Methodological triangulation in researching families: Making sense of dissonant data

The research literature on triangulation has paid little attention to the problematic of 'making sense of dissonant data'. Nor has there been much discussion around the use of the technique of triangulation when researching families. Through a presentation of research findings gathered from self-report questionnaires and in-depth interviews with couples and families the possibilities of convergent, complementary and dissonant data and their interpretation are explored. The paper reflects on the ontological, epistemological and methodological tensions that must be negotiated when working with triangulated data. It is argued that given the multi-faceted context and intimate subject matter in family and couples research there is a high likelihood of dissonant findings. Recommendations are made for family researchers interested in the technique of triangulation to consider the context and process of their research in the interpretation of their data. Despite the challenges that triangulation throws up for researchers, it is argued that working within a post-positivist paradigm, triangulation enables analysis which is both more complex and more meaningful.     

Dissonant Discourses in Institutional Communications on Sexual Violence

ABSTRACT

This article is a discourse analysis of a large Northwestern research university’s official communications regarding sexual violence for a 15-month time frame. Through close reading of these communications, we found that concurrent with high levels of criticism in the spring of 2014 over the university’s handling of a high-profile rape case, the university advanced dissonant discourses of risk and responsibility in its communications regarding sexual violence. At both the institutional and individual levels, these dissonant discourses work to construct who is at risk of committing or experiencing sexual violence, and who is responsible for preventing and responding to it. In conclusion, we discuss possible implications for these dissonant discourses on the future of campus sexual violence prevention and university response.     

Gender and Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Social work interventions for youths should be based on understanding how youths think about important issues in their lives. This study assesses the moral reasoning of 43 urban, low-income African American seventh graders in response to questions about how to handle dating dilemmas. Responses to videotaped dating situations were analyzed using qualitative methods to distinguish between justice and care perspectives. The majority of responses from both genders came from the justice perspective. Girls gave more responses that reflected care and combined justice and care perspectives. Boys were less skillful in communicating and tended to focus on negative consequences. Culture and social class appeared to play important roles in moral reasoning.     

Gender and Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Social work interventions for youth should be based on understanding how youth think about important issues in their lives. This study assesses the moral reasoning of 43 urban, low-income African American seventh graders in response to questions about how to handle dating dilemmas. Responses to videotaped dating situations were analyzed using qualitative methods to distinguish between justice and care perspectives. The majority of responses from both genders came from the justice perspective. Girls gave more responses that reflected care and combined justice and care perspectives. Boys were less skillful in communicating and tended to focus on negative consequences. Culture and social class appeared to play important roles in moral reasoning.     

Taxonomic Chaos in the Confused Canadian Bioethics Industry: Apres Moi la Deluge

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of a decade-old movement in Canada to purportedly raise ethical standards in research with human subjects, even though no systematic evidence has ever been presented either that there are serious ethical problems (especially in psychological research), or that the solutions imposed by the movement would improve the ethical situation, and not harm research's fundamental epistemological enterprise. The movement began with the activities of a committee from Canada's three major government research councils, the Tri-Council Committee (TCC). Like all ideological enterprises, it provided taxonomic chaos by, for example, confusing ethics with epistemology and feelings of discomfort concerning an area of investigation with intellectual expertise about that area. It also went beyond its American counterparts by calling its proposals a code of conduct rather than guidelines, and proposing that if a so-called research participant (i.e., a subject) did not like the investigator's hypotheses, she or he could withdraw “her” or “his” data. Even after the TCC and its various bureaucratic progeny retreated (though ambiguously) from these absurd positions, there has been a maintenance of such positions as the right and responsibility of IRBs to advise not only on the ethical issue of the treatment of subjects, but also on epistemological issues of research design. These issues require not only expertise in the requisite disciplines, but also an intimate familiarity with highly specialized sub-areas. In practical terms senior researchers may be able deal with the burgeoning North American bioethics industry and ignore the anti-epistemological and implicit principles according to which the industry operates. Younger researchers, who have no memory of how research used to be conducted, will succumb, and, in an epistemological sense, be “corrupted”. As the last phrase of my title suggests, senior researchers are currently acting like France's Louis XV.     

