Problem selection in educational research: some connections between theory and practice.

Presenter: David Nance,
University of Melbourne

Abstract:

A conventional view of educational research has been that the choice of topics is largely determined by the researchers' theoretical commitments. More recent studies have shown that various social factors, such as professional socialisation and funding agencies, also have an influence on problem selection. However, all such influences are external to individuals, and this paper argues that personal experiences are an important influence in determining what researchers define as problematic. There are many aspects of researchers' "personal realities", often developed long before they were professionally trained, which have consequences for their research work. The personally real and problematic may often become the starting point for scientific inquiry. Personal experience has an influence on educational researchers because they take "role distance". That is, people do not always live up to all the prescriptions allocated to their position - there is a gap between role obligation and role performance. Individual role-conceptions are formed only partially within the present organisational setting. Individual ideas about occupational roles are influenced by many other personal factors, such as childhood experiences, values and personality characteristics. The educational researchers interviewed in the biographical case studies that constitute the major part of this research have confirmed that personal reality has been a very significant factor in the choice of their research topics. Many of these researchers have felt quite lonely and isolated, particularly early in their life. This has led to a form of "marginality", which in turn has led to a research interest in educational inequality.

Paper:

Introduction:
Foci of attention in scientific work and how they change have been long-standing problems in the history and philosophy of science. Among philosophers of science, Karl Popper has been concerned with the problem in a long series of books and papers at least since his Logik der Forschung (1935) - see the translation in its second edition, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).

Both reflecting and deepening the renewed interest in this problem is Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn joins Popper in a major concern with "the dynamic process by which scientific knowledge is acquired rather than with the logical structure of the products of scientific research" (Kuhn, 1970b, p.1). Given that concern, both Kuhn and Popper emphasise, "as legitimate data, the facts and also the spirit of actual scientific life" (Kuhn, 1970b, p.1), and "an analysis of the development of scientific knowledge must take account of the way science has actually been practiced" (Kuhn, 1970b, p.4). Central to this kind of inquiry, for Kuhn, is an understanding of "what problems (scientists) will undertake", and "it should be clear that the explanation must, in the final analysis, be psychological or sociological" (Kuhn, 1970b, p.21).

Over a period of many years scientists have occasionally stated that finding research problems is far more difficult than finding their answers. Aubrey in the seventeenth century, Darwin in the nineteenth century and Merton in the twentieth century have all attested to this fact (Merton, 1959, Introduction, p.ix). Despite Merton stating in 1959 that little is known about the processes that lead scientists to find problems it is only relatively recently that sociologists have begun to accept that problem choice must be a central problem in studies of scientific development (Zuckerman, 1978; Gieryn, 1978).

Although some recent studies focus on significant themes across disciplines (eg, Becher, 1989), the bulk of sociological studies on the scientific community have restricted their discussions to basic research in experimental sciences (eg, Hagstrom,1965; Hill, 1979). Only a relatively few studies have concentrated on influences in the social sciences. This paper examines various influences on social science research, and in particular educational research.

A conventional view, inculcated in the training of newcomers to science, is that scientists' choice of problems is determined by theoretical commitments. However, sociological studies have shown that various social factors also have an influence on problem selection eg. Merton, 1973, Gaston, 1978. Some influences are external to the social system of science: eg, funding agencies. Others are internal influences: eg, the normative structure and the reward system of science (including gatekeeping structures, competition, the Matthew Effect, age and gender), research networks, the power structure, ethics and professional socialisation. Social structure has been viewed as being all-determining. However, all these influences are external to individuals, and this paper will argue that personal experience is an important influence in determining what social scientists define as problematic. Personal experience has been neglected in past research on problem selection. There are many aspects of social scientists' personal reality, often developed long before they were professionally trained, which have consequences for scientific work. The personally real may often become the starting point for scientific inquiry.

Polanyi's (1958) distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness is important to this paper, which assumes a strong connection between personal meaning and research work. For some part of any sociological work is started by sociologists' attempts to explore some of their own most deeply personal experiences. Some part of sociologists' efforts to know the social world is an effort to understand themselves: their experiences in their social world and their relationship to it. This has a bearing on the sources of sociological research. Not all parts of the social world are of equal interest or importance to sociologists, and they focus their attention upon it selectively.

Alvin Gouldner's (1971) discussion on "reality" forms the very heart of this research. The research explores the notion that anything sociologists define as "real" will shape their work importantly. Sociologists, like others, impute "reality" to certain things in their social world; they believe, sometimes with focal and sometimes with only subsidiary awareness, that the world has a certain character. According to Gouldner there are two kinds of "reality" that are part of sociologists' lives. One consists of "role realities", the things they learn as sociologists; these include the "facts" established by previous researches. Those imputations that sociologists make about the factuality of beliefs based on research tend to become part of their reality, part of their focal awareness as sociologists. Reality also consists of conceptions of the "personally real". These are aspects of the social world to which sociologists will, like those who are not sociologists, impute reality because of their personal experiences: because of what they have seen, heard, been told, or read. Many parts of personal reality have been developed long before sociologists were professionally trained. While the personal reality of sociologists is every bit as real to them as the facts they have acquired through sociological research, the sociologist qua sociologist is not supposed to acknowledge them. Imputations about the world that are part of their personal reality may therefore sink into their subsidiary awareness. But this doesn't mean that they don't have consequences for their work as sociologists. "In practice, the sociologist's role realities and his (sic) personal realities interpenetrate and mutually influence one another" (Gouldner, 1971, p.42).

The imputedly real includes aspects of "personal reality" as well as "role reality" and is a special force in structuring the perception of sociologists and shaping their research. This research confirms Gouldner's belief that "the personally real and problematic often enough becomes the starting point for systematic inquiry", and he adds that "there is no scientific reason this should not be so" (Gouldner, 1971, p.45).

