Elizabeth Bredberg

Centre for Applied Studies in Early Childhood

Queensland University of Technology

18 January, 1998

A version of a paper presented at the AARE Conference, Brisbane, December 1997

Abstract

Developments in methods of educational research that have taken place during the past few decades

are often associated with changes in perceptions of education and of the role of educational professionals.

The ensuing shift from a strictly quantitative paradigm to one that also includes a variety of qualitative

methods has, however, been seldom matched by changes in the style with which research is reported.

Despite the acknowledgement, within many qualitative methodologies, of the significance of the

investigator's perspective and the personal involvement, most educational research continues to be reported

in a style that suppresses the authorial voice. In an attempt to gain an understanding of the persistence of

this stylistic practice, I examine its characteristic techniques and its relation to academic writing in other

disciplines. My investigation then extends itself into other cultural settings, both contemporary and historical,

in which suppression of personal identity has functioned as a symbol of authority, and speculate on the

implications of this practice in modern society. I conclude with some suggestions about ways in which

research reporting might be made more stylistically consistent with the philosophical substrata that underlie

current methodologies.

Introduction

I begin this paper in a way that immediately brands it, and me, as departing from the language in which

educational research has traditionally been reported. The use of the first person signals to its reader that

I am either writing from outside the conventions of educational research or deliberately attempting to

breach its norms. The latter is in fact the case; I have begun in this manner to highlight some observations

on which I shall report the course of this paper, about writing style in educational research. I shall also

offer some conjectures about the genealogy of that style.

I first became curious about the diction in which educational researchers report their findings while

completing my doctorate in special education. I came to this discipline via a route that included degrees

in music and theology. I was acquainted with scholarly writing in both those disciplines as well as in

history and philosophy, in none of which had I found the strange degree of depersonalisation that I

encountered in journal articles in education and in psychology. In addition to the reading that I did in

the course of my own studies, I worked as an editorial assistant for a couple of educational journals, and

edited numerous theses by other students. Again I was puzzled by what struck me as the depersonalisation

of the writing that dealt with research in education and in psychology, two fields that would seem as though

they should be essentially personal by virtue of their subject matter.

Was this, I wondered, characteristic of all scientific writing? What were the defining characteristics of

this style of writing that gave me the over-all impression depersonalisation? I began casual inquiries

among colleagues and instructors. Other students told me that they had often begun by writing papers

in a more personalised way: they had used the first person, for example, and the active voice far more

frequently. At the behest of their instructors, however, they had assumed the diction of the journals:

They had replaced "I" or "we" with "the author", "the authors", "the researcher". They began to use the

impersonal passive ("It is believed..."). They no longer selected subjects for their studies, instead, "Subjects"

(or more recently and correctly, "Participants") "were selected according to criteria...." These same

participants did not complete questionnaires, but "were administered questionnaires", often by unidentified

agents.

Instructors told me that they wrote as they did, and instructed their students to do so as well, because they

thought the use of the first person signalled a lack of objectivity. This explanation perplexed me. How, I

wondered, could the suppression of the author's presence in a research report, presumably written after the

completion of a body of research, have any real effect towards ensuring that the research had been carried

out in an objective fashion?

In the course of my work as editorial assistant, I familiarised myself with the Publication Manual of the

American Psychological Association. Its authors counselled writers of research reports to "prefer the active

voice." (32) over the passive. They recommended the use of the first person over the fictitious third person

as well as the avoidance of the anthropomorphisms (29,30) that seemed to be a favoured technique of my

colleagues. In addition to the observations that I have made, however, I was struck by the apparent

inconsistency between this prevalent style of writing and the newer developments in educational research.

Despite shifts in paradigm to qualitative methods, which challenge the assumed (or perhaps attributed)

objectivity of traditional research, qualitative researchers seemed to continue to adhere to the traditional

writing style with its conveyed objectivity and depsonalised tone.

There seems to be scant literature that addresses this practice of suppression of the author's person. In 1982,

Polyson, Levinson and Miller surveyed editors of APA journals about their preference for first or third person.

They reported that at that time a majority of editors either preferred the first person or had no preference.

At that time, the second edition of the APA Manual was current; it made no prescription regarding the use

of person in writing for its journals. The third and fourth editions have done so, as noted above. Despite this,

and the apparent preferences of editors, writing style has not changed substantially, and many writers assume

incorrectly that the APA mandates the depersonalised style that they use.