‘She Knew What was Coming’: Knowledge and Domestic Violence in Social Work Education

Social Work educators are aware that within any class of social work students there are likely to be students with first-hand experience of domestic violence. The Writing Stories project was designed to engage students with social policy learning using experiential accounts. An unintended outcome of the project was the disclosure of students' experience of domestic violence. The accounts of violence offer an interesting juxtaposition with the formalised academic story of violence. This paper, by drawing on the concept of banality, aims to uncover how knowledge is presented in those stories and what challenges this may pose for educators. Feminist research highlights the need for researchers to enable women to tell their stories. Social work values also stress that service-user experience should be central to theorising and knowledge production. However, within an educational relationship these stories also need to be examined for how they can both provide a basis for knowledge and compete with, clash or resist other forms of knowledge. The key argument is that neither the formal, academic forms of knowledge, nor the experiential should be privileged. Instead, it is by working across a spectrum of epistemological methods that practice is best contextualised.     

Explaining the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse: A Behavior Analytic Conceptualization

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, several authors have proposed conceptual models to explain the adverse effects of child sexual abuse (CSA). Although conceptual models have been proposed from broadly behavioral perspectives (e.g., cognitive behavioral), as yet there is no comprehensive behavior analytic conceptualization of the effect of CSA. In this article, the behavior analytic mechanisms used to explain the development and maintenance of behavior are described, with specific reference to how the mechanisms provide a comprehensive means of accounting for adverse reactions following CSA.     

LGBT voices in work-life: a call for research and a research community

ABSTRACT

Despite an apparent expansive inclusivity of the aims of work–life programmes, there remains a fairly narrowly defined heteronormative view of the family. Alternative and non-normative perspectives of family life, and especially those pertaining to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual (LGBT) identities, remain relatively occluded and under-researched. The aim of this paper is to question the presence and relevance of LGBT voices and perspectives in work–life research as they seem neither visible nor on the frontline of work–life research despite their increasingly legitimate presence in organisational and societal discourses.     

Choices,Challenges, and Tensions

ABSTRACT

No research has examined the challenges faced by lesbian women seeking to adopt from the perspective of lesbian couples themselves. The current qualitative study utilized data from 70 women (from 35 same-sex couples) who were in the process of adopting to explore how lesbian women experience and navigate the challenges they encounter during this critical life transition. Ecological, minority stress, and feminist perspectives informed our analysis. Results indicated that many women experienced tensions between their desire to be “out” in the adoption process and the legal and social realities of adoption. Based on their reports, women in this sample faced numerous barriers to adopting but engaged in multiple forms of resistance to legal and social inequities. Women also identified supportive practices by agencies that facilitated the adoption process. Findings suggest the importance of considering lesbian women's experiences as a starting point in understanding how heteronormative social practices shape the experiences of same-sex couples striving to adopt.     

The Importance of GLBT Think Tanks to Our Agenda of Equality and Liberation

SUMMARY

The gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement should support research, policy analysis, and strategy development to advance greater understanding and equality of GLBT people. Most public policy frameworks affect GLBT people in particular ways, but we have not yet developed analyses of these frameworks, let alone articulated perspectives in critical policy debates affecting us. This article illustrates how the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force works on identifying the concerns of GLBT people through research and policy analysis to provide the basis for more effective and proactive organizing.     

Doing it differently: emancipatory autism studies within a neurodiverse academic space

Abstract

In the current research climate, in which many autistic and autism communities are increasingly calling for a move towards collaborative forms of research, we consider how a loosely formed epistemological community may serve to challenge ‘business as usual’ in the academy. Mindful of the need to move beyond theory, we use this experience to concretely consider how knowledge about autism and neurotypicality can be meaningfully (co)-produced, and made available both to the research community and also to autistic and autism communities. Here, we use our own co-production of this article to explore how autistic experience may trouble normative meanings of academic knowledge production. We also consider the limits and possibilities of a neurodiverse research collaboration to reflect on ways in which a loose epistemological space may serve to contribute to knowledge about both autism and neurotypicality, adding to debate around collaborative research.     

INTERPRETING THE SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS: CAN THERE BE A “TRUE” MEANING OF MEAD?

Many sociologists have tried in vain to find the “true” meaning of the classic works in the discipline. An interactionist perspective suggests that this search is not a valid one for sociologists, especially symbolic interactionists. Although there can be no “true” meaning, some authors use conventions of writing that make their work more or less clear. Using Mead's Mind, Self and Society as an example, we discuss the dimensions of clarity. We then argue that the sociological classics should be read to (I) simulate new theories and research (pragmatic analysis), (2) determine how sociologists have used that classic to support or refute particular theories or perspectives (rhetorical analysis), and (3) provide information about the sociological concerns of the author and his/her contemporaries (historical analysis).     

