Reading through the responses and my notes, I reflected that a lot of the definitions of research that came up surrounded ideas of objectivity vs subjectivity. Research for a lot of the students had some kind of relationship to ‘facts’ and the exact nature of what constituted facts varied. In terms of specific sites of research books and galleries came up. It is useful to note that we were in an art gallery for a research trip I was about to take them on, at the time that I asked the question, so that would have affected some answers.
After this initial reflection, I wanted to make sure I had taken proper account of all the individual answers I got, before doing more in depth analysis. I decided to do some textual analysis on the responses, using ‘Text analyse’ software, to see what key words came up most frequently. I wouldn’t rely on this textual analysis solely, rather use it as a prompt and aid for my autoethnographic analysis.
These were the crude results:
And from these crude results, I generated a word cloud. You can see here that ‘information’ is the thing most discussed in relation to research, with ‘reading’ the most popular methodology mentioned.:
I then highlighted all the words that I determined were useful to group for thematic analysis (ignoring connecting words like ‘and’ etc). Working off a new table in Excel containing only these words, I then grouped the words into themes I could see emerging.
According to the bar chart (above), produced from textual thematic analysis, when asked about research, most students referenced the interpretive aspect of doing research. They used words like: ‘interpret’, ‘processing’, ‘refining’. ‘analyse’, ‘link’, ‘evaluated’, ‘understanding’, ‘relate’ or variations on those words (18 references). The next most referenced themes were ‘references to human effects on research‘ e.g. ‘subjectivity’, ‘bias’, ‘humanity’ as well as references to the ‘personal’, ‘someone’, the ‘individual’ (16). Tied with this were allusions to research as where you get some kind of knowledge e.g. ‘information’, findings’, knowledge’, ‘sources’ (16). Textual sources, were the next most popular thing students mentioned e.g. ‘book’, ‘library’, ‘reading’, ‘articles’ (12), closely followed by visual sources e.g. art, films, videos, drawing, gallery media (11).
Mid-level popularity were references to cumulative processes of gathering data (collection, recorded, culmination); areas of knowledge (theme, subject, topic), an openness (or perhaps a vagueness) towards how research can take place (anywhere, anytime), and a reference to history being something research can tell us (history, background, context) – all these had 7 mentions. References to research as a kind of journey were also popular (6), to which we can add a drawing that I wasn’t able to include in the textual analysis to make (7). After this, there was a drop off with most themes being mentioned only twice during the conversation, with a few themes being mentioned 3-6 times.
There are limitations to this type of analysis which just looks at words and phrases used. For one: it is only showing us the popularity of such words, rather than the context in which they were used. For example: someone could have said that research is ‘all about reading’ or they could have said ‘Reading isn’t the most important thing when it comes to research’. One person could also have also said one word or ‘theme’ several times to make one point, leading to that ‘theme’ appearing as disproportionately more popular than it actually was e.g. if someone said: ‘I think research depends on people’s bias – if people hold certain beliefs’. On the other hand, textual analysis of this kind is useful as a kind of comparative tool. For me it highlights especially what isn’t spoken about that much – something I otherwise might have missed. It also shows what kinds of terms and language students speak about research in, which regardless of whether they were spoken about positively or negatively, indicate what students think is important to the conversation around research. For this reason my conclusions at this stage are based on a combination of using word analysis, thematic analysis and auto-ethographic analysis. I looked at the bar chart and the quotations from students alongside each other to get as full a picture of what was actually going on.
To conclude I would say that:
- Most students agree that research is about interpreting or processing information in some way. One student wrote: ‘Research can be done through different modes of exploration e.g. reading information that exists.’ This is a very typical answer that hits on three of the most popular themes identified in the word analysis (in bold).
- Most student agree that reading is important to research, but visual sources are also well acknowledged. I wonder if there would have been so many answers that recognised visual sources like ‘gallery’, ‘picture’ or ‘art’ research, if we hadn’t had this conversation in an art gallery (which I’d framed to them as a research trip)? This context did not stop someone from writing down ‘Art’ and crossing it out – which became a talking point among students, making the word appear more frequently about analysis. However it was clear that viewing art as being a form of research was more contentious than books – textual sources were widely mentioned, but never questioned.
- The bar chart shows ‘site’ visits as quite high, but in fact this is a mistake, due to counting words ‘site’ and ‘visit’ as two different occurances, when the phrase ‘site visit’ is being used. Rather, than 8 it has 4 references.
- Despite this course being a performance course, no students mentioned any kinds of performance as types of research/ sites of research e.g. dance, theatre, performance art. This for me illustrates a big disconnect between the students’ actual practices and their idea of research. The ‘body’ was referenced three times, but only one student mentioned it as a key part of their definition (see drawing below). I’m sure that students learn many things through embodied methods of practice, but it is interesting that no one framed this as research. In contrast, research was more often named in quite detatached, scientific terms: finding, observation, looking, recording, brain, mind. As I wrote about elsewhere, after this session a student came straight up to me and said ‘I think that [discussion] was more useful for you than it was for us.’ I find this interesting as the discussion was open to be led by the students, to talk about research in a way they were passionate about, but rather than that the student disengaged. Reviewing all the data, the most embodied way of talking about research, I found used was the word ‘consume’, which was used once.
- Nature/ plants had only two mentions in the whole conversation. No other spaces that exist outside of institutions were mentioned.
- All the responses are very general. Few reference a specific site e.g. The Warburg Iconographic Archive, which we had visited just the week before. Again it feels that there is a lack of personal connection with research. Many of these answers feel ‘text book’, I suspect regurgitating what they’ve learned at school, rather than their own genuine feelings about research.
- All students in the group contributed vocally as well as textually to the data, thanks to the collection method used. So while the answers are all relatively homogenous, with few specifics or contentious or radical statements, I can say this homogeneity is reflective of a homogenous consensus of what research is in the group, even though they have diverse backgrounds.
As a result of these conclusions, I felt sure that the research trip to Bethnal Green Nature Reserve that I had planned for the following week would open up students thinking around possibilities of sites of research, as is is a grassroots (literally) project in the heart of a community, and also would involve embodied interaction using multiple senses e.g. making and drinking tea from plants growing in the medicinal garden. I was interested to see if this encouraged them to see research as embodied, and to think about other embodied forms of research that they might do. Also research beyond the university.
I was also keen that they felt more ownership over making their own definitions of research. I was aware that some students did not know London and this could be a barrier for them in identifying research sites that would be genuinely useful to their practices. For this reason I created a worksheet which I hoped would empower them to make their own research trip, and briefed them to do this.
REVISION 12/01/24
After I did the first round of data analysis, I actually went back and double checked my thematic analysis here, before I did the final comparative analysis. I wanted to make sure it was accurate before making the final conclusions. This meant some small amounts of data shifted, but the overall conclusions that I made at this point still stand.