In her analysis of the rhetoric of medical writing, Segal (1993) suggests that, within medicine, depersonalised

diction serves, paradoxically, as a personal validation of the author/researcher. She notes the use of the

impersonal passive and the avoidance of use of the first person as techniques by with this may be effected.

There has not to my knowledge been any follow up of Segal's study. Moreover, as I shall discuss later, the

articles in medical journals that I surveyed did not match well with Segal's description.

Irving Zola, writing of representation of people with disabilities in 1985, noted that the passive voice was

frequently employed in their depiction; again, this observation has not been pursued further.

Theorists of methodology who advocate the adoption of personalised qualitative methods discuss the

match, or discrepancy, between the style of reporting and the ethic associated with their methods

(e.g., Hofmann, 1997; Lather, 1996); their suggestions are controversial, however, even among qualitative

methodologists. Again, I have found no explicit written examination in that literature of depersonalisation

in scientific reporting.

Gross (1996), describing rhetorical practices throughout the history of science, notes the equal status that

the use of the passive voice in biological writing affords to scientists, procedures, and the objects manipulated

by the procedures. His example, however, includes the use of the first person. He does not discuss the

possible significance of omitting its use through the introduction of the impersonal passive (see below).

Formulation of Research Questions; Identification of Presuppositions

Motivated by an interest in the nature of the research culture itself, I began an inquiry into the characteristics

that made this style so distinctively depersonalised and into a related set of questions: In what disciplines

was this writing style found? Was it common to all of the sciences that have traditionally demanded

objectivity as a validating characteristic of experimental and naturalistic investigation?

I based my investigation on the presupposition that there were identifiable techniques or grammatical

structures within writing that either directly signal or suppress the presence and identity of an author. I take

the use of the first person to be a clear acknowledgement of an author's presence within a body of writing.

In addition to the avoidance of use of the first person, suppression, I suggest, occurs primarily through four

grammatical constructions. All four may be used to depersonalise other participants in a research project in

addition to the author, so that their effective use can render a report on human activity a virtual ghost town:

1. Use of the passive voice can suppress the agency of both investigator and subjects in one stroke.

Compare, for example, "We selected students from six local schools as participants in the study," with

"Students from six local schools were selected as participants in the study." or "Participants completed the

questionnaire.", with "A questionnaire was administered to the participants."

2. The use of an artificial third person to denote the author persists, despite the fact that it has a somewhat

archaic tone in addition to its depersonalising effect. "The researcher...", as noted in the APA Style Manual,

leaves readers uncertain whether the author and the researcher are the same person. A question ensues

regarding just who is writing the report.

3. Anthropomorphism, or personification, involves the attribution of human agency and, frequently,

judgement to various instruments or processes. These include the research process itself ("The study

sought to investigate...") and various tests and questionnaires which identify, evaluate, or categorise

research participants in various ways.

4. Paradoxically, the editorial "we" is an effective means of masking authorial presence, by assuming an

identity with the entire readership. "We do not yet know the cause of ...." looks personal on first glance,

but can in fact have either of two meanings. "We (meaning the authors) have not found out the cause of

something", or "Nobody as yet knows the cause..." The latter of these is clearly depersonalised. "We all

would like to...", is similarly depersonalised by virtue of its lack of particularity. By the same token, the

impersonal "one" has the same role. "One would like," "One is not aware," It is infrequently used in any

of the categories of writing that I investigated; when it did occur, I coded it as an editorial "we".

In addition, I based my investigation on a presupposition that authorial presence was more strongly suppressed

within scientific writing than within scholarly reporting in the humanities. I did not confirm this

presupposition with any degree of rigour; the frequency of the first person in scholarly publications

in philosophy, history or literary criticisms seemed adequate confirmation of this presupposition.

The initial screening that I did of any particular genre within academic writing was based on an assessment

of the frequency of the first person. This screening, done over a period of years, eventually led me to limit

my investigation to research reports in scientific and educational (if the distinction be admitted) journals.

These reports showed a sufficient homogeneity of style that their investigation might provide some indications

of the ways in which the techniques that I had identified conveyed this sense of depersonalisation. In order to

eliminate the complicating factor involved in writing about different types of activity, I excluded all papers

but research reports from my investigation.

Sample Selection

I selected 24 research articles from refereed journals (see Appendix A). These journals fell into four

categories: psychology (excluding educational psychology), education, other science, and medicine.