Culture-Centered Counseling Skills as a Preventive Strategy for College Health Services

Abstract

All learning occurs in a cultural context. Successful counseling can be achieved by training healthcare providers to interpret behaviors in their cultural context. The author describes a culture-centered approach, using a cultural grid that matches same/different behaviors with same/different expectations. Clients with shared positive expectations may display dissonant and apparently negative behaviors. Culturally accurate knowledge and culturally appropriate skills provide a three-level developmental sequence for more accurate and more appropriate healthcare guidance in such multicultural settings as those met on the college campus.     

The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

Decentralist vanguards: women’s autonomous power and left convergence in Rojava

ABSTRACT

Since 2012, the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria has attracted the attention of the global Left. Although this project has been subjected to many analyses from different political perspectives, there has not been a systematic analysis of the way it brings together anarchism and Marxism. By focusing on the question of how a revolutionary movement should be organized, we arrive at the argument that Rojava features a specific hybrid of anarchist and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary methods in the form of ‘decentralist vanguardism’. The most advanced form of this hybrid method in Rojava is represented by women. By virtue of being theorized as a revolutionary agent, having autonomous organizations, and carrying a leading role in educating the general public, women in Rojava become what we call ‘a revolutionary middle stratum’: a distinct revolutionary group with autonomous power that can push forward the revolutionary process while dispersing the authority of the vanguard movement.     

The evolution of competitive capability: a cognition and complex systems perspective

Abstract

This paper explores the ability of four theoretical perspectives on cognition to interpret the evolution of competitive capability in a purposive sample of exemplar firms. Interpretations predicated on managers guiding the flow of events using cognitivist, goal-directed processes are shown to be limited. More satisfactory accounts are achieved when evolution is viewed as the product of complex system dynamics.     

Young Women's Life Stories and Accounts of Parental Divorce

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of an analysis of 7 young women's life story accounts of the experience of parental separation during adolescence. The young women took part in the Life Stories and Family Transitions Study conducted in New Zealand. The qualitative methodology used in this study allowed for an investigation of the ways that participants made sense of their experiences of parental separation within the life story. The narratives of parental separation were extracted from the interviews and analyzed for form and content. The analysis of form found that the stories progressed through a number of stages, titled “The Early Years,” “The Deteriorating Parental Relationship,” “The Climax,” and “The Aftermath.” A number of themes emerged from a process of interpretive thematic analysis. These themes were often associated with different stages of the story of separation, and were titled “Putting Together the Pieces,” “The Struggling Self,” and “Self-Determination and Competency.” As participants put together the stories of separation, they considered their parents' perspectives and integrated these with their own experiences of family events, developing their own personal theories. The stories of struggle, and of personal strength and self-determination, emerge from the analysis.     

Female-partnered women conceiving kinship: Does sharing a sperm donor mean we are family?

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study explored how 36 initially female-partnered mothers defined their own, and their children's, relationships with families who share their unknown sperm donor (i.e., “linked” families). Shared genetics among children were sometimes sufficient to describe relationships among linked families as familial, especially from the children's perspectives. Most women described their own relationships with linked families as significant but not necessarily in traditional family terms. Family terms were sometimes seen as undermining ties to siblings and genetically unrelated mothers. As shared experiences have come to define “chosen family,” definitions of significant relationships must expand to include those defined by shared genetics alone.     

Agency in advanced liberal services: grounding sociological knowledge in homeless people's accounts

This paper aims to understand how people who are homeless respond to advanced liberal social services that endeavour to promote their autonomy and responsible actions. We prioritize the experiences and positions of people who are homeless, and what agentic action means to them. Sociological literature is selective about what accounts are deemed agentic. Agency is associated with accounts that resist or subvert dominant neoliberal framings of homelessness as failure of individuals. When people experiencing homelessness or poverty themselves foreground autonomy or responsibility, sociologists treat them as cultural dopes who have internalized neoliberal discourse. Our analysis is driven by an ethnographic study in an Australian homelessness shelter. We demonstrate how people who are homeless neither outright reject nor completely embrace advanced liberal practices to influence their actions and promote autonomy. People engaged in relational reasoning. Paternalist and advanced liberal social services were both lauded and rejected for their capacities and limitations to realize a good life. We contribute to the discussion for sociology to value people's accounts and experiences, rather than broader social process explaining their accounts. From the perspectives of people who are homeless, we show that just because something appears neoliberal does not mean it should be automatically rejected.