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WHAT ROLE, IF ANY, SHOULD CLIFFORD GEERTZ’S ‘THICK
DESCRIPTION’ PLAY IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
The lesson of the master, like that of one or two contemporaries, is that the discipline of
ethnographic attention to the variety of human doings is primary. Describing thickly and
truthfully the real things which are there is the first, best duty of the human scientist and
intellectual.
(Inglis 2000, 26)
ABSTRACT
In this paper the author will attempt to outline the possible purposes of educational
research and to identify and define the two major methodologies within educational
research. Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ is encompassed in one of these
methodologies and this method of data collection and its usefulness to educational
research will be the focus of the paper.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of research is to generate knowledge either through descriptions,
explanations or generalizations. Based on the purpose of the research the researcher will
gather data. This data will then be analyzed. One type of data collection is termed ‘thick
description’ the purpose of which is to add specific understanding to a particular
situation.
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Although there is no doubt that the practice itself can add to the deeper understanding of
a particular subject in a particular time and place under specific circumstances, is the
research applicable in any other environment---is it generalizable to a wider research
field? The question posed in this paper is: does this type of specific data collection serve
the purpose of adding new understanding or knowledge to the field of education or is it
too limited in its scope to be of value?
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: Educational Research Methodologies
Research as the systematic exploration of an issue, must serve the purpose of adding
something new to existing knowledge in a field. Educational research lies within the
field of social science and is expected to generate knowledge for one of four reasons: for
the sake of itself, to test existing understanding, to inform decision and policy making, or
to improve practice. The knowledge generated (be it to describe, to increase
understanding, to predict, to improve decision making, or to better practice) is done so for
the purpose of describing, explaining or generalizing.
A basic element of generating new knowledge is data collection. The term data is used to
mean all information collected systematically in order to investigate a theory or question.
Data collected for educational research are usually concerned with understanding human
behavior in relation to issues about teaching and learning. Data can take a variety of
forms and are collected in relation to individuals, groups or institutions in order to
describe, compare, contrast, classify, analyze and interpret those relationships. The ways
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in which educational research (including data collection) may be conducted is based on
the goals and basic assumptions which underlie both researcher and project.
Research can be empirical with new or primary data gathered to answer the research
question or literature-based with secondary information derived from an analysis and
synthesis of existing literature and documents. It can also be a combination of several
types. The methods of collecting empirical data can be quantitative (objective, statistical,
nomothetic) or qualitative (subjective, descriptive, ideographic). Quantitative is used
when doing positivist research, when wanting to prove something or nonothetic, when
stating laws. The qualitative is a method of understanding situations, events and
ideographic meaning.
Data collection within the two methodologies differs. Quantitative researchers employ
tools such as surveys, documentary methods, observation, sociometry, experiments.
Qualitative methods of data collection include those of quantitative researchers but the
principles that guide the research are different for the focus is on the subject, the object or
development. Therefore, the tools may also include case studies, interviews, thick
description, etc.
Quantitative methodology has its roots in the positivist paradigm which means the
research often attempts to prove a hypothesis or to answer a question posed by the
researcher and is “based on theories that the researcher seeks to test” (Creswell 2003,
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119). A theory, says Creswell, is “an interrelated set of constructs (variables) formed into
propositions, or hypotheses, that specify the relationship among variables (typically in
terms of magnitude or direction)” (120). Creswell says that in quantitative studies a
theory appears at the beginning of the plan and is used deductively as a point to verify
rather than develop.
On the other hand, qualitative methodology is associated with many diverse methods of
research but is in contrast to quantitative methodology. It is an alternative to the
traditional positivism paradigm; therefore, the principles which underlie it are based on
the assumption that “the social world is always a human creation” unlike in quantitative
methodology where it is a discovery (Saratakos 1998, 46). The tools or methods of
qualitative methodology seek to capture the essence of life through understanding not
through measurement.