In one of the few studies that have researched the realities of social research Platt (1976) found some factors in the private lives of scientists that had influenced research choice. In a very small number of cases the research was truly autobiographical in spirit; "more commonly the interest was less personal, although it still arose from initially non-academic interests" (Platt, 1976, p.114). Another book that gives some insight into the affect of biography on problem selection is Shipman's The Organisation and Impact of Social Research (1976). One Australian book, in the same style as Shipman's but with a wider collection, is Bell and Encel's Inside the Whale (1978). Here are included ten personal accounts of social research written by researchers who had conducted social research in Australia. In one extremely rare Australian attempt to discover where the research questions come from Anderson (1986) asked researchers engaged in work on youth about the origin of their studies. Nearly half his sample said that the origin was their own concern with a real-world problem.

In seeking an explanation for the diversity in educational research in Australia individual researchers have been interviewed in this research to determine the reasons why they have chosen their particular topics for investigation. It is believed that Australian researchers in the sociology of education (like other researchers) do not sharply distinguish between their activities as social researchers and the rest of their lives, and the research draws on the personal accounts of several researchers in the field to ascertain the importance of personal realities for research direction. Personal experience has an influence on social scientists because they take role distance. A person limits the degree to which a role is embraced because of society's understanding of people as multiple-role-performers. It is in manifestations of role distance that an individual's personal reality is to be found.

Goffman (1972) explains that people do not always live up to all the prescriptions allocated to their position - there is a gap between role obligation and role performance, "a wedge between the individual and his {sic] role, between doing and being" (Goffman, 1972, p.95). For Goffman individuals limit the degree to which they embrace a "situated role" because of society's understanding of them as multiple-role-performers rather than as persons with a particular role.

The concept of role distancing has been strengthened by other observations (e.g. Turner, 1976) that there is a declining tendency to locate the self in institutional roles.
By accepting the position that a personal dimension can be introduced into role conception and performance via the concept of role distance, one can study the relative importance of "role realities" and "personal realities" (as defined by Gouldner, 1971, pp.40-45) on problem selection in the social sciences.

Taking role distance allows social scientists to impose their own expectations and conceptions on roles and to modify role performance according to their own unique personal experiences. Things that are "personally real" will interact with the "role realities" of social scientists, and together they will form a unique approach to research problems. What that approach will be can only be determined by a biographical analysis of each individual social scientist. As Corrigan explains,

Sociologists seem to claim that they became interested in topics because they read the work of other sociologists. It is true that other people's work has an effect upon the way in which they choose a research problem; but the main set of reasons for choice is to be found in the biography of the researcher. (Corrigan,1979, p.4)

Methodology:
Data were collected by means of unstructured interviews with sociologists working in the area of schooling and performance in Australia. They are well-known researchers in their field. The sample has no claim to representativeness. The interviews were recorded on tape with the permission of the respondents. Each interview lasted from three to four hours.

Many of the respondents expressed surprise at the conclusion of their interview at some of the influences that had surfaced during discussion - things they have never thought of before which obviously had had a bearing on their research choices. Three respondents asked for a copy of the tapes so that they could reflect further on some of their answers. Some respondents initially only considered intellectual interests as having any bearing on their problem selections and began early discussions in a way that suggested that this was the way it "ought to be".

CASE STUDY ONE: Sally
Sally is a lecturer in a university and initially trained as a teacher. She is very well known throughout Australia for her research work on teenage girls. After school teaching for several years Sally returned to further undergraduate studies where she was influenced by three lecturers who were vitally interested in the treatment received by deprived groups in schools. In later studies she became impressed by reciprocal interaction theories such as phenomenology and symbolic interactionism and these theories related to deprived groups were a very significant influence on her academic work. These intellectual factors were certainly an important influence on her selection of problems for later research - as were social factors such as career pressure, fashion, stimulus from Faculty colleagues, conferences and research networks. However, an examination of earlier life experiences reveals many other, more significant, influences. This researcher has concentrated on girls and women, and prior to 1970 they had not been popular research topics. In the early 1970s it needed very independent, capable women to break though the prejudice surrounding this area.

Sally's previous research includes a study on the influence of a national women's magazine on girls' educational aspirations, a study on parents' attitudes to girls' education and a study on equal opportunity in schools. Sally completed a PhD thesis on sex role orientation in adolescent girls.

Sally completed a major study on girls for a PhD because of her desire to gain permanent tenure as a lecturer. She has been lecturing for many years and sees her inability to gain tenure being connected with her choice of research topics eg, discrimination against women in Australian universities. Sally's university Faculty encourages reputable research to the extent that she is aware of what is risky research for career advancement. Sally considered that the 'climate' had changed and it was a risk worth taking to establish this new, important area of research.

Sally is one researcher who has kept a specific field of interest over a long period of time and could be labelled a missionary.

... just analysing why I've done what I've done, and done some of those unpopular things that I've done, I have a feeling that I must fall into the category of teacher labelled missionary. That is, I want to - find out, because I want to teach or alter, or otherwise change - that's what I think really, has been an underlying assumption I've made about what I do. Initially I started research in this area because I thought it had to be done, somebody ought to push it - push the barrow. So I chose girls as my topic of study.

In formulating my research I was aware of working on behalf of my own, vulnerable group. I do have a commitment to a particular ideology which may prejudice my approach to research. I think I have a commitment to an ideology that both men and women should be able to choose their roles - have individual freedom of choice about what they want to do. That's altered everything I've asked, in all the research I've done.

I've always been a feminist and I'm also very argumentative about injustice, or what I see as injustice. And I'm intolerant of the self-centredness of men about the education system. I don't know that that's really an answer because I've used the systems that there are. I mean I worked myself up as a teacher and conformed, and I've worked myself up as a student and conformed. But I think at the back of my mind, I've always believed that the situation's wrong - that I've known so many competent women, there's got to be some answer for the way things are. And that probably stems right back to Mum and my aunts and so I could say that's why I did it.

A significant factor in my childhood that has had an impact on later research thinking and developed an independent attitude was the strong influence of family members. I never doubted that women were capable of doing anything. Mother was a bookkeeper and my strongest memory of her is as the full-time organiser in the Red Cross during the war. She was a partner in Dad's building firm too. Mother really had things at her fingertips. I don't think she was ever very feminist and yet she was a competent woman. You know she was never complaining about the rewards that women got for their work, or anything like that.

