CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Dervin, B. (1999, May). From metatheory to methodology to method: Sense-Making as exemplar. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco.
© Brenda Dervin (1999).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
This project focuses on the question “what does being methodological mean.” The primary concern is for building more explicit bridges between Sense-Making’s metatheoretical assumptions and its mandated methods. The secondary concern is for understanding why this is far from a straightforward journey and why, in fact, being methodological is a neglected category of attention in the study of the human condition.

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
There are many people using Sense-Making in many different ways - as metatheory, as practice, as method. This is gratifying, of course. But on the other hand, the many uses of Sense-Making are sometimes contradictory to each other and sometimes a substantial distance from my own intent. As a result, I have faced three challenges. One is understanding the variety of interpretations. The second is learning how to explicate Sense-Making in such a way that its methodological uses have a more ready connection to method. The third is in coming to understand that the second goal must be tempered for even attempting to achieve it would be antithetical to what Sense-Making’s metatheory implies.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
If we look stereotypically at humanities-based versus sciences-based approaches to studying the human condition we see a divide. On the humanities side there is heavy emphasis placed on metatheory; on the sciences side there is heavy emphasis placed on method. What I have come to understand in a year-long struggle is that the humanities side for the most part collapses methodology into metatheory while the sciences side collapses methodology into method. Thus, it is not unusual to see textbooks in “critical methodology” which pay little attention to method and textbooks in “scientific methodology” which are nothing but statistics texts. My discussion here is helped greatly by writers who walk, as I attempt to, into the “in between” between these artificial polarities (see short list of references).

Coming to this surprising understanding has helped me make sense of why scholars working from different sides of this divide have such difficulty communicating with each other, and why they so often see such different things in Sense-Making. It has also helped me understand why even scholars operating within the same tradition implement Sense-Making in radically different and sometimes contradictory ways. As one example, it has helped me understand how it is that so many scholars working in the genre of research focusing on information seeking and use, draw on Sense-Making for its attention to the interpretive, constructivist, and/or phenomenological (depending on the period of time at which the scholar has intersected Sense-Making) while at the same time ignoring Sense-Making’s mandated attention to time-space and thus conceptualizing users as unchangeable across time-space. This is a common example which illustrates well-intentioned uses of Sense-Making which I have come to accept and even spend energy on nourishing as steps in what I consider to be useful directions.

Given Sense-Making’s metatheory and its anchoring in emancipatory practice, I think it is important that I have achieved some kind of peace with all this spirited variety in uses of Sense-Making. For one, it would be antithetical to close down interpretations even if some offend me because each discourse community has its limited spaces of intervention. What may appear to be a very limited use of Sense-Making to me may in fact be a radical intervention in another discourse. Second, it is clear that the openness and tolerance in the “Sense-Making community” has allowed people with many different perspectives and methods to come and to usefully tarry. In the process, we all learn and Sense-Making is challenged and continues to evolve. At the same time this challenge has impelled me to a way of thinking about Sense-Making that has stretched both me and it.

WHAT HAS BEEN HELPFUL:
It has been very helpful coming to understand that there is a need for explications of the roads by which methodology serves as explicit link between metatheory and method. This has forced me to attempt to more explicitly articulate the linkages than I have done so in the past. These explications have taken the form of “If you assume as Sense-Making’s metatheory does that…….what does this imply for method.” Space here does not permit a full review of all of Sense-Making’s metatheoretic assumptions and how they relate to implications for method. A recent version with an attempt to make linkages to Sense-Making methods of studying information seeking and use is available in Dervin 1999-4.

What I have learned in the process is how difficult this is (see next section) but how helpful as well. Let me take as an example the impact of just a few of Sense-Makings’ metatheoretic premises on potential framings for studying information seeking and use. The purpose of this example is illustrate the complexity involved not to exhaust what is necessarily a lengthy presentation. To illustrate I have selected these Sense-Making premises: 1) Multiple layers of interpretation stand between the observer and the observed; 2) Reality is elusive not only because of these multiple interpretations but because time-space keeps moving; 3) However, reality cannot be set aside as unknowable; and knowing cannot be set aside as infinitely variable (both are assumed orderly in part); 4) Humans are mandated to multiple gap-bridgings, between mind and body, self and other, time 1 and time 2, self and collectivities, space 1 and space 2, and so on; 5) No apriori instruction or socialization or hegemony can entirely bridge the gap; there is always a space not only for resistance but for creativity and capriciousness; 6) Mappings of reality necessarily arise from a given time-space; if they get formalized they have considerable force or energy behind them; what we consider knowledge or information consists of such mappings inscribed by extant power systems.