Qualitative research focuses on the quality of social life and tries to interpret human
activity rather than generalize about it. But this epistemology assumes that there is more
than one truth unlike the positivist paradigm. This idea is important as we move on to the
way in which research is conducted and the epistemology which underpins the qualitative
research process. According to Denzin and Lincoln in The Landscape of Qualitative
Research the process, qualitative or otherwise, should be divided into five phases: the
researcher as a multicultural subject; theoretical paradigms and perspectives; research
strategies; methods of collection and analysis; the art, practices and politics of
interpretation and presentation (Denzin and Lincoln 2003). This five phase process
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means that early on the researcher must identify the paradigms and perspectives which
guide his or her project. For the educational researcher who falls under the notions of the
sociologist, this means realizing that more than one truth exists as the subjects studied are
evolving themselves as well as creating the society in which they live. Qualitative
research is then the most appropriate methodology if one is considering education
through a sociologist’s eyes, and especially through an anthropologist’s eyes.
The following section will give the history of and attempt to define ‘thick description’
within the domain of qualitative research which will aid in the assessment of its
usefulness to educational research.
THE CENTRAL FOCUS: Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’
Anthropology, derived from the Greek meaning “human” or “person”, is the study of
humanity with an emphasis on the examination of context and cross-cultural
comparisons. Cultural anthropology grew up around the practice of ethnography which
is a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot
necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other.
Ethnographies study groups and/or cultures over a period of time. Ethnography, an
entirely fieldwork based research method, is the direct, first hand observation of daily
behavior where the researcher may even participate in the actual process as a participant
observer. Cultural phenomena is observed as it occurs real time and gives the researcher
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the worldview of his subjects. The goal of this type of research is to comprehend a
particular culture or group with research being completed using various methods;
however, the researcher is usually immersed within the group for an extended period of
time allowing for a more detailed collection of information.
According to Clifford Geertz, the role of the ethnographer is more or less to observe,
record, and analyze a culture. In his book The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz begins
by defining and explaining the role of anthropology in the study of culture. He uses the
words of Max Weber to exemplify his own view of culture: “Man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs,
and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science of law but an
interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1993, 5).
In an attempt to make sense of the webs of culture, Geertz uses a term he adopted from
the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In the book above, Geertz dedicates a chapter to the term
that he took from Ryle but popularized himself. It is in this chapter “Thick Description:
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” that Geertz attempts to clarify the definition,
validity and usefulness of the ethnographic form of data collection called thick
description. He weaves the definition and usefulness of thick description with criticism
of the method. First, the definition will be looked at and then the criticisms.
In brief, thick description is the detailed observation of a subject in a particular situation
and, according to Geertz, is necessary to understand cultural meaning. Geertz says that to
understand any strain of science one needs to look at what the practitioners do. In the
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case of social anthropology, he says, the practitioners “do” ethnography. He claims that
anthropology is a form of knowledge and understanding; ethnography will aid in
comprehending that form of knowledge. He says that although a technical definition of
what anthropologists do is possible (“establishing rapport, selecting informants,
transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on”),
ethnography is the intellectual effort of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1993, 6).
Geertz uses Ryle’s explanation of a wink to define thick description. Ryle explained that
without understanding of context, if someone winks, one does not know what that wink
means: attraction, secret communication, understanding, etc. As the context changes so
does the meaning of the wink. Geertz argues that this is true for all human behavior. A
thin description would be of the wink itself but a thick description would include the
context and meanings within the society and for the individual himself:
Two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an
involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two
movements are, as movements, identical . . . Yet the difference, however
unphotographical, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate
enough to have had the first taken for the second know. The winker is
communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way . . .
(Geertz 1993, 6)
Geertz claims that between the thin description (the action itself) and the thick (what and
why the boy winks within a context), lies the object of ethnography: “a stratified
hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks,
parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without
which they would not . . . in fact exist” (Geertz 1993, 7).
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He goes on to explain that “the point for now is only that ethnography is thick
description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced with---except when (as, of course, he
must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection---is a
multiplicity of complex conceptual structure, many of them superimposed upon or
knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which
he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render” (Geertz 1993, 10). Geertz
likens the job of an anthropologist (doing ethnography as he puts it) to reading an ancient,
foreign manuscript not through symbols of sound but through symbols of behavior.
