NCRM/Qualiti Seminar, University of Surrey, 22 February 2006
Multi-method research: reflections from historical and social geography
Richard Dennis
Department of Geography, UCL
r.dennis@geog.ucl.ac.uk
I should offer at least two apologies by way of introduction. First, that if I have anything
worthwhile to say it is more in the area of integrating quantitative and qualitative methods and
sources than in combining a range of qualitative methods – so while I will try to stick to the
qualitative agenda, there will be hints of quantification creeping in from time to time.
My second disclaimer is even more scandalous in present company – and that is my devout
scepticism to the notion of research training divorced from a specific thematic as well as
disciplinary context. So I find it hard to talk about research methods in the abstract without
lapsing into the particularities of individual pieces of research. One of my own heroes in
historical geography is the Canadian geographer, Cole Harris, Professor at UBC. When I first
gave a paper at an international conference, in Canada, thirty years ago, Cole was there to be
enthusiastic and encouraging for a paper that really was full of correlation, regression and
factor analysis, a million miles from his own humanistic interests and, with the benefit of
hindsight, even I think it was a disturbingly reductionist take on that most humanistic of
concepts, community. Cole’s own broad-church eclecticism (and I guess it is from Cole that I
picked up on the word ‘eclectic’ that Amanda Coffey latched on to when she invited me) was
expressed in a classic paper he wrote for David Ley’s and Marwyn Samuels’s Humanistic
Geography (1978), entitled ‘The historical mind and the practice of geography’. In that paper,
he advocated the cultivation of a “historical mind” which was “open, eclectic … sensitive to
motivation and value” but also embraced “factual accuracy” including the use of statistics; a
mind that was “enthusiastic for hard data” but “ready to make explicit use of appropriate
theory”. But his all-embracing eclecticism and his call “to deemphasize technique and
resurrect learning” could also be interpreted as elitist, or ageist – in this case in discriminating
against youth! He lay most emphasis on the researcher’s acquisition of experience and
familiarity with their chosen society and landscape. And his conclusion that “there is no
methodological palliative to replace years of study and creative intelligence” runs counter to
today’s wisdom about training in research methods.
So – how to remain faithful to Cole Harris’s message without being totally dismissive of the
ESRC Centre that has invited me today?!
I’m here as a ‘cultural and historical geographer’ to use the phrase that Geography
Departments everywhere will no doubt be continuing to use in filling in their RAE forms. But
as I’ve already indicated, I regard myself as a historical geographer who is more than just
cultural. Within cultural geography, one of the most useful recent primers to research methods,
mainly targeted at third-year undergraduates and masters’ students researching and writing
their dissertations, but useful for us here as a pretty comprehensive survey of research practice
across the discipline, is the mostly-Queen Mary collectively edited Cultural Geography in
Practice (2003). Its sections on ‘writing’, ‘living’, ‘visualising’ and ‘performing’ cultural
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geography are somewhat contrived, but the subjects of individual chapters indicate the state of
the art: using archival records; or newspapers; or novels; or web chatrooms; or oral histories,
letters and personal diaries; or ethnographic fieldwork; or personal interviews; or
questionnaires; or discussion groups; or participant observation; or advertisements; or
photographs; or maps as texts; or films as texts; or public art. Few of the chapters explicitly
discuss combining methods, though, implicitly, visual sources are contextualised through
textual materials, and primary sources are interpreted through the lens of secondary materials.
While there are references to iconography and semiotics, there is no advocacy of any formal,
systematic mode of textual or visual analysis. The emphasis is on constructing a credible story.
In other, more social than cultural geographies, there is more explicit reference to mixed
methods and the language of triangulation and verification – I am thinking of the debate
initiated by Baxter and Eyles (Evaluating qualitative research in social geography, TIBG
1997), tabulating the range of qualitative methods employed by environmental researchers,
often doing research for clients who expected, if not a quantitative approach, at least one that
simulated the supposed rigour of scientific method; and also the discussions among population
geographers, researching migration through a combination of census analysis, questionnaires
and either semi-structured interviews or oral history. In historical population geography, Colin
Pooley and colleagues at Lancaster have done some impressive work in migration history,
recruiting thousands of family historians researching their own family histories, either to
provide their ancestors’ personal documents like diaries which can be read and mapped as
individual cases, or simply to supply the bare details of who in their family moved where,
when, and how often. So that, from thousands of such qualitative family histories, some
quantifiable data on migration and mobility could be generated.
