Pragmatic post‐structuralism (I): participant observation and discourse in evaluating violence intervention

Abstract

This paper discusses the process and merits of a post-structuralist approach to participant observation and describes the use of this research strategy in evaluating a community based`stopping violence' programme. While the participant observation research strategy is commonly employed as a`process evaluation' method (Rossi and Freeman, 1993) it's role within a distinctly post-structuralist programme is a novel application of a well-established research strategy. This has signi®cant implications for how social scientists may approach both participant observation and evaluation in the future.

Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school

“…4 4 . The principle of generalisation is not generally applicable to post‐structural research, which operates according to principles of discursive locatedness and partiality of any research findings (O'Neil & Morgan, 2001; Blaise, 2005). …”

Pragmatic post‐structuralism (II): an outcomes evaluation of a stopping violence programme

“…From this position, based upon our observations of the programme itself (O'Neill and Morgan, 2001) and the interview data presented here, a number of conclusions were drawn from the evaluation study and the ®nal stage within the formal evaluation process involved presenting these to the local programme providers. Key conclusions were communicated to this organization through a detailed written report and an oral overview of key ®ndings and issues.…”

“…Where appropriate the discursive resources identi®ed in the post-structuralist review of violence in the social science literature (O'Neill, 1998) was employed to categorize the recurring features of the men's narratives. As reiterated in O'Neill and Morgan (2001), this post-structuralist taxonomy included the discourses of Medical pathology; Romantic expressive-tension; Liberal Humanist instrumentalism; Structuralist social systemic constraints; and Learned behaviour. This taxonomy of accounts employed with the social sciences proved to be an adequate resource for locating the men's accounts.…”

“…Identifying primary emotions, which underlie secondary anger, was a key part of the anger management and masculinity consciousness raising components to the programme (O'Neill and Morgan, 2001) and the employment of this concept in the men's postprogramme talk indicates that the men have learnt to draw on this account when re¯ecting on their violence. Primary emotions were constructed by the men as either motivating them to control their partners (instrumentally) or as involuntarily culminating in an explosive rage (expressive tension) or both.…”

The need to broaden and strengthen the evidence base for supervised consumption sites

“…Establishing causality was a key feature of early writers on quasi‐experimental designs who required investigators to remove systematically all rival hypotheses until the most probable cause was revealed . Since then, there have been developments in qualitative approaches to assessing causality whereby researchers monitor by observation causal mechanisms linking interventions to outcomes . While combining methodological approaches may be challenging, it has the potential to advance research beyond the traditional ‘gold standard' for establishing effectiveness .…”