I also had a number of very competent aunts (father's sisters) - one of them ran a pub in the city and during the first world war she'd run a hospital ship. She was an administrator, born and bred, obviously. There were dad's other sisters - they were tough cookies, you know. They were all big-boned, I imagine as I am, and strong women. We didn't have any delicate ways in the family. So we never thought of females as being someone you should help. And, I always thought you could do things. Like when my sister and I were young we did things that a lot of boys wouldn't be asked to do - like digging and moving large objects like boats and things like that. I guess, you know, at the time it never occurred to me that life was any different for anyone else. But looking back now I think that those factors about the family must have made me less conscious of the normal womanly attitude that you're weaker and you have to ask for help. I think those influences - you don't realise how they affect your attitude to doing things.

Having some very competent sisters and a very competent wife my father knew women could do anything. I think father's pretty significant, because if father treats you like a bit of china and plays up to you sexually, as that's your role in life - sexual object, you tend to look for that in other men; and Dad never did that. 'Sal get up on the top of that roof and clean up the gutter for me up there, will you?' and this sort of thing was nothing to Dad! - and I never thought about it either!

An independent character was a valuable asset for someone contemplating research on girls and although this independence was fostered by family members and school friends to model oneself on there were also other factors at play. Although I was a robust girl something happened to me that according to all the theories probably makes me more independent. When I was about seven I had an antrum operation, and it didn't heal properly. And I got blocked antrums again and I had to have the operation again. And so this time they decided that it was the damp coastal climate and they sent me up - above a thousand feet, to a distant relative who lived in the country - where I was the only child and the nearest aged person in the family was about fifteen. And they were miles from anywhere. It was a tiny little country school. I've never been so unhappy in all my life. But, I depended very, very, much on my own resources. I'd spend the whole day away - I'd go out with my nasturtium sandwiches and take them miles into the bush and sit down by myself and construct fairy tales around me, you know. And I think, just reading the research about kids who have an experience that isolates them from their friends, there's no doubt that was a significant factor to me. It was - oh, I can only remember the unhappiness of it. But it must have made me less dependent on relationships and kids (my friends), I think!

An independent spirit was clearly evident at primary school. I did not enjoy Primary School - I was always in disgrace! At one stage I can remember - I think it's quite clever now, looking back on it! - I managed to avoid sewing lessons for a whole term. The teacher didn't know I was in the class - because I never went into it at the beginning. I didn't like sewing, you see; so I just used to go home. It was easy to go home from the top of the school ground and I used to go to the bedroom and read. And my mother was often out in the afternoon, so she didn't know. Oh - terrible disgrace.

And then I was always talking. And talking was the big deal - you weren't supposed to be talking in primary school. So I was always being sent outside for talking. All I can remember about my primary school years is getting into trouble .... it was terrible weaving your way between all those punishments and disgraces. I wonder sometimes though - everybody was expected to be absolutely like everybody else and conform. And, I don't know - if you've got any kinds of ideas of your own, you can't do that. And I guess the talking is just a sign that it was all going too slowly for me! And I had to amuse myself in some other way.

I think that something which has undoubtedly influenced me is that at the age of twelve I won a scholarship to a top secondary school which gave fifty to girls and fifty to boys each year. My secondary schooling thus took place amongst some brilliant people who are now leaders of Australian society. So peer groups at school were an important influence on me. I think we learned that all things are possible at that school and I didn't notice the slightest discrimination against women till I got to university. Every girl of my childhood peer group I went to school with - half of them are doctors, not all of medicine. And they've all achieved quite significant leadership in their areas. That's a group of about eight girls, so, you know, I think they have influenced me. They were all girls who were in my year at school and so I went through and saw a lot of them at university as well.

I didn't notice the slightest discrimination against women until I got to University. I don't think I really took up this thread until I went to university and I recognised that boys in tutorials were often listened to more. I noticed that tutors took more notice of boys when they spoke. Perhaps because I was expecting equal notice to be taken of me, because that's what had happened at school, I noticed it when it wasn't. I mean, a lot of things were unfair about the university. Like women couldn't be Rhodes Scholars. There were almost no scholarships, anyway, for women. There were a lot of scholarships for men.

I'm sure that I became interested in discrimination against women then. I can remember having a lot of arguments with the people in the Evangelical Union about why the women should always do the cooking on camps, and things like that. I guess I was interested in it. I remember writing some articles for the university paper on it.

Secondary school teaching over many years totally convinced me of the need for research in this area. It made me totally convinced that girls needed a bomb put under them! No, I do think it convinced me. I mean, it was the teaching experience of seeing girls bringing out these national women's magazines at lunch time that put me onto the national women's magazine study to start with. Their really quite blind choices and disregard for the future; I mean, it's very, very disconcerting when you get a brilliant girl and she says, you know, at the end of fifth form, that she is going to leave school because she only needs a job for a couple of years before she is going to get married. And you know that her parents could afford to keep her at school, that she's liking school, enjoying the subjects, but she is just so convinced she is going to get married and won't ever need to do it again. I ran up against several girls like that - so it was a constant perception of the problem.

I definitely place more emphasis on my personal experience and teaching in making me aware of things. They were definitely more important than any interviewing I did. There is no doubt about that - because I wouldn't have started the interviewing without that background of frustration. In the '30s we looked up to achieving women. I went to school with a lot of achieving females; went to university with the same kind of people. It seemed to me that I could put my fingers in almost any class I taught in those schools - because they were upper socio-economic schools, most of them; you could put your finger on eight or ten girls who could do quite outstanding things. And, perpetually, my experience with them was, with a few exceptions, frustrating. I mean there are a few of them who've gone on; they've got doctorates before I have, I guess. But it was the teaching, yes, certainly, that made me very aware.

