Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
AUTHOR’S RESPONSE TO COMMENTARY
Response to Paul Stenner’s commentary on ‘How interviews with
adults who stammer inform research directions’
Rosie Sage
The Centre for Innovation in Raising Educational Achievement
The University of Leicester
Rs70@leicester.ac.uk
In his response to Sage (2004), Paul Stenner (2004) affirms his belief in the value of theoretically
informed research that ‘demonstrates the practical benefits that can flow from a qualitative
investigation’, whilst acknowledging that guiding principles tend to be double-edged. While asserting
the benefits, he suggests we should be aware of the possible costs in ‘a certain worry about standards’.
In the context of the article he infers that the fabled Emperor has been discovered without his clothes!
His discomfit arises from four related tendencies, listed below:
1. A failure of analytic nerve, in that the client interviews are merely descriptive and exploratory
with the remainder of the article reading like abstracted empiricism. It is a ‘qualitative report
without a qualitative analysis’.
2. The attempt to identify qualitative research with ‘informal’ interviews. Unlike quantitative
researchers, it seems the aim is ‘to indulge in interminable quasi-philosophical meanderings’.
3. The use of data extracts which support the writer’s argument, without any proof that contrary
evidence has been reviewed. The attempt to downplay such issues of validity and reliability in
research and to replace them with other criteria like ‘authenticity’ from reproduced
‘experience’ is misguided.
4. A belief that a particular partisan moral or political position determines how we analyse data
and what constitutes a ‘good’ piece of research.
In answer to these arguments, I propose the following. The treatment of data depends on the
purpose and in this case the interviews were to animate the quantitative information collected in other
parts of the study and to reflect on issues that could guide future research and practice. The
presentation of real stories makes issues meaningful unlike quantitative research, which turns the
phenomenon into a ‘black box’. The interviews should not be viewed as competitive with the
quantitative work. The proper relationship is a division of labour, in which the interviews seek to
answer ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions and then pass on these findings so that causes and outputs of the
identified phenomena (‘why’ questions’) can be studied. As such, the use of analytic induction methods
or other appropriate methods for validating studies (constant comparison, deviant-case analysis,
comprehensive data treatment or perhaps appropriate tabulations) does not seem necessary. The Hansei
(reflective) method, although considered as ‘philosophical meanderings’ would be the best fit for the
purpose.
Second, although the interviews can be useful, there is a need to justify departing from the naturally
occurring data that would be possible from observing someone who stammers in real situations. The
structured interview allowed a situation where participants were required to consider the ‘what’ and
‘how’ of their stammering situation which is unlikely to have happened naturally. The standard nature
of the questioning enabled comparisons both amongst the four case studies and the main data.
Ambiguous questions are useful in allowing similarities and differences to emerge (Adler, 1995) and
the equivocal nature of our language means that any question can be criticised for lack of clarity.
Third, the relevance of issues of validity and reliability means we cannot be satisfied with telling
convincing stories. What people say in answer to interview questions does not have a stable
relationship to how they behave in naturally occurring situations. Ultimately, all methods of data
collection are analysed ‘qualitatively’ in so far as the act of analysis is an interpretation, and therefore
of necessity a selective appraisal. In this research, the data were triangulated with quantitative
information and respondent validation, although by counterposing different contexts this ignores the
context-bound and skilful character of social interaction. Objective truth, thus, may be impossible, but
generalisability can be increased by combining qualitative and quantitative measures of populations
and purposive and theoretical sampling, which is demonstrated in the methodology of this study.
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