Opening up to possibilities rather than probabilities: A relational constructionist approach

Extracts from Hosking and Pluut's original text:
(Re)constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach

relational constructionist perspective which radically re-conceptualizes reflexivity:
(a) as a local and co-constructed process oriented towards the question
(b) how are we ‘going on’ together, and therefore paying attention to
(c) the realities and relations we are co-creating during the research process and so
(d) is concerned with local pragmatic and ethical issues (Gergen & Hosking, 2006; McNamee, 1994) rather than with the quality of truth claims.

 

• Our relational constructionist meta-theory implies that the processes that some call “research” are processes in which the identities of researcher, research object and related realities are in ongoing re-construction.
•  The centring of construction invites a view of research as intervention, the centring of relating implies that ethics and responsibility be re-constructed and centred e.g., through reflexive dialogues, and talk of multiple forms of life invites attention to multiple local ways of knowing and “power to.”
• Research as intervention:
• our relational premises imply that participating in inquiry inevitably (re)constructs peoples' lives in some degree (McNamee, 1994) and imply that all participants – including scientific researchers – construct and reconstruct their local (community-based) knowledges, identities and relations. From this it follows that research may be practised in ways that construct researchers as copractitioners and practitioners as co-researchers (Cunliffe & Shotter, 2006). Viewing research (or, as we prefer to call it, inquiry) as intervention, and shifting reflexive attention to the research process itself, enables a relational conception of ethics and responsibility.

• Relational ethics/ Relation responsibility
• our relational premises imply that inquiry is intervention.
• Sheila McNamee speaks of this as a matter of relational (rather than individual) responsibility (McNamee, 2004) – relational responsibility for the research process – and the kinds of people and worlds it (re)produces.

• Ongoing Reflexive Dialogues Directed at the Research Process
• Gergen outlined three important "overtures to innovation."
• deconstruction - “wherein all presumptions of the true, the rational, and the good are open to suspicion” (Gergen, 1994, p. 62).
• democratization or "relational responsibility",
• reconstruction – “wherein new realities and practices are fashioned for cultural transformation” (Gergen, 1994, p. 63).

• Reflexive dialogues are a way of putting these "overtures" to work in research. This can be done by inviting communal reflection (Gergen & Gergen, 1991) throughout the inquiry.

• Reporting strategies:
• Meta-theoretical assumptions offer a different view – the process is the product (Brown & Hosking, 1986)
• Alternatively, the style, form and content of the reporting strategy can be more open and, for example, oriented towards processes, possibilities and generative theorising.
• Another possibility is that full and equal participation is attempted in the
  writing of the report. Participative research practices can be extended to include "cogenerated reports" (Allard-Poesi, 2005)
• Notions of symmetry: all research participants to share responsibility for learning.
• Instead it becomes an ongoing relational process of “turning back” on the construction
  of the ”inquiry.” Reflexive dialogues, directed at the research process, can open up
  new ways of going on together by mobilizing local knowledges and communally
  reflecting on research identities and relations.
• These dialogues can all be considered attempts to construct soft self-other differentiation. In this way reflexivity is not a slide into infinite regress, but an opening up to multiple local forms of life and to possibilities rather than probabilities (Gergen, 1994; Hosking, 2008).