What are “Emerging” Methods?

By Janet Salmons

Dr. Salmons is the Research Community Manager for Methodspace, and will serve as Mentor in Residence for June. Her most recent book from SAGE Publishing is Doing Qualitative Research Online. Her most recent book from SAGE Publishing is Doing Qualitative Research Online. If ordering from SAGE, use MSPACEQ222 for a 20% discount, valid through the end of June 2022.

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Anything that is emerging is inherently in a state of change, making it hard to define. All we can do is describe it at a point in time: now a chrysalis, now a butterfly. We understand it is inherently in flux. When it is fully formed, it will take on a distinct name and identity. For example, at some point Strauss and Corbin decided to name what they’d been developing “grounded theory,” before that, it was an emerging method (Strauss and Corbin, 1998, p.10). To frame this month’s focus, let’s look at some chrysalis-to-butterfly characteristics of emerging methods.

Hesse-Biber and Leavy introduce their 2008 volume, Handbook of Emergent Methods, with this explanation:

Some researchers may find that even when they stretch the traditional framework of a given method, they are unable to find a tool that works, given their particular research problem. Or a researcher may have access to new information or skills that are put to use in a given research endeavor that leads to the creation of a new method. In addition, innovations may evolve as the result of the creation of a technology, that in turn may provide the impetus for a new methods advance. (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2008) 

Let’s home in on a few key points:

1.      To stretch a traditional framework, we must know it. We need firm grounding in accepted theories, methodologies, methods, and practices before trying to update or replace them.

2.      New information can include new research findings that reveal dimensions not previously known, or outside of the scholarly realm important social, cultural, political, or economic shifts can shake the status quo and call for new ways of doing things. New information could include insights gained from other disciplines, or from practice.

3.      Communications are at the heart of many research methods, whether we are interviewing participants or sharing findings with colleagues. With each new technology we have new questions about how it changes ways we conduct research and what we study. Not every effort to develop new methods will involve online or technology-oriented research, but using updated research tools is often an impetus for innovation.

With these premises in mind, a researcher who wants to work on emerging methods would ideally balance a deep methodological grounding with a wide-ranging curiosity about relevant scholarship, the state of life in the world, and tools that could be used to study it. We will define emerging methods as:

Theories, methodologies, methods and/or protocols being developed to study problems that cannot be adequately understood with existing approaches, or to take advantage of new information, tools, and/or technologies.

Let’s look at characteristics of emerging methods as exemplified in this open-access article:
Bay, J., & Sullivan, P. (2021). Researching Home-Based Technical and Professional Communication: Emerging Structures and Methods. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 167–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920959185  

We could say these researchers received “new information” that limited them from proceeding as planned, the information being that the field site was closed. Bay and Sullivan wanted to study workplace writing strategies but were conducting their data collection at the point in the Covid pandemic when offices were shut down.

It was apparent that “existing methods for workplace research, including storytelling, ethnographic methods that leverage interviewing and embedded fieldwork, and network analysis, are challenging to conduct in a home-based workplace” (p. 167). The research team looked for ways to work with and within the challenges, and take a different approach. They tried to draw from methods used previously to study the remote workplace, with the realization that a home workplace has different characteristics and dynamics when it is also the school-room and life-hub in a time when everything was shut down. They needed to rethink their methodologies, and decided to stretch and adapt feminist, ethnographic, and participatory action research approaches. These allowed for a more open power dynamic and a more collaborative experience.

They also realized that technology such as video and audio conferencing could create new opportunities and could be used as tools for capturing embodied narratives, while other tools were used for time-use diaries.

While Bay and Sullivan did not articulate a new method, their process shows that creative re-thinking of all of the elements of the study allowed a workable approach to emerge. Follow this month on Methodspace for more examples and recommendations.

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More about emerging methods