Boundary Setting in Naturalistic Designs
Key terms
Confirming case
Deviant case
Disconfirming case
Domain analysis
Gaining access
Homogeneous selection
Maximum variation
Theory-based selection
Typical case
Let us now look at the way in which a researcher engages in the action process of setting boundaries when conducting a study using naturalistic designs. In naturalistic research, setting boundaries is a dynamic, inductive process. It is an action process that is flexible and fluid and that occurs over a prolonged period of engagement in fieldwork.
Because the basic purpose of naturalistic research is exploration, understanding, description, and explanation, the researcher does not often know the specific boundaries of the inquiry or the particular conceptual domains before undertaking the study. Indeed, the very point of the study may be to uncover and establish the specific characteristics that bound or define a group of persons or explicate a particular concept or human experience. Thus, for most naturalistic designs, boundary setting is embedded in the field experience; boundaries emerge and are set on the basis of the process of collecting information and ongoing formative analyses. The final determination of boundaries for a particular concept, or set of constructs, may not actually occur until the formal analysis and reporting phases of the study. Nevertheless, a researcher must start setting boundaries at some point and make decisions as to what to observe, with whom to talk, and how to proceed in the field. Thus, boundary setting in naturalistic inquiry begins broadly and then becomes refined as the research proceeds.
Ways of setting boundaries
Researchers working in the traditions of naturalistic inquiry must consider bounding their study along a number of dimensions. These dimensions include the location or physical or virtual setting, the cultural groups, the range and nature of experiences that will be examined, the particular concepts that will be explored, the artifacts that will be examined, and the ways in which individuals are involved.
Geographic Location
Naturalistic studies can investigate a wide range of locations, from virtual settings (e.g., Second Life, Internet chat rooms, blogs, Web sites) to geographic locations and physical settings. Regardless of the setting, there are basic principles for creating boundaries. Consider the following example of bounding a naturalistic study.
In Tally’s Corner, Liebow1 conducted an ethnography to “gain … a clear, first-hand picture of lower class Negro men especially street corner Negroes.” Thus, the initial boundaries of the research were set broadly to include a subgroup of African American men, those spending time on the street corner. Liebow identified a geographic location to enter the field, so his research was initially bounded by the physical location of a neighborhood where the men lived, worked, and “hung out.” As the study proceeded, Liebow noted that his data collection took him beyond the initial geographic boundaries to “courtrooms, jails, hospitals, dance halls, beaches, and private houses.” Liebow initially set boundaries for entry into the study and then expanded and modified these boundaries as the study proceeded to understand the men who congregated on the street corner. This process is characteristic of boundary setting in naturalistic inquiry.
In this classic study, Tally’s Corner, the geographic location initially formed the boundary because the query sought to understand the lives and experiences of African American men who frequented urban street corners. The identification of a specific locale, geographic region, or area is a customary way of initially bounding a study in the naturalistic traditions. It allows the investigator to enter the field, but the location is only an entry point and may be expanded, as in Liebow’s research, to other locales as well.
Choosing the initial boundary or location is a conscious methodological decision, and the investigator may choose to then expand or not expand the location. Consider the following example, in which the location remained very bounded throughout the study.
In Gubrium’s classic investigation2 of life at a nursing home, the facility of Murray Manor established the initial boundaries of the study, and Gubrium decided to conduct all his observations in this facility. He consciously chose not to observe prior home life of residents or examine interactions outside the nursing home setting. By focusing or delimiting the study to the world within the nursing home, he achieved a rich or “thick” description of the multiple social worlds of patients and staff in that one locale. Also, by staying within that one setting, he implicitly made the interpretive point that it is through the lens of the present status and set of interactions within the nursing home that previous life is reinterpreted and experienced. Thus, similar to the residents themselves, we are forced to relive their history through their current everyday life. By staying within that setting and the present day of residents, Gubrium emphasized its permanence, the connection of the past to the present, and thus the deep impact on quality of life.
Now we apply the principles from these examples to a virtual location.
Suppose you were interested in identifying the experiences of students with mobility impairments on college campuses in northeastern United States. Rather than spend time on multiple campuses, you choose to enter an online site that students with mobility impairment have created to discuss their experiences. Or suppose you wanted to theorize about how the construct of diversity is reflected in the virtual environment. You might enter a site such as Second Life and observe or interact to understand how avatars and interactions inform diversity differently than embodied, racial, or ethnic views of the physical world.
You therefore choose your initial point of entry into the field as the interactive chat room on the Web site, setting this virtual location as your initial boundary.
Cultural Groups
Cultural groups are another way in which researchers in the naturalistic tradition may form their study’s initial boundary and point of entry. A “culture” may be loosely defined as the customs and tacit knowledge held by individuals who belong to a group. A group can be defined by ethnicity, race, or shared experience (e.g., parents of children with chronic illness, substance abusers). Culture may also be identified by the location in which it exists or as the rules, beliefs, and values that guide a person or group of people through a particular experience, such as the “culture of home care therapists,” “culture of disability,” or “culture of caregiving.”
