23/03/2010 by lizit.

For a few weeks now I have been clear that my DPhil is about the learning journeys of those involved with supporting and caring for children and young people on the autistic spectrum.  Having read a lot of articles with varying degrees of relevance, it is becoming clear that this needs some refining. Most of the literature on parents with children on the spectrum seems to focus on parents of children with classic autism, rather than Aspergers or HFA, and much of it looks at support needs, especially around the time of diagnosis and several articles include parents of children with either autism or Downs syndrome. My focus is on the high functioning/Aspergers end of the spectrum and I need to reflect this in my title.

The other contentious area at the moment - no doubt there are others waiting to appear over the horizon - is the categorisation of participants. I have been dividing people into parents, professionals and non-professionals and recognising that some people may fall into more than one category. However, this may not be the most appropriate or helpful categorisation. The idea behind splitting off professionals was to identify those with a formally recognised qualification from those without. My reasoning lay in the privileging of  knowledge that is formally accredited over other knowledge, but it probably isn’t as straightforward as that.

For example, two teachers are both professionals with a formally accredited qualification in education. Both may be employed as SENCOs, but one may have additional specialist qualifications and several years experience of working with children with special needs and the other may have taken the role on because the school needed a SENCO and it was a way of getting a promotion, but have little experience or special knowledge of SENs or related administrative procedures.

This suggests that I may be looking at a generic/specialist split, but I am unsure that will meet my needs. I already know that social care staff, even senior, highly qualified care staff, are on lower pay scales than teaching staff. Am I therefore looking at two different things: professional as measured by possession of a formally recognised professional qualification and specialist as measured by knowledge and experience within the domain.

This also challenges my third category of parents. Some parents may also have professional qualifications and/or specialist knowledge in the domain.

This would suggest that the professional, non-professional and parent categorisation is only useful in terms of identifying the jobs people might be doing within the domain. As my focus is on learning journeys (how, what and why people know about the autistic spectrum), it may be that I need to slice across the roles and instead be looking at those with accredited qualifications, those with specialist knowledge but without accredited qualifications and those with neither accredited qualifications or specialist knowledge.

Probably need to think about this a bit more…

Posted in Aspergers/HFA, categories, specialist knowledge, qualifications, experience, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

20/03/2010 by lizit.

Since my last post I have been reading quite a lot around biographical methods (Harrison & Lyon, 1993; Merrill and West, 2009; Miller, 2007; Stanley, 1993; West, et al, 2007). This is beginning to earth some of my earlier reading of learning biography and digging into the TLRP Learning Lives materials and more recent reading of a number of studies of the experience of diagnosis of families with children on the autistic spectrum. These studies have relied heavily on life history approaches of varying kinds, some of which allow the researcher and their personal story and perspectives to be part of or to focus the research study.

My reading of Patton (2002) helped me to realise that my own story is relevant to my research; my reading of these texts is showing me that not only is my story relevant but it is an integral part of the research I want to undertake.

In reading Miller (2007), I was interested to see reference made to the first sociological text I ever read, though I did not recognise it as such at the time. Richard Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” was recommended to me by one of my sixth form teachers at about the time I decided not to continue directly from school into HE, but to take some time out. Also there was Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden’s “Education and the Working Class” which I stumbled across as an undergraduate and began to understand something of the role education had played in my extended family - my grandfather was a skilled craftsman (a tailor), my father went to the grammar school but had to leave early to help support the family financially and then gained his degree through ‘night school’ and became (eventually) a headteacher but always considered himself working class, and my brother and I both grew up with the expectation that we would go to university. One of my father’s brothers followed a similar route and another brother passed various Civil Service exams to gain a senior post, but his other brother led a varied but interesting life as a butcher, betting shop manager, delivery driver while his sister remained at home until late middle-life to look after her father and whichever siblings still occupied the family home, earning some income from casual work and cleaning jobs.

