Researcher as Research Tool

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Social research has only recently fully accepted the idea of the researcher as research tool. For many years, the positivist concept of “objectivity” disallowed an active role of the researcher in any social study. Feminist researchers such as Ann Oakley began to point out that not only was such objectivity impossible in a conversation between two human beings but that it was ethically suspect. The first-time mothers (i.e., women having their first child) she interviewed would ask her questions that they did not feel able (or had not had the opportunity) to ask their medical doctors. As an objective researcher, Oakley had been advised to fend off such questions, but as a human being (and a mother) she could not refuse to share her own knowledge. As a result, she had much greater rapport with her interviewees and the data she collected were much richer. Qualitative researchers began to interrogate their role as researchers more thoroughly and saw how their participation in the interview affected the outcome. Far from seeing this as negative or simply clarification, researchers soon came to regard their identity and the role they played in the research (especially in interviews) as crucial to the outcome. The researcher himself or herself had become one of the most valuable research tools. The inclusion of researcher as research tool extends to the analysis of qualitative studies, as demonstrated by Mauthner and Doucet in their influential article “Reflections on a Voice-Centred Relational Method.” They deny the feminist aim to simply represent the “voices” of their participants, arguing that researchers' omnipresence throughout all the stages of research inevitably means that researchers are, and must be, both the subjects and objects of their own research.

Application

An increasing number of case study researchers take their own lives and experience as either a part of a larger case study, or the case study in its entirety. Liz Stanley provides some rich reflections that take her own experience as a fully adequate “case.” In her article “The Knowing Because Experiencing Subject” she examines her own diary during the period after her mother's severe stroke and before her death. Her objective in the article is to examine the self as a referential subject. The selves she examines are her mother's changed self, her own response, and how that is reflected in her diary entries. At the heart of this is to assert the knowledge claims of both experience and narratives about that experience. In this case, as in others, the only case that it makes sense to examine is that of the researcher's own experience. The researcher is both the case and the research tool. In studies where the emphasis is on what we can learn from the researcher's own life, incidents in the researcher's life become the trigger for deeply theoretical discussion, as the Stanley example shows. An analysis of someone else's diary or research notes might raise as many questions as answers, but in autobiographical material the researcher has access to at least some of the explanatory background. This does not, of course, make it objectively true, but it does enable the researcher to write with more confidence about what the material refers to, knowing, as he or she does, the context in which it occurred.

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