Guest Post: Adapting an Investigative Report into a Performance Script

It's Guest Post Friday, and Tara Goldstein shares her experience of turning an investigative report into a performance script.

In May 2007, 15-year old Jordan Manners was shot and killed in the hallway of his Toronto school. In June 2007, the Toronto District School Board commissioned an investigation into school safety, which resulted in a report entitled The Road to Health. In February 2008, in an attempt to provoke discussion about the investigative report among teacher candidates and teacher educators in Toronto, I adapted The Road to Health into a performance script. The script, directed by MA student and theatre artist Jocelyn Wickett, was performed in September 2008, for 500 teacher candidates at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s (OISE’s) annual Safe Schools Conference. It will be performed again on February 25, 2010, at Hart House at the University of Toronto (from 3:00-5:00 pm in the Great Hall).

One of my first adaptation decisions was to include public responses to the report as well as excerpts from the report itself in the performance script. A second early adaptation decision was imagining the audience that would be engaging with the performance script. OISE’s annual Safe Schools Conference for initial teacher education students was an ideal site for a performance of The Road to Health, so I decided to write the script for an audience of teacher candidates and their teacher educators. These two early decisions provided me with several characters for the script: a media reporter and a group of five new teachers. Arts-based research (including this arts-based adaptation of an investigative report) works to create knowledge based on resonance and understanding. One way to ensure that my performance script resonated with my intended audience was to include them as major characters in the performance. A third early decision was to write myself into the script by giving myself the role of narrator. As contemporary researchers have been writing for decades now, writing up research data is an interpretative, subjective, value-laden project. I wanted my audience to remember that the performance they were watching was inventing truths about the meaning of the report at the same time as it was attempting to represent truths contained in the report. I used the notion of story to do this. This guest blog has been excerpted from a paper that is published Qualitative Inquiry 15 (8).

Professor Tara Goldstein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning. In 2007, Tara founded Gailey Road Productions, a company that produces research-based theatre. For more information about Gailey Road see: www.gaileyroad.com , and for Tara's Gailey Road Blog see: http://GaileyRoad.blogspot.com .

UK Universities Reward Research Over Teaching

A report released by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester found that universities in the UK were inconsistent in their promotion policies. While all universities studied (104) include research criteria in their promotions decisions, only 73 examined teaching and learning outcomes. These results are consistent with a February HEA report that while nearly all (92%) of academics surveyed felt that teaching should be included in promotion decisions, less than half (43%) believed that it actually was. According to George MacDonald Ross, senior advisor to the HEA, "it is hypocritical for certain universities to say in their mission statements and strategies that they give equal weight to teaching and research, and not to practice this in their promotion procedures."

Does your university reward teaching or research in promotional decisions?

Attwood, R. (2009, December 10). Pedagogy a poor second in promotions. The Times Higher Education, retrieved online from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409511&c=2 .

Guest Post Friday: Kids and Ethnography

It's Guest Post Friday and today's post is about the roles that children play in conducting fieldwork, by Hilary Levey.

“Which one is yours?” the woman asked, gesturing to the children on the playground. Taken aback, I laughed and quickly replied, “Oh, none of them! I’m here doing dissertation research.” “I thought you looked a little young,” she smiled in return. “So, what is your dissertation about?”

When this exchange occurred early in my fieldwork—studying families with elementary school-age children who play chess, soccer, or dance competitively—I was surprised. As a young woman in her mid-twenties it was biologically possible for me to have children who were old enough to be attending a summer enrichment camp, but it would have been socially unexpected given my educational background. By the third time I was asked this question, I knew it was a question worth considering more thoroughly.

What does it mean that when a young, white woman is around children the automatic assumption is that she is a mother; and how different would the reaction have been had I not been white or been a male? Based on the seemingly innocuous question, “which one is yours?” I began thinking about the ways in which fieldwork with and around children presents particular challenges for an ethnographer.

I explore these issues in a recently published paper in Qualitative Sociology. In this work I identify four roles that children can play in ethnographies: 1) as “wedges,” or as instrumentally important in terms of helping adults gain access to fieldsites, relationships, and knowledge; 2) as collaborators, when children contribute to the formulation of research questions, collect data, or write reports; 3) as objects of study, when the topic of a ethnography is about children’s issues but children themselves are not directly observed and/or consulted; and 4) as subjects of study, when children are seen as individuals fully able to answer questions in a worthwhile way.