One of my earliest studies was about the educational influence on girls of an Australian national women's magazine and this came about because as a teacher, for many a long year, I had battled with this magazine. I'd battled publicly with the editors and eventually I'd selected that research because it seemed to me that it was a drug to girls. It was intended to make anything that women did in the house glamorous. Whereas, you, know, they didn't look far enough behind the surface. I argued that everything it was on about was bad for girls' education. So I wrote to them and told them so. Anyway that was the paper I published. It was about girls' education, but it was related to this national women's magazine.

Another important influence on me was that I travelled overseas with my husband - lived in England for a year and a country in Africa for two years. Going outside Australia was a revelation to me because I'd never realised quite how male oriented our society was. It was just like a new world. To see the different perceptions of competence and the numbers of women in positions was just an eye-opener - it was for me anyway.

I also believe that the fact that I was born in the 1920s and not the 1950s was of significance (there were fewer models in the 1950s). I think by growing up in the 1930s I knew the first wave of feminism. I mean, there was Amelia Eyrehart and stories about women in the first World War and they were perhaps not consciously intended to laud women, but in fact they did that. A lot of women were given credit for quite significant achievements. Well now if I'd been born in the '50s I would have been influenced by the return to the home movement and by the enormous consumerism impact on women to spend and buy for the home. And I think I wouldn't have been conscious of women who achieved, nearly so much.

CASE STUDY TWO: Peter
Peter is a senior lecturer, in a university, who failed at his first attempt to obtain a University degree in England. Although he trained as a teacher, after finally graduating, most of his life has been spent lecturing and carrying out research from within universities. Peter has completed many pieces of research, has published widely and is very well known throughout Australia for his work on educational inequality and in particular home background influences on educational opportunity. His later work has been concerned with the interaction of home and school influences. Peter's research is characterised by its statistical orientation and, although influenced by the phenomenological revolution in the early 1970s, he has always been committed to the positivistic style of research. Peter's interest in educational inequality has been long standing. Growing up in a working-class family and then experiencing upward social mobility has had a major influence upon his intellectual interest as a sociologist. The realities of his personal life have played quite a significant part in his research style and interests, although other factors such as availability of funds, government intervention and debate with colleagues have also played their part. Peter has completed a PhD thesis.

I came from a rough, working class family where father was a passenger guard in the railways and my brother became a bus conductor. I suppose a conventional characterising would be kind of respectable, stable, working class and within that respectable working class there would be more of a leaning towards the rough. Father wanted me to leave school as early as I could - thought it's a load of bullshit, quite right too. Mother wanted me to get on, not so much from a desire for success but because her father had had a pretty tough life and she wanted me to have it a bit easier.

I didn't really enjoy primary school. It was all right .... (silence). Yeah, I did the work all right - some of the teachers were a bit tough. They were hard disciplinarians, got you for doing - you know .... (silence; Peter seemed a bit upset by the memory) ... too tough on you. Came down on you like a ton of bricks for some minor misdemeanour or even if you weren't doing anything wrong. I wasn't sort of ... ah ... (silence) - I didn't look forward to school - except during the summer holidays when you got a bit bored. But you know, if you could get off school that was terrific. I definitely enjoyed the play part more. I didn't have many friends at primary school.

Early secondary school wasn't something you enjoyed or didn't enjoy - you've just got to do it, you know? I enjoyed the fifth and sixth form; that was when I became interested in learning. It was the teachers, I think. Well, actually I got to the Grammar School on a scholarship, that was before the 11+ exam. I was pretty isolated in the secondary school - I didn't have many friends; I was pretty much on the outer really. I'm not really quite sure why. It's just a personality thing - you know, I've always been pretty much a loner. I was a working class kid going to a Grammar School and many kids from where I lived went to other schools. The kid next door went to a different school and I lost my social contact with him. The kid across the road went to another selective school, a private school, and I kept my social contact with him.

But I was a member of a youth club for quite a time - I was very keen on table tennis, played a lot of table tennis, which was a non-school kind of thing - not the sort of thing you'd learn at school. So in the youth clubs I retained my allegiance to something outside the school, you might call it working class - well kids who went to the youth club were working class.

In a way there are marginal man overtones - you know, torn between working class and people with say higher aspirations. Marginality of that kind has been a feature in my life for a long time. I've been aware of it for a long time; and it's also a sort of conflict between a sort of hedonistic, approachable kind of working-class person, belly laugh, you know, we're all in it together, good mates, easy sociability and the kind of social distancing you get in sort of Goffmanesquelike role performance in more educated groups - and that's been a feature in my life for a long time.

I found University a very disappointing place intellectually, and in the second year I just sort of went to bits and graduated to the ordinary degree course in the third year, and I didn't do a stroke of work, and left without a degree and went back again later. Well, when I went back after having been in the army I loved it - I had a terrific time. You know, I really came good intellectually.

As an English working-class scholarship boy who had 'made it' by climbing the ladder created by the 1944 Education Act, I was surprised to learn that the ideal of equality of opportunity was far from being realised, when, in the late nineteen fifties, I began my training as a teacher, and encountered studies in the sociology of education.

In the circles in which I moved it was widely held that education as a process of individual development was not confined to schooling and my interest in the educational disadvantages of poorer children naturally led me to become interested in their home and neighbourhood environments. There was a kind of psychologistic thing about the family and so on. You know, people had just seemed to have discovered that the family you grew up in has a very important influence on you - it's a kind of Freudianism I suppose, which was quite fashionable when I did my Dip. Ed..

From my first years as a university lecturer I became increasingly absorbed in social class and home backgrounds. Though initially inclined to be critical of the school as a cause of disadvantage, the volume of research into poorer children's home environments grew steadily and increasingly absorbed my attention. I was very interested in social class, very interested in it, and that was the result I'm sure of that experience of upward social mobility. I used to think about it and talk about it a lot, and teach about it a lot. It was after all, you know, an important aspect of the sociology of education.

