PROPOSING RESEARCH 23
Proposing Research:
From Mind to Paper to Action
Research-proposal writing is substantively and symbolically an important
event. In an excellent book on the subject, Proposals That Work, Locke,
Spirduso, and Silverman (1993) say that a dissertation proposal has three
substantive functions: to plan, to communicate, and to establish a con-
tract. There is, however, a fourth function. Developing a dissertation
proposal and getting it approved is a crucial step in the rite of passage of
earning a doctorate. Its ritualistic function can sometimesmake writing a
proposal seem daunting. It transforms the writer of the proposal from the
status of student to that of researcher.
RESEARCH PROPOSALSAS RITES OF PASSAGE
In some respects becoming an academic is like joining a club. As in
most other somewhat exclusive clubs, there are those who are in and
those who are out; there are elites and nonelites. There are privileges of
membership and there are penalties for not paying dues. To some extent,
success in the club is a matter of merit; but that success is sometimes
affected by issues of race, gender, and class that can influence entry into
the club in the first place, or weight the power of those who have been
admitted already.
Although pressures, strains, and contradictions affectthose who work
in collegiate institutions just as they do those who work in others, still
college faculty are paid for the pleasurable activities of reading, writing,
teaching, and doing research. Relative to public school teachers, for exam-
ple, we have a great deal of autonomy over our time and professional
lives. Not all doctoral candidates in education move on to faculty positions
in colleges or universities. But those who use their doctorates to assume
leadership positions in schoolsystems also often gain a degree of autonomy
in their working lives that many would envy.
Thosewho have already earned the doctorate often act as gatekeepers
to the club. During the rituals of proposal submission, review, and ap-
proval established by the gatekeepers, the power relationship between
candidate and doctoral advisor is very unequal. (See Locke et al., 1993,
chap. 2, for further discussion of dysfunctions that can occur between
doctoral candidates and faculty mentors.) Elements of sexism, racism,
classism, and institutional politics can enter the process. When that rela-
tionship is inequitable, the rite of passage can be excessively anxiety pro-
ducing. It takes a great deal of thoughtfulness on everyone's part to make
the relationship between doctoral candidate and committee equitable at
the proposal stage.
COMMITMENT
When a candidate's doctoral program is working well, a research
topic arises out of work that has gone before. Course work, fieldwork,
practica, clinical work, and comprehensive exams all lead the candidate
forward to an area of inquiry about which he or she feels some passion. If
the doctoral program has not worked well- if committee memberships
have changed, if the doctoral student has been convinced against his or
her own interests to pursue those of a professor- a student can progress
through the earlier stages of the rite of passage without identifying a topic
that is personally meaningful. In that case, predictably the writing of the
proposal will be more excruciating than satisfying.
In some cases doctoral candidates enter the program having already
chosen a topic. For a while they make their peers nervous because they
seem so advanced and confident. My sense is that such confidence is often
misplaced. The experience of the doctoral program itself should bring
about some sort of new orientation, some interest in new areas, some
growth in the candidate's outlook. If it does not, the candidate is looking
backward instead of forward.
Substantively, one of the underlying reasons for writing a proposal is
its planning function (Lockeet al., 1993).Although Joseph Maxwell in his
thoughtful book, Qualitative Research Design (1996), separates the pro-
cess of research design from proposal writing, my experience is that the
writing of the proposal is a prime opportunity for doctoral candidates to

24 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
clarify their research design. To plan, candidates must assess where they
have been and make a commitment to where they would like to go. This
can be a stressful part of the process.
I remember one outstanding doctoral candidate who was stalled for 6
months at the prospect of writing his dissertation proposal. It was not that
he could not find a subject; nor was he in search of a method. He was just
frozen in his writing. After 6 months of not being able to get around his
writing block, he finally discussed his anxieties about, in effect, changing
club memberships. He said that he had grown up in a working-class neigh-
borhood where people sat on their front-porch steps in the summer drink-
ing beer. That was what his parents still did. He was not sure that he
wanted to leave the front porch to start drinking white wine in the living
room at faculty gatherings. For many doctoral candidates, compIeting
their dissertations implies a commitment to a new professional and per-
sonal identity that can be difficult to make. In many ways writing a
dissertation proposal is a key step in the developmental process that occurs
in doctoral study, and such processes are seldom free of significant com-
plexities.