According to Geertz the role of anthropology as a scientific strain is to understand
culture. Culture he says is public because meaning is public: “Not a power, something to
which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a
context, something within which they can be intelligibly---that is thickly---described”
(Geertz 1993, 14). Therefore, Geertz is saying that thick description is the means by
which culture can be described, understood and interpreted. It is in effect a form of data
collection but perhaps more than that.
Geertz says that a good interpretation of anything including culture must take us into the
heart of that which is being interpreted and if the interpretation takes us somewhere else
then it is something other than an interpretation of the original task: “A piece of
anthropological interpretation consists in: tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it
into an inspectable form . . . The ethnographer ‘inscribes’ the social discourse; he writes
it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own
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moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be
reconsulted” (Geertz 1993, 19).
He concludes his discussion on ethnographic description which is indeed thick
description with its four characteristics: “it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of is the
flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the
‘said’ of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms . . it is
microscopic” (Geertz 1993, 21).
Geertz then moves into the theory underpinning thick description. Although he believes
that theory in any interpretive discipline is difficult to articulate and assess, he says that
when beginning thick description one should not arrive with no theoretical base:
Although one starts any effort at thick description, beyond the obvious and
superficial, from a state of general bewilderment as to what the devil is going on--
-trying to find one’s feet---one does not start (or ought not) intellectually empty-
handed. Theoretical ideas are not created wholly anew in each study, as I have
said, they are adopted from other, related studies, and, refined in the process,
applied to new interpretive problems (Geertz 1993, 27).
For Geertz, thick description is the ultimate way in which to understand culture.
However, even he himself recognizes the limitations of the method. The criticism against
ethnography is that the observers’ presence may in itself contribute to results that are
inaccurate. This is because the observed subjects may act in a manner that is different
from norm due to the presence of the observer. Since the observed behavior is not usual
behavior, the derived results are false because it does not depict normal behavior:
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What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s
constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to---is obscured because
most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea or
whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is
directly examined . . . there is nothing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any
case inevitable. But it does lead to a view of anthropological research as rather
more of an observational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is
(Geertz 1993, 9).
Geertz says that anthropological writings “are themselves interpretations, and second and
third order ones to boot . . . They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are
‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’---the original meaning of fiction---not that they
are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments” (Geertz 1993, 15). He goes
on with not what could be a called a criticism but certainly what could be called a
limitation in terms of positivist thinking: “The line between mode of representation and
substantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in painting; and that fact
in turn seems to threaten the objective status of anthropological knowledge by suggesting
that its source is not social reality but scholarly artifice” (16). He claims that this threat
to the ethnographic account is hollow because the real purpose of the anthropologist is in
his ability to capture, carry home and clarify culture:
If ethnography is thick description and ethnographers those who are doing the
describing, then the determining question for any given example of it, whether a
field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized monograph, is whether it sorts winks
from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones (16).
Once Geertz has established a definition and the characteristics of ethnography and its
method, he goes on to address the issue of how to move from thick description to its
usefulness. He criticizes those theories which would indicate that it is possible to find the
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“essence of national societies, civilizations, great religions, or whatever summed up and
simplified in so-called ‘typical’ small towns and villages is palpable nonsense” (Geertz
1993, 22). The anthropologist does not study a village but “in” a village and the
methodological problem posed by the microscopic-ness of ethnography cannot be
resolved by imagining that a piece of the whole is indeed the whole. Geertz does not
truly provide an answer to this dilemma except to say that thick description must be taken
at face value and used to understand what it is meant to understand and not more or less
than that.
On the other hand, Geertz spends time criticizing those who would “bleach” human
behavior on the assumption that culture is merely a symbolic system and that by looking
at its elements and characterizing the system in a general way we can assume to
understand it. He says that instead “whatever, or wherever, symbol systems ‘in their own
terms’ may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events, not by arranging
abstracted entities into unified patterns” (Geertz 1993, 17).