The "other science" category included physics, physical chemistry, applied chemistry, and biology.

I used refereed journals as the source of articles for analysis to ensure that the material that I investigated

conformed to the norms of research writing of the scholarly community that constituted the journal's readers.

In an additional attempt to match the standards of the articles, with one exception, I selected those journals

within each discipline that were within the top ten percent in circulation according to Ulrich's International

Periodicals Directory. The exception to this criterion lay in my inclusion of articles from Australian

educational and medical journals regardless of their relative circulation, in order to enable me to to address

an audience of Australian educational researchers with relevant comments on its writing. The inclusion of

these journals did not have any apparent effect on my overall findings.

For all of the categories except education, I attempted to minimise sampling bias by selecting the first

research report out of each journal. In one instance I used the second article because the first article was

written by authors at a European university whose first language was not English and the construction of

the paper reflected a non-English tradition. In all cases, I checked the resemblance of the selected article

to all other research reports within that journal to eliminate the possibility of selecting a "sport". Based on

an initial scan of the frequency of first person, and of the over-all construction of each paper, the style of

the selected articles were at least grammatically if not statistically, representative of the style of the journals

from which they were drawn.

Within the education category, I attempted to obtain a selection of both qualitative and quantitative research

from each journal that I drew upon. This was not always possible; not all journals included studies from

both paradigms.

Procedure and Results

For each of the 25 articles that I analysed, I counted the relative frequency (expressed as a percentage of

the total number of sentences in the article) of: (a) the first person, (b) the passive voice used in the main

clause of the sentence, (c) reference to the author/researcher in the third person, (d) personification of the

study or of instruments or processes used within it, (e) the editorial "we", and (f) a total score for all four

depersonalised usages. I then entered this data into SPSS. Although neither the sample size nor the

distribution of data permitted any meaningful expression of statistical significance, the exploratory summaries

that I obtained yielded some suggestive figures. (See Appendix B)

Although all four of the disciplines showed quite similar levels of depersonalised constructions, authors in

both education and psychology used a substantially lower frequency of the first person than did either

medicine or the other sciences. This was particularly true in the discussion sections of the articles.

Unlike authors in education and psychology, the authors in medicine and other sciences quite frequently

used expressions such as "We thus conclude that, while the proprioceptor monitoring tibial position", "We

have not yet monitored possible b influences from other parts of the body on the locust." (Jellema & Heitler,

1997, 2412), or "We have examined LRP1 in detail and found no evidence of significant linkage or

association in our familial or sporadic AD data sets." (Pericak-Vance, et al., 1997, 1237). It does not seem

particularly surprising to find a relatively strong use of the passive voice in the other sciences, although

authors in the physical sciences did use the active voice more frequently than I had anticipated to describe

the actions of chemical substances or physical processes. I found it interesting that, in medicine, a strong

authorial presence, signalled by relatively frequent use of the first person, was juxtaposed with a very high

use of the passive voice. This coincidence is only in part consistent with Segal's analysis of rhetoric in

medical authorship. It is, however, consistent with critical analyses such as, for example, Foucault's

description of the clinical gaze (1975), in which the patient as an active being has disappeared from the

therapeutic model, to become the object of the clinician's treatment.

Among the educational articles that I surveyed, I found no apparent difference in the degree of

personalisation in reports of either qualitative or quantitative studies, nor was there any discernible

difference associated with the gender of the first author.

Discussion

This is still very much a preliminary investigation. I think, however, that what I have found may warrant

further investigation.

Although the passive voice is a strong marker of depersonalisation, the investigation of its use would be a

better source of information were it divided into three subcategories:

1. The passive as used to mask the agency both of those carrying out the study as well as the participants.

"The participants were administered the test...", The agent remains still unknown: A research assistant?

The author?

2. The passive as focus on instrument or process. It has, in that respect, some affinities with the

personification of research or instruments to the suppression of human activity. "The test was administered

to the participants."

3. The impersonal passive, which sets agency at a further remove, "It was found that ..."

Each of these categories carries with it a different effect on the authorial presence. The distinction accounts

for the presence of both the first person and the passive voice in the medical articles that I investigated. The

authors referred to their own activities quite freely, but used the first and second varieties of passive voice in

a way that suppressed the personalisation of their patients/subjects.