Pooley represents the kind of social geographer with one foot in the past and the other as
firmly in contemporary social research. But even for those of us who are full-time historical
geographers, we are working in departments alongside social scientists of the contemporary
scene rather than, as historians, among colleagues all of whom are dealing with a more or less
distant past. Unsurprisingly, therefore, our historical method is often to try to emulate
contemporary social science methods. Can I reconstruct the equivalent of questionnaires of the
dead? Can I reconstruct interviews with the dead? Can I run discussion groups with them? Can
I hang out on their street corners?
Methods of record linkage developed in the 1970s by historical demographers were principally
quantitative – to calculate changes over time and space in fertility and mortality rates. But
record linkage is really just a technical name for the assembly of biographies of ordinary
people. In my own research on property ownership and landlordism in late 19th- and early 20thcentury Toronto, I began with lists of landlords derived from the city’s assessment records – I
knew what they owned but I didn’t know anything about their politics, their other business
interests, their associational life, their religion or their ethnicity. A trawl through biographical
dictionaries – the Who’s Who of Toronto – came up with entries for a few of the most
prominent; but to track down more ‘ordinary’ citizens, a more systematic strategy was
required. If I could find out when they died, then there was a reasonable chance of finding
their will and their probate record, and also of finding obituaries in the local press which, in
however sanitised a fashion, usually provided the information on their public life that I was
interested in. The best guide to when they died was to trace them through successive city
directories until they vanished. Of course, some of them vanished because they had retired to
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Florida, but in a good number of cases, disappearing from the directory led to an entry in a
probate index, which yielded a date of death, which led to an obituary in a newspaper.
Here I want to turn to the overarching theme of my own research, which is on the ‘modernity’
of cities – modernity in terms of modernization in technology, in discourses of power and
governance, in planning and regulation, and in the conceptualisation of abstract space; and
modernity in terms of experience, identity and self-consciousness – the shock of the new and
the creation of the self. My take on modernity is pretty conventional – Bermanesque – western
modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not the different, other, ordinary,
colonial and postcolonial modernities that have become fashionable in recent years – but that
alerts me to some of the archetypes of modern urban life: the flaneur, the detective, the
ragpicker. Historical researchers are necessarily on the margins, observing past society at
arm’s length, but acquiring a one-way intimacy with the regularities of behaviour of those we
observe. It would be nice to dignify my research by equating myself with the detective,
making connections between hitherto unrelated pieces of information; but really I’m more
often the ragpicker, searching in the rubbish of the past for whatever catches my eye.
There is a point to this extravagant comparison. Firstly, to think about modernity as method.
Modernization is mostly something that can be measured and quantified, and something that
can be ‘mapped’ – in the sense of observed from afar, a Lefebvrian ‘representation of space’ or
a de Certeau ‘place’ ripe for enumeration and systematic description. Modernity as identity is
mostly to be experienced through texts and images, accounts of spatial practice, expressions of
identity through resistance and transgression, amenable to representation on a map only in
individual cases or particular events: for example, in mapping the movements and interactions
of characters in novels, or daily routines from diary or oral history evidence, or the route of a
procession or the locations of temporary barricades as groups lay claim to and appropriated
space in the city.
Which leads back to the researcher as flaneur or detective, and to the strategies for selecting
sites or events or individuals for intensive study. In conventional social science research we
might start with a survey which, if not quantitative, was certainly intended to be
comprehensive – a pattern which both facilitates some kind of formal sampling and invites
explanation, probably through closer examination of the mechanisms and processes operating
in particular cases, possibly through interviews, discussion groups, inviting selected
participants to keep diaries, etc, etc. In historical research, this kind of strategy will be
frustrated, because we can’t get the equivalent of interviews with all or even most of the cases
we might sample. Nevertheless, if we keep records systematically and are prepared to work
iteratively, we may discover cases where it is possible to reconstruct not only what happened
but why it happened, what the consequences were, and what contemporaries thought about it.
Sometimes, the logic of the research process may be to start with the case study, hardly yet
knowing what it is a case of, and then to let the case generate the questions and the context
into which it fits.