Although Geertz chapter on thick description is useful in identifying the role and purpose
of anthropology, ethnography and thick description, the argument that he raised against
the methodology was alluded to but never answered specifically. Thus, in this paper I
will try to identify how useful thick description can actually be to educational research.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE RESEARCH
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According to Noel Gough in his article “Blank spots, blind spots, and methodological
questions,” research has varying definitions from experimentation and observation to
measurement and statistics to surveys and interviews. He compares the Oxford English
Dictionary definition to how researchers see themselves to the history of research
approaches. He says that “in education we perennially address the practical problem of
what should be taught and learned . . . where the emphasis is on making defensible
decisions in specific circumstances rather than on constructing theoretic generalizations
that are more universally applicable” (Gough 2002, 2).
Gough quotes Jon Wagner who claims that “ignorance is a better starting place than truth
for assessing usefulness of educational research.” He says that “educational researchers
often invoke truth and truthfulness-and related concepts such as validity and reliability-as
criteria for judging research” (Gough 2002, 3). Whether from ignorance or from an
assumption, education and research must begin somewhere.
Determining the effectiveness of research one must take into consideration the purpose of
the research as well as the position and context of the subject and the researcher. As
mentioned under the section entitled “Background and Context”, perspective will
influence how one sees the truth which in turn will affect the approach taken to data
collection and interpretation. I will use the criteria from Mike Wallace and Louise
Poulson as a starting point to identify the effectiveness of educational research and then
apply this model to Geertz’s method of data collection.
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In their book Educational Leadership & Management Wallace and Poulson begin their
discussion by defining research terminology. Their definition of knowledge will be
particularly useful to us. Firstly, they distinguish between three kinds of knowledge:
theoretical, research and practice. Theoretical knowledge involves a theory based on
claims about the social world and is developed through reflection on that world.
Research knowledge is claims about the social world supported by data collected and
analyzed through a systematic investigation. Practice knowledge is the interpretation and
evaluation of practice by practitioners which is developed through taking action. Their
diagram of the tools for thinking and the three kinds of knowledge is included below.
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Beyond the aspect of knowledge, they cover the notion that intellectual projects are
produced for the purpose of increasing knowledge. They define these types of projects as
“a scheme of enquiry to generate the kinds of knowledge that will achieve specified
purposes” (Wallace and Poulson 2003, 23). They provide five different projects for
studying aspects of the social world as can be seen in the second table provided. As they
note, the source of the five projects can be found in Bolam’s work (1999). The categories
and definitions of each include:
o Knowledge-for-understanding – attempting to develop theoretical and research
knowledge from a disinterested standpoint towards an aspect of the social world, in
order to understand, rather than improve, practice and policy and their underlying
ideologies;
o Knowledge-for-critical evaluation – attempting to develop theoretical and research
knowledge from an explicitly negative standpoint towards practice and policy, in
order to criticize and expose the prevailing ideology underlying existing practice and
policy and to argue why it should be rejected, and sometimes advocating
improvement according to an alternative ideology;
o Knowledge-for-action – attempting to develop theoretical and research knowledge
with practical application from a positive standpoint towards practice and policy, in
order to inform improvement efforts within the prevailing ideology;
o Instrumentalism – attempting to impart practice knowledge and associated skills
through training and consultancy from a positive standpoint towards practice and
policy, in order directly to improve practice within the prevailing ideology;
o Reflexive action – attempting to develop and share practitioners’ own practice
knowledge from a constructively self-critical standpoint towards their work, in order
to improve their practice either within the prevailing ideology or according to an
alternative ideology.
(Wallace and Poulson 2003,
23)
Wallace and Poulson then look at each of the projects in terms of the possible rationale,
mode of working, value stance, questioning about the social world, theoretical
knowledge, published literature produced, and the target audience. The authors’ purpose
in doing so is to determine which types of knowledge are drawn upon in creating
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literature. They give the example of education being an applied field of enquiry saying
that the authors of such literature would take concepts, models and theories from various
social science disciplines often making them applicable to improve practice.
I will use the Wallace and Poulson intellectual project model included below to look at
the extent to which Geertz’s thick description as a method of data collection is useful as a
generator of knowledge. Using this model one will have a tool by which to measure the
usefulness of thick description to educational research.
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USING THE MODEL
If we look at Wallace and Poulson’s first category, knowledge-for-understanding, we see
that this intellectual project has no underlying objective except to increase understanding.