FROM THOUGHT TO LANGUAGE
Many students have trouble writing proposals because they are
plagued by a sense of audience. The process seems dominated by doctoral
committees, and sometimes a more anonymous graduate review commit-
tee, that must approve the proposal. When audience plays such a dominat-
ing role, writing can easily suffer. Rather than concentrating on what
he or she wants to say, the candidate may filter every sentence through
the screen of what is expected and what will be acceptable to the com-
mittee.
Preliminary ideas about research often stay locked in one's inner
speech. They are fleeting, predicated, and unstable (Vygotsky, 1987),
making communication of them difficult. However, those ideas in inner
speech must be made explicit. Doctoral candidates do have to communi-
cate clearly to their committee what they are thinking about.
A key to communicating about plans for research is to focus first on
what is meaningful. When a proposal works best, it emanates from the
motives of the candidate and works its way through thought, inner speech,
and into external speech through meaning. Often, however, the form and
substance of the inquiry in a dissertation proposal can seem to the candi-
date to be imposed from the outside; the format of dissertation proposals
PROPOSING RESEARCH
can seem to take precedence over their substance. Then the writing of the
proposal can become mechanical and formulaic.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Peter Elbow (1981) offers an approach to writing that I think can be
useful in such cases. He suggests that trying both to create with the audi-
ence in mind and to make writing perfect from the start imposes an undue
burden on the writing process. He suggests making writing and editing
two separate aspects of the writing process. And he urges deferring
thoughts of the audience until the editing part of the process.
To facilitate that separation, Elbow suggests what has come to be
known as free-writing and focused free-writing. Focused free-writing is a
process that allows the writer to concentrate on the topic and forget the
audience. It advises writers to start writing on their topics and to continue
for a specified period of time without stopping. If they get stuck, they
should repeat their last word or write the word stuck until they get going
again. A person new to the process might begin with 5 minutes of focused
free-writing, gradually increasing the length of time.
After free-writing sections of the proposal, writers can then select
from these the most cogent, refashioning from them a first draft. Elbow
suggests other methods to help writers overcome blocks due to anxiety
about audience. Near the end of the writing process, rather than at the
beginning, writers can edit their drafts with the audience and the form of
dissertation proposal in mind. I recommend Elbow's (1981) Writing With
Power; Locke, Spirduso, and Silverman's (1993) Proposals That Work;
and Maxwell's (1996) Qualitative Research Design as important resources
for anyone about to write a dissertation proposal.
QUESTIONS TO STRUCTURE THE PROPOSAL
What?
Proposal writers need to ask themselves some simple questions. These
can be divided into several groups. First is a group of questions I put under
the heading of "What?" In what am 1 interested? What am I trying to
learn about and understand? What is the basis of my interest?
Interviewers begin with an interest in a particular area. At the begin-
ning of interviewers' research lurks the desire to understand what is going

26 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
4
PROPOSING RESEARCH
on. But how did that desire begin? Important questions that must be asked
in interviewing research and that are seldom asked in experimental or"
quasi-experimental research are, What is the context of my interest? HOW
did I come to this interest? What is my stake in the inquiry, and what do I
get out of pursuing my interest and learning about it? What are my expec-
tations about the subject of inquiry?
Research, like almost everything else in life, has autobiographical
roots. It is crucial for interviewers to identify the autobiographical roots of
their interest in their topic. Research is hard work; interviewing research
is especially so. In order to sustain the energy needed to do the research
well, a researcher must have some passion about his or her subject. Rather
than seeking a "disinterested" position as a researcher, the interviewer
needs to understand and affirm his or her interest in order to build on the
energy that can come from it. Equally important, researchers must iden-
tify the source of their interest in order to channel it appropriately. They
must acknowledge it in order to minimize the distortion such interest can
cause in the way they carry out their interviewing. An autobiographical
section explaining researchers' connections to their proposed research
seems to me to be crucial for those interested in in-depth interviewing.
(For an example of such an explanation, see Maxwell, 1996,pp. 123-124.)
Finally, interviewers must not only identify their connection with the
subject of the interview; they must also affirm that their interest in the
subject reflects a real desire to know what is going on, to understand the
experience. If in fact interviewers are so intimately connected to the sub-
ject of inquiry that they really do not feel perplexed, and what they are
really hoping to do is corroborate their own experience, they will not have
enough distance from the subject to interview effectively. The questions
will not be real; that is, they will not be questions to which the interview-
ers do not already have the answers.
