysis phase because Iwas working with the assumption that I would pursue multiple perspectives or layersof understanding (Ely et al 1997) This meant that I not only would exploredifferent pieces of data but I would explore some of them using different methodsI saw this strategy as part of an additive process (Miller amp Crabtree 1994) I alsosaw it as part of a crystallization process which included multiple perspectives in away that was different from the idea of triangulation which has been the moretraditional bridge from a positivistic design to a non-positivist one (Denzin ampLincoln 1994 Ely et al 1997) This crystallization of perspectives was meant toprovide different ways of seeing and understanding the data etc When using thesame data with different methods I thought of it as being similar to the metaphorof shining a light on an object By using different kinds of lights it may be possibleto highlight different aspects of the object so that different kinds of detail could beseen To carry the metaphor further hellip when a light is shown on one aspect of anobject you see more detail in that one highlighted area Similarly when the light ismoved around the object you see different things however it is still the same objectthat is being viewed With each viewing you understand the object differentlybecause of what is highlighted rather than strictly con rming that it is the sameobject

I think it will become clear in the following pages that the multiple perspectiveapproach was particular in uential in leading me back to the examination of mymethodology and paradigm shifts and in the emergence of my research design

Set of Questions

The danger in entering the eld with a very narrow focus is that theresearcher may have closed off the possibility of being surprised by what-ever else is there to be noticed hellip a ner focus will emerge only as the studyprogresses (Ely et al 1997 p 237)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

146 A Horton Merz

My set of questions and how I perceived them played a key role in my researchdesign As with any paradigm the questions indicate to the researcher some of whatneeds to be done and how However I was particularly in uenced by one of Morsersquos(1994) recommendations It was quite different from what I knew about thepositivistic approach to research questions Because there seemed to be someintuitive sense to it I wanted to understand it by using it According to JM Morse(1994)

As qualitative inquiry is often tenuous in the early stages hellip the researchershould make the question[s] as broad as possible rather than prematurelydelimit the study with a narrow question Narrowness distracts theresearcher from seeing the whole picture (Morse 1994 p 226)

In my case I took Morsersquos idea of questioning in two different directions The rstdirection focused more on what I think Morse intended In other words I generatedsome questions that were narrow enough for a focus but not too constraining of thelsquowhole picturersquo The second direction that I took with Morsersquos idea is different fromwhat I believe Morse intended but I think it is still related

The second direction was geared towards the questions method and design of thestudy It functioned under the assumption that the method and questions wereinextricably linked ie that one drove the other So when one changed the othercould change also This seems to be true no matter what paradigm this is associatedwith However there is usually no question or examination to see if the methodologyand paradigm shifted But as the bi-directional non-sequential diagram showed andas Guba and Lincolnrsquos (1994) idea that the methods must relate to the methodol-ogy then there should be at least a con rmation that the methodology and paradigmare still intact if something changes This becomes particularly important forresearchers who are in the midst of changing paradigms and are working with thepossibility of emerging designs

Re ections on the Journey of an Emergent Design

Exploring a Grounded Theory Approach

The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows over thequalitative researcher project (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994 p 5)

Since my data was mostly historical in nature I quickly moved into the data analysisphase and I was ready to move further into a non-positivistic approach Onealternative to a positivistic methodology was the grounded theory methodology Inparticular the grounded theory approach had the potential to allow a nice transitionfrom one paradigm to the next (ie from positivistic to non-positivistic) with itssystematic qualities (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994) One area of concern quickly becameapparent My model building process began to feel more like my old positivisticroots rather than the non-positivistic roots that I was trying to cultivate

I began to question if I was imposing my research agenda onto the study as ispossible in a positivistic study Did I have a type of bias that made me think that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

146 A Horton Merz

My set of questions and how I perceived them played a key role in my researchdesign As with any paradigm the questions indicate to the researcher some of whatneeds to be done and how However I was particularly in uenced by one of Morsersquos(1994) recommendations It was quite different from what I knew about thepositivistic approach to research questions Because there seemed to be someintuitive sense to it I wanted to understand it by using it According to JM Morse(1994)

As qualitative inquiry is often tenuous in the early stages hellip the researchershould make the question[s] as broad as possible rather than prematurelydelimit the study with a narrow question Narrowness distracts theresearcher from seeing the whole picture (Morse 1994 p 226)

In my case I took Morsersquos idea of questioning in two different directions The rstdirection focused more on what I think Morse intended In other words I generatedsome questions that were narrow enough for a focus but not too constraining of thelsquowhole picturersquo The second direction that I took with Morsersquos idea is different fromwhat I believe Morse intended but I think it is still related