The purpose is merely to find out “what happens and why?” (24). This type of intellectual
project is disinterested towards policy and practice but may be used at a later date to
inform another intellectual project which could for example have the purpose of
improving practice.
Ethnography in its purest form fits into the knowledge-for-understanding intellectual
project. Although as Geertz says one does not arrive at a project with no theoretical base,
the purpose and mindset is one of openness to the situation without a preconceived notion
which would guide the research methodology and data collection. As Wallace and
Poulson note themselves, the published literature produced may be a reference in the
associated policy literature for a target audience of policy makers, academics and
practitioners on advanced education programs (24).
The policy maker would need to generalize from the thick description to a wider group to
make the particular instance valuable to him or her. The academic in this situation would
be the one who would obviously stand to gain the most from the thick description
because he or she could use his or her own materials to match against the thick
description of another researcher which could then make the information transferable and
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possibly even generalizable. The practitioner, on the other hand, might find the
information valuable to gain insight into a similar situation that he or she is experiencing
but should obviously keep in mind that not all information can be transferred.
Geertz says about this form of research methodology that the purpose is not to change
anyone or anything but merely to increase understanding of a cultural phenomenon which
may at a later stage be generalizable or transferable to another intellectual project (Geertz
1993). In this area thick description as a data collection method is paramount because if
the researcher does not include enough information the project loses its transferability
and thus its wider usefulness. Whether Geertz was working in Indonesia, Bali or
Morocco, he was always attempting to record for the sake of itself the data of the culture
but the data would then be used by himself or others to draw conclusions:
ln the remoter provinces of Morocco and Indonesia I have wrestled with the same
questions other social scientists have wrestled with in more central locations--for
example, how comes it that men's most importunate claims to humanity are cast
in the accents of group pride? and with about the same conclusiveness. One can
add a dimension--one much needed in the present climate of size-up-and-solve
social science; but that is all. There is a certain value, if you are going to run on
about the exploitation of the masses in having seen a Javanese sharecropper
turning earth in a tropical downpour or a Moroccan tailor embroidering kaftans by
the light of a twenty-watt bulb.
(Geertz 1993, 19)
In the next project entitled knowledge-for-critical evaluation, policy makers would be
using the thick description to generalize in some way. However, thick description cannot
be conducted in its purest form as the underlying purpose of this type of intellectual
project is to critically evaluate policy and practice by asking the typical question “what is
wrong with what happens and why?” (24). This type of intellectual project can be seen in
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the work of Holliday, Hyde, and Kullman (2004) in their book Intercultural
Communication: and Advanced Resource Book.
The authors in this intellectual project have drawn upon their thick descriptions to
generalize and make assumptions about cultural diversity. They attempt to pull together
various situations through thick descriptions analyzing the various responses to
situations. Although for the most part the disciplines relate directly to the substantive
knowledge required for successful intercultural communication, there is also a research
methodology, focused on bracketing, thick description and emergent data, which comes
directly from mainstream qualitative research (Holliday, Hyde and Kullman 2004, 49).
Holliday, Hyde and Kullman have used the data of thick description to explore cultural
issues. They present the thick descriptions, deconstruct them and then generalize out
from them. They describe thick description which is important for the understanding of
their intentions:
Thick description as a term comes from anthropology and qualitative research and
involves two elements:
o deriving meaning from a broad view of social phenomena which pieces
together different, interconnected perspectives
o exploration, in which sense is made from an ongoing emergence of social
phenomena, which may not immediately seem to connect, and which may
indeed be unexpected (8).
In their first chapter they look at the concept of identity through case studies. A possible
example of thick description as a data collection method is the case study, but are they
the same? In a case study a researcher uses thick description to collect the data about the
subject and his/her environment. Thick description is a “matter of degree” according to
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Gomm, Hammersley and Foster (2000, 101). How much of a description should be
included must be considered. All data collected cannot be useful; however, enough to
establish transferability must be included to render the research useful:
The person who wishes to make a judgment of transferability needs information
about both contexts to make that judgment well. Now an inquirer cannot know all
the contexts to which someone may wish to transfer working hypotheses; one
cannot reasonably expect him or her to indicate the range of contexts to which
there might be some transferability. But it is entirely reasonable to expect an
inquirer to provide sufficient information about the context in which an inquiry is
carried out so that anyone else interested in transferability has a base of
information appropriate to the judgment. We shall call that appropriate base of
information a ‘thick description’ (40).
