Stances for Engaged Research Methodology
Numerous and diverse methodological approaches are available to researchers for conducting engaged work in communities. Although method selection may be driven by researchers’ experience and outlook, it also should be shaped by the relationship with the community.
Sustained treatment of the contexts and factors involved is beyond the scope of and space for this chapter; we have chosen to highlight ethnographic and empirical approaches.Ethnography, as a collection of methodological orientations and techniques, along with an underlying set of philosophical and theoretical positions, permits researchers the opportunity to observe the community on an intimate and in-depth level. Depending on access granted by community leaders and members, researcher(s) may have opportunities to observe (and sometimes record) community meetings, gatherings and activities, and member interactions and rituals. Whether a particular research team adopts an explicitly ethnographic perspective or not, in-depth exploration of community life may be fundamental to the project.
An example of researchers engaged in community ethnography is within the YRG CARE (Y. R. Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education) program, which conducts HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/ acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) community assistance and interventions based in Chennai, India. Established in 1993, the YRG CARE mission is “to respond to the needs of people who are not receiving care and support for HIV or related education/information.” A distinctive facet of this program is community training in understanding, critiquing, and comparing survey and other methods. Engaged scholarship using an ethnographic approach can provide richly textured treatments of the issue and community; however, if part of the epistemological position of the researchers is to assess rather than represent a sensitive or tense situation surrounding an issue, then maintaining such a position can be difficult.
Empirically oriented research attempts to gain knowledge through observation and measurement. In intergroup and community engagement literature, this methodological approach has been manifested in numerous ways. A common approach attempts to create conditions under which a proposed treatment or condition might positively (or negatively) affect outcomes for various community membership groups. Experimental communitybased research often is the by-product of the practical approach of determining whether training (i.e., sensitivity, cross-cultural) might improve relationships between subcultures within a community. Such work can also contribute directly to policy development, because of its established credibility in the eyes of administrators and policymakers (Dessel, 2010; Nagda & Zuniga, 2003; Schoem, 2003).
Many programs for intergroup dialogue in communities have originated in or have been supported by academic institutions. Dessel (2010) explored the effects of an engagementtraining program in a public high school by examining the strained relations between members of the school’s Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual (LGB) community, their high school classmates, and the faculty and staff. Public schools have long been places of struggle for adolescents dealing with emerging identities. Although those attempting to accept and find acceptance for their sexual identity may band together for assistance and support, in many cases, lack of reliable faculty or administrative support often leaves such groups vulnerable.
Dessel’s (2010) study focuses on the context of prejudice in public school settings against LGB students and their parents. The study’s premise is that engaging teachers and students in intergroup dialogue about stressors and harassments LGB students encounter will foster improved public school teacher attitudes and behaviors toward LGB students and their parents. Dessel used an experimental mixed- methods field design to test the intervention.
Results concluded that participating in dialogues with LGB students and other faculty members facilitated teachers’ positive changes in feelings, attitudes, and enacted behaviors to support LGB student interests. This is one of many such studies employing a mixed- methods approach, which we find appropriate in most community research contexts.Articulating and
Confronting Ethical Challenges Within the Projects and Processes of Community Engagement
This section of our review draws on recent writings on applied/practical ethics, both within and beyond communication, to accomplish two things: first, to suggest a few ethical guidelines—formulated as dialectics—that must be confronted in engaged communitybased and conflict-oriented projects, and second, to ask the reader-investigator to stand back and reflect on the entire enterprise at the meta-level, ensuring that conscious treatment of ethics is woven into relevant projects. At the outset, we observe the distinction between “explicit” attention to ethics, as in studies of communication that draw directly on ethical theories and principles, and “implicit” discussions of ethics, as with much of the work under the heading of “social justice.” Very recently, scholars attempted to bridge these academic communities (see, e.g., Cheney et al., 2011). Beyond this distinction, we emphasize a broader ethics of intervention that is of particular importance for engaged scholarship: acute awareness of the need to avoid harm and implications of this overriding principle for research conceptualization, methodology, and conduct, sometimes including attention to related quasi-legal and legal implications in addition to ethical concerns.
An implicit ethical commitment, and often a statement of values (e.g., process-oriented neutrality with respect to key parties and their positions), has always existed in community (mediation) work. However, what we now see is a maturation and expansion of work on applied ethics in communication, where standards and theories (e.g., those of Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Buber, Rawls, Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Nussbaum) are applied and modified per empirical contexts (i.e., in the process of casuistic reasoning). This part of the chapter exemplifies that matured tradition. The principle of neutrality in alternative dispute resolution is central to this discussion and can be placed in conversation with explicit ethical positions, especially as they bear on various postures toward—and processes with—participants/ partners/clients. In this regard, it is important to trace the implications of an ethics of duty, ethics of rights/contract, ethics of outcomes, and ethics of virtue—all in contemporary, communication-sensitive ways.