FELICITY HAYNES, Graduate School of Education, The University of Western Australia

I begin with a quote from a recent ethnographic study at Masters' level:

Here the researcher is trying to see to what extent the artist's values and beliefs influence his paintings. She is trying to see to what extent artistic "knowledge" as presented in schools influences art practices. His actions provide evidence for her knowledge that the artist's purpose is to get a "Gothic" atmosphere in his painting by mixing colours and that he could not have had such an intention without the influence of his education in art. Not only his discourse, but the length of time he takes to think abut it, this is the evidence for his artistic purpose. Artistic purpose becomes real, is reified by the evidence required to make it real to the reader. ironically, because it seems to me that in all social science reearch we presume that the people we are looking at are acting intentionally, with purpose rather than simply reacting or behaving, Despite its qualitative reference - the intention or purpose of the artist - the genre of the research becomes empirical, the precise measurement of time and description of both behaviour and actions are seen to help make it "objectively" real. Davidson (1963) and Harre (1980,p.278) both warn that we must preserve the independence of act/action descriptions as analytic tools for social performances but each admits that it is difficult to distinguish

In telling the reader the aims of the research, the researcher has already implied that what she is looking for will reveal itself directly to the reader as well as the researcher. The act of research presumes that the object fixed upon will become part of the corpus of knowledge. As such it gains meaning by being made "real" to our understanding no matter how insubstantial the matter in question is. Indeed in many cases it will already have beome "real" or substantive to those working in the area. Artistic purpose is a marginalised topic in educational research and that is one of my reasons for choosing it. We are less aware of the construction of such objects of educational research as "intelligence", "youth at risk" , "body mutilation", "disciplinary problems", "bullying" because we are already operating within a socialised and normalising institution which has made these features of a social world into a matter for inspection.

When van Manen writes (1990:12) that he is using human science interchangeably with phenomenological and hermeneutical research in a search for what it means to be human, he is asserting that we both should and could examine, through qualitative research methods, human values.

But already we sense a contradiction. How can we discover our own core? IS that something we too invent? Much of the language that Merleau Ponty, and indeed Husserl, use makes it appear as if there IS a set of values that will reveal itself as THE core of our being. In phenomenology researchers are encouraged to engage in a single minded effort to "bracket' out their own presuppositions, prior knowledge and espoused viewpoints and allow the data to speak for themselves. Foucault would claim that that data cannot speak for itself. It simply presents itself as the object of our gaze and often qua object it has simply become more internalized in our individual disciplinary practices; not only self- observation and self-examination, but also continuous, ever watchful self-monitoring. Thus the shift from the sovereign purpose of the classical period to the disciplinary purpose of the modern can be correlated for Foucault, with a shift in the mode of vision dominant in our political institutions: the shift, namely from governmentality organised around the gaze of the sovereign to governmentality organised by surveillance, panopticism, the normalizing gaze dispersed throughout the social system, maintaining civil order as Van Manen's descriptions of pedagogy.

I argue that this "objectification" , this making real, of our intentions, values and purposes is a normalizing construct of the research method and that it is common to both qualitative and quantitive research. There is something about the construction of knowledge through accepted research methods that requires us either to reify our purposes as the object of our gaze or to render them invisible as the driving force of our research act. Guba and Lincoln for instance claim (1987 p.213) "... in situations where motives, attitudes, beliefs and values direct much, if not all behaviour, the most sophisticated instrumentation we possess is still the careful observer - the human beingwho can watch, see, listen, question, probe and finally analyse and organise his direct experience"

"Finally analyse and organise his direct experience"? The experience is really there? Yes, it is really experienced. But let us not forget that it is our focus on it that allows us to experience it. We cannot forget the purpose of purpose in educational research and the in-forming of knowledge. The OED defines purpose as " The object which one has in view Educational research is never done without a purpose, that is, it is not done accidentally or incidentally. It is done with an intention with which it is often synonymous, that is, the act of straining or directing the mind towards something.

This is not a new insight. Max Weber (Shils et al, 1949) reminds us that all science first arose in connection with practical considerations. t was mentioned in Krimerman, Broudy and Ennis as part of an exercise as to why educational research could not be neutral or value free. According to them one could do empirical research neutrally as long as one stated one's purposes up front and explained why one was looking at the subject.

To a certain extent this move of making the "facts" relative to a context of purpose renders all empirical research, quantatitive or qualitative , purposeful, and therefore qualitative. The context of the first piece of research quoted allows the reader to perceive that the time taken to decide on the appropriate paint colour IS relevant to artistic intentions, because the researcher has already informed us that she is looking for the extent to which the artist believes that art is the representation of intentional beliefs. Her revelation of HER purpose in looking makes us see why certain features of the artist's behaviour are salient to her. Because the epistemology of qualitative research presumes a search for meanings rather than truth, it is driven by human purposes which have constrained what count as salient features.

