Researching Moving Targets: Using Diaries to Explore Supply Teachers’ Lives

Imaginative leaps occur at many stages of research. This chapter exemplifies three quite distinct ways in which a creative approach can extend research horizons. First, we may choose themes, issues, phenomena, or groups which have previously been disregarded, perhaps because they appeared unworthy of attention, apparently peripheral to mainstream concerns. In articulating such themes we make visible what was invisible, and allow the reader to judge its importance or otherwise. Second, we can decide to study phenomena previously neglected because they presented particular logistical or methodological problems. In tackling what has been assumed to be ‘undoable’ we balance the risk of failure against the opportunity of breaking new ground. Third, we can adopt research methods that are familiar in other situations, but are now employed in a novel way, or in a new context. These were some of the substantive and methodological themes that preoccupied us in the research project from which this chapter draws.