Which is a more onerous task: carrying out research or justifying that you did it in an ‘academically-sound’ fashion? As is the case with most disciplines, in Development Studies, it is the latter. Forget the fact that you had to travel two days and 200 miles to interview ten people in rural Mali; caught malaria en route to a remote village in the interior of Cameroon in order to participate in a village meeting; or had to live with former combatants for six months in order to build up some trust. The most Herculean task in most, if not all, cases, is justifying to your colleagues – many of who have never done any fieldwork and/or are not acquainted in the slightest with the rigours of undertaking research in developing world settings – that the work was carried out ‘correctly’. This leads to what I refer to as ‘Post Methodology Sickness’: the frazzled state a researcher often finds him/herself in following collection of his/her empirical data, brought on by the pressure of having to convince the armchair academics that it was obtained in accordance with instructions outlined in The Fundamentals of Qualitative Research Methods and Data Collection, Volume 20.
What complicates things even more is that things never go according to plan when undertaking research in the village: planned focus groups become discussion groups; participatory exercises turn into fist fights; and group meetings with elders become a meeting with the chief’s son because you haven’t convinced the elders that you are important enough to warrant any attention. Does The Fundamentals offer a contingency plan in the event that such a case arises (which it often does)? And, if not, how does one justify, academically, a move to more unconventional means of data collection generally not recognized to be part of the qualitative methodological machinery but which nevertheless are great at gathering important information? Some of the most interesting stories I’ve heard, and which have shaped my research, over the years were told in the most bizarre of settings and at unpredictable times: whilst eating at a local eatery in Mahdia; at an internet café in Paramaribo; and in a tro-tro on the Bogoso-Prestea Road. In each case, purely by chance, I stumbled across individuals who shared valuable information with me.
Reflecting upon these events brings to mind what Martin Bulmer said over twenty years ago: that when carrying out field research in developing countries, it is not only a question of a lack of data but in many situations, it is a case of there being no data at all. Two decades on, with so few people in the discipline committed to carrying out fieldwork and informing policy from the bottom up, we find ourselves in the same situation.
These days, I don’t really suffer from ‘Post Methodology Sickness’ much. As someone acquainted with the rigours and frustrations of doing research in developing world setting, I don’t care much about how the research approach may have drifted away from the guidelines outlined in The Fundamentals. Everyone undertaking empirical research has an epistemological starting point, a methodology, a discourse, a hypothesis, a set of objectives, a set of research questions. But before criticizing the approach taken and identifying how it does not conform to the blueprints outlined in The Fundamentals, does it not make sense to examine the data that has been retrieved? As supposed development practitioners, it is astonishing to think of how little we know about the countries we are supposedly assisting. So isn’t any detailed data about peoples’ habits, needs and struggles valuable information?
After all, every methodology has its flaws.
