Complicating Methodological Transparency

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tqse20

Complicating methodological transparency a

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Sarah Bridges-Rhoads , Jessica Van Cleave & Hilary E. Hughes

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Department of Early Childhood Education, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA b

Education Department, Mars Hill University, Mars Hill, NC, USA

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Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Published online: 19 Aug 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Jessica Van Cleave & Hilary E. Hughes (2015): Complicating methodological transparency, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2015.1063733 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2015.1063733

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2015.1063733

Complicating methodological transparency Sarah Bridges-Rhoadsa*, Jessica Van Cleaveb and Hilary E. Hughesc a

Department of Early Childhood Education, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA; Education Department, Mars Hill University, Mars Hill, NC, USA; cDepartment of Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

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(Received 23 August 2014; accepted 2 June 2015) A historical indicator of the quality, validity, and rigor of qualitative research has been the documentation and disclosure of the behind-the-scenes work of the researcher. In this paper, we use what we call methodological data as a tool to complicate the possibility and desirability of such transparency. Specifically, we draw on our disparate attempts to address calls for transparency about methodological processes in our respective dissertation studies in order to examine how novice researchers can explore transparency as a situated, ongoing, and philosophically informed series of decisions about how, when, and if to be transparent about our work. This work contributes to conversations about how qualitative researchers in education can understand, discuss, and teach qualitative inquiry while continuing to push the boundaries of the field. Keywords: methodological data; transparency; doctoral education; phenomenology; poststructuralism; writing as inquiry

A historical indicator of the quality, validity, and rigor of qualitative research has been the documentation and disclosure of the behind-the-scenes work of the researcher (Anfara, Brown, & Mangione, 2002; Bringer, Johnston, & Brackenridge, 2004; Denzin, 2008; Freeman, deMarrais, Preissle, Roulston, & St. Pierre, 2007; Tracy, 2010). Thorough and reflexive accounts of one’s research make available a researcher’s ongoing contemplation, decisions, and processes so that she can be understood within the context of the study and situated in the field. Such models, as Freeman et al. (2007) described, can enable researchers to better understand what “exemplary researchers whose methodology is innovative and effective do and how they make their work convincing” (p. 26). This is particularly important in a context in which “qualitative research is seen as an assault” on the gold standard of experimental positivist science which assumes that “‘truth’ can transcend opinion and personal bias” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 2). Maintaining qualitative research as “open and supple” (Freeman et al., 2007, p. 25) regardless of the paradigm, then, must involve transparency about our processes as well as continuous evaluation of what is produced when we say we are doing qualitative research. Grappling with this daunting task, qualitative researchers often write methodological articles questioning topics like the ethics of research (Berbary, 2013; Hammersley, 2014), what counts as data (St. Pierre, 1997b), where the field begins *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] © 2015 Taylor & Francis

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and ends (Enguix, 2014), what constitutes responsible interactions with participants (Granek, 2013), and so forth. Those articles offer spaces for researchers not only to demonstrate how methodology is continuously produced while the research is enacted (St. Pierre, 2011; Vagle, 2009) but also to highlight the fact that transparency in a research report is problematic, and indeed, that there is much more to be said about methodology than what is published in a final text. Kuntz (2010), for example, hinted at the complexity of transparency when he described his decisions not to include analytic memos in his dissertation text despite the fact that his theoretical underpinnings emphasized their importance. His understanding at the time was that “the product of self-reflexive work, not its process, was the stuff of the dissertation” (emphasis added, p. 432). As a result, those moments that gave him pause, made him realign his epistemological commitments, modify his research processes, and rethink certain ethical decisions related to his study – moments when Kuntz was thinking with theory to produce his methodology – never made it to the methodological discussion or to citations in his dissertation and left him claiming his dissertation as an “example of misrepresentation” (p. 432).1 As early career scholars currently working with doctoral students, we find our students pondering issues of representation similar to Kuntz as they search for clarity about what methodological reasoning belongs in the dissertation or research report and what belongs in a methodological article to be unpacked at another time and place. They ask questions similar to those we asked as doctoral students and continue to ask now: How do I represent the never-ending theorizing about what constitutes data, the field, data collection, analysis, and any of the other categories that seem so normal, natural, and real that “[w]e’ve forgotten we made [them] up” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 613)? Where does this representation fit in my dissertation or research report? And once I have made and represented those decisions, how do I justify and represent the thinking about that representation? We believe such questions indicate a need for conversations about what is written and can be written about our methodological processes. In particular, such questions point to the idea that in order for the dissertation to act as a training instrument – a text which must, in part, represent the author as a researcher and demonstrate ethics and validity (Kamler & Thomson, 2008) – we need to help students struggle with the idea that descriptions of research are not neutral and the extent to which transparency is an uncomplicated and desirable methodological task differs across paradigms.2 Such support is crucial in the current context of education research where straightforward, transparent, and replicable methodologies are privileged and any kind of thinking outside of positivist science can be a difficult task for many novice researchers (Hazzan & Nutov, 2014; Luttrell, 2005). We worry that the temptation is all too great to brush aside the “tensions, contradictions, and hesitations” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 15) that characterize qualitative inquiry – to tidy up the mess, so-to-speak – and, as a result, opportunities may be limited for researchers to negotiate the “constantly changing landscape of educational research far beyond the application of technical methods and procedures” (Lather, 2006, p. 53). Simply put, we believe doctoral students, especially those who work outside of positivism, need tools to help them theorize, represent, and justify the methodologies they produce. In this article, then, we name and operationalize methodological data – data about methodology that is produced, collected, imagined, resisted, or even data that deconstruct as researchers enact qualitative research. Drawing upon our respective