To advance the analytic enterprise I also identify three ways in which children, whether one’s own or not, can affect the ethnographic process across the four roles. The first is through their mere presence in the field. Simply by “being there” children can help establish a fieldworkers’ identity, mainly by helping the adult occupy an understandable role in a community. Next, children can promote stronger researcher/informant relations and access to information in three ways. For example, children can help dampen tensions between the fieldworker and the subjects of research; the presence of a child may help rule out other relationship possibilities, including those of an intimate nature. Children can also level relationships that would otherwise be hierarchical, reducing class and status differences by creating a common denominator as “parents” that span other social boundaries. Third, children can help open and close windows into communities and research topics, perhaps by bringing up issues the fieldworker had not thought of before. Finally, in terms of how children can affect the ethnographies, they can do so by making substantive contributions in the form of knowledge and insight, helping with the research process by gathering data, or even conducting analyses that appear in published ethnographic works.

In a larger sense, this focus on the roles and mechanisms related to children and ethnography is a way of thinking about the ways various personal relationships—such as siblings, spouses, or close friends and relatives—can impact the ethnographic process. The presence of kids in the fieldwork process raises various ethnographic issues encountered by most ethnographers, like reflexivity and agency, particularly since children are often in powerless positions (in relation to adults). The presence of personal relations in the field, let alone those of an intimate or sexual nature, generally remain shrouded in silence—but as ethnography as a qualitative research method strives to strengthen its purchase, such issues call out for more sustained attention and thought.

HILARY LEVEY is a post-doctoral scholar in sociology at Harvard, through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Program.

YouTube for Academics - The Debate Continues

The debate over the academic usefulness of YouTube persists. A recent commentary in the Times Higher Education sorts through the nonsense of Youtube (i.e. - the cat videos!) to address a few of Youtube's greatest contributions to academia, including:

1. A wealth of media clips that can be shared in classes to illustrate points;
2. Access to digital storytelling;
3. A collection of scholarly lectures and interviews;
4. University marketing;
5. An opportunity to share and benefit from teaching best practices;
6. Along the same lines, students can view how other students learn and produce work;
7. An outlet to share research

The advances of the Internet have improved research across the continuum, from gaining access to subjects to disseminating results when completed. Instead of being limited to university press releases, scholars now can use blogs, twitter and YouTube to reach a wider audience. Have you used Youtube to share your research results?

Brabazon, T. (2009, December 2). YouTube has merit, but enough of the cat videos already. Times Higher Education, retrieved online from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409416&c=1 .

Guest Post Friday: Asking Factual Knowledge Questions: Reliability in Web-Based, Passive Sampling Surveys

It's Guest Post Friday, and today's post reviews the use of web based surveys as a data collection method, by Dr. Kimmo Elo.

The advent of the Internet has opened wholly new possibilities for data collecting. The Internet undoubtedly offers a number of advantages as a survey mode, especially when high costs or problems of reaching large numbers of respondents in a short period of time are an issue to be dealt with.

At the same time, several unanswered methodological pitfalls are present, possibly questioning the usability of data from Web surveys. The most important sources of errors include coverage, sampling, and measurement error. On the one hand, when using passive samples where the data are collected by using no predefined sampling criterias, both inference and generalizations to the target population with statistical methods requiring probabilistic samples are problematic. On the other hand, the problem with probabilistic Internet samples lurks in the unobservables: If the sample differs from the target population in terms of e.g. cognitive skills or other characteristics that are not directly observable, the sample is not representative of the target population and the generalizations possibly drawn from the sample might be misleading or incorrect.

Our research project has used a web-based, passive sampling knowledge survey to obtain an Internet sample. The results from this sample have been compared with those from a genuine probabilistic sample. Both data have the same questions and are, thus, truly comparable.

The findings of these comparisons are quite clear. The demographic characteristics were in line with previous research: men, young, better educated, and politically interested persons dominated the online sample. However, although the distribution of the knowledge scores in the Internet sample were far more skewed toward high knowledge scores than was the case in the probabilistic sample, the tendencies and differences between e.g. socioeconomic groups were very similar in both samples.

To sum up: Our findings show that online surveys are capable of providing valuable and reliable information about the differences (and similarities) between different groups of respondents, i.e. about general trends. However, the findings strongly suggest that online surveys should be used as a complementary, not as a substitutive method for traditional data collecting. As far as factual knowledge questions are concerned, online surveys are not a suitable alternative and we strongly discourage that scholars abandon traditional techniques of data collection. Good things cost money and the scholarly community should concern itself with quality instead of trying to minimize costs.

Dr Kimmo Elo is senior researcher in Political Science in the department of political science at the at the University of Turku (Finland) and adjunct professor in the department of political science at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). He also leads the research group “Knowledge of Politics” (launched 2007) at the University of Turku. His main research interests are knowledge of politics, research methodology, political systems and post-WW-II German politics. Contact: kimmo.elo@utu.fi or visit the research website here.