The second direction was geared towards the questions method and design of thestudy It functioned under the assumption that the method and questions wereinextricably linked ie that one drove the other So when one changed the othercould change also This seems to be true no matter what paradigm this is associatedwith However there is usually no question or examination to see if the methodologyand paradigm shifted But as the bi-directional non-sequential diagram showed andas Guba and Lincolnrsquos (1994) idea that the methods must relate to the methodol-ogy then there should be at least a con rmation that the methodology and paradigmare still intact if something changes This becomes particularly important forresearchers who are in the midst of changing paradigms and are working with thepossibility of emerging designs

Re ections on the Journey of an Emergent Design

Exploring a Grounded Theory Approach

The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows over thequalitative researcher project (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994 p 5)

Since my data was mostly historical in nature I quickly moved into the data analysisphase and I was ready to move further into a non-positivistic approach Onealternative to a positivistic methodology was the grounded theory methodology Inparticular the grounded theory approach had the potential to allow a nice transitionfrom one paradigm to the next (ie from positivistic to non-positivistic) with itssystematic qualities (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994) One area of concern quickly becameapparent My model building process began to feel more like my old positivisticroots rather than the non-positivistic roots that I was trying to cultivate

I began to question if I was imposing my research agenda onto the study as ispossible in a positivistic study Did I have a type of bias that made me think that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 147

something was there because I wanted it to be there and because other scholars hadshared the idea that it could be there More speci cally in the positivist paradigma researcher would not go into a study without looking for something speci c thatis based on theory and trying to prove it Whereas in a non-positivist paradigm theresearcher can be open to surprises even if it is different from hisher original plan(Ely et al 1997) In addition the researcher is not so much involved with lsquoprovingthe true naturersquo of something as trying to capture it in a meaningful and respectfulway All of this meant that I wanted to be careful and I wanted to listen to the dataso that I was not imposing an idea onto the data without knowing for sure if it wasthere

Imagine now what method methodology or paradigm I pursued next Instead ofmy putting this into a non-positivistic framework these thoughts led me to feel thatmaybe I needed to look at this study more objectively In other words I was startingto move back and forth in my comfort levels in my exploration with the familiar andunfamiliar Because of this I was also starting to vacillate between paradigms iebetween what I knew and what I was still learning about While I still liked theuncon rmed model that I was building I began to understand that a groundedtheory approach was not the right path at the moment And while it allowed me towork on some of my questions it did not allow me to work on the key question Butthe key question only emerged as I continued through a few more methods of dataanalysis In addition I believed that the work that I had done in exploring a modelwas not in vain So rather than discarding it and lsquoignoringrsquo the information that Ihad learned I kept it in mind as I pursued the next methods that involved a moretraditional content-analysis perspective And lsquothe having of different perspectivesrsquowas in alignment with my beliefs about the study So I did not believe that I wasoff-track

Content Analysis

Content analysis has been unable to capture the context within which awritten text has meaning (Manning amp Cullum-Swan 1994 p 464)

For the content analysis I began by identifying the phrases in the journal thatrepresented my idea that I was pursuing To get away from thinking that I wasimposing my ideas I took an emic approach that used the teacherrsquos languageto express the experience (Schwandt 1997) It wasnrsquot until I had identi edexact phrases that I began the etic portion of the analysis by developing lsquoresearcher-developedrsquo categories for the phrases However this is as far as it got It was startingto feel like deja vu my old positivistic background was impinging again This timehowever I realized something different about my paradigm shifting

The problem that now stared-me-in-the-face is described by Manning and Cul-lum-Swan (1994) who stated lsquocontent analysis has been unable to capture thecontext within which a written text has meaningrsquo (p 464) That is how I felt eventhough there have been some in-roads into employing qualitative content analysis(Berg 2001 Mayring 2000) In other words the phrases and categories that I had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

148 A Horton Merz

identi ed meant little outside of the context the stories became lost The ultimateproblem then became that this approach was contrary to the non-positivisticparadigm that I was pursuing Under my new yet shifting paradigm the storiescould not be lost

Choosing the Cases

There are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partial (Ely et al 1997 p 60)

Because of the need to pay attention to and to incorporate the context I temporarilymoved away from the analyses and back towards the methodology One of themethodologies that seemed to lend itself to dealing with both the context and thestory was the case method By dealing with the context I also hoped that I wouldavoid revisiting my old positivistic paradigm again and that I could start making theparadigm shift that I was working towards