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dissertation studies, we use methodological data as a tool to illuminate some of the choices and compromises we made in our disparate attempts to address calls for transparency about methodological processes. The construct of methodological data is not meant to be taken as static, monolithic, and coherent; rather, the meaning and purpose(s) of methodological data, like the data we draw on for our objects of knowledge, must shift depending on paradigm, context, researcher, and the boundaries of work and time. In fact, we use the term methodological data to encourage researchers to position the theorization of methodology within/against ongoing conversations about data in qualitative research that question, for example, how researchers can and should work with data (Saldana, 2013), if data is still a useful construct (Brinkmann, 2014; Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013), and even if data might be dead (Denzin, 2013).3 Decades ago, Erickson (1986) described how data do not exist in fieldnotes but must be named as such by the researcher in the context of a specific study. More recently, St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) described how qualitative researchers must “us[e] theory to determine first, what counts as data and second, what counts as ‘good’ or appropriate data” for a particular purpose (p. 715). Methodological data, then, cannot be thought of or taught as any one thing to be addressed by all qualitative researchers in a singular fashion. Instead, it provides a tool for making thinking visible and exploring the effects of decisions about transparency so that researchers can respond to questions about the quality and rigor of their work while maintaining a “perpetual resistance against attempts to impose a single, umbrella-like paradigm” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. xiii). Below we highlight the usefulness of methodological data by describing how complicating transparency is a necessary part of philosophically informed inquiry. Methodological data and philosophically informed inquiry In our doctoral training,4 exploring methodology as an object of knowledge was an important part of enacting philosophically informed inquiry.5 We were trained, for example, to read, read, read and get theory smart early on so that we had something to think with when we began to design and carry out research that addressed the specific ethical, political, and cultural contexts of our individual studies (Blair, 2010; Metz, 2001; Pallas, 2001). That type of philosophically informed inquiry, according to St. Pierre (2011), “immerse[s researchers] in a field of complex and contradictory theory rich enough to address the complex and contradictory nature of whatever they encounter in fieldwork and analysis” (p. 614). In this line of thinking, research training, as Lather (2006) described, cannot adopt a “linear sense of development toward ‘one best way’” (p. 36), but instead explores and produces a “less comfortable social science full of stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of truth, interpretation and responsibility” (p. 52). Although we were cognizant that there was not “one best way” to be transparent about what is often considered behind-the-scenes methodological work, we were struck by the sheer number of questions we had about how, when, and where to be transparent. Calls such as Anfara et al.’s (2002) that doctoral students disclose “all aspects of the analysis process” (p. 28) became problematic for our work because the decisions we had to make about transparency included whether or not to be transparent at times. Our respective studies involved countless complex decisions that we theorized within planned spaces, like in any of the “mass of research

