A Reflection on Professional Practice

In: Doing Work Based Research: Approaches to Enquiry for

Insider-Researchers

By: Carol Costley, Geoffrey Elliott & Paul Gibbs

Pub. Date: 2013
Access Date: November 13, 2020
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9781848606784
Online ISBN: 9781446287880
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446287880
Print pages: 115-129
© 2010 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the
online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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A Reflection on Professional Practice

Key Points

This chapter considers what it means to reflect on professional practice. The

connection between reflective practice and action research is made explicit, as is
the distinction between reflection and reflexivity. A step-by-step guide to reflective
practice is given which explains the key stages in moving from everyday
observation to theorization.

Understanding the Workplace

To understand work based research, it is necessary to understand the workplace. This will require you to
be aware of and alert to the subtleties of the work setting. Not only this, but you will need an appreciation
of the history, environment and culture of the workplace. The history will indicate how the industry arrived
where it is; the dominant influences, forces, trends and values that have shaped the industry; and how it
has responded (or not) to modernization, globalization and changes in the economic and social context in
which the industry operates. The environment will indicate its relationship with other parts of the industry
and with other industries; how successful it is in comparison with others; what its distinguishing features and
unique selling points (USPs) are; and to what extent it has been influenced and reshaped by inter-professional
agendas, workforce organization and re-organization, downsizing, mergers and takeovers. The culture will
indicate a multiplicity of influences, the principal being the inter-personal, the psychological, the social and
the political.

As well as history, environment and culture, we have to take into account the influence of the individual, the
personal and the work based researcher. This introduces the idea of ‘agency’, that is, the effect and impact
of the individual person operating in the present. You will bring your own biography, history, experience and
personality into the work setting. Thus, we can see that to understand work based research, we need to have
a grasp of factors external to the organization, factors internal to the organization, and factors relating to you,
the work based researcher.

It is good practice to acknowledge these influences, and in particular to acknowledge the influence that you,
as a researcher, have on the work setting. This is the idea of reflexivity, or self-awareness. It means that you
need to be sensitive to influences on you from outside the organization – your gender, ethnicity, social class,
relationships and responsibilities, your own biography and psychology. These frame the lens through which
you view the world, and observe and interact with colleagues and others in organizations. This awareness

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about the interaction between yourself and others – reflexivity – is at the heart of good qualitative research,
and it is worthwhile reflecting upon the implications of this for your own work based research project. This
chapter will help you to discover how, as an insider-researcher, you can make an original and worthwhile
contribution to the literature in your chosen field using a reflective practice approach that will help you to write
convincingly in a way that emerges from, but at the same time transcends, the work setting.

Practitioners, Professionals and Politics

Many work based research settings are populated by professionals who are regulated and influenced in their
professional lives by sets of professional codes and practices. The term ‘practitioner’ has developed as a kind
of quasi-professional concept, suggesting a mode of working that is characterized by thoughtful and reflexive
action. For the work based researcher, how professionals and practitioners regard themselves and their work
situation is a vital and rich source of data. A number of studies (for example Elliott, 1996, 1998) have found
that practitioners and professionals, in the face of growing managerialism, the introduction of narrow and
prescriptive occupational standards and the demands made by policy shifts towards increased accountability,
find it necessary to affirm the territory of their expertise. This is frequently located in their subject or vocational
background. Reflective practice is an enabling practice that makes such an approach possible.

The starting point of a reflective practitioner approach to work based practice and work based research
is the recognition that, in order to be meaningful for the practitioner, conceptualizations of work should be
grounded in practitioners' own understandings and experience of their working practices. It should equally
reflect the range of these practices as well as their epistemological and ethical basis. It should reflect
a phenomenological perspective towards organizations which recognizes the centrality of understanding
individuals' orientations (Maslow, 1954) and that ‘organisations are to be understood in terms of people's
beliefs about their behaviour within them’ (Greenfield, 1975: 83). It should also be capable of supporting
theoretical and political opposition to attempts to redefine practitioners' shared values. Reflective practice
requires a micro-political perspective that recognizes the different interests, biographies, careers, priorities,
subjects, status and orientations of practitioners. It requires a moral and values orientation, since it is only
through the ‘grounding of our actions in our values that we can recognize the nature of the competing
rationalities we face and find means of coping with them, whether as managers or those being managed’
(Bennett et al., 1992: 15). It requires a political stance since it is centrally concerned with the development
of a critical consciousness to a level where individuals can achieve a sufficient degree of social and political
awareness to understand contradictions within society and work to transform it – what Freire (1972: 16) has
termed ‘conscientisation’.