It is important to remember that the accounts given by Holliday, Hyde and Kullman are
in third person which means that the authors have interpreted the actual words of their
subjects. From these accounts the authors expect that readers will be able to generalize
out; and in Section C there is an invitation for readers to bring their own cultural milieux
into research activities (xvi).
Theme 1 on identity is set out in the same way that the other themes are constructed: title,
aim, case study, deconstruction, analysis and recommendations (or generalizations) based
on the analysis. The final section in each unit focuses on what is needed (inferred from
the deconstruction of the case study) for successful communication.
Important to their suggestions is the notion that essentialist and reductive views are the
quick fix to understanding culture and which are the underlying causes of sexism, racism
and otherization:
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Essentialism in the way we see people and culture is the same essentialism which
drives sexism and racism. The equivalent condition, culturism, similarly reduces
andotherizes the individual and underlies many of the problems in the world
today. By otherization we mean imagining someone as alien and different to ‘us’
in such a way that ‘they’ are excluded form ‘our’ ‘normal’, ‘superior’ and
‘civilized’ group. Indeed, it is by imagining a foreign Other in this way that ‘our’
group can become more confident and exclusive. Essentialism therefore needs to
be defined strongly, recognized and fought against wherever it is found (Holliday,
Hyde and Kullman 2004, 3).
Therefore, the authors try to distinguish between the essentialism and nonessentialism
through the case studies. These case studies are created from actual experience but have
been edited to protect the subjects. The authors do not feel this is an issue since the
readers experience of identifying with the subject should be the same as if the study were
accurately presented.
It will suffice for the purpose of argument to describe one unit within the first theme of
identity. The case study has been conducted on a young Iranian woman who has come to
a European city to participate in an international convention on food processing. The
problem identified by the researcher through the thick description is that Parisa’s
European colleagues “saw her in a particular way which just wasn’t her at all” (Holliday,
Hyde and Kullman 2004, 6). The case study goes on to describe how Parisa’s colleagues
might unknowingly show surprise when Parisa was creative, assertive or articulate or
they called her ‘Westernized’ and ‘not a real Iranian’.
Parisa was able to invite three of her colleagues to see a film showing at an Iranian film
festival. One of the female characters in the film was an independent, successful career
woman which surprised Parisa’s colleagues who admitted thinking that Muslim women
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were supposed to be subservient. Later, another Iranian joined the convention. This
particularly pleased Parisa because “he was educated, worldly, urbane, well-dressed and
also extremely articulate” (Holliday, Hyde and Kullman 2004, 7).
The deconstruction of the thick description identifies the issues of being stereotyped and
otherized based on media images and a lack of examples. These issues the authors say
speak to the multi-facetness of Other people and societies and address the way people
talk which is not always intended to be offensive but at times can be unintentionally
offensive. Parisa’s experiences along with the others recorded in this unit are the piecing
together of different, interconnected perspectives. The authors claim that this is the
“principle of discovery implicit in thick description---seeing the complexity of a social
event by looking at it from different aspects” (Holliday, Hyde and Kullman 2004, 8)
Although the generalizations generate questions for this author in terms of the validity of
the conclusions drawn (what about other elements of Parisa’s character; is she naturally
defensive; is she overly sensitive; how can we assume that other Iranians feel the same as
she does?), these case studies (light forms of thick description) for the purpose of
informational knowledge looked at from various perspectives demonstrate the usefulness
of thick description not alone but when combined with other thick descriptions. Clearly
conclusions can and were drawn when many case studies were considered.
The last three categories of the intellectual project can be considered together in a group
that this author will call knowledge for an action-based objective. Although knowledge
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for understanding could be considered an intellectual action as is knowledge for critical
evaluation, the last three categories (knowledge-for-action, instrumentalism, reflexive
action) have the purpose of informing to improve or actually improving practice whether
it be of oneself (reflexive) or of others (action, instrumentalism). Therefore, an
underlying motive exists and knowledge for the sake of itself is no longer possible.
