Handbook of emergent methods

Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy & Leavy, Patricia (Eds.). (2008). New York: Guilford.

Introduction. Pushing on the methodological boundaries: The growing need for emergent methods within and across the disciplines. (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, pp. 1-16).

The authors defined paradigms as "models of knowledge building that provide templates for studying social reality" and "consist of the basic concepts and ideas by which a given discipline views the word." (p. 2).

They argued that social change promotes theoretical and technological innovations and at the same time technological innovations provide the impetus for asking new questions and revealing new realities. They noted that among the researchers who use these emergent methods, they face to negotiating their identities of both insiders and outsiders: They are insiders as they know research processes, yet outsiders because they are not familiar with methods and questions they ask. They asked:

"If I conduct mu research as an "outsider," will I be overly identifying with the other's perspective? If I conduct my research as an "insider," will I lose my ability to challenge my disciplinary perspective?" (p. 4)

The authors noted that thus the development of innovative methods has occurred congruently with increased scholarship on reflexivity. In their term, reflexivity is "the practice of actively locating oneself within the research process, including the representation stage. Reflexive practice seeks to minimize the unintentional effects of power in the research process through attention to the ways that biography, authorship, and textual representations mediate the knowledge-building process, to work within an emergent method and to successfully negotiate insider and outsider status require a highly reflexive process" (p. 4)

The authors justify emerging methods as a respond to social change and our progress in understanding the social world. While emphasizing legitimizing and revealing new methods, they do not limit to specific methods or dividing them into QUAL or QUAN. Instead they asked questions about hybridity of methods. In particular, they asked about arts-based methods:" when dealing with the visual arts and other art-driven methods, how can words be transformed into images and vice versa?" (10). They also criticize lack of training program of emerging methods. What appears to be the most challenging in the era of emerging methods is epistemological justification. The authors noted:

"More than anything else, emergent methods are about advancing our understanding of the human condition. These new approaches--often initially criticized and even feared by those who feel more comfortable with conventional ways of knowing and traditional criteria for judging the usefulness of research (traditionally referred to as validity and reliability)--challenge our very conceptions of knowledge, including who creates it, what counts as knowledge, how it is to be disseminated and to whom, and how authenticity and trustworthiness can be achieved and evaluated." (p. 12)