Seminar to Medical Educators Winchester

1. On the courageous/outrageous
boundary:
an approach to representing
qualitative data
ProfTansy Jessop
Southampton Solent University
Guest Lecture to Medical Educators, UoW
31 March 2017

2. Choose a Picture
•Don’t think about it too much
•Choose a picture that you are drawn too

3. Jottings
•Why did I choose this picture?
•How does this speak to me as a
medical professional?
•How does it speak to me as someone
embarking on a research project?

4. Is there a place in research for bringing
the creative and the critical together?

5. Apartheid’s imprint

6. ….on teachers, nurses, police and
vicars

7. Rural teacher narratives
• Apartheid’s impact on teachers
• Choices:Teachers, nurses, police
• Contested space
• ‘Collaborators’
• Soweto 1976
• “Education before liberation”
• Civil conflict in KZN from1987-1994

8. Bantu
Education
meets
Soweto
uprising 1976

9. 1995-7
The Context of
my PhD

10. Post-apartheid KwaZulu-Natal
• Low-intensity civil war, 10,000 to 30,000 dead
• Rural primary teachers
• ‘Inside out’ study
• Teacher development
• Interviews (68), ethnographic data,
documentary sources

11. 43:1 pupil teacher ratios?
42% schools
electrified
34% schools
have no water

12. Raw data
• Read Segment 1 and 2 of the raw data:
Jot down some thoughts:
What strikes you?
What might you do with interview data like this?
How could you represent it?
• Chat in pairs about it.

14. Why poetry?
• Compelling stories of trauma, hope, broken
dreams
• Flesh-and-blood social realities
• Illuminating the critical rational analysis
• Voice, power, emotion
• Positioned – research from ‘somewhere’
• Research as writing
• Epistemological paradigm

15. “Poetry is the shortest emotional distance
between two points” (Robert Frost).

16. Two interpretive communities
(Denzin, 1994)
Tender-minded
Intuitive
Emotional
Open-ended texts
Interpretation as art
Personal biases
Experimental texts
Tough-minded
Hard nosed empiricists
Rational analytical
Closed texts
Interpretation as method
Neutrality
Traditional texts

17. “Emotion has only
recently gotten a
foothold inside the
academy, and we still
don’t know whether to
give it a seminar room, a
lecture hall, or just a
closet we can air out now
and then”
(Behar, 1996).

18. I’ve seen nothing

20. Dilemmas
• Authorial voice: who is speaking?
• Stark, emotional, evocative – no subtle grey
shades
• What about the academy?
• Critical detachment, abstraction, distance
• In-between space: “At best only almost poetry”
• Influence on policymakers

21. Agency
Structure
Relational Instrumental
Survivor
Pragmatist
Realist
Idealist

22. So why be outrageous/courageous?
• Thick description
• Interview speech closer to poetry than prose
• Animates and invigorates
• “A vital text is not boring – it grips the reader”
(Richardson, 1994)
• Bridge between art and social science (Diversi,
1993)
• Useful in getting a different angle on data
• Develops empathy

23. References
Behar, R. (1996)TheVulnerable Observer: Anthropology that breaks
your heart. Boston. Beacon Press.
Denzin, N. (1994) ‘TheArt and Politics of Interpretation’ in Handbook
of Qual. Research. Calfornia. Sage. 500-515.
Diversi, M. (1998) Glimpses of Street Life: Represented Experience
through Short Stories. Qualitative Inquiry 4(2) 131-147
Jessop and Penny (1999)A story behind a story: developing
strategies for making sense of teacher narratives. Int.Journal of
Social Research Methodology. 2(3) 213-230.
Richardson, L. (1994) ‘Writing:A Method of Inquiry’ in Handbook of
Qual. Research. California. Sage. 516-529.