My identifying and writing the cases went smoothly without any dif culty in myparadigm-shifting So I continued with several methods for analyzing the cases sothat I could have multiple perspectives for understanding the cases This series ofinvestigations into the data did indeed allow me to pursue a more non-positivisticparadigm for my questions and analyses While these investigations yielded someinteresting insights for me there was an intuitive sense of my not getting at the essence(Smith 1994) This surprised and frustrated me because I had the misconceptionthat a certain methodology would lend itself to avoiding this problem However Ibegan to understand another meaning of what Ely et al (1997) meant when theystated lsquoThere are many ways to come to know something and even then suchknowing is partialrsquo (p 60) I was now experiencing the non-positivistic paradigm

Moving to the Essences

lsquoThe gure under the carpetrsquo hellip [is] like a tapestry which shows images onits front side and displays the underlying construction on the back (Smith1994 p 291)

At this point it became important for me to remember my datarsquos lsquorootsrsquo In otherwords when I rst encountered the data I was captivated by it While it was veryunusual data3 there was something very special and beautiful about it to me thatwent beyond its unusualness It was the beauty and essence that was not beingcaptured by my design so far So I put my lsquoresearchrsquo voice aside and read my dataas if it were a spell-binding novel Through this re-reading of the data I began torealize that if I wanted to represent what was there then I needed to understand itfor itself I needed to understand its lsquowholenessrsquo Smith (1994) referred to this moremetaphorically by needing to know about the lsquo gure under the rugrsquo ie the beautyof the construction underneath as well as of the image on the surface of a tapestry

In my case it was an implicit lsquohermeneutical-nessrsquo that was coming into playHow is it that I hadnrsquot seen this lsquohermeneuticalrsquo aspect before My realization is that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 149

I had encountered a common fallacy of thinking about onersquos own knowledge Ithought that I had an understanding of hermeneutics based on a couple of generalqualitative methods courses that I had taken But I understand now that by workingin that genre and not just reading about it I began to see and understand itdifferently At the same time I realized that I had a lot more to learn aboutunderstanding it and utilizing it Finally I felt like my study was not just changingbut it was emerging in a more metaphorical sense

By going through the data in order to capture the essence I was employing a morebiographical and hermeneutical methodology as well as paradigm I was not tryingto set about lsquocapturingrsquo bits of reality of the data so much as the beauty of its wholeWithin the tapestry metaphor this meant that not only was I trying to capture whatI saw on the surface (ie through the data and the case stories) but I was trying tocapture the beauty in its construction (ie with the essences)

Moving Back to the Set of Questions

The way in which I experience the world governs the way I talk about itThe way in which I talk about the world however now informs the way inwhich I see it in the future (Brown 1997 p 37)

The nal aspects of the study dealt with what to do with the essences in relation tothe initial set of questions Chenail (1997) referred to this process as the need tomake sure that onersquos research is plumb So I needed to investigate lsquoWas there arelationship and how could the essences and the questions be reconciledrsquo One ofmy steps in addressing this was to revisit the initial set of questions which did yieldsome insights into the dilemma of reconciliation As it turned out some of thebroader questions that were included were addressed by the lsquoessencesrsquo piece of theanalysis With a bit of modi cation the cases and their analyses were able toillustrate the essences while at the same time re ecting on some of the more detailedfocused questions With the inclusion of both the broad and more focused ques-tions along with the exibility to pursue the essences in relation to the set ofquestions I was able to develop an emerging design that was more respectful to thedata the participant and the story that needed to be told Without the exibility thestories would be different or even non-existent

So Where Does This Leave Us

Knowing occurs in an environment full of historical leftovers (Brown1997 p 48)

Hermeneutical understanding never arrives at its object directly onersquosapproach is always conditioned by the interpretations explored on the way(Brown 1997 p 37)

We x the ow of time by making statements that hold for the time beinghellip Nevertheless hermeneutic analysis sees hellip lsquo xitiesrsquo as subject to re-vision (Brown 1997 p 38)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

150 A Horton Merz

The question remains though lsquowhere does that leave usrsquo with regards to the ideaof paradigm methodology and methods Interestingly enough my paradigm be-came what I was doing which was hermeneutical in nature This meant to me thatmy lsquomisstepsrsquo were NOT missteps they were part of the process of getting to whereI needed to be Each step (ie each perspective each leftovers) along the wayprovided some insight and direction about what I needed to know and about whereI needed to go next It was as if I needed to explore each step of the emergent designin order to understand the study And there was no one xed design that couldhave gotten me there faster So the emergent design was quite copesetic withregards to hermeneutics and vice versa

Another question that remains is the following Where does that leave us regard-ing the studyrsquos questions One issue was related to utilizing broad questions and theother was related to the lsquokeyrsquo question(s) As it turned out the key question(s) werein my broad set of questions however they were not the ones that I started out with(even though I had thought I had) The key questions became the ones that wentbeyond my question of imposition One was to understand the essences rst Onlyby understanding the essences could I understand if I was imposing an idea onto thestudy or not hellip and if and when that was an lsquookrsquo thing to do Only by understandingthe essences could I understand the non-positivistic paradigm that I was workingtowards in my study