Although more recent debate and research has led me to shift my position somewhat my early life has always had some influence on my research thinking. When I first began my longitudinal study on the interaction of home and school influences on educational opportunity of adolescent boys I was convinced one had to have repeated measures of students' scholastic achievement. It's part of the way I look at it - that scholastic achievement in school is a kind of distributor of educational opportunities. And that really goes back to my English background, I think. When I went through the English schooling system it was a very strongly structured, selective process, with testing, and I suppose the reason why I experienced that word 'mobility' from a working class background is because I was successful in jumping those academic hoops. So I've always seen that as an important sort of factor in educational opportunity and one that has not, in my view, really been emphasised sufficiently in the research.

The realities of Peter's personal life have had a large influence on his research choice. He is a researcher who has kept a specific field of interest over a long period.

My interest in educational inequality has been, you know, pretty long standing. I suppose because of growing up in a working-class family and having experienced upward social mobility that's had a major influence upon my intellectual interests as a sociologist ... My political ideology has influenced my selection of topics and their formulation, in the sense that I'm on the side of the underdog. In formulating my research I suppose I've got a kind of a commitment to disadvantaged people (working-class groups), but really my main interest is in the academic analysis of it all - if I'm quite frank.

The realities of Peter's personal life have had a tremendous impact on his personality and subsequently his research interests. Peter has always been a loner. He didn't enjoy primary school and didn't have many friends at primary school. He was born into a working-class family but won a scholarship to a Grammar school and lost contact with the children who lived near his home. Peter thus felt isolated in the secondary school, and again didn't have many friends - he was on the outer and sees this as 'a personality thing'.

Peter didn't develop any friendships during his later post-graduate research. Today he doesn't mix socially with his lecturing colleagues, and only has one or two close friends outside the University. Peter has often experienced "marginal man" overtones - torn between his working-class background and people with higher aspirations. This form of marginality has been a feature of his life for a long time.

By the end of his interview Peter himself had become aware, perhaps for the first time, of some of the implications of his answers.

I think a picture of me has come out of it as a - huh - it's rather surprised me in a way - of, someone not very much influenced by other people - a sort of independent, lone researcher guy - which I suppose is probably true, but I'd not really ... but I think I have been quite honest, I think. But just reflecting - this is just my interpretation of that interview - I think what's really come out of it is that I'm a pretty isolated individual and that's reflected in my style of research, I think really.

Not only his style of research but his research interests have been generated by his feeling of isolation. Peter was prompted to write a letter after the interview -

Since talking to you I have thought about some of my replies again and would say my interest in social stratification was stimulated by my marginal man position, and that led to an interest in educational inequality.

CASE STUDY THREE: Mark
Mark is now a senior lecturer in a university, although he initially left school after Form 3 at fourteen years of age and had a variety of jobs. He returned to study several years later and obtained his matriculation when he was twenty-six years of age. He undertook his first university degree part-time while teaching in secondary schools. Mark then studied in America for several years, completing Masters and PhD degrees. On his return to Australia he took up a post of lecturer in a university. Mark's research is vitally concerned with the social context within which people behave. This concern partly came out of a stimulating graduate school experience, but it was also part of a thread running through from his early days as a child at home and at school which left a strong impression on him. He was also greatly influenced by his architect friends while he was undertaking his undergraduate degree.
The main focus of Mark's research has been on what might loosely be called 'action research', that is, changing social structures in order that different attitudes and behaviours can emerge from these structural and organisational relationships. The reference points have been in both secondary and primary schools and a juvenile correctional institution. Projects are usually of two years' duration, and practising teachers, in selected schools, who are involved in education studies at university, work as a research team within the school setting under Mark's guidance.

I was the eldest of seven children from a working-class family. My father worked for fifty years in the railways and earned a reasonable income, working firstly as a porter then as an assistant station master for the rest of his working life. He received middle of the stream working-class wages and there was always food on the table. It was a fairly typical, top end of the stream, working-class family.

My father's political views were a powerful influence on my later research thinking and formulations. My father was a fairly staunch Labour voter and he was always seen as a bit of a lefty in the trade labour union movement at the railways - supported J.J. Brown. I wouldn't say he was Marxist left, I think he was just probably a good middle of the road socialist. He was a very powerful influence. Oh, my mother always argued that education was very important - that was also a powerful influence. My mother's aspirations were always for education. My father couldn't have cared less. He felt that you got a job in the railways - that was good enough for him, good enough for you.

But I left school at fourteen. I was a total disaster at school, an absolute disaster! I went down the tube in almost everything I did. I always tested very well in the I.Q. test, and they always used to shake their heads and say, 'How could you score this, you're the biggest clown we've got?' Oh, I disliked school, I thought it was terrible. I just disliked school! - both primary and secondary. I went to a central school and then only had eight months of secondary - I knicked off after that, went wagging it. I left at the end of third year and went working. I hated secondary school, it was even worse than the central school - impersonal and lots of bullies.

There were factors here that became a later thread in my research. I have a concern in my research and teaching not to have happen to kids in the schools what happened to me - a very powerful influence. I see kids who are failing in schools and I know what they're feeling. Kids hide their books and they won't answer questions. They won't answer questions not because they're dumb but because they're just tired of being embarrassed, tired of being made to feel stupid. They're preserving what little they have left of their dignity inside schools that brutalise many kids; very lonely, devastating experiences - and I was one of those kids. I was lonely in school, continually embarrassed by the whole process of schooling. The only thing that connected me with schools was music. I was a mad keen jazz drummer and used to drum them in every day. I got thrown out of the school orchestra for doing a jazz riff on 'Pedro the Fisherman' in third form, and that did it! (This was my one period of revolution for the third form!).

I have very clear memories of all my primary and secondary schooling. I can remember the teachers, I can remember incidents, I can remember feelings I had all the way through - continually never being able to grasp mathematical concepts, being continually embarrassed by my wanting to do things differently. I was always a sort of a pretty verbose kid - I was thin and lean but I always wanted to do things differently. I was put up in third grade into a higher grade because I was bright apparently - from what they tell me, in first and second grade. Then after third grade I was just simply too young. I was in a class of which I was a year younger than the rest of the kids and I seem to have never really picked that up all the way through. I seemed to have always been struggling then to pick up the grasp of what was going on, and for me it was just a continual round of teachers who were just bullies. Just bullying kids all the time and if you weren't one of their pets you were always demeaned - it was always an embarrassing experience in that classroom. I remember that you never passed tests, you were always middle of the road or down the bottom of the class somewhere. And constantly in trouble for talking. Talking was my problem; you weren't allowed to talk in those days, you know - weren't allowed to express yourself! And my problem was I was always talking - so that was the difficulty. That's primary schools in the '40's I'm talking about.