Some concrete examples. One window into modernity on which I have concentrated focuses
on attitudes to living in flats in late 19th and early 20th century cities – on both sides of the
Atlantic. Flats are a useful barometer for a variety of issues in modern life:
 Attitudes to property (until WW2 flats were invariably rented, yet the prevailing norm
in society, especially in North America, equated modernity with homeownership)
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Attitudes to family and to immigration (flats were no place to bring up children, so
couples who lived too long in flats were not only anti-family, but anti-patriotic,
committing ‘race suicide’, almost encouraging foreign immigration if population
growth and economic growth were to be maintained; moreover flats were ‘foreign’ –
French flats in London and New York – implying foreign values)
Attitudes to gender and sexual morality (there was not enough housework in flats to
keep women occupied while their spouses were at work, so living in flats encouraged
women to look for other things to fill their time; at the same time, unattached women
could stay independent and make their own home living in a flat)
Attitudes to privacy, and to the impact of tall buildings on their surroundings (the
safety of living high above the ground, and questions of overlooking or casting
shadows over neighbouring properties, not to mention the impact on population and
traffic densities of large numbers of people living on a site hitherto occupied by only
one or two single-family dwellings)
It is easy to find expressions of these kinds of attitudes in the press and, in fact, my first
venture into this topic focused on a particular moment in 1912 when the City of Toronto
passed legislation prohibiting the erection of new apartment buildings in so-called ‘residential’
areas of the city. When I began this research in the late 1980s, there were no searchable online
newspaper archives, a manual search was all that was possible, so by focusing on a key event,
and restricting the search to the few months before and after the passage of the by-law, I
maximised my chances of finding relevant material.
The 1912 by-law created a system where developers could apply for exemptions, permitting
the construction of further apartments on hitherto prohibited sites. It was easy to enumerate
these exemptions, but the official record in council minutes rarely did more than note the
decision. Again, however, it was possible to research individual cases, either by linking from
the printed council record to committee correspondence files which yielded letters and
petitions; or by tracing the reports of council meetings in the Toronto press, where the cut and
thrust of debates in the council chamber were gleefully reported. There were also visual
sources – publicity postcards; architectural elevations, perspectives and floor plans;
advertisements (especially associated with the opening of buildings). What all this added up to
were several dozen buildings that I felt I knew intimately (even though some had been
demolished long before I started this research), and which then constituted the sample for more
quantitative research back among assessment and census records.
You will probably tell me that these biographies – whether of people or buildings – are not
really qualitative research because they all connect at some point with a quantifiable list of
which my biographies are argued to be ‘representative’ or ‘typical’. So let me end by moving
out of the realm of the documentary – the newspaper or the letter – and back into the realm of
imagination – the novel.
Geographers have long engaged in critical debate about the value of novels as ‘sources’. One
cultural geographer, Marc Brosseau, has been particularly scathing in his criticism of those
who treat novels as effectively ‘factual’ sources, or as purely illustrative, to add ‘colour’ to
descriptive statistics – a variety of approaches using novels to answer our questions, rather
than – as Brosseau would prefer – letting the text generate new questions. I guess this is a
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criticism that can be levelled at any textual analysis: do we impose our codes on the text or let
the text generate the codes? Focusing on SITES of modernity I’ve selected particular sites
which feature in literature: any building will appear in the census or in city building records,
but only a few feature in literature, so if we start with the latter we can be confident that we
will also be able to draw on the more ubiquitous records later. Rather than use the novel to
provide just another description of what an apartment block, or a department store or a slum
was like – how it was laid out, for example – the value of literary description seems to me to
be at least twofold:
1. metaphorical and iconographic
2. to show how space worked
A brief example of the former: in William Dean Howells’ classic novel of New York life in
the 1880s, A Hazard of New Fortunes, the apartment building in which Howells’ protagonists,
Basil and Isabel March, eventually settle after a long search is ‘The Xenophon’. Why
Xenophon? What did contemporaries know about Xenophon? How would they have read this
allusion?
One route from this textual reference was to search the NY press: the Brooklyn Daily Eagle is
a wonderful free on-line resource, and this led to me to various references, not only to
Xenophon as part of a classical education, but also to advertisers in the real estate pages using
Xenophon as a pseudonym.
