Introduction

For my own notes as much as anything else, I want to set out my research stall here. I need to clarify my approach to this study in terms of my paradigm, epistemology, ontology, theoretical perspective and methodologies. These often-interchangeable words and phrases can be opaque and confusing yet come together to form the backbone of everything I'll be doing for the next few years. As I'm going to be at the centre of my research these need to be clear as they will be woven into every experiment I conduct and word I write. So here goes.

Epistemology and Ontology

How is knowledge acquired? Well, it’s subjective, innit? My love of Morrissey, the fact that I think Matt Smith is handsome, and my oddly obsessive love of cottage pie are things that I have decided are ‘pleasing’. Many others do not agree, especially when it comes to Morrissey.  Before I go any further, an admission. I'm still unsure of my semantic accuracy here, as many overarching, philosophical research terms appear to be used interchangeably and I do get confused.  BUT I am pretty sure my epistemology is subjectivism. I'm further convinced because I see subjectivism linked explicitly to constructivism – all things in our reality, our experiences and what we learn and how we learn it are constructed by us and are subjective in that our experiences are different to others’.

Ontologically speaking, when pondering the question ‘what exists in the human world that we can acquire knowledge about? I just want to shout ‘EVERYTHING!’, because as far as I see it, everything is relative, realities exist as the multiple tangible mental constructions of each individual, so no reality exists beyond subjects and their constructs and interpretations. 

Methodology and Methods

I'm a qualitative researcher, and I know this because my Masters was qualitative and I felt confident and comfortable using this methodology. I'm not awful at maths, but don't feel energised by numeric data. Nor do I feel as confident or comfortable, and my knowledge of analysis software like SPSS is about 15 years out of date. Add to this the fact that I don't see anything as being particularly binary, objective, definitive, or black and white, quantitative methods don't fit with my philosophy or preferred way of gathering data. If I'm honest, quantitative research also feels a little like wearing a research-based straitjacket and does not suit my personality. There. I said it.

I do feel comfortable and confident in my belief that all is data…which is handy, because that’s exactly what Barney Glaser said in 1978. And those three words provide the broadest of etymological umbrellas for the qualitative methodology I have chosen for this study: grounded theory, a research method concerned with the generation of theory, which is ‘grounded’ in data that has been systematically collected, compared, and analysed. It's generally used to uncover things like social relationships and behaviours of groups (or their social processes, and was developed in the USA by Glaser and Anselm Strauss.

I'm using constructivist grounded theory, an offshoot of classic grounded theory proposed by Kathy Charmaz in 1995. Charmaz built on the earlier work of Glaser and Strauss and proposed an approach to research that examines how people interpret their experiences and perspectives, and uses these interpretations to develop a deeper understanding of the topic under study. 

Furthermore, to implement constructivist grounded theory, I'm going to use a constructivist design that allows my participants to be active in their learning process, and interpret the data themselves. I shall also be central to the research, keeping a daily journal of my gaming habits and experiences (1) and acting as a participant in my own study. That’s wholly appropriate as it was the unintended consequences I experienced that triggered this project. These experiences will feed into my understanding of participants, and my ongoing gaming habits will add grist to the research mill. After all, if 'all is data', that includes me, right?

Rather than approaching my research with a definitive hypothesis to be proved or question to be answered, I’ll be constructing my own theories as the research unfolds via semi-structured interviews, participant journals, and analysis of extant literature. Theories will be grounded in the data through a process of constant comparison and analysis via coding and categorising data. 

At a pure (constructivist) grounded theorist level I’ll be examining the experiences of higher education students who play open world RPGs and simply asking ‘what’s going on here?’ But how do I look for any unintended consequences experienced by my participants if the core tenet for grounded theory is to that there is no question to answer, and theories are there to be discovered? Like a detective (Columbo, probably), I’ll be on the lookout for evidence that links to the notion of unintended consequences as I interview my participants, and tailoring prompts and follow-up questions that look more directly at unintended consequences as and when the situation dictates. 

I wonder if there’s a nihilistic streak in grounded theory researchers who are prepared to simply go on an adventure and see what they discover along the way? Moreso, those who are prepared to start their study with one question but change direction as theories emerge and end their study with the answer to a completely different research question than the one they set out to ask, and perhaps a whole new theory to the one they began with. Man, what a rush!

Finally, I am unashamedly calling this research 'an adventure' because if the term is good enough for Melanie Birks and Jane Mills (2023), then it’s certainly good enough for me. In terms of my love of open world role-playing games, I am literally an adventurer, so the methodology and methods I am using are linked to who I am as a gamer, as a researcher, and as an individual.

And I think that writing this all down has made things a little clearer to me. 🙂