Stephen Gough writes in Learning to Read Critically in Educational Leadership and
Management about a Caribbean field study funded by the UK government’s Department
for International Development. In the chapter “International development education:
managing change in countries”, Gough looks at the effectiveness of the study in terms of
Bolam’s model---the same one modified by Wallace and Poulson which is being used as
our model for usefulness here. Steve Gough and the research team (a consortium from the
University of Bath, King’s College and an environmental NGO, Field Studies Council)
have produced an intellectual project based on the knowledge for action aspect but as
they note the project runs into the other categories. But how useful and practical is thick
description in this type of intellectual project?
Gough clearly states that the Caribbean study falls under the category of knowledge-for-
action because of the underlying position of those funding the project and the purpose of
conducting the research:
. . . the research was centrally concerned with the intellectual project of
‘knowledge-for-action’. Taking a focus on a particular region, it aimed to
produce relevant, useful and applicable results which might enable the successful
management of a particular educational initiative by a particular organization at a
particular time (though this does not, as we shall see, entirely rule out some
subsequent generalization to other contexts). It was expected that, if successful,
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the research would contribute to social goals judged desirable, but selecting,
defining and prioritizing these goals was considered to be the prerogative of the
sponsor, the DFID (Gough 2003, 177).
The goal of the research project was to “make recommendations to the DFID on
managing a process of ‘mainstreaming environmental education into its global
development programmes” (Gough 2003, 171); therefore, Gough and the research team
had pre-designated institutional goals which focused the project including the
management of educational resources which in turn ruled out many questions which
might otherwise have been critical to the study (172).
The notion of preconceived purpose and ideas in and of itself goes against the purest
form of Geertz’s thick description which can be informed but must be guided by the
cultural information discovered not the asking of questions based on the research answers
required. However, Gough and the team did use a combination of case study and
problem-based methodology which could be considered a form of thick description.
They discuss the pros and cons of this type of data collection.
Gough says that the research team hoped to “provide qualitative data which, used with
appropriate skill and sensitivity to context, might subsequently facilitate purposive
actions by educational managers to achieve specified improvements in a variety of real
educational settings” (180). This they intended to achieve through both case study and
PBM. The difference between the two methodologies is that PBM focuses on a problem
while case study focuses on an instance; however, Gough contends that the two
methodologies overlap because both the problem and the instance overlap. Although
26
qualitative methods were considered the most effective tools for data collection the
drawback (as with thick description) was that “one cannot generalize from the findings of
this study directly to any sixth Caribbean country” (182).
Due to the time constraints and the purposive nature of the inquiry (or any intellectual
project from the last three categories of Wallace and Poulson’s model unless perhaps it
was a very long-term project), thick description as a data collection tool lacks the
practicality and generalizability necessary to conduct research to implement action be it
to inform or improve practice. Gough realizes the difficulty of time and financial
constraints even with the quicker forms of data collection he and the team employ:
Costs in terms of finance, time, physical resources and the patience of those being
researched were an issue. The overall research contract had been won through a
competitive tendering process, and the budget was constrained. What is more, it
was to be expected that the research would not necessarily be welcome among
some of those individuals and groups being researched. No researcher could be
entirely happy about this state of affair, since it suggests that what the researcher
actually did was at least as much a product of institutional pragmatism as of a
detached, critical scoping process (172).
Gough and the research team combined case study and other qualitative methods of data
collection to make recommendations to the commission regarding the best procedure to
employ. However, as Gough indicates above, it was nor practical or valid to use thick
description alone to make generalizable or transferable recommendations. This could be
true in any action-based project unless the scope of the project was specific and limited to
the situation in which the thick description occurred.
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An example of this type of project might be in a specific school where analysis or
improvement is desired; however, the researcher would probably use the thick description
combined with another specific example for comparison in order to draw conclusions or
make recommendations. As with the above project, many interviews were conducted and
the results were compared. One observation was not sufficient to make recommendations
for improvement. Informational knowledge for the sake of itself would not lead to action
but would need to be combined with other information to be of value. When considering
the usefulness of case studies and thick description, of particular interest is the cross
section entitled main target audience for published literature where we can see how
policy makers, academics, and practitioners on advanced education programmes might
use a case study to inform their everyday practices.
