2 Chapter 2: Methods in Adolescence Research

REVIEW

• What are the methods of inquiry that are most common in the study of adolescence? How do they differ? How are they similar?
• What is the principal approach in positivism?

REFLECT

1.Given the different methods of inquiry that are most commonly used to study adolescence, if you were still between the ages of 13 and 18, which of the methods do you think would give researchers the best idea of your experiences, attitudes and behaviors?

As discussed in the first chapter, the biological view of adolescence is one of the dominant frameworks for studying the lifespan.  Both biologists and psychologists assert that it is possible to study the individual in isolation from the context in which they live.  They are more likely to believe that individuals across social contexts share certain characteristics based on their group membership.  Thus, they would assert that the normal functioning of a 16-year-old in the USA and a 16-year-old in Morocco would be the same.  According to bio psychologists, any variation from the norm is because of external influence that interrupts the normal; thus, biological and psychological researchers ‘essentialize’ groups of humans based on race, gender, age etc.  Biologists and psychologists are more likely to assert that there are universal traits that people from the same group share.  Research studies are conducted to identify these characteristics.  The focus of psychology as a field is typically the immediate environment of the child.  While sub-disciplines like social psychology and organizational psychology deal with larger environments and institutions, the center of action in a sense, is the individual and the responses of the individual to external and internal factors.

Biologists and psychologists use a variety of strategies common to other disciplines but are likely to focus on the individual or the family functioning in order to make meaning of an event.  The biological tools available for the study of adolescents has increased at a dramatic pace in the last two decades, giving scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the structure and functioning of the brain.  Some of these include:

Contrast Radiography: This tool allows for a radioactive material to be injected into the blood vessels in the brain to observe for any brain abnormalities.

Computerized Axial Tomography Scan (CT scan): This makes the whole brain structure visible to the scientist in the form of 3D images.

Positron Tomography Scans (PET scans): Captures the function of neurons and the brain by marking neurons that are active.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): This is perhaps the most important of the all the tools developed in recent years. Scientists use this to study both structure and function of the brain without having to inject the patient with radioactive substances.  However, since it is very expensive to employ, studies using fMRI data tend to have small sample sizes and this has an impact on the generalizability and validity of the findings.

The growth of historiography (the study of history as an academic field) was pioneered by the German historian von Ranke (1981) who professionalized the teaching and the study of history.  He fought against the prevailing notions of that time that suggested that societies always evolved from primitive to advanced.  He proposed that each era should be studied for its own sake.  French historians in the 19th century moved the focus in history to exploring the social history (i.e., the lives of individuals and communities) of any era from the previously popular study of political history.  They emphasized the usage of materials that ordinary people used and the psychological environment within communities over governments and political institutions.  The historical method of interpreting data is typically qualitative.  Historians study a phenomenon, the various factors that led to the occurrence of a historical event and the interpretation that the data lends itself to.  Some of the best historical studies involve the study of primary documents and artefacts including those from archaeology.  An important aspect of the historical method involves source criticism; this involves evaluating the reliability, credibility and relevance of a piece of historical material.

One chief source of data for a historian is eye-witness testimony; it is crucial for historians to make accurate judgements about the credibility of eye-witness documentation.  The criteria for judgements of accuracy is the plausibility of the statements, the time period of the account, the internal contradictions in the data, and other corroborating evidence.  Sometimes, the information obtained by a historian may come from secondary sources in which case, the researcher has additional judgements to make about how much to rely on the source.  Some of the questions they may ask is, how close to the event was the testimony given, how complete is the account and what was left out.  In many cultures, especially those without written artefacts, oral traditions form a significant source of information about events and historical phenomena.  Historians must put these oral traditions through additional credibility tests to ascertain their validity.  As part of our study of adolescence, we will explore the historian’s view of youth experiences over the ages.

Postmodern theorists argue that there is not just one way to interpret our world but many; in earlier times they argue, every society had one dominating story (meta-narrative) that gave meaning to existence.  Some examples would be the Bible for Christian societies and the Koran for Muslim societies.  In modern times, with the number of images and texts that we are exposed to, those meta-narratives have given way to multiplicities of stories that depict our relationship with the world.   According to Foucault (2012) one of the main proponents of postmodernism, there is no one truth and everything is subjective or relative.  Postmodernists disagree with several other social sciences that life and society move towards endless progress.  Sociologists, for example, argue that with the help of scientific methods we can build better societies while psychologists argue that their research can lead to superior ways to address mental health issues.  Postmodernists would argue that it is impossible to know the essential nature of reality and that all renditions of reality should be celebrated; they call this the democratization of truth.  One of the strengths of this view is that frameworks from the margins and the disenfranchised are given a great deal of validity.

