CHAPTER 3: Methods

This chapter focuses on how I collected and analyzed the data to answer my research questions. I present these descriptions with a full awareness of, using Andrea Fontana and James Frey's (2000) words, how "the techniques used, and the ways of recording information, all come to bear on the results of the study" (p. 660). Therefore this chapter is more than an enumeration of the specific data collection and analysis techniques but is also a discussion of the issues that framed and shaped the research process.

The location of the speaker is always epistemically significant (Alcoff, 1991). In the introduction to this dissertation I described how I decided to research this topic, and in doing that, I connected myself, my assumptions and background to the project. To avoid repetition, and to escape what may otherwise be perceived as self-centeredness, "soul searching" (Harding, 1987) or plain overdoing it (Fontana and Frey, 2000), I do not go over who I am and what I bring to this research here again. In recognizing the tremendous influence a researcher has on the process and findings, especially if unspoken (Fontana and Frey, 2000), I do, though, explore in this chapter how I may have influenced the research process.

Gathering data

To answer the research questions, I needed to explore and understand how researchers both in and outside the academy made sense of their involvement in collaborative research. I had to find out about their research practices, ideologies and relationships with other researchers. I also needed to find out who had been involved in collaborative research projects involving both academic and non-academically located researchers and explore how they managed or did not manage to bring academic and community values and practices to the research activities. I assessed the different options I had to collect data. Using an ethnographic approach I could do a case study of a collaborative project. The benefit of this option would be that I would be able to see and document interactions as they happened, and to interview participants about their current thoughts, pressures, hopes and disillusions. Looking at one single project would have allowed me to explore collaborative relationships in depth. This would have been a useful approach but it would have limited the study to that case and those involved. Also, the area of collaborative research was relatively new to the literature, with quite a few accounts and descriptions of specific collaborations, but little mapping of what is happening in the social sciences. On a more practical matter, I was pregnant at the time and it was hard to find a project in which I could participate and do the interviews before going into labour.