When I left school at fourteen I went to work in an optical factory, grinding lenses. I was there for a couple of years and while I was there my mother got me to do an I.Q. test, or some industrial aptitude test, and they said I wasn't suited for factory work, I was suited for clerical work. So that was a big transition in my life and I went to work with an airline as a clerk for a couple of years. It was a little cleaner but it was the same sort of work. And so there was a whole procession of jobs - as a clerk, as a storeman, as a traveller, as a real estate clerk, as a clerk in advertising; then I got a job as a head instructor in a gym because I'd been a successful swimmer at State level. And that's where I went back and did Matriculation at that point.

So while I worked full time at the gym I went to a private adult college and did sixth form. I did two subjects in first year and then I failed one subject in my second year. So I went back the third year and did the whole four subjects and got 'em all that year. I was 26 years old then.

I was about 23 when I became interested in learning for its intrinsic interest and intellectual enjoyment. I had got into a situation which stimulated that interest. I was involved with a girl at that time whose father was a Professor at a University. I saw his lifestyle and I thought it was an intellectually interesting and vigorous lifestyle and I'd worked in the commercial world for 10 years and was absolutely fed up to the back teeth with all the bits and pieces of it. And I saw this man had a sense of integrity with his work which really fascinated me. It was the first time I'd ever met anybody with that sort of relationship with his personal self and his work. And I always felt terribly split down the middle with the commercial world, and I hated what I had to do there, and I didn't like the ethics of it and I didn't like all sorts of things, and I always felt there must be a better way of life than this one. Of course, when I saw that, well then I was determined that I would try and get to a University and get a degree and do something different with my life.

I took an arts course at University part-time - I got a part-time job teaching school, and that University experience was the most politically divorced experience I've ever had in my life! However, my education took place off the campus where my friends were a big influence on my development. I lived with a group of architects who became firm friends and I'm still firm friends with them right now. They opened up an aesthetic view of the world, a way in which you could actually change social structures and change areas that would influence people's behaviour; and there was their creativeness. In other words, social settings weren't just there - they were created by somebody's brain and somebody's intelligence and somebody's ideas. I learnt that social settings were living ideas and you could change them. You could just dismiss them and you could take them away. You could re-create them and you could own that experience of re-creating. The whole world wasn't a static experience, you know you just didn't suddenly step into the arena of life and everything was given; that things changed and you could be a part of that change. And so they opened up all that area - I got into reading Gropius and all the architects, and I got really caught up in that whole group. That led onto a range of things - in poetry, although I've always been interested in poetry, of course, and music. They opened up a whole creative field which meant that social structures were for us to change and for us to use according to what we think and need. These ideas stayed with me right through and were a very powerful influence. But they were learnt off the university campus - nothing to do with what I did at the university. I think that the biggest influence in my undergraduate years were the years off with the architects, particularly understanding what the Bauhaus School of Education meant, and the liberation of myself in terms of imagining the world and having a vision of the world that was different.

I didn't enjoy University much but I enjoyed being a University student - off campus. See I never had any full-time years. All my years were part-time - I was working as a school teacher for six years (five years in an inner suburban High School and one year in a private school). And so the other significant influence in my life in those days were the kids at school.

A Journal article I just happened to pick up a few years ago has had a big influence on my work. It was from the American Psychologist, March, 1973, and was titled 'On Being Useful; The Nature and Consequences of Psychological Research on Social Problems'. I can't see myself as a detached, non-judgemental empiricist or scientist. I think that moral issues and political issues are directly interwoven with my work. I just think that for me, as a teacher in the University setting, unless all my work addresses the critical social issues of our time I think I'm bloody useless and I think I'm a charlatan. I don't think there's a detached issue - I don't think there's an issue of education that is not tied up critically to the social issues of our times. I just think that unless the critical social issues of our times are reflected in my research I don't see myself as being particularly useful. I just think that we have to continually be accountable, in some way or another. So I guess that's the reason why most of the action research I've done was with what we call so-called disadvantaged schools. I've taken on the tough schools - I've never worked with other sorts of schools. Not that I'm saying they don't need help also. But I'm saying that that's been my concern, and so the issues are always political for me, and economic.

As far as my field of interest has been concerned it has been fairly consistent all the way through. There's been a high degree of consistency in my emotional allegiance, but there's been, I think, a very strong evolution over time of my theoretical perspective. I think that I had a political-emotional allegiance first which then became informed by more rigorous, quantitative material. And an understanding of that came over a period of time through my graduate studies into my development as a teacher at the university. So there's been sympathetic leaps of understanding about this over the years. I think that my theory developed over time, rather than I took it initially and then worked it. I think what happened was that I got caught up in various teaching situations and so forth and then worked it out as I went along - adding to it, sorting it out, discarding and adapting.

The realities of Mark's personal life have played a part in shaping his research direction. While undertaking his first degree he was greatly influenced by his architect friends off the campus, and he learnt that social structures were for people to change and use according to their beliefs and needs. The architects opened up a view of the world which gave a way of actually changing social structures and changing areas that would influence people's behaviour. At the same time Mark was teaching part time in an inner suburban High School and he saw that his own unhappy childhood experiences in school were being experienced by many other children. He began to realise that one of the things about school failures is that

when kids are streamed and grouped into remedial streams early in their career they can very seldom negotiate their way out of that position. In other words, once remedial almost always a remedial. And after four or five years you are perceived as a failure, both by your peers and by your teachers and by other people in the school setting.

Mark sees his action research as a practical way of helping to prevent children in schools experiencing his own loneliness and embarrassment.