Jean Baudrillard (1994) offered the term ‘simulacra’ (a copy with no original) that signifies the notion that material objects are no longer important in exchanges between people; according to him, ideas and representations have equal validity.  In terms of life-span theory, Disney land would be a simulacrum because there is no such land and no Disney characters in real life.  The fact that the Disney Inc. is one of the most successful of corporations demonstrates the power of symbol over substance.  In modern society, the media produces an ever-changing stream of images and ideas that are often perceived as more real than our offline lives.  Postmodernists would assert that in today’s fragmented setting, we are what we consume and are therefore highly changeable.

Deconstruction is therefore one of the important methods to do inquiry with postmodernism; Derrida (1997) was one of its principal proponents.  He asserted that the workings of institutions today can be understood by taking apart the assumptions underlying the traditions of the institution, especially nations and nation states.  In addition, for Derrida, the major ideas or traditions in modern life are built around the concept of the binary where ideas are divided into opposites (male /female, day /night etc.) and where one of the terms is given more importance or is considered more of an ideal state than the other term.  Deconstructionists thus do not locate meaning either in the author of the words, the words themselves or in the objects the words are supposed to represent.  The word ‘woman’ on the surface might point to a person with similar characteristics that we can all agree on.  However, as we probe further the meaning that we had construed for the word falls apart and each of us ascribe different images or traits to the same word- woman.  For our purposes, the same could be said of the word adolescence.  While developmental psychologists would assert that adolescence has a common set of traits that people who use the word can agree on, when we dig deeper into its origin and explore its function today, the common understanding of adolescence falls apart.  Thus, deconstructionists assert that no sign (word) has an essential meaning except one that is artificially imposed by language.  The role of postmodern theorists is to identify the tensions inherent in concepts and phenomena, especially as they are constructed in a binary fashion.

Both sociology and anthropology deal with people, structures and institutions.  They study societies and hierarchies, people and their contexts.  Some methodologies that are perhaps unique to sociology and cultural anthropology are the principles of holism – that it is important to understand the relationship between elements of a phenomena in order to understand the whole.  Cultural anthropology emphasizes relativism and cross-cultural contexts with a focus on marginalized populations.  Fieldwork is an important method to uncover these patterns and engage with people in a real-world setting – thus observational studies are used extensively to help explain events.  Unlike psychologists, there is little research conducted in laboratories.  Thus, researchers in these fields, but especially anthropology, spend considerable time learning new languages and understanding rituals and practices they may not be familiar with.  Both sociologists and anthropologists attempt to understand people and societies in their own terms rather than comparing them to the social order of the Global North.  Ethnographies are very important tools to test theories; while previously constructed hypothesis may be used, in sociology and anthropology it is often used flexibly depending on new information that is being uncovered by the researcher as a study progresses.

Today, generally in the social sciences but especially in sociology and anthropology, there has been a big push to make research collaborative and to include participants in the designing and the implementation of a research project.  Some indigenous researcher/activists have called for decolonizing research and use locally meaningful methods to explore social phenomena. The participating researcher observes the community with little bias and performs the role of the interlocutor, collecting and interpreting information and providing a framework to interpret the information.

Quantitative Data

The aim of quantitative research is to classify data, organize them and perform statistical analysis and derive mathematical models from the evidence.  When using quantitative data, the researcher must know what they are looking for and actively looks for the relationships they are hoping to find even before they begin their study; the research plan is highly designed.  Thus, quantitative methodology works best when a phenomenon is already explored and there is consensus among researchers about the basic principles at work and the factors that may be involved in any phenomena.  Thus, in order to conduct a statistical data analysis a researcher would need to fulfil certain conditions.  Firstly, there must be a hypothesis that is an outcome of theory or previous research studies.  Secondly, the participants of the study would have to be randomly selected and would have to be representative of the population to which the findings are to be generalized.

For studies that have not been controlled in the form of an experiment, a causal connection cannot be established.  Thus, one of the simplest data analyses that establishes a relationship between 2 factors without establishing a causal connection is a simple correlational study.  One example would be the relationship between smoking and lung disease; until the biological effects of tobacco were finally demonstrated in recent years, it was impossible for researchers to identify a causal connection between smoking and lung disease.  The reason for this is that it is unethical to force random samples of participants to smoke.

In an experiment every part of the study is tightly controlled by the experimenter.  Every experiment consists of manipulating variables or factors that the experimenter is interested in. The independent variables are those that the experimenter chooses to control themselves, while the dependent variable(s) are those that change as a result of the manipulation.  For instance, if the experimenter wanted to study the impact of practice on test results, they would manipulate the amount of practice the participant was allowed (IV) and measure the test results (DV) after the various levels of practice. The participants are randomly chosen with the sample size large enough to perform a robust statistical analysis.  When the study uses well designed experiments, researchers can perform more complicated statistical tests where the independent and dependent variables under exploration can be subjected to regression models that may be better at predicting the value of the dependent variable given a combination of independent variables.  Some studies use statistical meta analytic techniques, where the results of several quantitative studies are combined to see if the relationship between variables are still valid across several studies.