The idea of reflective practice can be demonstrated to be at the centre of British philosophical discourse,
from the seventeenth-century philosopher Locke's (1690) belief that appropriate knowledge and judgement
are vital to well-informed rather than ill-informed understanding, to Mill's (1843) concern with the centrality
of inferential thinking to the exercise of good judgement. John Dewey (1933) was the first to formally apply

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the idea to a work context (education). His definition of reflective thought is predicated upon its status as
a conscious, voluntary and purposeful activity. Dewey believed that reflective thinking was an artistic rather
than scientific endeavour which represented the ideal human mental state (1933: 29, 287–88) and acted as
an antidote to a restrictive preoccupation with ‘those things that are immediately connected with what we
want to do and get at the moment’ (Dewey, 1929: 159). In this respect, and to the extent that he understood
human growth to be dependent upon both experience and reflection, Dewey's work was highly prescient of
the reflective practice movement.

Laurence Stenhouse (1979) recognized the key role of reflective thinking for practitioners, arguing that what is
learnt from comparative studies can ‘tutor our judgement’ (1979: 6). Donald Schön (1983) develops Dewey's
notion of the essential artistry involved in the intellectual process of reflecting on action. It is the creative
dimension of reflective practice which enables practitioners to deal reflectively with inconsistent or impractical
demands, and which thus makes it such a powerful framework for understanding action in non-rational,
unpredictable organizations.

A significant advantage of the notion of the reflective practitioner is that it provides a conceptual framework
within which the complexities, tensions and contradictions of work can be explored, and at the same time
a reference point against which the intrinsic value of practice can be judged. The potential for practitioners
to inform and influence policy, and the process by which they make considered responses to political,
cultural and technological change and devise considered strategies to contain or exploit both intended and
unintended consequences, are also key issues which are given prominence within a reflective practice model.

In addition to the benefits at the level of practice, there are significant gains at the level of theory to a reflective
practitioner model. Constructing reflective practice as an epistemology rather than a methodology frees it
from the theoretical straitjacket of any single research tradition and opens up the possibility of exploring
practice from a variety of perspectives. One major gain of this is that it achieves a defensible conception
of theory as ‘critical and systematic reflection on practice’ (Pring, 1978). Another major advantage of this
approach is that it can link practice with an important and influential body of literature, providing a theoretical
and conceptual orientation which has the capacity to inform, improve and, perhaps most important at the
present time, value practitioners' own reflective practice against the impositions of market-based policies at
national and institutional level. Reflective practice embodies an approach to research that is distinct and well
documented across a number of disciplines. It is particularly suitable for the work based researcher since
its focus is the work based practice of the professional or practitioner. It is an approach that is particularly
popular in the disciplines of education and health, however it is also well suited to interdisciplinary studies,
and has been successfully applied in many other fields of study as varied as engineering design (Valkenburg
and Dorst, 1998), social work (Yelloly and Henkel, 1995), management (Smith, 2001) and policing (Matthews
and Pitts, 2001).

Probably the greatest exponent of reflective practice was Donald Schön, who described the process of
thoughtfully considering one's own experiences in applying knowledge to practice while being coached by
professionals in the discipline (Schön, 1983, 1987). In other words, it is the ability to think about what you are
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doing whilst you are doing it. This is understood as a key characteristic of professionals which enables them
to apply experience to new settings and to make use of tacit knowledge, which is knowledge derived from
practical experience and reflection. Schön understood reflective practice as a planned, conscious, purposeful
and documented approach to research. In this, it is distinct from simple reflection or thoughtful action, but
such activities may lead a practitioner professional to adopt reflective practice as a research approach.

In developing his ideas on reflective practice, Schön drew on his earlier work with Argyris on professional
effectiveness in which the model of reflective practice was developed as a social process (Argyris and Schön,
1974). Reflective practice, whilst it produces a personal narrative account of the development of professional
practice knowledge, needs to be given validity by reflexivity towards the methods and analytic processes of
practice knowledge production. This approach to reflective practice can be seen in social science researchers'
accounts of auto-ethnography, and is built into the model developed by Argyris and Schön. Knowledge
generation and production within practice for particular audiences require processes of knowledge use,
change and evaluation of practice outcomes from professional actions to be accessible as sources of data
that can be evaluated by the reader and user of research.