Taking just these few examples of Sense-Making’s metatheoretic assumptions, what I list here is a beginning potential set of implications for method in studying information seeking and use:
1) The term information could no longer be treated as if it had absolute ontological status. Users would have to be allowed to define information on their own terms and since the term information is itself so system-loaded the data collection method would have to free itself of the use of the term ‘information’ altogether. Users would have to be asked if and when and how they made sense - created ideas, arrived at conclusions, got understandings, arrived at feelings - which serve as fodder for their journeys.
2) The questionings, muddlings, concludings, and strugglings that users face would all constitute the realm of potential “information seeking and use” even though some of these would involve seeking and using things not traditionally labeled as information (e.g. emotional understanding) and some of them would involve resistings and rejectings of so-called expert information. Sense-Making would mandate that each of these be taken seriously and studied as potential concerns in information systems mandated to address human needs.
3) If we look across users (including expert users), we should find areas where sense-making converges and areas where it diverges. Each of these should be studied situationally and contextually - what led to it, what were its consequences.
4) Each divergence as well as each convergence should be seen as making ‘sense’ under some condition. Each divergence might point to arenas of hidden or suppressed understandings; or terrains of general human ignorance; or highly contested and self-interested interpretations of events, or interpretations driven by highly different experiences. Likewise, each convergence might point to areas where factizing has led to highly agreed upon useful ends; or terrains of tightly imposed hegemony; or terrains in which the brute force of reality speaks more loudly than usual. No easy choice can be made between these options. Only a continued circling permits reinterrogation of these issues and mandates bringing to bear on the analysis observations from other sources as well (e.g., political economic analyses of information systems).
5) The unit of analysis would more usefully become not the individual person (i.e. the information user and seeker) but the practice (i.e. the information using and seeking). Attention should be directed to if and when and how and with what outcomes sense-making practices change across time or remain static across time. They cannot be assumed in advance to be an attribute of the person that remains static across time-space.

The above example attempts to illustrate briefly how a set of Sense-Making metatheoretic premises become methodological when applied in a given context. The methodology we speak of here is not recipe but rather philosophically informed guidance for research step-taking, including the definings of that step-taking as well as the data-collectings, analyzings, concludings, and so on. What becomes more apparent, however, the more one works on building bridges from metatheory to method through methodology is not so much that they elide into each other (which they do in part) but that they do, in a very substantial way, define what it is possible to theorize, study, and observe. For example, if one does not introduce movement through time as a methodological mandate, then information seeking and use is necessarily studied as a constant attribute of a person’s behavior across time. It is only by introducing time-space as a mandated variable or factor for consideration that fluidity or stability becomes a question.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
Beyond the challenges mentioned above, I struggle with the problems of communicating Sense-Making in useful ways. On the one hand, there are people who want some kind of succinct overview of Sense-Making, but I am emerging from this journey with a beginning understanding that that may just not be possible. In the example above, we see how intertwined the assumptions are and how they jointly play a role. Because of this, the assumptions are probably best explicated with an intricate set of hypertextual links. I am still struggling with this. I also struggle with coming to realize that not only do we not walk easily from one philosophic discourse to another, we do not walk easily from one substantive discourse to another. Thus, when I explicate the methodological implications of Sense-Making in one terrain—e.g. information seeking and use—readers do not readily see the methodological implications in another terrain.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
Being able to engage other treatments of methodology that are indeed methodological. Reading explications of Sense-Making by others which are methodological so I can grasp understandings, as I often do, because of our differences.

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this project is to attend to the question of what it means to be “methodological.” “Methodology” is defined as the reflexive analysis and development of the hows of theorizing, observing, analyzing, interpreting. Methodology is seen as the bridge between metatheory and method. “Metatheory” is defined as presuppositions which provide general perspectives or ways of looking, based on assumptions about the nature of reality and human beings (ontology), the nature of knowing (epistemology), the purposes of theory and research (teleology); values and ethics (axiology); and the nature of power (ideology). “Method” is defined as the specific hows, techniques, guided implicitly or explicitly by methodological considerations. These are all seen as serving the development and testing of substantive theory, defined as inductively and/or deductively derived concepts (which define phenomena) and propositions (which suggest how and under which conditions concepts are thought to be connected).

While traditionally, methodology is considered a branch of philosophy, and thus metatheory, in practice, methodology is rarely discussed in a methodological way - i.e. in terms of what it means for the hows of research. In science-based studies of the human condition, methodology is collapsed into methods, and often reduced to merely statistics. On the other hand, in humanities-based studies of the human condition, methodology is collapsed into metatheory and discussed as philosophic assumptions which provide no guidance for method. It is fair to say then that the answer to the question “What does it mean to be methodological?” has not yet been written.

Along with a few others who have walked into this divide, the purpose of this project is to examine what being methodological might mean using Sense-Making as exemplar. Primary conclusions to date have included: 1) Methodological explication does not provide method recipes but it does move closer to method than metatheoretic talk usually does, and ideally it makes a link between metatheory and method by setting forth the foundation upon which specific methods would be enlisted; 2) It is reasonable to conclude that what you are able to study is mapped by the juxtaposition of metatheory-methodology-method and that far too little attention is paid to the impacts of implicitly assumed methodological assumptions which are sometimes at odds with the very metatheoretic assumptions with which projects start; 3) Sense-Making’s most robust applications come with more fully aware methodological implementation.

REFERENCES:
(For references to works by Dervin and colleagues, see Dervin’s writings: Chronological listing.)

Bourdieu, P. (1996). Understanding. Theory, Culture, and Society, 13 (2), 17-36.

Carter, R. F. (1990). Our future research agenda - Confronting challenges, or our dying grasp. Journalism Quarterly, 67 (2), 292-285.

McGuire, W. J. (1986). A perspectivist looks at contextualism and the future of the behavioral sciences. In R. L. Rosnow & M. Georgoudi (Eds.), Contextualism and understanding in behavioral science: Implications for research and theory (pp. 271-301). New York: Praeger.

Morrow, R. A. (1994). Critical theory and methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage.

Murdock, G. (1997). Thin descriptions: Questions of method in cultural analysis. In J. McGuigan. (Ed.), Cultural methodologies (pp. 178-192). London: Sage.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistdervin.html