In the articles that I surveyed, avoidance of the first person was most pronounced in psychology and

education. This seems incongruous with the fact that the practice of these two disciplines would appear

to be the most personal of those investigated. In 1982, those editors of psychological journals who

expressed a preference for the third person or to the complete absence of reference to authorial viewpoint

held that these practices were appropriate in a discipline in which "researchers' thoughts, opinions and

beliefs had no place in journal articles, but that one (sic) should focus exclusively on the data and the

operations or methods employed.." (Polyson, Levinson, and Miller, 1982) The avoidance of a personal

stance is thus associated with the representation of psychology and education as exact sciences, the

measurements of which can be presented as though they were being transcribed directly from the dials

of an instrument. This is, clearly, an exaggerated positivism, and one to which researchers in other

sciences seem no longer to adhere. I have heard colleagues suggest that the reason that educators and

psychologists have been so heavily reliant on representing the "hardness" of their science lay in its actual

softness compared to the other the disciplines from which I selected writing samples for my study.

In fact, the use or avoidance of the first person has never been an indicator of "real" science. Newton,

often represented as the father of modern scientific investigation, wrote of his investigations in the first

person (cf. his Opticks), as did Charles Darwin in the Origin of the Species, as did Watson and Crick when

they described their findings about the structure of DNA: "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of

deoxyribose nucleic acid." (Watson & Crick, 1953, 737) There seems to be nothing intrinsic to scientific

reporting that mandates the use of an depersonalised diction.

There is another possibility, more cultural than methodological, which I will discuss at some length in

the rest of this paper:

Language as Vestment: Depersonalised Authority

So far in this paper, I have identified two distinctive characteristics common throughout the scientific

writing that I surveyed, but particularly so in psychology and in education. They are the suppression

of personal identity and the assumption, for no apparent functional or communicative reason, of a diction

that is quite distinct from that of either day-to-day communication or of scholarship in the humanities.

In order to highlight the latter of these, I compared the frequencies of the five grammatical constructions

that I had found in the four scientific categories I had investigated to their frequencies in a piece of historical

writing, the first chapter of Michael Ignatieff's The Russian Album. The difference was quite striking.

(See Appendix B., where Ignatieff's work is represented under the category "Other".)

The register of Ignatieff's writing is again scholarly, but the degree of personalisation is very marked. It

differs radically from that of the other articles; although its standard of writing is very high (it won an

award from the Royal Society of Literature) it would, however, differ far less from articles in journals of

philosophy or history. In addition, the diction, although elevated, has affinities with day-to-day speech in

its grammatical structure.

Conventional scientific writing, on the other hand, seems to convey a quality of assumed alterity from day

to day speech or correspondence. It is inconceivable to think, for example, of a postcard written in the

passive voice: "The weather is seen to be fine. A lovely time is being had. It is wished that you were here...?"

Although this is not the language of Sir Isaac Newton nor of James Watson and Frances Crick, it is the

language of the journals that I surveyed. Is this some new, innovative practice? Or is it an inheritance

of some other aspect of western culture?

I suggest that the latter is the case, and that the genealogy of this peculiar diction is traceable from the

earliest incursions of the Roman Church into Western Europe. The priestly culture that bore the Christian

tradition did not merely carry a religious message; it bore with it everywhere a distinctive language, apart

from that of vernacular, quotidian culture. Latin became the language of written scholarship, and, to a

substantial extent, for more than a millennium, of all scholarly communication. Its heritage in science is

evident to this day in the vocabulary of scientific writing. (cf. Hogben, 1969; but that heritage may extend

beyond the construction of terminology. It may have influenced the way in which scientists were socialised

into a status of alterity from mainstream society.

Latin was also the language used for much of education, from that of schoolboys (rarely girls) to higher

learning. The access to that learning was contingent on the assumption of a language that set its users apart

from the rest of society. Learning, the prerequisite of the authority of the clergy and later of the scholar, the

lawyer, the physician, mandated the assumption of a status of alterity from the ordinary, the vernacular world.

There are, however, other oddities of locution identifiable in western culture. Are there other similarities

with the clerical culture that support my assertion of a genealogical link between it and modern, secular

educational research and modern secular psychology? What of the depersonalisation of scientific writing?

Of the long-mandated objectivity, the removal of any personal vantage, and its replacement with readings

from a dial or from a test score?

