2 | Research design and methods
How to foster sustainability in assentamentos? This question guided our research design and methods. From the start, our idea was not to merely seek theoretical knowledge (as in purely academic research), nor to inform a specific decision (as in traditional policy analysis approaches), but to produce knowledge that could lead to better decisions by stakeholders involved in agrarian reform (Mead, 2005). In short, we have carried out what we understand as a policy research.
Therefore, we decided to design a qualitative field research. We felt that our questions could be better answered by such a method. This was not only due to the lack of relevant statistics about the rural communities of interest, but also because we felt that our question required us to “lay our hands on the institutions” (Mead, 2005, p. 1) and have direct contact with agrarian reform policy elements. Consequently, we collected and read government documents, observed assentamento dynamics, and interviewed community residents and bureaucrats, with the intention of constructing our own updated perspective of the question.
In order to gather information and limit our data collection, we opted for a collective instrumental case study. It is instrumental (Stake, 2005) as our objective in studying a case was to use information and insights obtained to help us construct an answer for a broader question—i.e. how to foster sustainability in assentamentos—rather than studying in depth the particularities and dynamics of each individual case.
Furthermore, it is collective because we studied a number of different communities (assentamentos and ecovillages). Although embedded in different contexts and having different characteristics, the communities had two elements in common: they were rural and showed some concern to translate the concept of ‘sustainability’ into practice. Also, we believed that understanding them would lead to a better understanding of our research question.
Our research can also be said to be experimental, as the state of prior theory and research in the field (sustainability in rural agrarian communities) is still limited, or nascent (Edmondson & McManus, 2007, p. 1160). Therefore, we opted for elaborating an “open-ended inquiry about the phenomenon of interest”, using “qualitative, open-ended data that need to be interpreted for meaning”. “Identifying patterns” became our main goal, suggesting ties with theory and outlining recommendations as “an invitation for further work on the issue or set of issues opened up by the study” (Edmondson & McManus, 2007, p. 1160).
Furthermore, we should highlight that our research was inspired by a strong constructivist approach. Although some preconceived ideas were present in the design of our research project, we tried, as much as we could, to go into the field without preconceptions, frameworks or even theories to understand our data. Inspired by the so-called “Gioia Method” and grounded theory, we designed our research to allow “revelation, richness and trustworthiness” and to explore salient concerns and questions linked to sustainability in rural communities. As Gioia (2004) suggests, we tried to “pick people's brains” and “figure out how they make sense of their organizational experience” to elaborate descriptive narratives that could capture what we think they know and explore salient themes based on their experience (Langley & Abdallah, 2011, p. 14).
Based on our previous experiences, we felt that in order to collect data and insights on selected cases and to later present them to our readers in novel ways, multimedia material would have to be collected. Following an increasing interest in incorporating a visual dimension to policy research (Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary, & Van Leeuwen, 2013), we decided to try it out. Therefore, we collected videos, photos, and sketches—ourselves or with help from colleagues—and tried, as much as we could, to incorporate those objects to the research analysis and description. Although this text does not contain many visual elements, we intend to soon publish a multimedia interactive journey through our research data.
From the start, we were aware that using video cameras for interviews could have an impact on our in-depth interview dynamics. However, as our topic was not very sensitive, we believe the gains of incorporating this visual dimension can exceed eventual losses. Anyhow, we tested the multimedia data collection approach in our first field trips and concluded that it did not seem to have a significant impact on interviews—our main concern. It is true that, as participants knew beforehand that they were going to be recorded or photographed—and that records would be openly available in the Internet—only those that agreed with those conditions participated.