Informed guessing: enacting abductively-driven research

ABSTRACT

Various abductive research approaches have been foregrounded in the literature in recent years. This paper joins the literature on engaging with abductive research approaches, and proposes the term of ‘informed guessing’ as a way to think about enacting educational research abductively to allow new concepts, ideas and insights to come into being. Informed guessing is triggered by a surprising encounter, and the researcher attempts to understand that encounter (a little) differently by making relations and connections among disparate entities (e.g. concepts and objects). In informed guessing, theories and concepts play an important role by allowing one to refer to ‘invisible’ structures as well as for the enactment of defamiliarization, which allows for alternative understandings. Informed guessing is illustrated through an instance of my research enactment on the U.S. school choice lottery system. I conclude by raising concern about the relation between abduction and deduction in informed guessing.

KEYWORDS:

• Abduction
• informed guessing
• qualitative methodology
• new ideas
• research enactment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Adrian W. Chew http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6550-5566

Notes

1 I use the term ‘enactment’ to align with how other scholars (e.g. Singh, Heimans, and Glasswell 2014; Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012; Dewsbury et al. 2002) use the term to articulate how a researcher, and her research practices, co-constitutes the world that she is researching. A research enactment is thus not about a person applying methods/methodologies to the world to discover something, but something that emerges through a myriad of (dis)connections among diverse subjects, objects and discourses.

2 This proposition depends on how the terms induction and deduction are understood. For instance, certain inductively-driven case-study research approaches (e.g. Stake 2006) emphasize the building of new ideas and insights from observing data. As for deduction, Sherlock Holmes used the term that mirrored Peircean abduction (see Eco and Sebeok 1983).

3 To be clear, I am not valorising the new, lest one forgets that ‘[n]ot all change leads necessarily to rewarding improvements, and many changes culminate in punishing losses for too many’ (Luke 2016, 115). For instance, when families in the U.S. are given more options to choose schools for their children (e.g. expansion of charter schools), expanded and unrestricted school choice options led to increased academic inequality and racial segregation (see Orfield and Frankenberg 2013). Nonetheless, there are various forms of injustices and inequalities around us (see for example, Dorling 2014; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010), and if one is committed to live in a different, perhaps more just and equal world, then new concepts, ideas and insights (i.e. different ways of understanding phenomena) probably contribute to discussions and actions towards such a world(s). The relation between ideas and material consequences is captured succinctly by post-qualitative scholars who firmly believe that ‘thinking differently changes being’ (i.e. how a different understanding of the world contributes to a different engagement with the world, which allows for new worlds) (Lather and St. Pierre 2013, 631). This relation is also argued by transformative learning scholars who see ideas and actions intricately linked and affecting each other (e.g. Hoggan 2016; O’Sullivan and Taylor 2004).

4 Alternatively, following a Peircean model of scientific inquiry to test the provisional interpretation, one may also look for that flying insect, and/or ask the person why she is clapping her hands.

5 Peirce (1966) would not agree with associating abduction with a serendipitous nature as he argues that luck only plays a small part in abducting ‘successful’ theories. For him, successful abduction has much to do with the human mind’s affinity with the natural order of the world. Nonetheless, as Fann (1970) points out, Peirce’s proposition of the success of abduction in arriving at a finite number of testable hypotheses/theories due to humans’ affinity with nature is itself an abductive inference in itself. The upshot here is that what primarily contributes to successful abductions is open for debate.

6 Survivor is a reality television franchise produced in many countries albeit with some variations. For most part, it retains the franchise name Survivor, but is also named as Expedition Robinson in some European and South American countries. However, regardless of how it is named, it follows the arc of participants living on an island for an extended period where they compete in various challenges to be the sole participant on that island.

7 As highlighted in Footnote 3, difference does not always lead to positive consequences for people, but the status quo, I would argue alongside other scholars (e.g. Dorling 2014; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010), is rift with injustices and inequalities, which then provides a moral impetus for a different world(s).