Assume you want to study family interactions and the impact of caregiving among Cuban Americans, a cultural group highly concentrated in Florida and in the southern United States. You begin your study in one region of Florida but are uncertain of the impact of “southern” values and culture on interaction patterns. You may want to expand or redefine the boundary of your study to include other geographic locations with Cuban American communities to tease out the potential influence of the Southern culture of the United States.
As a researcher collects information about a cultural group, he or she may refine the boundaries of the study to obtain a fuller understanding of the group. In the previous example, you could decide to travel to Cuba to understand the cultural underpinnings and historical forces that have shaped your Cuban American study group. A researcher also might use virtual sites to expand cultural boundaries, such as Web sites devoted to a particular cultural group.
Personal Experience
In studies that focus on the exploration of a particular experience, the phenomenon immediately sets the boundaries for what will be examined; that is, the boundaries of the inquiry lie within the realm of the particular experiences described by the individuals. Experiences such as suffering, healing, aging, poverty, a rite of passages, and terminal illness are examples of potential areas of exploration from a phenomenological perspective. In phenomenological studies, the goal is to understand the experiences of a small set of individuals from their own perspectives or “lived” experience. For example, a phenomenologist who wants to describe the experience of a parent who has a child with a terminal illness may choose to interview and observe that parent. The boundary of the study (and thus the understanding derived from it) applies only to the individual’s lived experience. As stated earlier, however, the researcher must begin somewhere and make a selection decision as to which individual or individuals to interview who possess the specific characteristic of having a terminally ill child. The selection process may be purposeful in that the researcher makes the judgment as to which parent may be a reasonable “informant” given the scope or depth of his or her particular experience. Other decisions about how to delimit the study must be made as well. The researcher must decide what other data materials to examine (e.g., parent’s diaries, e-mails, favorite book, or music selection).
Wiseman,3 in a phenomenological study of the experience of loneliness, initially identified the domain of concern as the “phenomenon of loneliness among university students.” To explore the different meanings of this experience, she selected four students who had high scores on a loneliness trait scale. Her study demonstrated that even though these students had similar scoring patterns on a standardized test, their experiences of loneliness and the meanings attributed to this psychological state varied greatly. Wiseman’s study was delimited by the conceptual domain of loneliness. The study purpose shaped other bounding decisions, such as who was selected for study participation.
Similarly, suppose you are interested in the following experience.
To explore the different meanings of the experience of trauma resulting from exposure to war, you might identify soldiers (and/or civilians) from one or more wars with varying levels of exposure to traumatic experiences. Many possible directions are available for you to take. If your purpose is to understand the variability in the experiences of trauma, you would want to maximize the variability of persons and experiences examined. If, however, your intent is to explore a more select or targeted aspect of traumatic experiences (e.g., prisoners of war), you would select individuals accordingly.
The investigator must initially establish the immediate study purpose and bound the personal experience that is to be targeted, at least initially, to engage in a feasible research process.
Concepts
As in the previous example, some forms of inquiry explore a particular concept. Thus, it is the particular concept that initially bounds the scope of the study in these types of inquiry. Wiseman’s study3 was limited to the exploration of one concept—loneliness. The study expanded understanding of the dimensions and nature of loneliness by identifying the range of different meanings.
In other types of naturalistic inquiry, the investigator “casts a wide net” and is interested in understanding underlying values or beliefs that guide behaviors.4 In these forms of inquiry, the concepts of interest may not be immediately identified and may emerge only in the course of the study as a consequence of the analytical process.
Gitlin and colleagues were interested in discovering the meanings attributed to mobility aids and other special assistive devices for persons after their first stroke.5 The concepts that explicated particular meanings were uncovered from an analysis of interviews with 102 individuals receiving rehabilitation services. Concepts such as social “stigma,” “biographic management,” and “continuity of self” emerged as important analytical domains that explained the dimensions of meanings associated with device use. Each concept had been defined and developed by other researchers involved in disability studies. Gitlin and associates did not initially bound the study to these conceptual domains; rather, these concepts emerged as important focal points in the analytical phase of the study.5
Some studies, however, begin by setting conceptual boundaries.
A study by DePoy6 using a Delphi technique (a method in which expert respondents answer questions several times to achieve consensus) sought to define the concept of “mastery” in occupational therapy practice. The investigator wanted to know what is meant by being “good” at clinical practice. In the first part of a two-part study, DePoy used a nonprobability purposive sampling process to select a group of experts who could define mastery. These experts nominated “masters,” who were then interviewed to obtain their unique experiences as master clinicians. However, even though a sample of experts provided the initial data, the boundary was the concept of mastery, not the individuals who contributed to its definition. In the second part of the study, DePoy expanded the boundary to the practice arena and examined how mastery was demonstrated by the three masters nominated by the expert respondents. The concept of mastery derived from the first part of the study was examined in the practices of these three informants through an extensive unstructured interview with each informant. DePoy made no claim of external validity but suggested that the model of mastery that was developed (i.e., the domain of the study) should be tested for its relevance to other domains of practice.
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