Finally where does this leave us with regard to my re ection in the researchdesign process Initially I thought that the readers of my study would nd mycross-country trek with various explorations through the data to be distractingand of limited interest (Remember my old positivistic roots that imply that Ishould have found one right way to do my study) I am starting to understandthough that my rst lsquotakersquo on (or interpretations of) my trek was probably morecommon than not for those of us qualitative researchers who started out withquantitative roots I think that it also has to do with brevity and the purpose of thestory-to-be-told It is as if there are multiple stories to be told in one qualitativestudy There is the story about the subjects the method the theory the researcheretc All have an important place in and of their own However one is usually carefulnot to confound one with the other or in my case is usually careful not to have onestory distract the other So it is important to nd the proper place and audience foreach

In addition I discovered that through utilizing an emergent design the researcheris in charge of nding hisher own voice in the study While positivist or singleparadigms encourage the researcher to adopt a particular voice an emergent designcan encourage the researcher to develop hisher own voice By developing onersquos ownvoice the researcher can begin to go beyond the limits imposed by anotherrsquos way ofthinking or doing things in order to develop a more in-depth way of understandingand reporting the experience In addition as Schwandt (1997) Chenail (1997)Duf n and Simpson (2000) point out the researcher has to think about and re ecton the sensicalness and validation of the design rather than just doing it because oftradition or because of whimsy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

A Journey through Emergent Design 151

Notes

Denzin and Lincoln (1994) attribute the term bricoleur to Levi-StraussIn the positivist tradition this section would be labeled lsquomethodologyrsquo However in the

non-positivist traditions this section is labeled either lsquoresearch strategiesrsquo or lsquostrategies ofinquiryrsquo (Denzin amp Lincoln 1994)

It was ve years worth of data that consisted of a teacherrsquos journaling of her teaching with the rst four of those ve years not written for research purposes

References

BERG BL (2001) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed) (Boston MA Allynand Bacon)

BORG WR amp GALL MD (1983) Educational Research (4th ed) (New York Longman)BROWN T (1997) Mathematics Education and Language Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-

structuralism (Vol 20) (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers)CHENAIL RJ (1997) Keeping things plumb in qualitative research (3(3)) [On-line Journal] The

Qualitative Report Available httpwwwnovaedussssQRQR3-3plumbhtml Last Up-date not speci ed [Accessed June 2001]

DENZIN NK (1994) The art and politics of interpretation in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)DENZIN NK amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Introduction entering the eld of qualitative research in

NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

DUFFIN J amp SIMPSON A (2000) When does a way of working become a methodology Journalof Mathematical Behavior 19(2) pp 175ndash188

ELY M VINZ R DOWNING M amp ANZUL M (1997) On Writing Qualitative Research (LondonFalmer Press)

GUBA EG amp LINCOLN YS (1994) Competing paradigms in qualitative research in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

JANESICK VJ (1994) The dance of qualitative research design Metaphor methodolatry andmeaning in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thou-sand Oaks CA Sage)

MANNING PK amp CULLUM-SWAN B (1994) Narrative content and semiotic analysis in NKDENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CASage)

MAYRING P (2000) Qualitative content analysis (1(2)) [On-line Journal] Forum qualitativeSozialforschungForum Qualitative Social Research Available httpqualitative-researchnetfqsfqs-e2-00inhalt-ehtml Last Update April 2001 [Accessed June 2001]

MERZ AH (1999) Making sense of the moment The essences and improvisational nature ofteaching fth-grade mathematics Published doctoral dissertation (Greeley CO Universityof Northern Colorado)

METZ MH (2001) Intellectual border crossing in graduate education a report from the eldEducational Researcher 30 (5) pp 12ndash18

MILLER WL amp CRABTREE BF (1994) Clinical research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)MORSE JM (1994) Designing funded qualitative research in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN

(Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)PAGE RN (2001) Reshaping graduate preparation in educational research methods one schoolrsquos

experience Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 19ndash25PALLAS AM (2001) Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity Educa-

tional Researcher 30 (5) pp 6ndash11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013

152 A Horton Merz

SCHWANDT TA (1997) Qualitative Inquiry A Dictionary of Terms (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)SMITH LM (1994) Biographic method in NK DENZIN amp YS LINCOLN (Eds) Handbook of

Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks CA Sage)YOUNG LJ (2001) Border crossings and other journeys re-envisioning the doctoral preparation

of education researchers Educational Researcher 30 (5) pp 3ndash5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

01

16 0

2 Se

ptem

ber

2013