Considering the validity of the study

In the final section of this chapter, I wish to reflect upon what is often referred to as the validity, reliability, and generalizability of the research; how this research can be regarded as valid knowledge that also pertains to other contexts than the one under study. In a positivist research paradigm, these terms refer to the objectivity of the study and designate how research findings (ideally) should be free from bias, value-neutral, and replicable and verifiable by others. However, this notion of objectivity has been displaced in constructivist approaches to social research, which emphasize how knowledge and truth are produced in discourse (Foucault, 1972), and which also underlines its ethical dimension and the recognition that knowledge is used to serve specific interests and not others. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the ethnographic account offered here is “partially true” and can never be more than a product of a specific engagement in a field defined by unequal relations of power. Its findings are constrained by the perspectives applied as well as the interpretive repertoire and imagination of the researcher. So, how can we think of validity in connection to the present research? And to what extent are the findings of this study generalizable?

Brinkmann and Kvale (2015) discuss how questions of validity must concern the research process as a whole, from the formulation of initial research inter-ests to the dissemination of results. Each step of the research process should be conducted in an appropriate and coherent way, so as to make sure that the research in fact does contribute with valid knowledge and corresponds to “real” phenomena in the social world investigated. Brinkmann and Kvale (2015, p. 279) argue that such processes of validity can be understood in a communicative sense as “dialogical intersubjectivity,” which points to how validity and coherence of the research are continuously tested by engaging in dialogue with research participants as well as the academic community. With respect to the latter, this research has been validated through continuous discussions with supervisors, colleagues at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and at international music education conferences, which have informed and tested the research validity at all stages of the process.

The study also sought to establish a dialogical intersubjectivity in connection to the research participants. As Bruce Johnson and Larry Christensen (2008) discuss, validity in qualitative research implies consideration of “the degree to which the research participants’ viewpoints, thoughts, feelings, intentions, and experiences are accurately understood by the qualitative researcher and portrayed in the research report” (Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p. 277). In this case, it is relevant to consider whether the experiences and statements I discuss throughout this research project resonate with how the participants understand these themselves. A common method for ensuring that this is actu-ally the case is member checking. In interview research, this typicactu-ally means letting the informants read through their transcribed interview in order to confirm its correctness, or it could entail the researcher engaging participants in discussion of the analysis itself.

As described above, in the present research, validation of interview transcripts was made difficult because of the language barrier. The interview transcripts were therefore primarily validated by discussing them with the language assis-tant. However, I have also intended to validate my analyses by discussing them with my interlocutors themselves during my visit to the field in February 2018.

Yet, the fact that my analytical perspectives were foreign to many Palestinians and that my findings in some sense questioned locally accepted truths about Palestinian identity made me question the appropriateness of directly asking interlocutors to verify them. I also felt that this would force participants with socially divergent viewpoints to openly assume contentious positions. Further,

when I arrived in Lebanon, I found that due to work obligations and university studies, several of my key interlocutors were out of town at the time of my visit.

Instead of validating my analysis by discussing it with the research participants themselves, I therefore decided to do so through a range of conversations with people associated with the music program or the BAS organization, Norwegians with intimate knowledge of the music program, and with Palestinians and Lebanese from the local community.

To a large extent, these conversations have strengthened and informed the analyses presented here. However, it also became clear that some Palestinians reject the claim that the construction of a primordial national identity risks concealing other ways of imagining a sense of national belonging. Instead, it was argued, confirming this identity is the only way to liberation and, as such, constitutes a necessary and inevitable point of departure for every Palestinian growing up in Lebanon. Considering the political situation of the Palestinian refugees, I understand this viewpoint. Yet, as Ruba Salih and Sophie Richter-Devroe (2018) have also recently discussed, I see no reason why Palestine could not be imagined “beyond national frames.” Considering the story of “Ali”

narrated in article 4: “Music, Agency, and Social Transformation,” music may in fact be an effective way of doing just this. Yet, these issues are contested within the social field I have investigated. Due to the academic interest of this study, I have found it important to highlight these discrepancies, even if some of my interlocutors might find this questioning of national unity to amount to an inappropriate representation of the Palestinian community, and thus question its validity.

The discussion above also concerns a broader issue, namely, that the particular case under investigation is not solely studied in order to unravel its specifics.

Rather, the ambiguous social processes I describe in this research project are investigated with the purpose of illuminating such processes in musical-social work in general. While researching in this context obviously implies an ethical responsibility to the Palestinian community and the individual research par-ticipants, I also have a responsibility to the scholarly community of which I am a part, to deliver new knowledge that contributes to the field’s development.

This implies questions of the study’s analytic generalizability (Yin, 2016): To what extent can the notion of ambiguous musical practice developed here be used to illuminate the social processes of other musical practices?

I believe the wider applicability of the notion is still to be tested. I regard this study as exploratory, in the sense that it seeks to develop a conception

that responds to recognized issues within the field of music education. Most notably these include the tension that while music can be seen as a resource that individuals can put to use for social and personal development, music educational practices are at the same time entangled in social and institutional formations marred by inequality (see section 1.2). There is a sense in which the notion of ambiguous musical practice advanced here will be most applicable to contexts in which there is a clear discrepancy between the goals, desires, and needs of the participants (if they can even be said to share these) and the rationality of the social and institutional structures through which these needs are met. For example, if white, middle-class adults are musically addressed through structures built by other white, middle-class adults, these are likely to be experienced as unambiguous. However, as a number of recent studies have illustrated (see discussions in chapter 3), power relations as well as implicit assumptions of community and identity are crucial topics of investigation for gaining a deeper understanding of musical-social work.

The specific issues of national identity and forms of belonging that I have explored in connection to the music program in Rashidieh constitute an example of a contentious aspect of identity formation that is potentially negotiated, transformed, or reproduced in musical performance. As such, the specific analysis presented here may not be directly transferable to other contexts. Yet, if Dyndahl and Ellefsen are right that music educational practices constitute a field in which “students negotiate, renegotiate and identify with narratives of themselves as male/female, straight/queer, white/black, native/foreign, local/

cosmopolitan, young/grown-up . . . and . . . experience a sense of belonging and connection to high/low social class and/or culture as well” (Dyndahl & Ellefsen, 2009, pp. 15–16), then I suggest that, if closely examined, all such practices are likely to involve some paradoxes or conflicts. The notion of ambiguous musical practice may be a tool to unravel some of these.