One of the most useful aspects of reflective practice for the work based researcher is the notion of reflection-
in-action:

Reflection-in-action describes the process of working with, noticing and intervening to interpret
events and the effects of one's interventions. For much of the time these factors are invisible and
unconscious and, as Schön eloquently points out, they are part of the artistry of effective practice.
However, in developing expertise of any kind it can often be helpful to become more deliberate and
conscious of the process and aware of the decisions being made by others and ourselves. It is
through exposing these decisions to scrutiny that the assumptions behind them can be identified and
a conscious decision taken to act from a new perspective. (Boud, 2001: 12)

For the work based researcher, then, reflection-in-action is a powerful tool for uncovering otherwise hidden
processes, decision paths and power relations in the workplace. It helps the researcher move beyond mere
description to analysis. It could be argued that, if learning and change are core aspects of successful
businesses, reflective practice becomes a core strategic tool for managers and executives in organizations
of all types. Moreover, in everyday life, it could be further argued that the increasingly common practice of
‘blogging’ is a modern expression of reflective practice, albeit adapted for the platform of twenty-first century
technology.

Reflective Practice and Ethnography

Ethnography has become a popular research approach in education, health and other fields of social science
(see, for example, Barton, 2008). However, it has its origin in anthropology, where it is used to describe ‘a
picture of the way of life of some interacting human group’ (Wolcott, 1975: 112). Both reflective practice and

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ethnography are strongly represented within the wider field of qualitative research approaches. There are very
close connections between the two, and many would argue that reflective practice is ethnography in action:

[Ethnography] is concerned with what people are, how they behave, how they interact together. It
aims to uncover their beliefs, values, perspectives, motivations, and how all these things develop or
change over time or from situation to situation. It tries to do all this from within the group, and from
within the perspectives of the group's members … Ethnographers thus try to rid themselves of any
presuppositions they might have about the situation under study. They go into the ‘field’ to ‘observe’
things as they happen in their natural setting, frequently ‘participating’ themselves in the ongoing
action as members of the organisation or group. (Woods, 1986: 4–5)

It is the twin aspects of uncovering a multi-layered reality from the subject's point of view and with the
researcher participating in the organization that connects both ethnography and reflective practice so closely
with both each other and with work based research. Observational research carried out by a participant
is a very common form of enquiry in the social sciences, and is often referred to by the term ‘participant
observation’. All these terms are closely related and indeed overlap with each other, which should be
reassuring for the work based researcher who will have a well-established body of research methods
literature to draw upon in designing and carrying out work based research.

Theory Building and Conceptual Frameworks

Reflective practice is an invaluable approach to thinking about theory building and conceptual frameworks.
Many learners find theory building the hardest aspect of work based research to grasp. However, theories are
simply models – ways of thinking about or categorizing knowledge about the world. A first step is to create a
conceptual framework by narrowing ideas to some initial general constructs. Miles and Huberman amusingly
call these concepts ‘bins’:

Theory building relies on a few general constructs that subsume a mountain of particulars. Terms
such as ‘stress’ or ‘role conflict’ are typically labels we put on bins containing a lot of discrete events
and behaviours. When we assign a label to a bin, we may or may not know how all the contents of
the bin fit together, or how this bin relates to another. But any researcher, no matter how inductive in
approach, knows which bin to start with and what their general contents are likely to be. Bins come
from theory and experience and (often) from the general objectives of the study envisioned. Laying
out those bins, giving each a descriptive or inferential name, and getting some clarity about their
interrelationships is what a conceptual framework is all about. (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 18)

You will sometimes see such general constructs referred to as ‘categories’. Researchers use categories as
one of their core tools for organizing, sorting and labelling the data gathered during the research process.

A good example of a data category is ‘quality assurance’. Other examples are ‘power’, ‘management’,
‘satisficing’ (that is, doing just enough to comply but without heart or commitment) and ‘motivation’. The
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characteristics of categories are that they are relevant to the research setting and to the problem under
investigation; describe in a general way the individual components (events, actions and behaviours); bring
together components in a purposeful way; and ascribe a generic meaning to otherwise isolated events or
behaviours. They are normally recognizable in the relevant literature, although cutting-edge research may
well develop new categories that go beyond existing taxonomies.

Codes and Categories

The ability to carry out high-quality work based research relies on the process of organizing reflection-on-
action into coherent data that can be communicated, understood, analysed, and related to other data. It is to
the question of how to go about this process of organizing reflection that we now turn. To do this, we can think
about reflection as a number of stages:

• observation
• experience
• purpose
• reflection-on-action
• coding
• categorization
• analysis
• comparison
• theorization.