Another route was to ask about Howells as an authority on NY apartment houses – which led
me to his own correspondence and life-history – to discover the apartments he had lived in
himself shortly before writing the novel.
And the third route was to interrogate the manuscript census to see what kinds of people were
recorded as living in real apartments in the vicinity of the Xenophon. If we can trust Howells’
placement of the March family by checking if ‘real’ March-type families lived there, then
perhaps we can place more dependence on the attitudes to apartment-living that Howells
discusses in his novel – the kind of information it would be much harder to elicit from
documentary sources.
And an even briefer example of researching how space works:
An oft-quoted passage in George Gissing’s novel about London in the 1880s, The Nether
World, describes the Farringdon Road Buildings, a real block of model dwellings, thankfully
no longer with us, as a ‘barracks for the army of industrialism’ – a more soul-destroying place
it is hard to imagine. Maybe this is just Gissing’s notorious sour attitude towards the modern
city and, anyway, it deals with the experience of a character who has lost all hope. It is easy to
find lots of articles in the architectural press praising the buildings when they opened in 1874
(although even then there was some contrary opinion). Almost purely by chance, I happened
upon an illustration in Catherine Bauer’s Modern Housing (1934), depicting ‘Three Kinds of
Metropolitan Slum’, in which Farringdon Road Buildings appeared as the central image –
labelled a ‘Built-in Slum’, a slum from the day it was built, a judgment that amazingly
reproduces Gissing’s fifty years on. By now, this combination of sources indicated that there
was more to be done in exploring how Farringdon Road Buildings WORKED. And this led
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me, among other sources, back to The Nether World and to other passages, where we can see
how the flats and the spaces around the flats were actually occupied.
Here, it seems to me, novels are imparting information that contemporaries took for granted,
that nobody would normally bother to write down. Yet the words become meaningful only
when placed in the context of the architectural plans.
All of this confirms my status as rag-picker and occasionally detective, but I should at least try
to connect all these research anecdotes to the theme of today’s symposium.
Firstly, I cannot imagine how any satisfactory piece of historical research could NOT be
dependent on a variety of sources of data and probably a variety of skills, since
complementary sources would include textual, visual and nominative materials, and the former
would probably include a range of ‘factual’, ‘opinion’ and ‘imaginative’ materials. In practice,
though, the range of methodologies may be more limited, since so much of the treatment of
visual sources involves thinking of them as ‘texts’ or as ‘discourses’ and therefore amenable to
the same approaches as ‘real’ texts.
Secondly, in historical research: how do we know where to search? Whatever we say about the
dangers of source-driven research, I believe that in historical research the discovery of a ‘good
source’ is a legitimate starting point for research, especially if we allow the source to generate
new questions. But I fear that intuition and experience will continue to play a part in finding
such sources in the first place.
Thirdly, to invoke ideas about using multiple methods and sources as forms of triangulation:
one form of triangulation discussed by Baxter and Eyles is ‘investigator triangulation’: would
different investigators come up with the same results when presented with the same material?
This is an interesting question and one that constantly worries me as a research control-freak:
would, for example, a research officer make the same interpretations of a newspaper archive,
and select the same material as relevant as I would? This bears on what Baxter and Eyles call
the ‘dependability’ of research results – the degree to which interpretation is made in a
consistent manner. Of course, a kind of triangulation occurs whenever rival researchers
disagree over the interpretation of a source, but that occurs outside the research process itself,
in public debate. But on the whole, source- or method-based triangulation is implicit and
unself-consciously applied in historical research whenever one source is compared with
another.
A critical issue here is that research is necessarily sequential: we consult one source before we
consult another, so our initial interpretation of the latter is inevitably shaped by our knowledge
of the former, and our interpretation of the former is denied the insights afforded by the latter.
It’s a problem that surfaces regularly in contemporary social geography over debates on
whether questionnaire research should precede or follow on from focus groups. In historical
research, we read things differently according to the order in which we encounter them.
Practically, this confirms the need for repeated, iterative and reflexive reading.
So I’ve implied that through this non-methodological, but actually quite systematic, method,
we can in effect interview the dead. We can also, though I haven’t had time to explore this,
even hang about on Victorian street corners.
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