Striving for Validity

 

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose." 

- Zora Neale Hurston, American Anthropologist



Having now completed my interviews and my follow-up interviews, it feels a good time to reflect a little on the experience, mostly for my own reference and thought-showering, but if anyone can relate or take anything from it, thank you for stopping by.


The first major obstacle with my interviews was actually setting the things up. My plan had been to interview two full-time dance teachers and one current professional dancer for my research into storytelling in dance education, however this proved rather difficult. After agreeing to take part, and therefore me assuming I was sorted, it took a lot of prompting to get the two dance teachers to move along with the process, and when I thought that despite the delays we were finally ready to crack on, both withdrew for their own reasons.

Although understandable and part of ethical practice, as a researcher, this is undeniably an immense frustration as I hadn't contacted any other participants, given that I thought I had the ones I needed - this was a mistake, assume nothing, is all I can say - and time was ticking by on a project with a short time span. 

In contrast, the dancer was a breeze and we had the interview done within days, even working around her busy schedule. However, I couldn't get any other dance teachers who were both willing and available, which when your research is on dance education, is cause for mild panic. Fortunately, I had a recently stage-retired dancer step in to be interviewed and share her experiences instead.


This did three things:

  1. Allowed me to actually breathe oxygen again
  2. Meant my research could continue 
  3. Changed my research from what I thought it would be

I now had two professional dancers (one just retired from stage) who both had teaching experience but who's experiences with my topic centred mostly on themselves and own past education.

This is the part researchers generally don't like and get tense about because you have to stop following your plan and start following the research. Yes, it's as stressful as it sounds, especially when your entire research is primary data-led and your angle has just changed.

But what is research without the unexpected? ...probably easier...but also not as beneficial.


What became apparent, and what changed the research questions, was that experiences weren't so much about storytelling itself, though this does feature both independently and cooperatively, but about emotion, feeling, and connection in dance as a performer of it.

Relation to narrative emotion, relationship between dancers, developing creativity and communication, and the impact of undertaking a role all came up as significant themes.


In an effort to validate my research, I had planned to conduct follow-up interviews in order to present my independent interview analysis to the research participants to allow them chance to agree, disagree, expand on, question, or clarify the findings. 

This proved to be very useful and there was more feedback than I had really anticipated, in both the sense of the participant felt the analysis captured what they had experienced, and in the sense of additional contributions that they wanted to make.

Overall I think follow-up interviews are an excellent validity method to ensure your interpretation of raw data correlates to the true meaning underlying what was expressed by the participant, especially for phenomenological research such as my own, where data generally comes from fewer sources (participants) but goes deeper into the experience they had and the meaning drawn from it.

Because of this, although I could not interview dance teachers as I had intended and felt would be most beneficial for the research, I have been able to gather rich data on the topic, it is simply that the lens has changed according to the nature of the experiences of a different type of participant.


Now my task is to map out the literature that is most suitable for this new direction and begin to triangulate the interviews, literature, and my own experiences. Easier said than done.

However in my search for validity, I would argue that interpretation is valid in itself if it holds meaning for you and can ultimately benefit your professional practice.


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