We now have a working model of reflective practice, a model that takes us through the process of translating
observations in the workplace into theory making. There are some points to note before we look at the model
in detail. First, the model is a cycle because, having theorized to the end, we can continue to make further
observations, reflect more on our own and others' experience, re-state our purpose and so on. Second, like
any model, it is to be used, changed and made personal. There is no right and wrong model; they are all tools
to use and adapt. Third, also like any model, it is an over-simplification of the real world. All social settings,
workplaces included, are complex environments and our personal interaction and experience in them is also
complex and multi-faceted. A model is merely a guide for thinking about the extremely complex process of
capturing social reality for the purposes of a research project. You should acknowledge this clearly in your
writing or run the risk of naive over-simplification.

Observation

Quite simply, observation is looking, reading, listening and being aware of your surroundings. It is noting what
is interesting, strange, seemingly important or significant, amusing, shocking or telling. Many researchers find
it helpful to use a workbook or a log to note their observations. Please note that at this point your observations

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will be relatively unstructured and disorganized – so much the better. It is tempting to focus on a specific line
of research enquiry early in the project, but much better to let your observations freewheel, as it were, to allow
you fully to absorb the cultures, subcultures, mores, customs and power relationships of the workplace. Do
this for a couple of days and you will have a kaleidoscope of observations that will be a rich source of ideas
for possible research enquiry.

Experience

There is, it is said, no substitute for experience. This is true in research and especially for reflective practice.
If you are an experienced professional or practitioner, you will have amassed a wealth of experience and
understanding about your workplace which will provide a rich vein of topics for future enquiry. This also has
its disadvantages, in particular the danger that you have become over-familiar with your work setting so, for
example, fail to recognize the subtleties of power relationships in operation, or mis-read the dynamics of your
own interrelationships with those senior and junior to you. However, one of the more powerful aspects of
reflective practice is that it can help you to objectify your subjective experience through sensitizing you to
your environment. This is what anthropologists describe as creating a ‘strangeness’ between yourself and the
research subjects.

Purpose

It will be necessary to direct or connect your observational and experiential knowledge to a purpose. In your
case, the purpose is to generate data for a work based research project, so this task must inform and direct
your effort. Using your experiential knowledge and prior thinking about your work based studies in general,
and about the project in particular, you will be juggling a range of potential issues and subjects. Just as the
model as a whole is cyclical rather than linear, we have noted, so is this aspect of reflection. There will be
interaction between purpose, observation and experience, and it is their frequent exchanges that will nudge
you towards a shortlist of topics. Sometimes this process can seem like a whirlwind of confusing ideas,
thoughts and blind alleys. ‘Sleeping on it’ is sometimes good advice. Some people find it helpful to write down
some possible topics at this stage, while others prefer to approach this task with friends or fellow learners,
and talk through potential possibilities and opportunities.

Reflection-on-Action

Schön makes a distinction between ‘reflection-in-action’ and ‘reflection-on-action’. The former is sometimes
referred to as ‘thinking on our feet’, and refers to the ability – often associated with professionals – to draw on
experience, understanding and judgement in order to deal with new and changing circumstances. The idea
of reflection-in-action nicely encapsulates Schön's epistemology of practice which rejects technical–rational
positivist explanations of how practitioners manage change in favour of an epistemology of practice in which
the knowledge inherent in practice can be understood as artful doing. In encountering new situations, we

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draw on comparable memories and experiences to construct a frame or framework that guides our present
actions and responses. Reflection-on-action describes the process of reflecting on experience after the event,
drawing out lessons, implications and understandings that will inform future action.

Coding

Coding is the technical term for a descriptive label used to name observations, events and behaviours.
An example is ‘formal quality procedure’. Others might be ‘quality in work conversations’, ‘customer quality
concerns’, ‘management of quality’, ‘confusion about quality’ and so on. Note that these codes could
subsequently be grouped together under a single category of ‘quality assurance’. However, it is best to group
into categories later in the research process rather than sooner. The reason is that some codes may go into
more than one category. For example, ‘quality management’ would obviously fit into a category of ‘quality
assurance’ but, equally obviously, would also fit into a category of ‘management’. Equally, and perhaps
confusingly, you may need to convert some codes into categories (see next paragraph)!