There is, therefore, an inherent paradox at the heart of the issue of
what topics researchers choose to study. On the one hand, they must
choose topics that engage their interest, their passion,-and sustain their
motivation forthe labor-intensivework that interviewing research is. That
usually means in some way or another they must be close to their topics.
On the other hand, to be open to the process of listening and careful
exploration that is crucial in an interviewing study, they must approach
their research interests with a certain sense of naivete, innocence, and
absence of prejudgments (Moustakas, 1994, p. 85). Researchers who can
negotiate that complex tension will be able to listen intently, ask real
questions, and set the stage for working well with the material they
gather.
Why?in Context
The next question to ask is why the subject might be important to
others. Why is the subject significant? What is the background of this
subject, and why is that background important to understand? To what
else does the subject relate? If you understand the complexities of this
subject, what will be the benefit and who will obtain it? What is the
context of previous work that has been done on the subject (Locke et al.,
1993)? How will your work build on what has been done already? (See
Locke et al., 1993; Rubin & Rubin, 1995, for succinct discussions of the
issue of significance.)
Locke and his colleagues are especially cogent in their discussion of
what often appears in dissertation proposals as "reviews of the literature."
They stress that these sometimes mechanical summaries of previous re-
search miss the intent of reading the literature connected to the subject.
Such reading should inform researchers of the context of the research,
allow them to gain a better sense of the issue's significance and how it has
been approached before, as well as reveal what is missing in the previous
research. These understandings can be integrated into the various sections
of the proposal and do not necessitate a separate one that sometimes reads
like a book report. (See Locke et al., 1993, chap. 4, and Maxwell, 1996,
chap. 3, who is also thoughtful on this issue.)
In addition to asking why the topic is historically significant, critical
ethnographers suggest that how the topic relates to issues of power, justice,
and oppression must also be raised. Especially important are the issues of
power that are implicit in the research topic itself (Solsken, 1989) and in
interviewing as a methodology. John Rowan (1981)suggests that research-
ers consider not only how their own personal interests are served by their
research but also who else's interest is served. What about the participants
in the research? What do they get out of participating? What do they risk?
Does the research underwrite any existing patterns of oppression? Or does
the research offer some possibilityof understanding that could create liber-
ating energy? In a world beset by inequity, why is the topic of research
important? (SeeFay, 1987, for an important discussion of the foundations
of critical social science.)
How?
A next question to ask is, How? Assuming that researchers have de-
cided that in-depth interviewing is appropriate for their study, how can
they adapt the structure of in-depth, phenomenological interviewing out-

28 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
lined in Chapter 2 to their subject of study? I offer examples of such
adaptations by two doctoral students who have worked with this approach
to interviewing. (Ishare the partial results of their work in the Appendix.)
Marguerite Sheehan (1989), who was a doctoral candidate in early
childhood education at the University of Massachusetts, addressed the
question as follows. She was interested in studying child care as a career.
In her review of the literature she had found that most of the research on
child-care providers focused on those who had left the field early because
of what was called "burn-out." Sheehan was interested in people who
stayed in the field, especially those who saw providing child care as a
career. She hoped to come to understand the nature of their experience
and to see if she could unravel some of the factors that contributed to their
longevity in the field. Sheehan took the three-interview structure and
adapted it as follows:
Interview One (life history): How did the participant come to be a
child-care provider? A review of the participant's life history up
to the time he or she became a child-care provider.
Interview Two (contemporary experience): What is it like for the
participant to be a child-care provider? What are the det-ails of
the participant's work as a child-care provider?
Interview Three: What does it mean to the participant to be a child-
care provider? Given what the participant has said in interviews
one and two, how does he or she make sense of his or her work as
a child-care provider?
Toon Fuderich (1995), also a doctoral candidate at the School of
Education of the University of Massachusetts, was interested in studying
the experience of Cambodian refugees who as children had experienced
the terrors of war. She adapted her interest in this topic to the three-
interview structure as follows:
Interview One (life history): How did the participant become a refu-
gee? What was the participant's life history before coming to the
United States?
Interview Two (contemporary experience): What is life like for the
participant in the United States? What is her education, work,
and family life like?
Interview Three (reflection on meaning): What does it mean to the
participant to be living in the United States now? How does she
make senseof her present life in the context of her life experience?
PROPOSING RESEARCH
Who?When?Where?
The next set of questions asks whom the researchers will interview,
and how they will get access and make contact with their participants. In
Chapter 4 we discuss the complexities of access, contact, and selecting
participants. What is called for at this point is a consideration of the
strategy the researchers will use. What will the range of participants be?
