The case: Meadowbank Academy
A fictional 11-16 school of about 900 pupils. Referrals for "low-level disruption" rose from 260 to 412 between the autumn and spring terms, and senior staff have asked for research. In January the behaviour policy changed: referral, previously discretionary, became the expected response to a second warning.
So nobody yet knows whether pupils are behaving differently. The log records staff referrals, not pupil behaviour, and the thing that most obviously changed is the rule about when to refer. The school's full evidence file sits inside the activity below, and it is the same file for every lens.
All figures are invented for teaching. They are not estimates of anything, and no real school, policy or dataset is described.
First, a judgement
Three research teams are given exactly the material above. They differ only in what they assume the social world is like and how it can be known.
The lens switch
Declare a starting point, then make five decisions. Each decision offers the same four options whichever lens you declared - the tool never labels an option with the position it belongs to, because in a real research meeting nobody does either.
Need a hand?
Nothing here changes the controls for you, and none of it says what you are going to find.
Key terms
- Ontology
- What a position takes its research object to be — an underlying mechanism, a regularity among observables, or something produced in talk.
- Epistemology
- What that position treats as knowledge of the object, and therefore what could count as evidence about it.
- Positivism
- Looking for regularities among observable quantities, and treating careful measurement of them as the route to knowledge.
- Critical realism
- Holding that there are real structures beyond what is observed, while our access to them stays fallible and theory-laden.
- Social constructionism
- Treating the object of study as produced in interaction and language. It is a claim about how the object comes to be what it is, not a claim that nothing is real.
Build a study from a position
The specification on the right fills in as you choose. Watch what happens to the rows you have not touched.
The study you are specifying
Case: a reported rise in low-level disruption at Meadowbank Academy.
What this study could and could not say
The evidence the school holds, for reference
- Recorded incidents. 260 logged in the autumn term, 412 in the spring term. A logged incident is a referral typed into the behaviour system by a member of staff.
- A staff survey. 68% of the 74 respondents agree that "behaviour in lessons has got worse this year". 12% disagree.
- A policy change. In January the behaviour policy was revised. Referral, previously discretionary, became the expected response to a second warning.
- Staffing. Eleven of the 62 teaching staff are in their first year at the school, against three the year before.
- Rooms and timetable. Two departments moved into temporary accommodation in January; both are among the four highest-referring departments.
- Pupil focus groups. Notes from two sessions. Recurring phrases include "they only write you up if they don't like you" and "it depends whose lesson it is".
Lenses you have run on this case
| Starting point | Object of study | Becomes visible | Recedes from view | Action it points to |
|---|
Challenge - five things somebody wants to say
Each sentence below could appear in the school's report to governors. For each, decide which design - if any - could support it.
What this demonstrates
Methods are usually taught as a toolbox: pick the technique that suits the question. That hides the step before it. All three teams held the same log, the same survey and the same policy change; what differed was what each took disruption to be, and that decision settled the question, the evidence and the claim before anything was collected. Choosing a method looks like the decision. It is the consequence of one already taken.
For teaching elsewhere: take this activity as one self-contained block of HTML, on the clipboard or as a file. Either way it is styled so that it will not disturb the page you put it into.