Categorization

Categories, as we have already noted, are constructs or ‘bins’ into which discrete events, actions and
behaviours are placed for later analysis. Categories are necessarily broader and more general than codes,
so ‘winking’ would be a code, whilst ‘non-verbal communication’ would be a category. But, as we have
noted above, you may need to convert codes into categories. To take a trivial example, having decided
that ‘winking’ is a code, you may come across distinct types of winking that signify different meanings,
for example sexual, knowing, collusion, twitch and so on, that might justify elevating ‘winking’ from code
to category. Categories map and differentiate the topic of the study. Often, categories can themselves be
grouped into super-categories. For example, ‘quality assurance’, ‘human resources’, ‘finance’ and ‘strategy’
might all be grouped into a super-category called ‘management’. Categories are creative constructs, and can
help and inform the reflective process, in particular in thinking about relationships between events, actions
and behaviours.

Analysis

Given a clear purpose for the work based project, and data organized into codes, categories and possibly
super-categories, analysis is simply the description of relationships between the themes (categories) you
have discovered. Analysis is critical, so it goes beyond description. This means it is essential to draw out
implications and inferences from your data, exploring relationships, for example, between quality documents
and quality in practice, and drafting emerging conclusions and implications which are further developed later
in the study. Analysis is thoughtful and creative, so you have to link your themes to those in the literature,
making judgements about the strength of evidence you have uncovered for particular trends and comparing
this with what other researchers have found. It is well worth looking at the assessment criteria for your project,

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which will refer to analysis in some detail, as this is what differentiates high-quality work from the rest. At
Queen's University Belfast, for example, a Masters level dissertation will achieve an A grade (70 per cent or
above) only if it demonstrates:

• high-level analysis
• synthesis and evaluation of literature and topics/issues
• an evaluative approach evident in internal consistency of arguments and external criteria
• evidence of capacity to apply learning to this and other areas of experience
• flair
• originality and insight
• clear evidence of a high level of understanding and skill in undertaking and reporting a research
process.

(Queen's University Belfast, 2007)

Comparison

Notice that in the assessment criteria above, reference is made to ‘synthesis’, ‘evaluation’ and ‘other areas of
experience’. This demonstrates the importance of comparison. You will need to locate your research findings
and analysis in the context of other work based research. However, this is something that you will do early
on in the research process at the point when you are formulating your topic. Looking at relevant literature is
a good way of identifying a good topic and will help to ensure that your own study is relevant, topical and
connected to other literature in the field. Another important comparison is with the sector or profession in
which you work. Professions in particular rely on commonly accepted or tacit knowledge and understanding
about the way the profession is followed and how professionals conduct themselves, communicated through
training, professional development, common working practices and professional ethics and codes of conduct.
Your research may confirm, question or undermine some or all of these forms of knowledge and customary
practice, and you will need to be prepared to challenge accepted knowledge in an appropriate and scholarly
way. This aspect is developed in more detail in Chapter 4.

Theorization

Theorization, or theorizing, is a high-sounding term for what is quite a straightforward process. As noted at
the beginning of this chapter, theories are simply models – ways of thinking about or categorizing knowledge
about the world. By following the steps above (from ‘observation’ through to ‘the-orization’), you will have
completed the essential process of theorizing and developed generalized categories that are connected
by purpose and which illuminate one or more aspects of work based practice. The authors of this book
strongly believe that learners should become more confident in engaging with theory discussion, and we
encourage the notion of ‘theory-in-use’ developed by Donald Schön. Theory-in-use is that implicit in what
we do as practitioners. Theory that we use to describe our actions to others can be described as ‘espoused

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theory’. Theory-making makes strong use of comparison, connecting with existing theory, and seeing what is
confirmed and what seems not to fit our own case. This is why the methodical and careful approach to coding
and categorizing described above will pay off in terms of providing the basic ingredients for theory building.

Dilemmas for the Reflective Practitioner

Elliott (1991), writing in the context of action research for educational change, identified a number of dilemmas
for reflective practitioners which we have generalized to all work based research settings. In each case, we
have drawn on Elliott's analysis in suggesting ways the dilemma might be resolved.

Encouraging Others to Critique One's Professional Practice

Professional status carries with it notions of autonomy, high status, independence and personal expertise, all
of which, in the minds of some, can be undermined by questioning and critique. Your success in encouraging
others to question your own practice will depend on how successfully you can establish a climate of critical
openness and respect for professional expertise that is not predicated on preciousness, vanity or aloofness.
Setting clear boundaries to questioning is often helpful, for example disallowing or limiting references to
other professionals. Always let colleagues know what you are doing and why, to help to create a supportive
environment for insider research in the organization.