Under this numerical system of data gathering and analysis, anomalies are set aside as outliers and left out of the analysis.  Thus, quantitative research is more interested in patterns than in the cases that do not conform.  The tools that are used consist of surveys, questionnaires, experiments, biological testing tools – any instrument that collects quantitative data in the form of numbers and statistics.  Since the inception of the social sciences, quantitative data is often touted as being more objective and having less bias; proponents’ reason that the answer is revealed by the numbers and not by the researchers who are said to simply implement the design.  However, critics point out that quantitative studies may be biased and lead to substantiate the prejudices of the researcher.  The study investigator must make judgements about what phenomena they are going to measure and how it will be measured.

Qualitative Method

Qualitative methods attempt to get at the ‘whole picture’ and present a complete detailed description about the topic under examination.  The data might consist of words, images, documents, and objects.  This form of research is very useful when a field is very new and has not had an opportunity to have a groundwork of studies done to establish basic principles; thus, it is ideal for conducting preliminary research.  It is typically more flexible and amenable to change as the researcher begins the study and want to change the framework or lens through which they are examining an event.  The researcher themselves is a key participant of the data collection process since they are making judgements throughout the study about what needs attention, the method that might be most appropriate and how they might want to analyze the data.  The resulting product is a very rich tapestry of information about a phenomenon.

The qualitative data analysis begins with the researcher or a team of researchers coding the data systematically.  While the analyst may have some codes when they begin the analysis, it is an ever-evolving process as the study continues and new data is introduced.  Code structures are large conceptual frameworks and questions that the researchers have before they begin the study and sometimes after they have started data collection.  Some of these may arise from the study itself; in this inductive method, the data reveals new questions to be explored.  Many studies integrate both preexisting code structures and inductive methodology; large ideas are derived from earlier studies, but specific concepts are derived from the process of the study itself.  Once the data is gathered, the researcher goes through an iterative process where after coding a few of the responses, they might go back to check the validity of the framework and try to reduce the numbers of codes to larger categories.  They may work with other researchers as a team to test the validity of the codes and the frameworks used.  Today, researchers have sophisticated software that facilitate the process of data compilation and analysis for both quantitative and qualitative data.

The strengths of this method of study is that it tends to be less reductive and provide a richer picture of the topics under study. Some drawbacks with this method are that the study may be time-consuming, the results of the study less able to be generalizable if the sample size is very small, and the researcher may get drawn into the lives of the participants to the extent that they lose their objectivity and may become active in the life of the person or community under study.  While both qualitative and quantitative methods have the problem of observer paradox (where the results are altered simply because the phenomenon is being observed), there is a higher likelihood of the problem occurring in a qualitative study.

McCarthy & Shrum (1994) working from within the discipline of psychology hypothesized that values must have a strong relationship to recycling.  They used a values scale that had been pretested and collected self-reports of undergraduate students’ recycling habits; thus, this research is a survey since the questions were all filled out by the interviewees. Oskamp et al (1991) conducted phone interviews and asked their 221 respondents from one city about their recycling behaviors.  Since they had oral interviews, but the questions were unchanged from one participant to another, the method would be called an interview survey.   Hopper & Nielsen (1991) conducted a survey initially but followed up with an experiment where they had neighborhood leaders encourage community members to recycle.  They found that peer encouragement increased recycling behavior.  The authors used two strategies – survey and experiments.  Schultz (1999) observed a neighborhood of 605 families and then conducted experimental interventions in recycling behavior giving families feedback on their recycling.  They found that interventions helped increase recycling.  The authors used both naturalistic observation and used the results to guide the next stage of their study which was an experiment.  Miyafodzyeva & Brandt (2013) conducted a meta-analysis of 63 published studies to understand the factors that contribute to recycling behavior; they concluded that convenience, moral norms, environmental concern and information as the most important factors that affected recycling behaviors.  Annamalai (2015) explored the issue of recycling from a biological framework; he examined the impact of recycling on the health of the workers in the field.

The methods described above are mainstream social science research methods that involve human participants. Some examples of deconstruction and historical research studies also demonstrate the richness of those methods.  Cooper (2010) did a study of a historical view of treating waste in Europe questioning the very notion of what is considered ‘waste’, as it varies from one time period to another.   Hyatton & Burns (2007) used deconstruction methodology to analyze governmental policies towards wildlife management and noted how human relationship to environmental conservation is socially constructed.  Similarly, Lee & Ha (2019) explore recycling as a culturally embedded activity with the social context determining the what, the how and the why of recycling as they are determined by cultural variables and values.  They use the postmodern deconstruction method to explore their topic.

The reader can see that there are a variety of ways to conduct research depending on the questions the researcher asks, their disciplinary backgrounds and research training, the kinds of data that are feasible to be gathered, and the kinds of data analysis tool that the researcher has.  One of the most important factors that is often underemphasized in the dissemination of the results of research studies are the values that researchers hold about the nature of knowledge itself as well as what kind of society the researcher might want to help build.  Many of the disagreements between researchers can be traced to these values.  However, some criteria that all researchers hold dear is the value of being methodical in their analysis and allowing other researchers to test the validity of their findings through discipline appropriate methods.