CONCLUSIONS
Thick description is a method of data collection whereby specific data is collected by a
researcher from within a culture on that culture. Its aim is to gather information for the
sake of itself. To do the data collection method justice, we must consider it by degrees, at
least two. Examples of the purest form of thick description can be found in the work of
Geertz when he goes to places such as Bali or Morocco and lives amongst the peoples
there in order to collect information on those peoples, the purpose being merely to
increase understanding of the culture. In terms of Wallace and Poulson’s adaptation of
Bolam’s model, thick description adds new knowledge for the sake of itself in a pure (but
not without fault-as discussed earlier) sense and can be useful in educational research
28
simply to increase understanding when no action is necessary. However, it can also be
useful when paired with other research to draw conclusions which can then be used for
action-based purposes be it to evaluate policy or to improve practice.
The case study could be considered a watered-down form of thick description and when
used to support claims as in the work of Holliday, Hyde, and Kullman, can be valuable as
supporting details. Even in the work of Gough, case study and problem-based study was
paramount as a data collection method to provide the necessary understanding from
which to draw conclusions and recommendations. Whether for intellectual purposes
(critical analysis) or for action purposes (improvement), the case study is useful in adding
depth to research. It certainly must be said that whether in case study, problem-based
study or thick description a necessary element is enough data recorded within the study to
make the information transferable or generalizeable whether the study is for the sake of
itself or for action.
The research process includes several different stages and various authors have
represented this process with diverse models which illustrate the stages of the process.
Several of these models have been included in the appendix. When looking at the
process it becomes clear that the initial moments of any research design include
establishing a problem, identifying the conceptual framework, creating a research
statement or hypothesis, deciding on methods of investigation and appropriate data
gathering techniques, recording and analyzing the data and finally writing the report.
These processes can be linear or circular moving back and forth between the stages and
29
steps. At the beginning of the process if the problem is unknown, thick description could
be a useful tool.
Thick description as the gathering of all data from a subject or subjects could also be a
way of generating questions when the problem is still unclear. From the data collected
the researcher could then identify a problem and perhaps decide to determine if the issue
is generalizable in broader terms. In this way thick description could be particularly
useful to the research process.
On the other hand, the data itself can be lengthy and much of it can be irrelevant to the
study. The whole of the thick description could actually be useless if not managed. In
the final report, thick description would be so specific and lengthy that its actual
significance to a wider body of knowledge could be lost. Therefore, thick description
could be considered a useful way of generating questions and even a way of generating a
research statement or a hypothesis. In addition it could be useful when compared with
other thick descriptions to draw conclusions, analyze or make recommendations.
On its own as data collection the nature of the data collected could actually be rendered
less than useful in many cases because at the end the data is so specific and time
consuming to gather that the knowledge gained from it brings into question its value as a
research tool. In quantitative terms thick description may seem uselessly time consuming
and valueless due to its overall data. The positivist would see the data as far too specific
30
from which to draw conclusions and as a research tool it would not be replicable as
indicated by Gough:
There are clearly problems with such an approach [naturalistic inquiry] if one
considers that a research study should be replicable. Not only were the interviews
impossible to replicate in practice (because of the impossibility of assembling the
same individuals in the same places more than once), they were impossible to
replicate in principle, since it would not have been possible to brief another
researcher to conduct the same interview in exactly the same way (Gough 2006,
184).
The action needed in the positivist’s mind must be discovered which, to the positivist, is
the role of the researcher. On the other hand, the qualitative researcher sees culture as
something created and observation of this creation is paramount to the understanding of
it. Thick description, in its purest form or in the watered-down version, can add
understanding to the quantitative or is valid in and of itself for the qualitative researcher.
Geertz would argue that what the positivist does could be considered pointless:
It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that
we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the
scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers. It is not
worth it, as Thoreau said, to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar
(Geertz 1993, 16).
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