This move should not satisfy the critical reader. Critical theorists, in particular, would say, Why did you as researcher have that purpose? Why does that subject interest you? or qua Habermas, why was that research in your interests? We can always push the question one layer further back. Are we looking at the object of research, or the purpose which makes it the object of research? The object exists as object, even objective fact, when one pushes the purpose behind one, and is seen simply as the object in view when one focusses on the purpose which makes it meaningful. The object is, as Foucault tells us, constituted by the gaze.

One can see the slide into an infinite regress of nested boxes of purpose-driven gazes. The minute we enter this dimension of looking at the purpose of individual purpose, we have constructed another level of social purpose which drives individual purpose which involves institutional power, hegemonies of language which determine what is to be the subject of the gaze.

I often begin my epistemology classes with an exercise from Matthew Lipman's philosophy for children book which ostensibly is trying to have children explore their own meanings of the words 'discover 'or 'invent'. Let's try it, very quickly:

Did Captain Cook discover or invent Australia?

Did Edison discover or invent the light bulb?

Did Franklin discover or invent electricity?

Did we discover or invent magnets?

Did we discover or invent magnetism? and

(this one supplied by a grade five child) Did we discover or invent mathematics?

The questions not only arouse a great deal of discussion and debate , but reflective debate on the matter begins to plug us into an epistemological awareness that we have to turn our attention to something, almost anticipate its possibility, before we can discover it, and that therefore institutionalised knowledge (shared social purposes and practices) drives our discoveries. Conversely, we have to discover things about the world, such as the likelihood that that insecurity will make people more likely to bully others, or that tungsten will produce a better bulb filament thread than grass or hair even when we are at our most imaginative moments in constructing future knowledge. Traditional distinctions between inductive and deductive research become blurred, as do the distinction between constructivism and post-positivism. They face in different directions. In the social sciences and educational research, we are constantly discovering and inventing things, to fit our purposes. We continually reify those invented constructs making them things that appear to have discovered. ADHD, dyslexia, gender. We have a purpose in placing these objects before our view. There is often a great deal of contention, and classes generally move together to an awareness that the world is not simply lying out there to be "picked up" or uncovered, but that our "mind" whatever that is, must connect concepts in such a way as to be able to make sense of what it sees, and to that extent it invents it. There is a symbolic interaction with the world which exists independently of whether we know it or not and the symbols we use to interact with it are of our own construction, individually and socially. The Lipman exercise creates an awareness that before we can discover something we have to be looking for it; we have to have "an object in view" ; we have to have a reason for looking. We could never ultimately define the purpose for which we are looking at the purpose of the purpose of the purpose of the research because at each stage there will be a searchlight on the objectified "facts" from some particular purpose or point of view.

I want to look at that nested set of purposes through a solipsistic lens for a minute. Powers (1974) said that the outside world reaches us only through a feedback system of purpose, a hierarchy arising initially from stimulations , sensory irritations, Quine might have said. The first five steps lead us to recognise different stimulations of the nerve endings as sensations, to cluster them into objects, to categorise them into sets, or concepts through language and to see that these "objects", or conceptual clusters stay relatively stable over time and space. For these first five stages the sequence follows a fairly straightforward neurophysiological process. But Powers is trying to invert the behaviorist S-R view of the world. Behaviour, he argues, is not simply caused by our conditioned or habitual responses to external stimuli but rather we behave in order to control our perceptions. That is, we try to keep our view of the external world consistent with our goals. Our goals are set by what he calls a governor, a comparator, a structure of beliefs about the world. So the researcher sees evidence through sensory stimulation of artistic purpose because that is what she is looking for. Van Manen sees evidence, and it is "real" evidence, of pedagogy. The researcher sees evidence of artistic purpose in the delay in producing the "right" colour. This is an inversion of the behaviorism and it claims all our actions, even the measurements we take in quantitative research , are intentional rather than caused behaviour.

The subject-centred, purpose-driven gaze of the observer-spectator paradigm in epistemology does not avoid the privileging of vision. Nor does it deny the physicality of the universe (Davidson). It says as long as a researcher states his/her purpose he/she provides a frame within which the sensed features of reality are made relevant to the researcher's purpose. How does one dispute the "facts" presented in such a frame? Not by providing counter-evidence or even, as Popper would have us believe, falsifying claims through testing against the "objective" world, but by questioning the purposes or value of such research.

Qualitative researchers continuously remind us that they are drawing our attention to meaning rather than truth, pulling salient features together to make us see something differently. "Each researcher has their own point of view, every society has different values, attitudes and behaviour, and these differences should be considered in any research activity," Axton and Burney, (1996 p.76) remind us in a paper on the ecology of research but they speak as if the interaction between researcher, subject of research and reader takes place passively. When we think of research as sharing purposes, even institutionalised ones, we can allow for consolidated purposes such as improving literacy in schools, or creative agendas such as ethical recognition of hermaphrodites and the breaking down of dualistic gender presumptions.