I have a very clear memory of the embarrassment I suffered at school, about being seen at the bottom end of the class all the time and struggling. I felt that I never wanted that to happen to other kids, and I think that's been a very powerful influence on the sorts of research that I've been doing in trying to get kids to role change.

My concern about context stripping procedures in empirical research, and my concern with meaning and context of things and action research, partly came out of graduate school but also partly came out of my own experience. I think what happened was that I had some experiential background and that was restructured and formulated and developed theoretically in terms of my graduate school experience. That's where the intellectual concepts came from. It shaped and formed them into intellectual conceptual frameworks - and that was the big difference.

I've got that thread running through from the early days, and my own school experiences which left a pretty strong impression on me, and my resolve not to let that happen to kids as much as I can - if I can - again. And to try and move that continually in a way that makes sense for those kids. Then it was articulated and formulated theoretically and conceptually in the graduate school experience, and I think there's been a continuation all the way through, in the concerns with the school work now.

CASE STUDY FOUR: Matthew
Matthew is a lecturer in a university. After teaching for three years he undertook post-graduate work at a Canadian university. The experience of working as a research assistant under the guidance of a sociologist from the Chicago school stimulated an already growing awareness in Matthew of the inequalities in our educational system. Personal realities are directly linked with his research topics. His early awareness of sex-role inequality in his own family, his dislike of primary school education, his observation that learning was just something to please the teacher, his experience of losing his working-class friends as he went further with his education, and the inequalities between different classes of students at University have all stimulated his research and developed a commitment to working-class children.

Matthew's research has revolved around bases of friendship among adolescent school children. It looks at the relationships between friendship and academic ability and attainment, performance in extra-curricular activities, social class of origin and destination, and degree of commitment to the school, as well as sex differences. Processes of socialisation within peer groups and a comparison between Australian, U.K. and U.S. research on social class mixing are central to his work. Matthew has completed a PhD thesis.

I came from a working-class family where Dad was a poor farmer in the mountains for many years, and then we shifted to the city to a working-class suburb and Dad became a boilermaker. We weren't lower working class, more respectable working-class - Dad was keen to get on.

As a child I was aware of sex-role differences and saw that they were unequal; it was just the natural order of things. Sex-role inequality was quite obvious then and has been a persistent thread in my research interests in later life. My sister went to the same school as me and left school at the end of Form V to work in a chemist shop. I think, talking about that later with her, one of the reasons was the small amount of money in the family and the need for her to go out and earn money, and also because it wasn't expected that girls would go on to tertiary education. She was pushed out into work and the marriage market to enable our small family income to be stretched to allow me to continue through to matriculation.
My mother and father were really keen for me to go as far as I could, and as long as I kept on passing they were willing to keep me at school. They were conscious that most of the kids in the neighbourhood left school as early as they could and went to work in labouring jobs, or else they went to a pretty rough technical school and got into trouble with the cops. So my parents were really concerned that I would mix with the kids who had high educational aspirations and were interested in going on with their schooling. My parents saw schooling as a bank deposit - it was the only way out.

I think any working-class kid who makes it to university starts to think about what class means and what social background means and some people deny their class and move out of it and other people maintain an interest in it; and I'm one of those - what it is to be working class and what working class values are. So that's obviously a continuing thing that's rooted in my childhood. But the other one was the experience of losing your friends as you go increasingly through your education. So that the kids who left school at fourteen dropped out after a while; you don't keep up friendships with them. And as it goes on various sorts of groups of friends peel off, and that can sometimes be a source of conflict as they accuse you of being a poofter and talking with a plum in your mouth, and so on - and that did happen to me. That's not a childhood influence, that's much more an adolescent one. But it's something that I've always remembered and I think was fairly important to me in looking at the research from the point of view of the extent of social class mixing in schools. That comes from both personal experience and also because of the need to compare the English and American research with the situation in Australia because there was hardly any Australian research in that area at all, when I did my study.

I did not enjoy primary school. I had a dragon of a teacher. I went to Prep. and then skipped first grade and went into second grade where I had a pretty ineffectual teacher. Then in third grade I had a rather austere, sexless teacher - spinster, who decided that it was such a bright grade that she would give us working-class kids the benefit of her culture. So she stayed with us right through grade three to six - and I hated it. I didn't find very much enjoyment in that. The only enjoyment I found in school was through sport. At school I learnt that learning was something to be done to please the teacher, and thus one would give as much as one had to and no more - and that actually comes out quite strongly in the research I did because it's quite obvious in talking to the kids that they're playing the game whereby they pitch their efforts just at that middle line which satisfies both their peers and the teacher. And the person who oversteps that line has to be a good all-rounder in order to get away with it, or a natural leader or someone who's really popular. And that's something certainly that I've pursued with interest because it was very much like my own schooling experience. I did have lots of friends at primary school.

I went to a Central School which was a feeder school to one of the more elite high schools in our State. I was screened by ability tests and then entered this high school which modelled itself on the independent schools. Success routes lay in being an all-rounder i.e., good at sport, leadership activities, school-work and music. I was reasonably good in all these activities, but I was hurt by the observation that success meant losing one's working-class friends. There are marginal man overtones here, but of course the terminology was not known to me until I studied sociology. This school tended to try and change us from working-class kids into middle-class kids; direct our accent and make us behave in a less boisterous way. A large number of the leadership positions were appointed positions, such as School Captain, and prefects were vetted and those who were voted in by the students but deemed unsuitable were not allowed to be prefects. So there was a conflict often between the allegiance that you had to pay to your working-class friends on the one hand and the extremely conservative values of the school on the other. I think that's true of many schools. I don't think it's unique to that one. But it might have been exacerbated by the fact that lots of working-class kids were brought into a school which was a different kind of school from your neighbourhood and so were very, very aware of the sort of socialising processes that that school puts on you. So in that sense you're aware of alternative sorts of behaviour that are open to you and you can be critical of both of them, and that leaves open the possibility of being marginal. I think a number of us were. I certainly used to absent myself from school.

