Working Backwards Through a Methodology

It is almost one year since I started my practice-led PhD, and in that time my eight-page proposal has reduced to five hundred words and grew again like an unwieldy hedge that needs constantly maintained by clipping. This first year has also been spent avoiding the issue of how, as a practicing artist, I can fit my non-verbal language and ways of researching into a recognised framework, where my hypothesis or questions are still not clear. This problem was more than apparent when I came to write my (unsuccessful) Arts and Humanities application for funding; I was basically taking the questions that had occurred at the end of my Masters degree and transplanting them into an application as something to work toward, rather than something to work from. This backward-thinking problem faces many artist researchers, where the more accepted format of working towards a set of goals to prove a theory goes against how they work as artists in real life, where more often than not, the artwork as an ‘end product’ is produced first.

As the term practice-led suggests, it is the practice that leads the research, not the theory; in my artistic investigations that means that experiences guide my thinking, some methods I use to gain experiences are swimming, diving, making, photographing and debating with peers. Fundamentally my life is my practice, yet I would disagree that I work within a ‘praxis’ framework where according to Freire ‘praxis’ is a ‘synthesis of theory and practice in which each informs the other.’ The point is, I do not have a theory, or my theory is not apparent in an obvious way. What I have is a set of subjects that I am interested in, the investigation of these subjects and the processes of how I am interacting with them, is uncovering some sort of hypothesis. In this sense I was glad to find out about Grounded Theory where ‘Grounded Theory is a systematic generation of theory from data that contains both inductive and deductive thinking,’ where ‘one goal of a Grounded Theory is to formulate hypotheses based on conceptual ideas. Others may try to verify the hypotheses that are generated by constantly comparing conceptualized data on different levels of abstraction, and these comparisons contain deductive steps…Grounded Theory does not aim for the "truth" but to conceptualize what's going on by using empirical data.’ (Glaser & Strauss 1967).

According to one version of this theory the aim, as Glaser in particular states, is ‘to discover the theory implicit in the data,’ therefore ‘all is data’. In other words anything that can help the researcher to generate concepts can be classed as data; in my research this would also include interviews with myself, as my own experiences and reactions to my study of experiential subjects is important information. By coding the data at different stages of the research, core variables can be identified, which can then be compared and interwoven with relevant future data. The codes can simply be words, adjectives and adverbs that best describe the concepts in the notes. Memoing is the next stage where the writing-up of ideas about the given codes and their theoretically coded relationships as they emerge during coding, collecting and analysing takes place. Memoing is a creative process where the memos are also used as an outlet for ideas that recognise preconscious processing and therefore accommodate serendipity.

Another interesting view encompassed in this theory is the one regarding literature. According to Glaser and Strauss, the reading of literature in the same subject area can influence the researchers views by giving them pre-conceived notions of how the theory should develop. In saying this, it is not meant that the researchers should not read, but the idea of a traditional literature review at the start of the process should be avoided. The literature comes in at a later stage, and is simply viewed as more data to make code comparisons with.

For a more in-depth but understandable explanation go here
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/grounded.html#a_gt_intro