One time, many years ago, I prepared some pasta as part of a meal for some friends. This group included a much older man who moved with his family from Italy to the US when he was a child in the early part of the 20th century. He was also an excellent cook, and very passionate and particular about the quality of the food he ate. He took one bite of the pasta - which was probably linguini or fettucini - and said to me "You added more water to the pan after the pasta started to cook, didn't you?" The answer to that question was "yes," and this happened because I had underestimated the amount of water needed and what was in the pan was not ample to cover the pasta. But I was, still am, very impressed that he could tell that from a single bite. I think my ability to figure out whether pasta is appropriately cooked has improved (although I have known a lot of people who prefer noodles mushier than my standard preparation) but I'm not certain if I have fine tuned my tasting ability enough to recognized if the cooking process was interrupted or restarted. I thought of this incident today as I considered a few research papers I have reviewed in recent months - where I think the research process was interrupted or restarted. (Right now, by the way, based on requests I see and the progress of my own works, it seems like everyone has time to write or revise but no one has time to review!) There is something very compelling about reading a work that has clear aims and appears to be "coherent" (this is a word the TQR editors use to describe cohesion or consistency among all of the aspects of research) from the purpose through to the end. As an aside, my recent efforts with secondary analysis have shown that full coherence is difficult to achieve, so you do what you can and honestly offer up the limitations, which should be weighed against the efficiencies inherent in secondary analysis. But for a planned, purposive research study, coherence seems like it should be a given. I was particularly reminded of the pasta episode because I see a few studies, including one I'm reading right now - where the purpose looks like it was revised, or the research was essentially rebooted while the project was cooking, AKA in progress. This is not the same process in my view as Patton's "emergent design flexibility" (see Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods published by Sage, now is its 4th edition) - which speaks to how, not why the research is conducted.
I see clear problems associated with shifting the purpose midstream - this leads to the major difficulty associated with secondary analysis - that of making your data fit your purpose, and, assuming there are data collected before and after the purpose was refined or the research was otherwise re-botted, there are likely challenges associated with presenting these data as a coherent whole. Leaving out data that do not fit is almost always wrong - from an ethical and credibility standpoint - and, at the least needs a clear rationale. As far as why purposes are shifted, my guess is that there are many reasons. I've already seen papers about one thing revised to address COVID-19, e.g., "XYZ behaviors in Q setting: What can this tell us about COVID-19?" and I assume that other research has likely been respun or shifted in presentation to emphasize any aspects that seem more timely or interesting. Because of the time span associated with research, it can seem faster and easier to revise a current study than to plan a new one. I also think that research done under the supervision of a committee - dissertations and theses - are particularly prone to being re-visualized. This may even occur prior to data collection but it still may result in a disconnect between/among the student's original purpose and the purpose(s) recommended by the committee. Unfortunately, in some instances this disconnect is not smoothed out or addressed and it remains present through the process, so the final report never seems to hang together in quite the right way - instead it offers theories that are not revisited, or veers off to identify problems that are never really addressed. One solution in a student research process - when it is a possibility, anyway - is to structure the project as muliple manuscripts rather than a single paper. This needs to be done with some care, but it allows subtle shifts in emphasis to co-exist in the same project. In the more challenging instances when the research is done and, for whatever reason, a decision is made to revise the purpose, my suggestion is to first see the original project through to the end - even if the findings are not exactly what was expected/wanted (and this may be why a revision is being contemplated), and only after that is complete, I would reconsider the data in a separate secondary analysis study. As part of the revisualized work, I would offer reviewers and readers full disclosure about the relationship between the original project aims and the re-presentation being offered. But, that's just what I think! Photo of my pantry taken with a Panasonic Lumix, minimally edited with Photos for Mac.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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