What strategy of gaining access to them will the researchers use? How will
they make contact with the participants? The strategy may allow for a
process of participant selection that evolves over the course of the study,
but the structure and strategy for that selectionmust be thought out in the
proposal.
Some writers suggest that the "how" of a qualitative research study
can itself be emergent as the study proceeds. That orientation assumes that
because qualitative research does not begin with a set of hypotheses to
test, strict control of variables is not necessary. Furthermore, because
the inquiry is being done in order to learn about complexities of which
researchers are not totally aware, the design and even the focus of the
study have to be seen as "emergent" (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, pp. 208-211,
pp. 224-225) or "flexible" (Rubin & Rubin, 1995,pp. 43-48).
Although it is understandable that researchers would want to build
flexibility into a research design, there is a danger in overemphasizing
the "emergent" nature of research design in qualitative research. To the
inexperienced, it can appear to minimize the need for careful preparation
and planning. It can lead to the notion that qualitative research is some-
how an "art" that really is incommunicable, or that somehow those who
engage in it have earned a special status because they do not share the
assumptions of those who do what is called quantitative research
(McCracken, 1988, pp. 12-13). The danger of overemphasizing the "emer-
gent" nature of the design of the study is a looseness, lack of focus, and
misplaced nonchalance about purpose, method, and procedure on the part
of those who do qualitative research. Lincoln and Guba (1985)themselves
stress that the emergent nature of qualitative research cannot be used as a
licensefor "undisciplined and haphazard 'poking around"' (p. 251).
! RATIONALE
Although the paradigms that underlie research methods in the social
sciences seem to be changing rapidly (Kvale, 1996; Lincoln & Guba,
1985), the extent to which researchers will have to defend their use of
in-depth interviewing as their research methodology will depend on their

INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
individual departments. Some are still dominated by experimentalism or
other forms of quantitative research. In others there may be a predisposi-
tion to experimental and quasi-experimental methods but nevertheless an
openness to qualitative research. In still others there may be a strong
preference for qualitative research among a significant number of the
faculty.
Whatever the departmental context, for the interviewing process to
be meaningful to researchers themselves and its use credible to reviewers,
it is important that researchers understand why they are choosing inter-
viewing rather than experimental or quasi-experimental research. They
must understand something about the history of science, the development
of positivism, and the critique of positivism as it is applied to the social
sciencesin general and the field of education in particular.
Because there is currently more acceptance of qualitative research in
graduate programs in education, many new researchers have not been
asked to learn the assumptions and the practices of experimental or quasi-
experimental research. Without this background, qualitative researchers
do not know what they do not know about methodology. Consequently,
their rationale for choosing a qualitative over a quantitative approach
may not be as well grounded as it could be.
At the minimum, Campbell and Stanley's (1963) definitive essay on
threats to what they call internal and external validity in experimental
and quasi-experimental research should be required reading for all those
who intend to do interviewing and other forms of qualitative research.
They should grapple firsthand with the issues that shaped a generation of
educational researchers and that still inform a significant body of educa-
tional research practice today. Even better would be thoughtful reading
in the history of science and epistemology. (See, e.g., James, 1947; John-
son, 1975; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Mannheim, 1975; Matson, 1966; Pola-
nyi, 1958.)
WORKING WITH THE MATERIAL
Research proposals should describe how researchers intend to work
with and analyze the material they gather. Describing this process ahead
of time is especially difficult for those who are doing empirical research
for the first time. It is difficult to project how they will work with material
from interview participants if they have never done interviewing work
before. In Chapter 8, I discuss working with the material. I stress the
importance of paying attention to the words of the participant, using those
PROPOSING RESEARCH
words to report on the results as much as possible, and looking for both
salient material within individual interviews and connections among in-
terviews and participants.
The role that theory plays becomes an issue when researchers are
actually trying to analyze and interpret the material they gather. Some
scholars would argue that the theory used to discern and forge relation-
ships among the words that participants share with interviewers must
come out of those words themselves. Theory cannot and should not be
imposed on the words but must emanate from them. This approach, exten-
sively discussed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), has been persuasive in the
field of qualitative research. It argues, rightly I think, especially against
taking theoretical frameworks developed in other contexts and force-
fitting the words of the participants into the matrices developed from
those theories.
