Performative Measures: Quantities, Theater, and Emergent Truths

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-4 - Truth, Trust, and Story: Practice, Pedagogy, and Power in the Lives of Youth

Abstract

PURPOSE:
This paper explores the creative and epistemological value of pairing quantitative and theatre methodologies as a way of researching the experiences of young people. It comes partially in response to provocations offered by researchers such as Omasta and Snyder-Young (2014), who challenge our comfortable, field-specific narratives/assumptions and the related avoidance of unfamiliar/disruptive research approaches, especially quantitative studies. Similar concerns fueled The Radical Hope Project: the desire to acquire a fulsome recognition of the sometimes-hidden ways youth experience hope and the aspiration to avoid delimiting the range of appreciable truths by pushing beyond familiar inquiry bound within standard ethnographies.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
The reflections on truth, aesthetics, and investigation offered by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (2004) provide a keystone for processing our quantitative inquiry. Three concepts are particularly important in this discussion: 1. Research as dependent on creative imagination, 2. Prioritizing truth that is communal and contextual (sensus communis), and 3. The use of “aesthetic differentiation” to discover emergent conversations that stoke the play impulse. In its totality, Gadamer’s perspectives support our decision to run contra the universally extrapolated truth typically found in quantitative studies (Teddlie, 2007).

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
The research featured in this paper, including simple word-frequency checks of interview data and the more complex mixed-methods, five-city survey of youth (65 questions, 195 individual respondents), appear on the surface rather traditional. However we broke from typical quantitative structures/analysis in two important ways. First, given our interest in communal truths, we deliberately restricted our participants to drama students with whom we had been relating in our larger qualitative study. Second, we have chosen to reflect hermeneutically on our qualitative and quantitative “texts” in ways that have depended upon theatrical modes of inquiry. One consecutive, two-step mode began by using textual alienation (à la theatre producer/theorist Berthold Brecht) to defamiliarize initial assumptions about the data and to reveal often unrecognized ‘conversations’ around points of shared meaningfulness. We then considered how these conversations tended to subsequently be ‘performed’ by youth inside and outside the classroom. This two-step process will be illustrated within the context of three analytical techniques: word-frequency counts, dimensional mapping, and data splitting.

RESULTS:
Our combined approach served not only to magnify the respondents’ reflexive reality – including their theories about the emerging and tenuous self – but also drew attention to the specific occasions in which they found themselves living (e.g. pessimism accompanying aging, ethnic divides). It additionally demonstrated how they began to re-perform the truth of who they are/wish to be (Schechner, 2006), such as their pursuit of care through the use of expressive and deferential roles.

SIGNIFICANCE:
Theatrical processes coupled with empirical data uniquely deepen our understanding of what youth feel is individually, collectively, and situationally true about themselves and the worlds they inhabit. This approach, we have discovered, is especially effective at emerging truths typically left unrevealed because they sit in the unconscious mind, beyond the immediate attention of the researcher, and/or hidden within systematic norms.

Author

• Scott Mealey, University of Toronto