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artifacts” that qualitative researchers produce regardless of paradigm (McLeod & Thomson, 2009, p. 125), and in unplanned spaces, like the “physicality of theorizing” that happens while one might be gardening or washing the car and simultaneously analyzing her data (St. Pierre, 2011). Our theoretical frameworks asked us to question the extent to which those descriptions could speak for themselves, so the “public disclosure of processes” (p. 29) that Anfara et al. described as necessary for validity was not an outcome that was desirable, possible, or even thinkable in our work. For us, then, methodological transparency did not include creating the kind of audit trail described by Anfara et al. because it was not an all or nothing decision. Like everything else we studied, methodological transparency was riddled with its own “stuck places and difficult philosophical issues” (Lather, 2006, p. 52). As doctoral students (then) and early career scholars (now) who worked through those stuck places in order to successfully complete and defend our dissertations, we found that we still needed to describe our methodologies for a variety of purposes post-dissertation (e.g. articles, award nomination packets, job talks, current conversations with our doctoral students), and sometimes those descriptions required a different length, purpose, and context than the dissertation did. As we talked together, sifted through the mounds of writing that never made it to the final dissertation text, and recalled the importance of un-cited philosophical texts for our thinking and analysis, we began to describe our methodologies, and sometimes each other’s methodologies, quite differently than we had in our dissertation texts. We found this intriguing because regardless of whether we situated our work in poststructural theories, which Britzman (2000) maintained operate on the assumption that “‘being there’ does not guarantee access to truth” (p. 32), or phenomenological theories where, according to Vagle (2014), a researcher “could just as easily be taken up by the data than doing the taking” (p. 78), we nevertheless wanted to get it right.6 As Luttrell (2010) described, like many novice researchers we needed assurance that getting anything exactly right was impossible in qualitative research. To think about those shifting descriptions not as invalid research practices, but as indicative of the work qualitative researchers do, we needed a tool. In the remainder of this article, we put methodological data to work using that construct to re-describe and explore some of the philosophically informed decisions we made as we tried to address expectations for methodological transparency while writing our respective dissertations. We begin by offering three examples – one from each of our dissertations – where we focus on the behind-the-scenes writing we produced throughout our respective studies as a site for identifying and analyzing methodological data. Following those examples, we discuss how methodological data both helps us examine complex and often uneasy decisions regarding methodological transparency and raises a number of questions about how to support doctoral students as they negotiate such complexity. Putting methodological data to work In this section, we focus on written texts as a possible site of methodological data – that is, those texts that were useful for our thinking but never made it to the final document. We recognize, however, that we certainly could have chosen other sites (e.g. conversations among writing partners never recorded, dreams we had that shifted the way we thought about some aspect of our study, and memories that continue to surface as we re-describe our methodologies for various purposes) and that,

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indeed, those other sites of thinking are always intertwined with writing. We focus on written texts in this article because doctoral students are often bound by expectations to produce writing that provides readers with the opportunity to judge their work, but also because we each theorized the writing we did throughout our studies as an integral part of our philosophically informed methodological work.7 Sarah and Jessica, who relied upon poststructural theorizations of writing, used writing as a space of knowing and thinking (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) in which the researcher focuses on how language is actively producing people and things in order to “open up present frames of knowing to the possibilities of thinking differently” (Lather, 2000, p. 288). Writing was essential for Hilary’s work because for some scholars and philosophers in phenomenology, writing is a way of “making contact with the things of our world” by focusing on the “right words and phrases, on styles and traditions, on metaphor and figures of speech, on argument and poetic image” (van Manen, 2011, para 4). Sarah Many of Sarah’s decisions about methodological transparency involved over 400 pages of writing that she produced in her research log as she thought with “all [she could] muster” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622) about both her object of knowledge – discourses of mission work in teacher education – and a number of methodological dilemmas that cropped up during the study. Because her theoretical commitments privileged keeping things in process, which can open, expose, expand, and add complexity to any attempt to reify the illusion of the self-sufficient presences of any identity (Caputo, 1997), it was important for her to maintain an openness to both the anticipated and unanticipated words and ideas that she produced in writing (e.g. direct quotes from poststructural philosophers like Derrida and Foucault; words from a Christian God she prayed to the night before; recollections of a 3-hour conversation with a writing partner; transcripts from interviews with participants; scripts from a movie she watched 2 years prior). As her study progressed, however, it became more and more difficult to make sense of the thinking that was happening in her log. A “cacophony of ideas swirling” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622) complicated her ability to maintain clear distinctions between a number of common methodological categories, such as researcher and participants, research questions and fieldwork, and data collection and data analysis. Further, her attempts to insert pauses into her thinking-in-writing so that she could claim “findings” about her methodological practices or her object of knowledge often caused ethical issues she had already theorized to resurface in different ways that required yet another theorization. (e.g. the impossibility of adhering to commonly agreed upon ethical criteria to use citation as a tool for giving credit where credit is due (American Psychological Association, 2009, p. 15). Describing a coherent methodology then (i.e. complete, static), or to a greater extent, the coherent methodologist who produced such a methodology, proved impossible. In order to not be paralyzed by the impossible – deconstructive work,8 after all, is not an excuse for inaction but rather an incitement to proceed with caution and attend to the effects of the work – Sarah pursued methods that allowed her to continue the thinking-in-writing as she wrote her dissertation text. To do this, she identified and analyzed methodological data that could help her move through the specific sticking points that evolved as she wrote, and she included that ongoing

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methodological reasoning in the dissertation text by way of endnotes. A citation of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), for example, became an opportunity to draw upon data and analysis from a similar problematization of citation in her log or to name additional data that cropped up as she wrote, rather than being a signal to the origin of a particular thought. She therefore included an endnote to the citation:

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As I sit here … along with Deleuze and Guattari’s text, I am reading St. Pierre’s (1997a) text (I mean literally, as in both are open on the table with my computer). I shift back and forth between the two texts (as well as two others by St. Pierre (1997b, 1997c) and a third by Nicolas Burbules (2000) that I found while reading … and remembered that he mentioned Deleuze). When words fall onto the page I have no idea which text helped me think them. I also have no idea what words (or notes) have dropped out of view only to find new significance at a later date. (Bridges-Rhoads, 2011, p. 87)

Notes such as these occurred throughout the dissertation. Sarah’s dissertation had over 200 endnotes that spanned approximately 70 pages and contributed to both an understanding and complication of “what happened” when she conducted her research. She wrote in that same note, for instance, about how such complications of citational authority signaled the possibility that other citations in the dissertation were perhaps irresponsible, despite adhering to conventional standards. She also emphasized her methodological work as unfinished by writing that she was “not sure what to make of this [citational confusion]” but would be “interested in exploring it at a later date” (p. 87). In other notes, she cited additional places in her dissertation in which she had taken up similar methodological dilemmas differently. Such intratextual citations complicated the ease with which a reader could determine how her methodology produced findings because a single reading of that methodology was impossible. Throughout the process she had to make sense of the multiple methodological iterations she was producing, and she turned to both methodological literature and philosophical texts to help her. She wrote additional endnotes in which she theorized herself as a post-humanist methodologist similar to how Gannon (2006) described “a complex (im)possible subject in a world where (self) knowledge can only ever be tentative, contingent, and situated” (p. 474). She also wrote additional notes and a lengthy preface to the dissertation in which she theorized her methodological work as a pursuit of Derridean responsibility in research (e.g. Derrida, 1989/1992, 1999), which Koro-Ljungberg (2010) suggests requires “unlimited and ongoing movement toward the unknown and beyond one’s established knowledge” (p. 605) as well as a “return of ethics in the context of validity” (p. 604). Additionally, after she finished writing her dissertation and at the request of her committee, Sarah added an appendix in which she pulled together the validity criteria she had identified throughout the text, claimed “poststructural qualitative inquiry” as a second object of knowledge for her study, and provided instructions for reading the format and content of her dissertation. Jessica Throughout Jessica’s study (Van Cleave, 2012), she used writing to theorize unanticipated issues of ethics, politics, and power she encountered, but she also had an already established analytic developed by Dean (1994) that she wanted to use to explore her object of knowledge: scientifically based research (SBR) in education.

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Dean’s analytic was particularly useful for Jessica’s study because it translated the Foucauldian theory of governmentality (1978/1991) she had studied for years into a research methodology with specific steps to use when analyzing her data. More importantly, because SBR largely disqualified qualitative research as a valid way of knowing, Jessica believed that relying on a well-established analytic method would enable her to claim a methodology that would more likely be recognized as high quality, rigorous, and valid – especially by some of her participants who were strong proponents of SBR and had publicly critiqued qualitative research. Jessica wanted to be convincing even to those who did not agree with her or who were skeptical of the value of qualitative research. However, as Jessica began to describe her work in relation to Dean’s analytic, she found herself also thinking about the other writing she had done throughout the study when she wrote, as Foucault (1978/2000) described, without “know[ing] what to think about this thing [she] want[ed] so much to think about” (p. 239). Jessica realized that this additional writing/theorizing complicated how she could describe her methodological representations because they were not limited to Dean’s analytic. There were multiple ways she was thinking with and writing about other interpretations of governmentality (e.g. Allen, 1998; Gordon, 1991; Lincoln & Cannella, 2004; McNay, 1994; Scheurich, 1994); Foucault’s other theories like genealogy (1977), power/knowledge (1980), and archaeology (1972); and the work of additional theorists, such as Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, and Cixous, whom she had always read in conjunction with Foucault – and those methodological data were just as important to Jessica’s methodological representations as Dean’s analytic. Because her theoretical commitments did not require her to attend to that evidence, to code and categorize, to find negative cases, or to achieve data saturation in order to claim transparency about her research process (meaning, doing so would not get her closer to the truth of what happened because meaning cannot be contained in language [Derrida, 1967/1974]), Jessica drafted a methodology chapter focused on her attempts to implement Dean’s analytic. She could then analyze that representation, questioning not “whether or not [her description was] right” but what the description “promises” and “from what it promises to protect” (Butler, 1995, pp. 127–128). When she reread the descriptions she had written about how she used Dean’s analytic, both the representations and the ways in which she saw herself as methodologist were immediately problematic. Despite that her methodology seemed clear and potentially accessible to readers who perhaps doubted the usefulness and rigor of qualitative research that was not linear, her descriptions highlighted moves she made as a methodologist that were inconsistent with the theoretical commitments she claimed throughout the dissertation. She described, for instance, how she assigned data about her object of knowledge to the already established categories of Dean’s analytic. Yet, as she read her writing about that process, the extent to which she had privileged clarity led her to doubt that readers grounded in poststructural theories, herself included, would claim her work as valid because poststructural scholars often express skepticism about erasing complexity in favor of clarity (e.g. Lather, 1996). Those problematic descriptions enticed Jessica to return to the methodological data she had attempted to exclude and use it to spark new thinking about her object of knowledge. As she re-drafted the methodological chapter of her dissertation, then, she decided to include multiple pages about the process of using Dean’s analytic, watching it deconstruct, and returning to writing to re-do, re-name, and re-describe her