Growing up in the 1960s and working in social and community work during the 70s and 80s, I was inevitably aware of, and influenced by, feminism and later by the disability movement and race awareness. What I had not realised was the influence of those movements, particularly feminism, on developments in sociology, though I was well aware of the affect on public policy. The reading I have been doing raises both the positive and the problematic of including oneself in a research study.

The issues, identified by Stanley (1993), are those of:

• Self/other - it is impossible for me to tell my story without also telling the stories of some others who may or may not have consented to their story being shared;
• Public/private - most textual material, even if written ostensibly as personal reflections and accounts as in a diary, also assumes an audience, whether that audience is external or an aspect of myself (”self who writes”, “self who was” and “self who is”. This assumption of an audience takes away distinctions between different forms of life writing;
• Immediacy/memory - although there is an assumption that some forms of life writing such as diaries are equivalent to reportage, in reality writers apply filters which select what is written about and offer their own interpretations of events and actions. Although there is a tendency to differentiate between written accounts which are true because they were written at the time of the event and those which are less likely to be as factual because they are written from memory, all life accounts raise the issue of what is ‘true’ in an absolute sense, but also serve to contextualise and situate what is written about.

My reading of Patton (2002) helped me to realise that my own story is relevant to my research; my reading of these texts is showing me that not only is my story relevant but it is an integral part of the research I want to undertake.

When I started these blogs and was looking for a name for the site, I recognised that I was going on a journey. The more I read and the more I think, the more I am aware of the twists and turns of that journey and the unexpected encounters on route. The goal is still there, but quite often the journey feels as though it may hold far more meaning than achieving the goal!

Harrison, B., & Lyon, E. S. (1993). A note on ethical issues in the use of autobiography in sociological research. Sociology, 27(1), 101-109.
Merrill, B., & West, L. (2009). Using Biographical Methods in Social Research. London: Sage.
Miller, N. (2007). Developing an auto/biographical imagination. In L. West, P. Alheit, A. S. Andersen & B. Merrill (Eds.), Using Biographical and Life History Approaches in the Study of Adult and Lifelong Learning: European Perspectives (pp. 167-186). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (Third ed.): Sage Publications.
Stanley, L. (1993). On auto/biography in sociology. Sociology, 27(1), 41-52.
West, L., Alheit, P., Andersen, A. S., & Merrill, B. (Eds.). (2007). Using Biographical and Life History Approaches in the Study of Adult and Lifelong Learning: European Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Posted in feminism, methodology, concepts | Print | 1 Comment »

02/03/2010 by lizit.

I seem to be keeping a lot of different balls in the air at the moment.

I have begun to recruit research participants and that is proving almost too easy. Both the schools are very happy to co-operate and one has around 7 staff happy to talk to me and the other is approaching parents on my behalf as well as giving access to a number of staff. I am amazed how generous people are with their time and knowledge. I now need to start setting up some interviews and beginning that part of the data gathering process.

I am also doing a fair bit of reading around qualitative research and the use of narrative as a research methodology. That is proving useful in understanding better what I am trying to do, but is also highlighting the complexities of the methodology. One thing I have been struggling with is the extent to which my own experience will simply inform my work and how far I can use it as a source of data. Looking at methodology has clarified that autoethnography is a legitimate approach and that there is a strong link between this and narratology (my story and the stories of others). Patton (2002) identifies around 15 different categories/theoretical stances for qualitative research and several are immediately relevant - autoethnography, phenomenology, social construction and constructivism, phenomenology, narratology and systems theory. He offers very useful guidance on choice of methods, research design, sampling and interviewing.

My immediate next tasks seem to be to tweak the documentation I have prepared for participants, to put together outlines for the interviews - I will be using a mixture of standardised questions and probes, interview guide and informal conversational techniques and the outline will vary according to the category of participant.

This is starting to get scary…

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (Third ed.): Sage Publications.

Posted in methodology, planning | Print | 3 Comments »