CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Dervin, B. (2003, May). A Sense-Making Methodology primer: What is methodological about Sense-Making. Introductory essay presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Diego, CA.
© Brenda Dervin (2003).

SOME DEFINITIONS OF METHODOLOGY:

The study of method, usually covering the procedures and aims of a particular discipline, and enquiry into the way in which that discipline is organized. (Flew, 1979, p. 230)

1. The science of method, or orderly arrangement; specifc., the branch of logic concerned with the application of the principles of reasoning to scientific and philosophical inquiry. 2. A system of methods, as in any particular science. (Guralnik, 1977, p. 895)

This is a theory of how inquiry should proceed. It involves analysis of the assumptions, principles, and procedures in a particular approach to inquiry (that, in turn, governs the use of particular methods). Methodologies explicate and define the kinds of problems that are worth investigating; what comprises a researchable problem, testable hypothesis, and so on; how to frame a problem in such a way that it can be investigated using particular designs and procedures; how to understand what constitutes a legitimate and warranted explanation; how to judge matters of generalizability; how to select and develop appropriate means of generating data; and how to develop the logic linking problem - data generation - analysis - argument. A methodology is a particular social science discourse (a way of acting, thinking, and speaking) that occupies a middle ground between discussions of method and discussions of issues in the philosophy of social science. . . . Methods and methodology display a synergistic relationship. . . . (Schwandt, 2001, pp. 161-162)

The general study of method in particular fields of enquiry: science, history, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, ethics. . . . It is tempting . . . to suppose that there is one right mode of enquiry logically guaranteed to find the truth . . . [and that] . . . the task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and unmask its counterfeits. . . . This standpoint now seems to many philosophers to be a fantasy. The more modest task of methodology is to investigate the methods that are actually adopted at various historical stages of investigation into different areas, with the aim not so much of criticizing but more of systematizing the presuppositions of a particular field at a particular time. . . . (Blackburn, 1996, p. 242)

One branch of the philosophy of science, methodology, is closely related to the theory of knowledge. It explores the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning the world and critically explores alleged rationales for these methods. Issues concerning the sense in which theories are accepted in science, the nature of the confirmation relation between evidence and hypothesis, the degree to which scientific claims can be falsified by observational data, and the like, are the concern of methodology. (Audi, 1995, p. 611)

THE RIDDLE OF METHODOLOGY:

. . . [I]t is useful to think of scientific approaches as having historically been strong on method and weak on metatheory and methodology. In fact, an examination of books on methods and methodology which are primarily written by those coming from the sciences show that they have collapsed methodology into method and built few explicit links to metatheory. For the humanists, on the other hand, it may be said they have been stereotypically strong on metatheory and weak on methodology. By their own description, they have collapsed methodology into metatheory. (Dervin, 2003, p. 136)

At one extreme we find some science-based researchers referring to metatheory [and, hence, methodological discussion] as orienting strategies and maintaining a separation between the concrete and the abstract, assuming a transparency to their discourse. At the other extreme, we find some humanities-based scholars arguing against scientific methods in a technologically determinist way that defies their own theorizings about the capacities of humans to appropriate and reinvent at least in part structures (including research technologies and tools) to their own ends. (Dervin, 2003, p. 137)

. . . [W]e lack a vocabulary for talking about methodology, a vocabulary which attends to the philosophic mandate in the term, the way in which it might build a bridge between metatheory and method and thus, make more obvious the impacts of these on research and its theory-constructings. The task is made more difficult because attending to issues of methodology implies a self-conscious a priori choice of method which in turn implies an awareness of at least some of the array of contested possibilities. This, in turn, mandates between informed by and drawing on understandings from sometimes seemingly incommensurate discourses. One of the difficulties with the current moves toward metatheory and/or methodology in both the sciences and the humanities is that most of the moves are ironically insular, concerned far more with self-definition and demarcation of turfs than with building bridges across discourses. (Dervin, 2003, pp. 137-138)

SOME QUOTES TO PONDER:

Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides. (Hubbard, Henifin, & Fried, 1979)

To admit that knowledge is intrinsically erroneous is not to imply that we should forego it. (McGuire, 1986)

Theory constructs its evidence, and values and faith construct what constitute theory. (Maines & Molseed, 1986)

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must . . . tear itself from all referents and take pride in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality. (Baudrillard, 1988)

METATHEORETIC THEMES INFORMING SENSE-MAKING METHODOLOGY:

• The human subject, embodied in materiality and soaring across time-space
• The ontological-epistemological divide, the in-between: The gap
• Time-space, movement, gap: Fluidities and rigidities
• The verbing as primary ontological category
• Where the real and the interpretive meet: The verbing between
• The role of power, energizing the in between
• Horizons, past, present, and future
• Ordinary human beings as theorists
• Talking the embodied and unconscious into the cognitive and conscious
• A utopian imagination
• The research as the researched: a dialogic humility
• Searching for patterns: Multiple connectivities
• Metatheory as deconstruction
• Standards of explanation: The dialectic dance of contests and commonnesses
• A quadruple hermeneutic
  (Dervin, 2003)

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:
Dervin, B. (2003). A brief pictorial guide to Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology. Unpublished manuscript. (136 KB .PDF download)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Audi, R. (Ed.). (1995). The Cambridge dictionary of philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1988). The ecstasy of communication. (B. Schutze & C. Schutze, Trans., S. Lotringer, Ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Blackburn, S. (1996). The Oxford dictionary of philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dervin, B. (2003). Sense-Making’s journey from metatheory to methodology to method: An example using information seeking and use as research focus. In B. Dervin & L. Foreman-Wernet (with E. Lauterbach) (Eds.), Sense-Making Methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin (pp. 133-164). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Flew, A. (Ed.). (1979). A dictionary of philosophy. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Guralnik, D. B. (Ed.). (1977). Webster’s new world dictionary of the American language. Cleveland, OH: Collins & World.

Hubbard, R., Henifin, M. S., & Fried, B. (with Druss, V. & Star, S. L.) (Eds.). (1979). Women look at biology looking at women : A collection of feminist critiques. Boston: G. K. Hall Press.

Maines, D. R., & Molseed, M. J. (1986). The obsessive discoverer’s complex and the “discovery” of growth in sociological theory. The American Journal of Sociology, 92, (1), 158-164.

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

Schwandt, T. A. (2001). Dictionary of qualitative inquiry (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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