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analysis. In other words, the new draft included an important background story that provided the reader with information about the complex creation of her new methodology. Consequently, Jessica and other readers (e.g. writing partner, committee members) found the new description problematic too. Although privileging complexity was more in line with her theoretical commitments, including descriptions of such a lengthy and messy process risked alienating those readers and participants who already doubted the usefulness and rigor of qualitative research. She needed to renegotiate her decision again. Jessica re-drafted her methodology chapter, this time emphasizing the result of the process – the new methodology – and excluding those pages of descriptions about the behind-the-scenes work. Rather than signaling the importance of the complexity and messiness, she cited literature on writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) in which well-known and well-respected scholars theorized writing as a “site of exploration and struggle” (p. 961) and argued that “[t]here is no such thing as ‘getting it right,’ only ‘getting it’ differently contoured and nuanced” (p. 962). Situating herself within the literature about writing as method allowed her to position all of the writing she had done for her dissertation – both the finished text and the writing that remained unseen – not as a descriptive tool to illuminate the process but a means for constantly decentering truth and deferring meaning (Derrida, 1978) while also appealing to citational authority. To add even more complexity and credibility, Jessica and a co-author presented a paper about writing as inquiry at a conference so she could cite it in her dissertation without interrupting the format. After her dissertation defense and at the request of her committee, Jessica included a few examples of her behind-the-scenes writing processes – methodological data – in her dissertation text in order to provide added transparency about her methodology. Hilary For Hilary, methodological transparency was complicated because of her decision to utilize an unconventional writing format – a multigenre text – for both her behindthe-scenes writing and the final dissertation. According to the phenomenological philosophy she read and re-read throughout her study, her research task was to construct “animating, evocative descriptions (texts) of human actions, behaviors, intentions, and experiences” (van Manen, 1990, p. 19). In addition to considering the content, it was important to consider the effect of the structure of the text on meaning. In other words, as van Manen (1990) described, “[c]ertain meaning is better expressed through how one writes than in what one writes” (p. 131). Calling upon multiple genres allowed her to write her way through the phenomenon of interest, what she named bodily-not-enoughness, and create a teen magazine that would illuminate the varied and fragmented subtle structures of the phenomenon as her participants met them in the lifeworld. Letters to the editor, advice columns, shape poems, multi-voiced poems, an imaginary interview between Hilary and two feminist phenomenological theorists, creative nonfiction excerpts ghost written in the voice of her participants, and popular culture ads illustrating American culture’s need to discipline the corporeal body were just some of the genres Hilary included in her dissertation as she tried to breathe life into the phenomenon (van Manen, 1990). The format of the dissertation text, then, became a metaphor for the phenomenon.

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Because a “phenomenological text does not just communicate information” but “also aims to address or evoke forms of meaning that are more poetic, elusive, or ambiguous, but that cannot be easily told in propositional discourse” (van Manen, 2011, p. 45), Hilary had to be transparent about her methodology without interrupting the work of the genres. This was complicated because she was writing each genre in her dissertation from a perspective that made sense for the phenomenon of interest, rather than as a methodologist trying to represent a study. She wanted to provide a model for what phenomenological inquiry could look like if both form and content mattered while still providing her readers, the committee, with what they needed in order to be comfortable judging the value of her work. Therefore, as Hilary wrote through the phenomenon in each genre, she also took up the opportunity to examine and illuminate methodological data that pointed to the many ways she was entangled with the phenomenon. For example, she compiled direct quotes across the data from one of the participants to “ghost write” in the voice of that participant and describe some methods of the study: how she selected participants, the weekly writing group meetings she had with participants, how she analyzed the relationships between the participants and the researcher, and the participants’ own experiences with bodily-not-enoughness. Writing in the voice of one participant, she (Hughes, 2011) wrote: All of the Purple Flowers (that’s our writing group’s name) say that I tell stories no matter what is going on around me … Like we’d be in writing class – that’s what we called it sometimes instead of writing group, like Miss Hilary did; even though Miss Hilary kept telling us over and over it wasn’t a “class” because we weren’t in school; but you try living every day of your life in school with grown-ups telling you what to do and then try not to think that way when you’re with a group of kids and an adult. So anyway, we’d be talking about some unfair teacher at school, or some girl who beat up some other girl, or our periods (which I didn’t think we should talk about because that’s not public conversation), or the different kinds of cookies Miss Hilary bought that we really didn’t like, and a story just popped into my head. (p. 46)