Looking back on it the main factors at secondary school were the clash of my background and what the school was trying to do and only responding to what the school was trying to do very late through a number of teacher models. I failed first year matric., repeated it, and then went straight on to university with a teaching studentship which paid my university fees. If I hadn't received any financial assistance I would have been out to work.

At university there was a continuation of that process that success meant losing one's working-class friends. I had a small group of friends at university who were involved in historical studies, but I didn't make a wide circle of friends at university because I didn't get involved in political or sporting activities. There were marginal man overtones there also. I didn't like university very much.

At university there was a growing awareness that friendship groups provide a buffer against demands of the institution and that social-class background gives differential assurance of success, almost irrespective of ability. The University was the first time I really came into contact with upper-class people, people who had different sorts of lives to me and also had different sorts of financial background. I was quite impressed by their confidence that they would always succeed even when I could see that they weren't nearly as bright as myself or some of my friends. And I was also impressed by the fact that some of the working-class kids that I went through University with were always anxious about the possibility of failure and concerned with the consequences of failure. Say, for example, failure for us would mean having to pay back the studentship or having to go out to work immediately in a job that wasn't one that we would particularly want. Whereas with some of the people I met failure only meant that they would have to go into their daddy's business sooner than they expected. It was these inequalities that I really used to get angry about, and I suppose that's the natural reaction when you first come across it. So the friendship groups were an obvious place where you could talk about those things and where people could encourage each other to continue. The majority of my friends there were working class.

As a university undergraduate I developed an interest in certain social conditions, such as inequalities in the education system, basically by getting involved in debates. I think it was really through debates at university that I came to sort of see the world outside the university, especially the educational world. Since I knew I was going to be a teacher I guess my main focus of interest was on the educational system and it really developed outside either my studies or outside my teacher training year. I found the university education quite academic and with the exception of one or two lecturers who seemed to be able to relate their studies to the real world I found most of it a waste of time.

Matthew can remember his own childhood days very clearly, and he is concerned for working-class children and the inequalities and pressures they experience, both in the school setting and outside it.

I do have a commitment to particular social groups, and in formulating my research I am aware of working on behalf of vulnerable groups. I always like the results to come out in the way I want them to! I mean I'm pleased when the results sort of confirm my particular social bias - very upset when they don't.


Conclusion:
All the researchers interviewed in this study were professionally trained and socialised into the norms and expectations of the scientific community through their post-graduate degrees. However they all confirmed that "personal reality" has been a very significant factor in the choice of their research topics. Two factors, established very early in their lives, were significant for their future research direction. One was the experiences of isolation, of being separated from childhood connections and of leaving one's working-class friends behind as they began mixing with people with higher aspirations. A second factor was the unhappiness at the way the schools treated children. They didn't like their own primary school days; in fact, they hated them and had quite unhappy memories of that crucial part of their life. Some did not like secondary school either; and later, as teachers, they were appalled at some of the things they saw happening in schools.

The loneliness theme, particularly early in their life, was important. Some even feel very isolated today, either professionally or personally, despite the recognition of their research. Most had early experiences of isolation which helped make them become very independent people, and this may help to explain in part why they are very successful researchers. But, more importantly for this research, this feeling of isolation points to one significant reason why these researchers chose their particular topics for research. Being torn between an allegiance to approachable, working-class people and less-approachable, more-educated people with higher aspirations led to a kind of "marginality" that has been a feature in their lives for a long time. They have been aware of this, and see it as a conflict in their lives. An interest in social stratification was stimulated by a quite conscious belief that they occupied a "marginal" position, and that led to an interest in educational inequality. Their interests in educational inequality have been very long-standing. The combination of growing up in working-class families and then having experienced upward social mobility has had a major influence upon their intellectual interests as sociologists, and on the selection and formulation of research topics. There is a sense that they are on the side of the underdog. In formulating their research they have a commitment to disadvantaged people, such as working-class groups or women. Even the researcher who, in her family, was brought up to believe that women could do anything came to feel very "marginal" at her university, and believed that discrimination against women results in a form of "marginality".

The term "marginality" first originated with the work of Robert E. Park, who used it in 1928 to refer to the cultural hybrid who shared the life and traditions of two distinct people as the result of migration, "never quite willing to break, even if he (sic) were permitted to do so , with his (sic) past and his (sic) traditions" ( Park, 1928, p. 891). In its earliest usage, "marginality" referred to the experience of discontinuity between people's early life experiences, their attitudes, the roles they played, the expectations they fulfilled, and those same roles and expectations and life experiences at a later time.

The key element in marginality is that of social, cultural pluralism and multiple group memberships. In this sense, David Riesman (1954, p.154) talks about "secret marginality" where there are "people who subjectively fail to feel the identities expected of them". Although critical of the form that Park's contribution took, Harman acknowledges that "the simple notion of a 'cultural hybrid' had, and still has, substantial merit in an increasingly migratory and cosmopolitan society" (1988, p.20). Being "cultural hybrids" may very well explain why the professional socialisation and the many other influences internal and external to the scientific community were never able to totally close off the effect of personal experiences when the particular people in this study acted as social scientists.

An unhappiness at the way schools treated children, formed by their own experiences as school-children and then their later experiences as school teachers, has been an important factor in their personal realities that influenced choice of research topics. The really quite blind choices that girls made regarding their future, and the lack of consideration they were given in the total school environment; the children who were failing in schools and who were tired of being embarrassed and made to feel stupid; the negative effects of streaming; and the learning that was pitched at a level just high enough to please the teacher - but not at a level so high as to displease the peer group: all these experiences were etched vividly in the minds of these educational researchers well before they were socialised into the scientific community, and they were a significant influence on their selection of problems for later academic research. This study strongly suggests that their socialisation into the scientific community, with all its various professional expectations, did not block out their previous life experiences when they came to act as social scientists.

The conclusions drawn from the interviews in this study confirm Gouldner's belief that "the personally real and problematic often enough becomes the starting point for systematic inquiry", and perhaps it could be added, again in Gouldner's words, "there is no scientific reason this should not be so" (1971, p.45).
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