On the other hand, it may be naive for us to argue that researchers
can be theory free. Everyone has theories. They are the explanations peo-
ple develop to help them make connections among events. Theories are
not the private preserve of scientists. Interviewers walk into interviews
with theories about human behavior, teaching and learning, the organiza-
tion of schools, and the way societies work. Some of their theories are
informed and supported by others, and some are very idiosyncratic. Oth-
ers arise from readings interviewers have done in and about the subject of-
their inquiry.
Some scholars argue that in qualitative research such reading should
be k e ~ tto a minimum lest it contaminate the view and the understanding
of the researcher (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).To a certain extent I agree with
that view. It helps to interview participants about their experience if the
interviewers are not weighted down with preformed ideas based on what
they have gleaned from the literature.
For example, in an interview I had the pleasure of conducting with
Linda Miller Cleary in 1996, she spoke to me about the interviewing
work that she and her colleague Thomas Peacock were conducting on the
experience of American Indian educators (Cleary & Peacock, 1997). She
said that, especially when interviewing in a cross-cultural setting, she was
cautious about doing too much reading ahead of time. While affirming
that she had to do enough reading to be informed and thoughtful about
her topic, she was concerned about taking too many stereotypes from the
literature into her interviewing. She said that "because I hadn't done a lot
of reading, I could ask questions that were real questions" (L. M. Cleary,
personal communication, August 11, 1996).
Inteniewers must be prepared for their work and be aware of the

32 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
research on which they are building (Yow, 1994,p. 33). Some researchers
go further and argue that interviewers must be expert on their topics
before they begin the interviews (Kvale, 1996,p. 147).
I think an intermediate position is sensible at the proposal stage. It is
crucial to read enough to be thoughtful and intelligent about the context
and history of the topic and to know what literature on the subject is
available. It is important to conduct the interviews with that context in
mind, while being genuinely open to what the participants are saying.
After the interviews have been completed and researchers are starting to
work intensively with the material, a return to the reading will help with
the analysis and interpretation of the interview material. No prior reading
is likely to match the individual stories of participants' experience, but
reading before and after the interviews can help make those stories more
understandable by providing a context for them.
The range of fields and associated readings that those who do research
in education must synthesizeis daunting. Often, we fall short of the task.
But for those who take the task seriously, it is first-rate intellectual work.
This work should be affirmed, represented in the proposal, and digested
before the completion of the research, but not necessarily totally before
the interviewing. This is a precarious and difficult position to hold. It
requires maintaining a delicate balance between the sometimescompeting
claims of the relevant literature and the experience of the interview parti-
cipants.
PILOTING YOUR WORK
The best advice I ever received as a researcher was to do a pilot of my
proposed study. The dictionary (Gove, 1971)definition of the verb pilot is
"to guide along strange paths or through dangerous places" (p. 1716).
Although it may not seem ahead of time that the world of interviewing
research takes one along strange paths or through dangerous places, the
unanticipated twists and turns of the interviewing process and the com-
plexities of the interviewing relationship deserve exploration before the
researchers plunge headlong into the thick of their projects.
I urge all interviewing researchers to build into their proposal a pilot
venture in which they try out their interviewing design with a small num-
ber of participants. They will learn whether their research structure is
appropriate for the study they envision. They will come to grips with
some of the practical aspects of establishing access, making contact, and
conducting the interview. The pilot can alert them to elements of their
own interview techniques that support the objectives of the study and
PROPOSING RESEARCH 33
to those that detract from those objectives. After completing the pilot,
researchers can step back, reflect on their experience, discuss it with their
doctoral committee, and revise their research approach based on what
they have learned from their pilot experience. (See Locke et al., 1993, pp.
80-82; Maxwell, 1996, for further discussion of pilot studies.)
CONCLUSION
As teachers must plan their objectives and how their methods fit those
objectives in order to be responsive to what they meet in their classrooms,
so too must researchers plan carefully for research. They must be thought-
ful about the what, why, how, who, when, and where of interviewing.
They must be as focused and clear as possible about their inquiry when
they begin the study. Such planning is the prerequisite for being able to
respond thoughtfully and carefully to what emerges as the study proceeds.
Because in-depth interviewing uses a method that is essentially open-
ended, preparation, planning, and structure are crucial. Each interview
requires a series of instantaneous decisions about what direction to take.
Researchers entering an interviewing situation without a plan, sense of
purpose, or structure within which to carry out that purpose have little on
which to base those decisions. Without a thoughtful structure for their
work, they increase the chance of distorting what they learn from their
participants (Hyman et al., 1954) and of imposing their own sense of the
world on their participants rather than eliciting theirs.