Thinking Outside the Girl Box: Teaming Up with Resilient Youth in Appalachia

8. Linda and Layne: There’s a (Research) Method to Our Madness

 8 There’s a (Research) Method to Our Madness froM proGrAM evALUATor To coLLABorATive eTHnoGrApHer. or, LindA’s JoUrneY “i don’t want to sit next to him,” Billy announced as he stood up and brushed himself off. Jordan had just given him a friendly punch in the arm, which resulted in Billy’s chair turning over to considerable laughter. “okay,” i responded, not sure how to proceed as i continued to arrange chairs. “Would anyone else like to sit here?” no volunteers—just some nervous chuckling and horsing around as Jordan gaveWesley a shove and tossed a small beanbag across the room where Anthony and Billy struggled with each other to get it.“Whoa,guys,take it easy!”cautioned Betty. Meanwhile, Ashley said, “Kelli’s not coming today. can i do her part?” Almost simultaneously, several other girls asked to do Kelli’s part as well. There’s a (Research) Method to Our Madness 167 such was the lively, chaotic, nature of our collaborative research including high school students, local community adults who work with youth, and those of us from the university.The scenario above took place at the high school as we rehearsed for a public presentation of our research —the culmination of over a year of work together. With the presentation, to be held at Marshall University, just one week away, we were having our first rehearsal with both girls and boys together.We were all pretty excited and nervous. The first i remember hearing about this kind of research—research that includes participants as an integral part of the study design and purpose , research with people rather than on them—was when i read patricia Maguire’s Doing Participatory Research:A Feminist Approach (1987). drawing on paulo freire’s concept of dialogues, Maguire interviewed women who had survived domestic violence and reflected with them about their own words (interview transcripts) and experiences—all in an effort to address the problem of how to move forward after the nightmare of living with violent partners. i was inspired by her work, by the possibility of research with genuine “real world” meaningfulness, especially around social problems such as intimate partner violence.i decided right then that my future research would be participatory, that i would do research in partnership with individuals and groups who would identify research goals to meet their needs rather than as a lone ranger who conducted research to create new knowledge that I determined was worthy. fast-forward fifteen years and several non-participatory research studies later.i met eric Lassiter,at that time a new professor on our faculty, read his Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (2005), and renewed my commitment to research that “involves the side-by-side work of all parties in a mutually beneficial research program” (American Anthropology Association el dorado Task force papers, in Lassiter 2005, ix). Although i had worked collaboratively as a facilitator of several research teams and had considered issues of power in my analyses, they were very much my analyses. despite my initial excitement about Maguire’s participatory work,i now realize that my own work—much of which came out of qualitative program evaluation research—was not participatory in the way that Lassiter describes. i had taken responsibility for creating the research designs, doing the fieldwork, analyzing the observation and interview 168 Linda and Layne data, and writing. i had considerable assistance with the fieldwork but did much of the analysis and most of the writing single-handedly, seeking feedback from research assistants and participants on fully formed drafts. Based on that feedback, i made revisions and then distributed completed manuscripts.clearly,i had the power of “the last word,”as Lassiter puts it. nikki Jones, a qualitative researcher, describes a telling moment that highlights this power of the last word. After submitting an article about her work with urban,African American girls for publication, Jones got feedback from a journal reviewer who suggested she situate her work within crime studies rather than the black feminist and sociological literature she had used. she rejected the suggestion, fearing it would “label the girls in this study as offenders, victims, delinquents, or criminals,” and did not reframe the work (2010, 181). following the insights of scholars such as Barbara smith, chandra Mohanty, and patricia Hill collins on the importance of centering research in the experiences and understandings of marginalized groups, Jones went on to...