ABSTRACT
This final chapter addresses some of the questions and concerns which people have raised about the Discipline of Noticing when it is considered as a method of research in and of itself. The principal problems people have identified lie in the unusual aspects of what constitute data, what constitutes a research finding and what constitutes validity. The questions addressed here are the following:
• How do you decide what to notice? • How do you select which incidents to recount, to transcribe, to study? • How can you remove all judgement and interpretation from brief-but-vivid
accounts? • Since memory is fallible, how can anything based on memories be reliable? • How is communication of selected meaning possible if priority is given to
subjective experience? • What makes something salient or significant? • How do you distinguish between salience and emotional commitment or
prejudice? • How do you know that your ‘sensitivity’ is helping the student-patient-
client? • Does not similarity between accounts reside in the reader not the accounts? • How can anything of value to others be revealed by using yourself as the
instrument by means of which you probe phenomena? • How can you protect yourself against being misled by a charismatic presen-
tation? • Why can’t you just tell me what steps to take, rather than bother with all this
uncertainty and imprecision? • What values underpin the Discipline of Noticing? • Is the individual the sole source of confidence and validity, and hence is the
individual promoted at the expense of the community? • How can you detect or measure effects and influence without being trapped
back into a quantitative extra-spective paradigm?
