Types of situation, types of partnership, types of thinking

Okay, after all my talk of ‘deductive’ analysis – the first thing I have ‘learned’ from my data – that emerged out of it, was something that I didn’t think to look for at all!!  Now it has, I feel the need to get it down on paper – and of course immediately, I have connected it up with some literature I have read.

As the main ‘helping agenda’ of the work I am doing involves appreciating partnership practices, the ‘Discovery’ interviews ask people to talk about a time when they had a great experience of partnership working.  We emphasised that this had to be an experience that they thought was great at the time – regardless of whether it was an ‘official’ success story.  People could answer from anytime in their history – not necessarily recently.

So I found myself noticing a bit of a pattern in the type of situations people were ‘engaging’ with when they had their ‘great experience’. Continue reading

Sensitising concepts

It feels as if Arwen and I are having a concept tennis match at the moment.  I write a blog gathering together disparate reading, which prompts Arwen to read, she summarises her reading in a blog, which them prompts further reading by myself, which I summarise in comment or a blog.  And so it goes back and forth, but the concepts are getting better, more useful to what we want.  And Arwen has now found what I currently think of as the ‘holy grail’ – the concept of a sensitising concept! Continue reading

My Research as an ‘event’ in a longer stream of inquiry

My last post set me off on a stream of thought in relation to what I am doing in my research – is it inductive? is it deductive? is it emic? is it etic?  I’ve started to realise that it is best to think of these pairs in terms of dualities, rather than dualisms. Through the research, there is an interplay.  But also I realised that my Research Project (with a big R and big P) does not stand alone – it is located in a wider stream of inquiry and it’s location in time impacts on what it is and how I relate to it. Continue reading

Is this research good?

Need to get to grips with some of those words that are being flung around – validity, reliability, generalisability, authenticity, rigour, replicability, triangulation.  At the moment they seem a bit of a blur of contested concepts – it’s about time I pursue an inquiry to get to grips with these concepts, the debates around them and more importantly – their relevance to MY particular research project. Continue reading

What do I have to experience to claim that someone is a systems thinker?

I am really clear now about my research project and what it is about.

In short – just in case you have not been following the last couple of months of blogs – I would like to analyse samples of the ‘talk’ of people in leadership roles to see whether or not they are systems thinkers.  But there’s the rub……. Continue reading

Research questions, hypothesis and views on causality

(T847, Block 2, Activities 1 and 2)

In TMA01 I stated the aim of my research project as follows:

to investigate the degree to which systems thinking is an ‘absent competence’ or ‘constrained capability’ amongst those involved in leading partnership working for wellbeing and health in an English city

Block 2 asks me to consider whether I should also use research question(s) and hypothesis as a way of tightening up the scale and scope of my research project.  It also suggests that I am clear on my perspective of causality. Continue reading

If systems thinking is the answer, what is the question?

May seem a little odd asking this question now, but it strikes me that this is part of that ongoing quest to ‘market’ systems thinking – as per previous posts on the Elevator pitch issue.

But it struck me recently that it is possible – and helpful – to apply the thinking that Ison (2010, 187) uses in relation to the idea of managing….. what is the system to which doing X is the answer (the how)? Continue reading