NIH Releases Report on Researcher Conflict of Interest

The National Institutes of Health released a report related to financial conflicts of interest reported in 2006, containing data from 41 grant recipient institutions. A majority (111 out of 165 researchers) of conflicts were due to stock or other equity ownership in companies which could affect researcher's ability to be impartial. It was reported that six researchers had ownership of greater than $100,000, while thirteen researchers had ownership of 50% or more. The remaining reported conflicts were due to contract/consulting positions, or researchers who had created technology. The report also identified that many institutions relied solely on researchers to disclose their own conflicts and did not require researchers to disclose actual monetary amounts on forms. Recommendations from NIH include improved details on the nature of all reported conflicts and how institutions plan to appropriately manage, reduce or eliminate these conflicts.

Have you encountered conflicts of interest in your research? How does your institution manage these conflicts?



Harris, G. (2009, November 18). Academic researcher's conflicts of interest often go unreported. The New York Times, retrieved online from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/health/policy/19nih.html?_r=3&scp=6&sq=university&st=cse .

Guest Post Friday: Role Sharing Between Evaluators and Stakeholders in Practice

It's Guest Post Friday, and today's post discusses the use of research-based knowledge in Safe Schools/Healthy Student Initiative sites, by Dr. Jennifer Cartland.

In our previous study conducted as part of the national evaluation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Safe Schools/Healthy Student Initiative (SS/HS), we examined the role of evaluators in twenty SS/HS projects over a three-year period (Cartland, Ruch-Ross, Mason, “Role-sharing between evaluators and stakeholders in practice,” American Journal of Evaluation, 2008; 29-4: 460-477). SS/HS sites are required to have a local evaluator and to reserve at least 7% of the overall budget of the project for evaluation. Since SS/HS grants are sizable, most SS/HS grantees have large, comprehensive and highly professional evaluations. For many grantees we studied, it was their first experience with such an evaluation.

At the completion of our study, a number of unanticipated questions surfaced about the long-term impact of the SS/HS evaluation on the culture of the stakeholder organizations—what we are calling “process effect”. We observed that each of the twenty sites seemed to fit into one of three categories regarding the extent to which their organizational cultures valued and used research-based knowledge; and we wondered what site dynamics were associated with value placed on research-based knowledge. The three categories are:

1. Embracers: In a few sites, seeking out relevant research-based knowledge seemed to become standard practice when decisions were being made and this standard practice was applied across all or most projects and initiatives (not just those connected to the SS/HS project). The leaders of the school district and other organizations appeared to embrace research-based knowledge as one of the key factors to consider when they were making a decision.
2. Selective users: In a second set of organizations, research-based knowledge began to be seen as potentially useful, but was not something consistently sought in decision making – e.g., it could be seen as relevant to deciding the right number and kinds of social workers the school should hire, but not relevant to deciding whether the school should have recess for grade school students. Research-based knowledge was employed when the research findings supported an agenda promoted by stakeholders or when an initiative or project was perceived to be ‘research-relevant.’
3. Resisters: In this sub-set of sites, stakeholders seemed to resist using research-based knowledge in decision-making. Evaluation results were perhaps useful in deciding which SS/HS programs to sustain, but these sites did not seek out research-based knowledge when they had other decisions to make. Resistance could be either active (some stakeholders expressed little faith in research-based knowledge) or passive (stakeholders made decisions based on the information that was presented to them and did not seek out any additional information).

Although not the only relevant factor, it appears that the higher the level of mutual collaboration between evaluator and project director, the higher the levels of co-learning between the evaluator and project director and, hence, the higher level of process effect. Process effect is defined as a change to the decision-making process of the client organization, and it results from a dynamic mutual process between the evaluator and stakeholders. We would like to study this process.

A second area for future study is the diffusion of the process effect within the client organization and across the client organization’s collaborators. In the SS/HS study, almost every site became comfortable with using research-based knowledge to decide what parts of the SS/HS project were most effective and beneficial. But only a minority of sites experienced any ‘contagion’ concerning the use of research-based knowledge. Sites appeared to have ‘nodes’ of decision makers who valued research-based knowledge, but not all were able to develop consensus among decision-makers (horizontally, within the lead organization and across to collaborating organizations) or among all levels of staff (vertically) that research-based knowledge is almost always helpful in any decision-making process. Thus, the second goal of a future study would be to examine how the increased value of research-based knowledge spreads within the lead organization and among partner organizations, what facilitates the contagion, and what prevents contagion.

Jenifer Cartland, PhD, a research assistant professor at the Northwestern University Medical School, is the Director of Child Health Data Lab and Co-Director of the Center for Community Partnerships and Health Promotion. Dr. Cartland is a public policy analyst with fifteen years of experience working on child and adolescent health and welfare issues. Her areas of expertise include evaluation, health care financing, community-based interventions and child and adolescent injury.