Participation, reactivity and research

Over the past 20 years, participation in research had become a major methodological and ethical issue, so I now insist that desired participant relations and strategies for achieving them are dealt with in the proposal.

This can be a complex process because participation is no longer solely a matter of how the researcher participates in the field — it’s also a matter of how those in the field participate in the research. Participation must be seen as a 2-way process: a researcher participates in various ways in the situation of those being researched, and they participate in various ways in the research. Those are methodologically important because different kinds and levels of participation in one side tend to produce different kinds and levels of reaction in the other. The following table lays out some of the more obvious possibilities.

Four modes of participation

This model uses four broad categories to distinguish the more common modes of participation —

•       Compliance —when one party sets agends, parameters, or issues directives to the other in some respects. This occurs when an organization commissions outsiders to perform research on their own organization, or a superior directs staff in researching aspects of their work. It is also common in post-graduate research supervision in the sciences. Compliance looks like co-operation when one party provides services such as giving information to the other, but it’s compliance if it’s non-negotiatable: at its most extreme compliance is co-operation under duress.

•       Co-operation — when one party agrees to assist the other, the assistance being willingly given by one participant to work that is managed by, and always belongs to, the other. Most dissertation research and supervision in the Arts is of this kind. Co-operation begins to look like collaboration when one party is enabling the other to achieve shared goals.

•       Collaboration — when people work together as co-researchers on a project in which they have equal shares overall. This occurs most often in collegial workplace action research and formative evaluation.

•       Critique — when one party makes evaluative judgements about the other or their work whilst having no control over them or it. Challenges create the most reactivity, and the most common in my experience are when a researcher uncovers a problem when probing another’s views or practices, or someone objects to (participating in) the research.

Direction is always constrained (and usually negotiated), so it’s never wholly one-way.

At the proposal stage one has to decide on the most desirable participant relations for the proposed research methods; but no one of these modes can ever describe all that happens during a project. That is because the kinds and levels of participation change during a project, from one situation to another, and from person to person. This is entirely appropriate: some aspects and situations require more or less control from one or another party, and some individuals are better or less well equipped to participate in different aspects and situations. The same relationship with everyone about everything is neither possible nor the most effective strategy; but unless the researcher has clarified their participant relations, they cannot then monitor and adjust them and their effects to perform the research effectively.

Dr David Tripp

Associate Professor in Education

The Australian Institute of Education

Murdoch University

Western Australia 6112

David Tripp