"Phenomenological projects and their methods often have a transformative effect on the researcher him or herself. Indeed, phenomenological research is often itself a form of deep learning, leading to a transformation of consciousness, heightened perceptiveness, increased thoughftulness and tact, and so on" (Van Manen, 1990, 163) As Charles Taylor (1985,p.54) charges "In the sciences of man insofar as they are hermeneutical there can be a valid response to "I don't understand" which takes the form, not only develop your intuitions," but more radically "change yourself." From the point of view of this short paper, the purpose of any research method is to draw others' attention to what the researcher considers important features of the world, to see how the object of your gaze would change under a different object of your gaze. It is to engage in a dialectical conversation in which we construct knowledge by sharing purposes through a social construction of our realities.

REFERENCES:

Broudy, H.S., Ennis R.H. and Krimerman, L.I. (1973)Philosophy of Educational Research, New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Davidson, D. (1980) 'Actions, reasons and causes" Journal of Philosophy, vol 60, pp 685 - 700.

Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the human sciences New York: Random House.

Frye, Marilyn (1983) The Politics of Reality Trumansberg, N.Y. CrossingPress.

Guba, E. and Lincoln, Y (1981) Naturalistic Inquiry, Beverly Hills, Sage Publications.

Harre, R "Meaning in Social science" in Social Being pp 63 -81

Hillman, H. (1993) "Research on the possible pain experienced during execution by different methods" Perception, vol 22, pp 745-53.

Levin, David (1993) Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, University of Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press

Little, Fowler and Coulson Eds (3rd ed) Oxford English Dictionary on historical principles Oxford:Clarendon Press

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Parer, M.S. and Unger, Zita (1996) Proceedings: Qualitative Research Methods Asia Pacific Workshop Morwell, Vic: Alella Books.

Powers, W.T. (1974) Behaviour: the Control of Perception. Chicago: Aldine Press.

Taylor, Charles (1985) "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man." in Philosophical Papers 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Van Manen, M. (1990) Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy London, Ontario: State University of New York Press

Yagyu. T. at al (1997) "Chewing gum flavour affects measures of global complexity of multichannel EEG" Neuropsychobiology, vol 35, pp 46-50.

Weber, Max, edited by Shils E.A. and Finch H.A. (eds) (1949) On the Methodology of the Social Sciences and reprinted in Broudy et al, (eds) (1973)Philosophy of Educational Research, New York: John Wiley and Sons pp 504-512.

Witztum, D., Rips, E and Rosenburg, Y (1994) "Equidistant letter Sequences in the book of Genesis" Statistical Science, vol 9, no 3 pp 429-38

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Abstract: Qualitative research is distinguished from quantitative research not simply because one contains values and the other doesn't; not simply because one is subjective and the other objective, or because one is based on opinion and the other on facts. Even some ethnographic and phenomenological research may be excluded from a qualitative conceptual frame on the grounds that it pretends to offer fixed and value-neutral meanings. Because the epistemology of qualitative research presumes a search for meanings rather than truth, it is driven by human purposes which have constrained what count as salient features. Poststructuralists and critical theorists alike have persuaded most people that descriptive empirical frames which deny purpose are rendering values invisible rather than evading them. Even hermeneuticists can present research as though the meanings were fixed. This paper will present several research examples from education, including case studies, surveys and interviews to show how different renderings of human purposes and interests shape the style of research method chosen.

Powers's nine point hierarchy

1. Intensity of stimulation. Sensory receptors responding to stimulation by generating neural currents which are at this low level of stimulation unrecognizable as sensations eg the ice-block from which your hand springs back without realizing whether it is hot or cold.

2. Recognition of configurations of stimulations as sensations, ie as touch, taste, smell, sound etc. Perceptual signals which depend on physical events but don't have any physical significance (p.1134)

3. Clustering of sensations into "objects" (chairs, a frown, phonemes)

4. perception of change and motion - the gestaltist grouping, so that we see an elliptical coin as a coin whether it is flat or upright.

5. sequencing of transitions into events, so that we don't see the multiple presentation of dots on a TV screen but believe a person is walking across the screen Detecting and controlling the sequence in which lower-order quantities occur.

These are all physically tied to different brain functions. The brain's model of reality is what we count as reality. The next steps are more obviously mental.

6. Control of relationships, concept attainment eg Bruner playing cards, Hanson's head, the duck-rabbit.

7. Program control - structures of relationships eg looking for my glasses (p.160) playing chess - a series of computer-like decision points rather than a list, computer-like algorithms, the rules of the game

8. Control of principles - heuristics which make programmes run more smoothly - Our very notion of obeying the rules of a game, prinmciples like honesty, perseverance.

9. Control of system concepts - Society, The System, Memory

10? God, the Self?