Gathering Data

Some data may be difficult to gather. Information may be confidential, sensitive or only available to certain
grades of employee. Insider-researchers often have to be patient, avoid taking pre-emptive or presumptuous
action and, where possible, seek permission from a sympathetic authority.

Sharing Data with Professional Peers Both Inside and Outside the
Organization

Sharing data promotes a reflective conversation and is at the heart of transforming any professional culture.
However, sharing data has the potential to bring latent conflict into the open where problem areas of practice
become exposed which can give rise to ‘finger pointing’. As an insider-researcher, you can agree to give
those who provide data their say on what is shared, but you need to recognize that this accedes to traditional
structures and spheres of authority which are often in tension with more democratic notions of reflective
practice and action research. As an insider-researcher, you will often find yourself having to resolve real
dilemmas of what to divulge and having to balance organizational interests with those of the research itself,
and indeed of your continued access to the workplace.

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Blurring the Practitioner-Researcher Role

It is a particular characteristic of qualitative research that some blurring of roles may occur. As an employee,
you will have access to data that are essentially in the private domain and restricted to the company or
organization in which you work. As a researcher, you will be drawn further into the public domain, and it is the
tension between the private and the public that can create dilemmas in selecting and sharing data. The more
data is depersonalized and de-contextualized, the more it resolves the dilemma of the private and the public
but becomes less valuable. Therefore, you must give considerable thought to what data can be made public
and who you should seek to gain permission. No two cases are the same and such judgements have to be
made and re-made for every single work based research project.

A Reluctance to Produce Case Studies of Researchers' Own Reflective

Practices

There is an ongoing debate amongst researchers about the wider significance of reflective practice, often
giving rise to concern about the extent to which findings can be generalized. This is a controversial debate
which polarizes opinion, however a number of writers have noted the powerful potential for small-scale
research, case studies and reflective practice to:

• tutor our judgement (Stenhouse, 1979)

• highlight internal contradictions in policy formulation and implementation (Finch, 1988)
• provide working recipes for an understanding of the abstract properties of social life (Rock, 1979)
• give a detailed understanding of the local context in which innovations are being attempted (Crossley
and Vulliamy, 1984)
• tap the quiddity, the uniqueness of particular cultures, contexts and personalities (Hurst, 1987)
• be a powerful management tool that is highly sensitive to the perspectives of those directly affected
by policies and procedures (Elliott, 1996)
• connect research with the everyday world through the use of fuzzy generalization (Bassey, 1998).

Each of these dilemmas, if left unresolved, has the potential to thwart even the most experienced work
based researcher. In general, careful thought, planning, discussion with your supervisor and consultation with
appropriate colleagues and managers in the workplace should point to ways of resolving most tensions you
come across. However, you should guard against easy solutions that constrain professionalism and legitimate
authority, privacy and territoriality. Helen Simons has powerfully argued the case for a distinctive methodology
of insider-research/evaluation which rests ‘upon the possibility of dismantling the value structure of privacy,
territory and hierarchy, and substituting the values of openness, shared critical responsibility and rational
autonomy’ (Simons, 1985).

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Discussion Questions

1. Consider some benefits and disadvantages of coding research data. How might the
disadvantages be overcome?
2. How might ‘blogging’ be used in an insider-research study as a tool for reflective practice?
3. Thinking about an organization you are familiar with, which of the dilemmas for the
reflective practitioner seem most problematic, and how might they be overcome?

References

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Barton, T. (2008) ‘Understanding practitioner ethnography’, Nurse Researcher15(2): 7–18. http://dx.doi.org/

10.7748/nr2008.01.15.2.7.c6322

Bassey, M. (1980) Fuzzy Generalisation: An Approach to Building Educational Theory. Paper presented to
British Educational Research Association annual conference, 27 August, Queen's University Belfast.

Edited by: Bennett, N., Crawford, M. and Riches, C. (eds) (1992) Managing Change in Education. London:
Paul Chapman Publishing/Open University Press.

Boud, D. (2001) ‘Using journal writing to enhance reflective practice’, in Edited by: L.M.English and
M.A.Gillen (eds) New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education90: 9–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ace.16

Crossley, M. and Vulliamy, G. (1984) ‘Case study research methods and comparative education’,
Comparative Education20(2): 193–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305006840200202

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