Using New and Emerging Methods in Your Work: Challenging Dominant Research Approaches and Building Rigorous Research Frameworks

 By Nathan Durdella

Dr. Nathan Durdella was a Mentor in Residence on Methodspace for March, 2022. He is the author of the new book Conducting Research with Human Participants, as well as Qualitative Dissertation Methodology. Purchase these excellent books from SAGE with a 20% discount through the end of June with this code MSPACEQ222.

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Researchers—whether undergraduate student, graduate student, early career faculty or more senior members of the field—are generally required to undergo peer review of proposals or manuscripts for scholarly value, research credibility, topical relevance, and ethical practice. Researchers proposing to use new or emerging methods can experiences challenges in this review process. Sometimes that adds delays to a project or more time to make revisions, and other times it means re-considering an approach. As a researcher, what can you do to move your project forward, advance the field of research, and challenge current thinking?

Development of and Resistance to Dominant Research Frames

Of course, the hidden codes, value-laden frameworks, and latent assumptions used in scholarly peer review and academic gatekeeping did not develop in a vacuum. Historically constructed, following Western thought and movement—colonization, military conflict, imperialist expansion, capitalist exploitation and more—positivist paradigms and dominant research designs in the behavioral and social sciences tend to reflect white, Western systems of knowledge and ideas of "modernity" most closely associated with "science." Over time, epistemological and methodological approaches have been generally trivialized or dismissed by social and behavioral science researchers.

Historically developed by white academics with male and imperialist gazes in U.S. and European universities, conventional research work—or what counts as rigorous and systematic investigative activities deemed to produce “credible” empirical evidence—has been challenged by changing demographic characteristics in disciplines, including women researchers, researchers of color, and white allies. From training graduate students to editorial boards of refereed journals to leadership of academic research associations, researchers have historically abided by a consensus formed around Western ideas of what constitutes sound design and methods for carrying out investigations in the social and behavioral sciences. These research conventions have governed what researchers do and produce. But this order has changed—between Individual researchers and groups of researchers within and across disciplines and broad social forces and constituent changes in the academy, researchers have resisted white research. Writing about decolonizing methodologies, Smith’s observation relates to this pattern: "Most indigenous criticisms of research are expressed within the single terms of ‘white research’, ‘academic research’ or ‘outsider research’" (Smith, 2012, Kindle Locations 1057-1063).

Subject to exploitation and dehumanization by white researchers in academic institutions in the West who have used deficit theorizing about the "other" with dominant language and systems of thinking and ways of knowing, the use of conventional research approaches—from sampling and recruitment to data collection instruments and procedures and data analysis procedures—have not generally accounted for historical constructions of time, knowledge, and power and cultural values, beliefs, behaviors, rituals and special events of communities who have been “researched.” More to the point, with individualistic performance at the center of research work, white methods have historically been as extractive and transactional, divorcing researchers from themselves and research participant thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Innovative Ways to Learn about and Engage with Humanity

Between shifts in research paradigms, challenges to dominant research design and methods, and changes associated with emerging technologies to collect, analyze, and interpret data, what is now considered systematic and rigorous has reshaped methodological principles and behavioral forms in the research process. As resistance to conventional research approaches in the academy yields to innovative ways of understanding and exploring patterns in human, researchers continue to update what we know as academic research.

Many emerging methods are no longer new or at the periphery—in many cases, they are now widely used and normative. For researchers, these approaches center the self and counter dominant narratives, tapping into lived experiences and leveraging insights and wisdoms of researchers in the research process. For example, visual and performance methods use parts of the brain and communicate in ways words alone cannot do, and they rely on protocols more as guides so that research contexts may feel more natural. They also move us away from text-heavy Western research products and support research participants doing things on their own time rather than in real time (as interviews frequently do). Digital methods tend to democratize the research process, opening it up, making in more transparent, and reaching new audiences so that contributions can be made to more than academic communities.

These approaches tend to be more flexible and operate in more fluid methodological spaces. This is consistent with Indigenous methodologies, which refocus Western notions of fixed, permanent knowledge that is owned as property and exchanged commercially to a more fluid, contextual, and relational way of learning about the world (Patel, 2016). According to Koro-Ljungberg (2016), methodologies are really "...situational, complex structures or constellations that are in flux,” even as research has historically been reified as "given, stable, rigid, predetermined methodological structures" (p. 80). If we take this view, then we can really see how methodologies have "[t]emporary limits and porous boundaries" (p. 81) so that changing norms in the field and emerging approaches in research change all the time.

As emerging and new methods shape disciplines and academic institutions, implications extend to how graduate students approach thesis dissertation research and writing (Barton, 2005), including collaborative research projects with peer and/or faculty advisers, digital projects linked by theme or application, scholarly or literary translations, and public scholarly projects.

Tips to Use with New and Emerging Methods in Your Research

Doing research continues to reshape conventions for what we do in the context of social and behavioral science research. As you start a new project or continue research work, consider using one or more of the strategies below to enhance your use of new and emerging methods.

Situate yourself early and often in your study, sharing your personal identities and researcher subjectivities and discuss intentionality in methodological decisions.

Center your research design and methods in communities with whom you work so that their cultural wealth and collective wisdom reshape research principles, assumptions, and procedures.

Relate your research questions and/or research hypotheses to your research design or tradition, underscoring how your unique way of exploring a phenomenon best aligns with your research framework.

Limit the use of a theoretical or conceptual framework, which may allow you to create unique and innovative approach from dimensions of current, emerging, and new ideas.

Connect your research approach to a conventional and/or emerging research design or tradition, constructively critiquing research conventions while discussing methodological choices.

Tie your development and use of new or emerging methods to conventional methods, articulating what may work well across the range of site and participant sampling and selection, instrumentation, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation.

Discuss limitations of your research approach as a function, in part, of learning about and from the use of new and emerging methods.

References
Barton, M. D. (2005). Dissertations: Past, present, and future. Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. (UMI 3188394).
Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous research methodologies (Kindle ed.). SAGE Publishing, Inc.
Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. SAGE Publishing, Inc.
Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. New York, NY: Routledge.
Smith, L.T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (Kindle ed.). Zed Books. Kindle Edition.

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