Within this tradition of alterity, the first figure of authority was that of the priest. The secular ruler might

still rule as a person and exercise a vernacular voice, but the priest functioned within an assumed alterity that

manifested itself in numerous ways. His sexuality was (at least nominally) surrendered; in his priestly role

he wore clothing that set him apart from the rest of society. Within that role, his effective functioning was

separated radically from his personal identity. His own voice, his own phraseology, was surrendered. He

spoke Christ's words of institution, not his own. His actions were those of the agent vicar of a higher

authority, ostensibly the deity, certainly the institution, that he served. The sacraments, by means of which

he carried out his priestly role, were entirely divorced from his own identity. They were objective means

of conveying grace, of which he was merely the vector. Compare this, then, to the way in which

standardised, normed test scores are treated as an impersonal means of admitting students, or excluding

them from, various categories and statuses.

The surrender of person can be the assumption of power. The researcher who masks biases and possible

foibles in the diction of an assumed objectivity, like the priest donning a vestment, can claim an exempt

status from responsibility. Church law determined the penance of the sinner; the standardised test score

determines the child's placement.

The above is admittedly a caricature. No scientist is exempt from bias and most will acknowledge that

fact; nor, if history gives true accounts, were clergy exclusively vicars of Christ. The imposition of

depersonalisation in the course of carrying out responsibilities effectively seems to reflect, in both

traditions, a fundamental pessimism about human nature. As persons, we seem to have been represented,

by the Church and by the subsequent professions that took it as their model, as incapable of setting aside

our own interests in the exercise of our professional roles. The Enlightenment, often presented by

historians as the point at which the secular and sacred domains split definitively, continued this pessimism.

The real world became, not that which could be viewed with the naked eye, but that which only instruments

free of human bias could measure. The clockwork cosmos of Newton was most appropriately observed and

described by other mechanisms, not by the untidy human psyche. Human scholarship was most credible

when it most nearly approached that clockwork in its indifference to affect.

Why should this inheritance be most evident in education and psychology? The modern world is,

fundamentally, a secular world. The virtually universal power over human activity once held by the

Church no longer exists. I suggest that education is one of the inheritors of a similarly widespread power

in the modern world. Although it is directly exercised only on children in its most universal form, the

effects of that exercise of power are lasting.

In like manner, psychology, although perhaps less universal in its clinical clientele than education seems

to offer the general populace many of the things that the Church did in earlier ages. The psyche seems to

have replaced the soul as the centre of healing and reconciliation; in as diverse investigators as Gilligan

(1982) and Kohlberg (1984) psychological inquiry has gained a footing in ethics.

Is it possible that the pessimistic view of human moral frailty has proven so daunting that educators and

psychologists have surrendered their identities to assume the depersonalised, status of agents of the

institutionalised forms of their practice? That professional ethics have proven easier to sustain in view of

the responsibilities implicit in their role than personal ethics? If that is the case, it is not surprising that their

discourse has become depersonalised in an attempt to convey a safe, incorruptible, and unbiased exercise of

authority.

Conclusion: Some Recommendations

As I was preparing this paper, I walked into the computer lab of my department to gather something

from the printer. I saw a doctoral student at one of the computers, typing earnestly. We discussed our

respective projects, and she told me that she is, indeed, using the first person in her thesis. It is an act

of courage; she has been socialised to believe that writing in which she is personally present will be

discounted as "subjective". But the method that is appropriate for her research demands her presence

in the paper, and she is taking the brave step. She told me that she had constantly to monitor herself for

the usages that I have described in this paper. She realises that their use is not entirely unavoidable, but

that their exclusive use will truly rob her research reporting of a level of depth and authenticity that her

can only be conveyed by her acknowledged presence as investigator and author.

It is time for us to acknowledge our own authority and our own responsibility as scholars and as educators.

Neither our scholarship nor our writing stands to lose by this acknowledgement; it is time that we free

ourselves of the old pessimism that saw fallen mankind as incapable of honest, unbiased scholarship and

forced us into an artificial neutrality. It is time that, as mature scholars, our voices change.

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M.M.; Conneally, P.M.; Small, G.W.; Vance, J.M.; Saunders, A.M.; Roses, A.D.; and Haines, J.L (1997).

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Schmidt, N.B., Lerew, D.R., and Jackson, R.J. (1997). The role of anxiety sensitivity in the pathogenesis

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Appendix B

Means of Frequencies of Grammatical Usages by Discipline