The “Introductions by Alice” genre, then, was grounded in both interview data and methodological data. Additionally, Hilary’s advisor requested that she be more specific about her methodology in a central location within the dissertation text, so she wrote an “Advice Column” in the voice of a novice phenomenologist asking a more seasoned one, “Am I doing this right?” As her defense time drew near, there were still several genres that were not ready to be included in the magazine because they were not fleshed out enough to “reawaken the basic experience of the phenomenon” they were describing (van Manen, 1990, p. 122). Those genres included explorations of methodological data, such as the constant negotiations some of the girls in the study were making between what they were told to think about their bodies by family and pastors, how they talked about their bodies in both negative and positive ways, and what they thought about how others perceived their bodies on any given day. And Hilary returned to those incomplete genres over and over to write toward those that were included in the final magazine. In other words, despite the fact that she did not ultimately include those genres, they were important to how she wrote her way through and to the phenomenon. Realizing those genres contained useful data about how Hilary analyzed the phenomenon of interest, while also recognizing there was simply not enough time to include all of the genres she had written, she heeded van Manen’s (2011) reminder that “no text is ever perfect, no interpretation is ever complete, no

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explication of meaning is ever final, no insight is beyond challenge” (para 5). Thus, she chose to include a section near the end of the magazine called, “Next Issue’s Previews,” where she nodded to the unfinished genres. Additionally, she attended to van Manen’s (1990) suggestion that phenomenological writing requires a certain kind of reader who is willing to “be sensitively attentive to the silence around the words by means of which we attempt to disclose the deep meaning of our world” (p. 131) by including an introductory letter to the reader that highlighted her use of the text as a metaphor and encouraged the reader to be mindful both of what was in the text and what was not there. Complicating transparency In the above examples, we used methodological data as a tool to complicate transparency by demonstrating that our representations of methodology were situated, partial, and value-laden. Much like Marcus and Fischer (1986), who years ago questioned the extent to which any interpretive description could reflect the social world, writing up “what happened” necessarily involved the explicit interference of the researcher’s interpretations. In other words, because “writing itself is not an innocent practice” (Denzin & Giardina, 2006, p. xvi), we were not off the hook, so-to-speak, for the ethical, political, and cultural implications of our representations of methodology. Our role as methodologists, then, was to constantly theorize what representation of methodology would be possible if we identified certain methodological data and not others while recognizing that any representation would need to be justified as theoretically informed. Because we did not only think about methodological representations during a pre-established time slot (e.g. while writing the dissertation proposal, after data collection, two months before the defense), all of the writing (and thinking and reading and talking, etc.) we produced throughout our studies had the potential to become methodological data useful for describing those studies – whether it be in the form of an endnote, an excerpt in a methodology chapter, a citation, or in the addition of a genre. Although complicating transparency brought forth a number of dilemmas throughout our respective studies, we focus this discussion on an important shift in thinking about transparency that methodological data made possible; specifically, that decisions about when to stop producing and theorizing representations of methodology became more important than capturing what we did when we claimed to be doing qualitative research. That is not to say that we gave up on the idea that qualitative researchers should explain their processes, and in fact, as described above, each of us were held to specific requirements to say what we did. However, as Koro-Ljungberg (2010) described in her discussion of validity and responsibility in qualitative research, decisions about when to stop interacting with data (methodological data in our case) are “always arbitrary and uncertain” (p. 607) and “[involve] the decision between closure and infinity of perspectives, interpretations, and findings” (p. 607). We all experienced tensions when thinking about what might be compromised with each decision we made in our attempts to stop producing and theorizing representations of methodology.

