Bonner’s Research Methodology
Kieran Bonner, Sociologist and Co-investigator on the Physician’s Moral Experience SSRCH Project, unpacks his research methodology.
The methodology of my research follows a well-established approach in interpretive social inquiry. While trained in the broad range of qualitative sociological approaches, I specialize in the more phenomenological[1] (Berger), ethnomethodological (Garfinkel)[2], hermeneutic[3] (Gadamer) and reflexive analytic[4] (Blum and McHugh) traditions. While these interpretive perspectives differ in important ways, all agree that anything known, to be intelligible, requires the assumption of a set of presuppositions. As such, there is no pure data; all data (statistics, interviews, archival research, ethnographic, etc.) are productions; all data, information, knowledge claims, etc., are already pre-structured along certain lines. From this radical interpretive perspective “no sign automatically attaches a referent, no fact speaks for itself, no proposition for its value” (McHugh). As the world and the language we use to understand the world are inextricably intertwined (‘the linguistic turn’[5]), this research keeps in play the nature of the encounter between the inquirer and the world they encounter (reflexivity) as this appears and is shaped through interviews, social science studies, bioethics debates, novelistic reflections, or journalistic reports. Radical interpretive research requires dialectically attending not only to what the ‘data’ says but also reflexively to the horizon or lifeworld within which the data was generated. ‘Radical’ here is taken in its etymological meaning as ‘root.’
This research method continues the historic interdisciplinary emphasis on meaning with the objective of understanding and analyzing written, verbal, and non-verbal communication. It starts with what people say and do as revealed in a variety of sources (official documents, popular culture, field notes, interviews, bioethical debates, etc.) seeing these as records or expressions of the views of the various actors involved in the object of research. The method seeks to understand such ‘texts’, recognizing that all surface meaning necessarily reveals and conceals deeper matters. The discipline of reflexive analysis examines this material to uncover the connections and interconnections the texts reveal. It examines the taken for granted conflicts and agreements underlying interpretations of actions and discourses around problems (the ‘what people say’) and seeks to see the way that these express ethical collisions (Blum 2003). (For instance, the debates around the ethics of MAID are examples of ethical collisions.) The reflexive analytic method, therefore, creates a research strategy that investigates speech acts as intimating a situation of problem-solving where the deeper matters need to be recovered through reflexive analysis. As stated, such a design-oriented research program uses data from a variety of sources (whether popular culture, archive, focus groups, bioethics debates, participant reflection, but in this case especially interviews) to uncover tensions buried in taken for granted surface agreements, then analyzed as the starting points of conversations to explore possible agreements and directions that can inform policy, action, and ethical innovation.
The Physicians’ Moral Experience project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between an interpretive sociologist and a philosopher, and while both are animated by the tradition of interpretation broadly understood, the approaches along this continuum are expected to vary in ways that enhance the dialectical character of the research and of the interpretations that result. This interdisciplinary tension, time consuming as it is, is a source of energy in the project and its workshops, conferences, and output. Together the data and the analysis of the discourses, in their different ways, maximize the dialectical element of the methodology creating an opening for innovative reconciliation of apparently different problems through dialogue.
From the reflexive analytic perspective, for example, the bio-ethics debate is just one discourse, the public debates on medical assistance in dying is another discourse and the lived experiences of clinicians involved in administering MAID is another discourse, and so on. The perspective does not assume that all these discourses are speaking to the same phenomenon, though on the surface they appear to be doing so. It is the task of the analyst to recover the phenomenon. In this process, no one discourse is privileged over the other. This means that the claims made by clinicians in interviews will be treated as phenomena in their own right, rather than being seen as reflections of a philosophical debate, or as reflections of the socialization and education of physicians, or as reflections that are determined by broad structural forces like class, race and creed. This approach presupposes a hermeneutics of goodwill rather than a hermeneutics of suspicion. (For a demonstration of this method with regard to interviewing parents in a rural setting see Bonner 1999, 71 – 104.) The research data and the analysis of this data will be productive for framing discussions about change, policies, and action concerning innovation.
A selection of readings that demonstrate the application of the method:
2019 “The Invention of Analysis: ‘If this is Sociology, I want to be in it.’” in Redefining the Situation: The Writings of Peter McHugh. Eds. K. Bonner and S. Raffel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. (pp. 258-285). (This is an interview with one of the founders of the reflexive analytic perspective.)
2017 “End of Life Conflicts, the Law, and Arendt’s Political Thinking” In The Art of Care: Moral Knowledge, Communication and the Culture of Caregiving. Eds. A. Blum and S. Murray. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (pp. 73-88)
2013 “Reason Giving, City Icons and the Culture of Cities: Data from a Radical Interpretive Perspective.” In Compaso: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology. Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2013 (pp. 21 – 31)
2011 “The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone’s and Meursault’s Confrontation with Death.” In Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability. Ed. Tristanne Connolly. Bristol, United Kingdom: Intellect Press. (43 – 56)
1998 Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of The Human Condition. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press. (176 p.)
1997/9 A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science, and the Urban-Rural Debate. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. (241 p.) (Paperback ed. 1999)
Notes:
[1] Phenomenology is an approach within the field of sociology that aims to reveal what role human awareness plays in the production of social action, social situations and social worlds.
[2] Ethnomethodology focuses on how people, in taken for granted ways, make sense of the everyday aspects of their world and how they make their social environment accountable to themselves.
[3] The theory, methodology, and (especially) art of interpretation
[4] A perspective, influenced by ethnomethodology, which reflexively recovers the grounds of speech and social action.
[5] The focus on the way human consciousness and the world are joined through language
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