The overuse of self-report in the study of beliefs in education: epistemological considerations

ABSTRACT

The last few decades abound in studies concerned with what teachers, students, parents, and other participants in the educational process believe about a wide variety of issues. Most of these studies follow methodological procedures based on reports that people make about their own beliefs. We argue that this strategy is seriously flawed under certain conditions that often obtain and, therefore, we should revise what we know so far about people’s beliefs. We also suggest a more suitable alternative procedure.

KEYWORDS:

• Beliefs
• educational research
• participant observation
• research methods
• self-report
• teacher beliefs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The notion of thick description is an important contribution to contemporary epistemology made during the second half of the twentieth century by the British philosopher Ryle (2009a). It is a key notion that helped to overcome some of the unjustified obstacles that logical positivism imposed to scientific inquiry. It was Geertz (1994) who introduced it to anthropology and the social sciences.

2 For anthropologists, participating entails joining in “the current of activity in which you carry on a life alongside and together with the persons and things that capture your attention” (Ingold 2014, 387). In this vein, Hockey and Martin (2012) assert that participant observation should be understood as participant engagement, which reflects the importance of both being there and being with other people. There are, of course, different ways in which researchers can participate in any given community (for there are different sorts of activities and different ways of engaging in them); and surely, these different kinds of participation provide access to different aspects of the observed phenomena. Thus, for example, some of the beliefs researchers can get knowledge of by participating as teaching assistants at school are clearly not available to them if their role is to make the coffee or to do some other non-pedagogical job. (We are thankful to the reviewers of this paper for making us state this point.)

3 Of course, there is no unique set of rules (either in chess or in any natural language) and, to that extent, there are different communities – so the knowledge acquired can be correctly generalized only to the specific community in which one has participated. This must always be considered when interpreting the results of participant observation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica de Chile (CONICYT) [grant numbers FONDECYT 11121589; FONDECYT 1120550; FONDEF ID15I10647].