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Negotiating stopping as a stuck place Because we had to complete our dissertations and successfully defend them to a panel of specific and immediate readers, we each had to put forth an iteration of methodology that would hopefully prove to our committees that we had completed valid and philosophically informed research. In addition, as described above, we negotiated a number of dilemmas as we tried to maintain our theoretical commitments in the face of reader requirements and anticipated needs, ethical conventions, timelines, and our own visions for our dissertations. Those dilemmas constituted complex and sometimes contradictory reasons for stopping our studies that we had to negotiate in our representations. Sarah, for example, identified and analyzed her thinking-in-writing in endnotes throughout her dissertation. Continuously writing endnotes was a way to produce a text whose categories fell apart as she wrote, including any clean separations between her thinking about her object of knowledge and her thinking about methodology. Stopping writing endnotes would simplify and interfere with the ongoing production of ethics she foregrounded in her study. Simultaneously, not stopping would confuse any findings she might claim about her object of knowledge. Seeing those endnotes as a situated process of methodological data collection and analysis– a process that she continuously claimed as unfinished throughout the dissertation– rather than as an audit trail, allowed her to view stopping as an iteration of methodology that she theorized as an unfinished pursuit. Jessica wrote multiple drafts of her methodology as she considered what was necessary to include about her analytic processes. For Jessica, stopping that writing meant risking being read as theoretically inconsistent because the representation in the conventional methodology chapter of her dissertation did not include the thinking-in-writing from the multiple drafts she wrote, some even after the chapter was complete. However, continuing that thinking and including it in the representation risked alienating readers who were already dubious about the value of qualitative research. Analyzing her multiple drafts as methodological data allowed her to see that she used citation as a tool to defer meaning and decenter truth by signaling to a network of philosophical and methodological literature, including a paper she had written and presented with her writing partner for that express purpose, that troubled clarity and signaled to a methodology to come. Hilary wanted to produce a text that recognized and demonstrated how form matters as a part of a responsible description of the phenomenon. Continuously producing additional genres provided the opportunity for her to elaborate the metaphor she was creating about her methodology and her object of knowledge. Choosing to stop producing more genres would mean limiting her ability to more fully describe the phenomenon as well as her own entanglement with her methodology, but not stopping would limit her ability to remain accessible to non-academic audiences, such as middle grades educators and teacher educators unfamiliar with phenomenology. Analyzing her unfinished genres as methodological data allowed Hilary to recognize that despite the fact that some genres remained unwritten, they greatly influenced her methodology, which allowed her to theorize the unwritten genres as meaningful silence in her description of the phenomenon. For all three of us, methodological data allowed us to understand that our stopping produced certain methodological representations that we could theorize as

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valid, responsible, and ethical, despite that those representations were situated, partial, and value-laden. Stopping, then, constituted the kind of risk that accompanies all attempts at representation in qualitative research. As Luttrell (2010) described, “something will be lost for each something gained” (p. 14). Understanding that such risks are a necessary part of inquiry allows us to expect those risks as a part of theoretically informed inquiry. For Sarah and Jessica, such risk is similar to what Derrida (1989/ 1992) called an aporia, which Burbules (2000) described as a “crisis of choice, of action and identity, and not only of belief” (p. 17) that happens often during research. He went on to say that researchers may find themselves with “too many choices, or no choices,” asking questions such as “What do I do?” “What do I say?” or “What’s wrong with me?” (p. 17). In such moments of indecision, the researcher must decide how to proceed responsibly when there is not one clear way forward and continuously examine the effects of that decision. For Hilary, such risk is inherent in phenomenological writing because the goal of phenomenological writing is to “achieve epiphany” (para 3) by describing the phenomenon fully and evocatively. The phenomenological researcher, then, must read the text she produced again and again in order to see if she has “managed to stir [her] own self” (para 3) beyond “the superficial haunt of sentimentality or catchy formulations” (van Manen, 2011, para 3). Reading transparency differently Understanding that our methodological representations involved a series of decisions related to stopping is valuable because it shifts the way we judge our credibility and the credibility of others as methodologists. Since our representations of methodology are necessarily partial, for example, we can expect that readers (ourselves included) will sometimes require additional or different information about our methodological work. As described above, we each created additional documents to summarize or clarify our methodologies or add to the current descriptions we had already produced at the request of our committees. Those requests, then, can simply be seen as invitations to produce additional iterations that are likewise situated and partial, much like the iterations of our dissertation work we produce now as we respond to editors’ and reviewers’ comments, specific publication guidelines of academic journals, and our own new interpretations of our dissertation research in light of work we have done since. In short, methodological data are still in play. When we read the work of others, we are reminded that any reading is situated in a network of epistemological, political, and practical factors that may be different than those in which the work was produced. We can see, then, the importance of giving authors the benefit of the doubt when we judge their methodologies because, for a variety of reasons, they may have needed to produce a different kind of transparency for that text than what we need as readers. Those realizations have important implications for us researchers and as professors working with doctoral students learning to do qualitative research and negotiating a variety of invitations and expectations for methodological transparency. Methodological data gives us a tool to support students as they determine how to respond to such calls as well as a tool for us to use as we read the representations of methodology they produce. We are not suggesting methodological data as a new heading in the dissertation proposal (i.e. How will you collect and analyze

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methodological data?), but rather that methodological data can be a reminder that discussions about transparency (e.g. when to stop representing methodology and theorizing those representations) should be ongoing throughout the study. We might ask students questions like: If this is your representation (i.e. where you stop), what might it say about you as a methodologist? What theories help you decide when to stop? If you adjust your format to include/exclude certain methodological data and analysis, how much guidance do you need to give the reader? We also might ask ourselves, as professors, questions such as: How transparent do students need to be for us to determine the credibility of their work? What interpretations of transparency are we willing to read (e.g. 70 pages of thinking about a stuck place; an artistic representation; non-linear format; additional methodological articles written by the student in conjunction with the dissertation)? How forthcoming will we be about our own struggles with methodological transparency when working with students? How rigid will we be with timelines for dissertation work? Conclusion Above we described how complicating transparency is a way for students and their professors to be mindful that every methodological representation is but one iteration. Such a complication highlights that qualitative research is a situated inquiry in which the researcher makes and remakes the field (e.g. Freeman et al., 2007; Preissle, 2011). How we produce transparency, then, contributes to how we understand qualitative research as a field and how we continue to push its boundaries. Although we have focused in this article on novice researchers, we hope that methodological data will continuously raise questions for all researchers about transparency and will serve as an incitement to discourse within the field of qualitative research. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes 1. Kuntz (2010) uses misrepresentation here as we have throughout this paper. He recognizes, for example, that there are “complex issues inherent in representation” (p. 423) that emphasize what Foucault (1972) said of representation, that “everything is never said” (p. 118). The struggle about representation that Kuntz describes – a negotiation between the desire to honor theoretical commitments and the desire to do justice with representation – renders “representation as necessarily incomplete” (p. 423). Kuntz further explained that “representation as an ethical issue extends to deeply set philosophical beliefs about what can be represented and how such representations might be articulated” (p. 429). Because our discussion here is situated in the emphasis on theoretically informed inquiry, each time we use the word representation, it can be assumed that we include the poststructural assertion that all representation is partial and situated and is, therefore, (mis)representation. 2. Bringer et al. (2004), for example, advocated for “[maximizing] transparency in a doctoral thesis” in light of the increased use of electronic tools for analysis. They argue that such transparency is necessary to “provide enough evidence for the examiners to evaluate the study with criteria designed for evaluating qualitative research within the chosen methodology, grounded theory” (p. 251). Using our studies, which were informed by poststructural and phenomenological theories, we build on this work by illustrating how transparency will necessarily look different for different studies depending on the

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3.

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

S. Bridges-Rhoads et al. assumptions and expectations of the particular epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies that guide the work. Researchers whose work is informed by poststructural theories, in particular, problematize constructs like data, making it difficult to read them as neutral, normal, and beyond question. Some researchers have even wondered if those constructs are so problematic that we would be better off leaving qualitative research behind in order to “do/live something else” (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013, p. 631). Indeed, Sarah and Jessica have grappled with that tension in other spaces (e.g. Bridges-Rhoads & Van Cleave, 2013). However, we have found that naming a shared concept can be a useful strategy that both enables us to have conversations with colleagues whose research is grounded in different theories than our own and that further serves as a reminder that concepts do not function the same way for all researchers (Hughes & Bridges-Rhoads, 2013). For example, each time we write data in this article, Sarah and Jessica read it as “data (under erasure), data-undone, data-rethought, data-particles, or maybe data-becoming” (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013, p. 219), prompting them to continuously question its self-evidence. All three authors of this article completed their PhDs at the same institution during which we took many of the same classes and had occasion to interact socially as well. Sarah was in writing and reading groups with both Jessica and Hilary. We use object of knowledge to signal to a field of inquiry for research (e.g. a research topic, problem of the present, and on-the-ground project) and to refer to that which is often separated from the methods and methodologies that analyze, produce, and so on. We recognize the term object of knowledge, like all of the terms we use in research, is inadequate and problematic because it implies easy separations between objects (e.g. disciplines and phenomena) and subjects (e.g. researchers), specifically given the ontological turn in which scholars, like Barad (2007), foreground the connection between knowing and being. However, we use it here as a way to both talk about how philosophically informed inquiry might be put to work in the world and to reaffirm our commitment to cross-paradigmatic discussion. Although we recognize the epistemological and ontological contradictions between poststructural and phenomenological theories, we also recognize that within each category there is much diversity. We use these terms for convenience and communicative ease, not to homogenize the work accomplished within them. See Van Cleave and Bridges-Rhoads (2013), Bridges-Rhoads and Van Cleave (2014), and Hughes and Bridges-Rhoads (2013) for an extended description of how writing functioned in each of our studies. See Derrida (1991) for a concise discussion of what deconstruction is not and see Caputo (1997) for discussions of deconstruction “in a nutshell.”

Notes on contributors Sarah Bridges-Rhoads is an assistant professor of literacy in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at Georgia State University. Her research interests bring critical and poststructural theories to bear on a variety of overlapping topics, such as writing as inquiry, ethics, and responsibility in qualitative research, and teacher preparation for social justice. Jessica Van Cleave is an assistant professor of education specializing in qualitative research and secondary English teacher preparation in the Department of Education at Mars Hill University. Her research explores the intersection of poststructural theory, qualitative methodology, and educational policy. Hilary E Hughes is an assistant professor of middle grades education in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include equity-oriented teacher education, young adolescents, theories around the body, and phenomenology as a philosophy and methodology.

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