Analytical Strategies: Constructing NeDiPal's Knowledge
As the university is now in the midst of its summer break, it is certainly time to take a little bit of distance and ponder the more profound questions: Where and how can research begin?
To answer this question, we have to start at the very beginning. We could say that research is about observing something, how something behaves or changes over time, in certain situations, and about describing these observations. These very few sentences already reveal the problem at hand: What is this specific "something" that research is supposed to be about? And to ask the more philosophical questions: How can we even know that there is something and not rather nothing? Assuming that there is something instead of there being just nothing is already a rather optimistic and far-reaching assumption that is in itself contingent.[1]
This specific something that we assume exists could be called an "object". With that, our research has already begun, because we started making assumptions, first by assuming that there is something to be observed and secondly by determining a word for it. Of course, these assumptions couldn't be more general, yet, they clearly are assumptions that are contingent and that could have been made otherwise. Instead of objects, the focus could be on subjects, but that is a question that has already been answered somewhere else. But the mere assumption that there is something and we might call it an object is already to contribute to constructing the research object and therefore is a constitutive part of the research project.
Most researchers skip this part in publications and presentations, and rightfully so, because it's not at all interesting or informative and doesn't help understanding the research project. To be workable, the assumptions have to be respecified, and at that point, things become a little bit more interesting, especially since this research is supposed to be constructivist research. If this is constructivist research, it means it constructs its object. It also means that the knowledge which is generated is the result of a construction, that knowledge itself is a construction.[2]
The issue with constructivist research is that this process of construction often remains implicit or invisible. Niels Åkerstrøm Anderson rightfully pointed this out.[3] Consequently, he is investigating how different (constructivist) theories are constructing the object that they are observing. By that, he is in a position to compare the different "analytical strategies" that theorists like Luhmann, Laclau, Foucault (and others) use to construct and observe their object and also, how these strategies shift over time, e.g. Foucault, who shifts from archaeological discourse analysis, over genealogy and self-technology analysis finally to dispositive analysis.[4]
All that is to simply state that it's worth thinking about how the NeDiPal research project is constructing its object. The project has twofold research objectives, each of them constructing their own research object. Hence, it is worthwhile to look at how these different research objects are constructed and operationalised, and what the analytical strategy of the NeDiPal project actually looks like.
Analytical Strategy: Operationalising Relations
To achieve this, we want to use the notation that George Spencer-Brown developed in his Laws of Form, as every observation is a form that must rely on distinctions to observe anything.[5] There are few works that demonstrate how Laws of Form can be used as a tool to model, operationalise and also visualise not only more theoretically oriented analytical strategies, but also empirical research.[6]
The first objective was worded as follows in the project proposal:
Investigate professionals’ use of digital technologies for organizational tasks, focusing on identifying formal and informal patterns like workarounds, invisible work, tinkering, and reverse engineering through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.
The objective was worded in such a way that it's very open to interpretation. We only know that it's about the professionals' perspective and that its focus is different practice patterns and routines. Additionally, we get a hint at the methodology. To operationalise this objective and to show what a corresponding analytical strategy might look like, it has to be respecified a little bit more, but without presupposing already too much. For this, we need to think about the context and about how we expect professionals to observe and thereby construct this context. We might suspect that the cornerstones that orient and stabilise this observation mode might revolve around the patients, the informal caregivers, the other care providers involved (especially since Belgian Équipe de Soutien operate as second-line care providers that support other care providers), the political landscape and policy landscape. Most importantly, this professional work is going to take place in a society, but we expect that to be more implicit, but nonetheless important. We might therefore note:
Regarding the first research objective, the professionals' perspective is what needs to be observed, what is marked against the backdrop and in relation to the patients, the informal caregivers, etc. That is not to say that, when focusing on the professional perspective, the patients, informal caregivers etc. are less important. There is no hierarchy involved. The goal is just to observe, to generate a contrast (like Latour in Inquiry into Modes of Existence) that allows for discerning differences in an otherwise noisy environment.
In a similar fashion, the second research objective was worded as follows:
Examine how care recipients, relatives, and informal caregivers use digital technologies in palliative care work, focusing on patterns of adoption, bypassing, and abandonment through ethnographic fieldwork.
This is – again – a very broad description that needs to be respecified in order to be workable. The distinction now shifts from observing professionals, distinguishing them from something else, to observing informal caregivers, distinguishing them from something else, without explicitly stating what they are distinguished from. If, as noted above, we consider the professionals' perspective in relation to the informal caregivers' perspective, we might conversely also consider the informal caregivers' perspective in relation to the professionals' perspective. But there is more to it: We assume that it might also be worthwhile to consider the informal caregivers (or "aidants proches", helping relatives, as they are called in French) perspective in relation to an administrative view, as death and dying can also be a bureaucratic challenge, especially for informal caregivers, who are maybe not used to dealing with these kinds of issues. Additionally, informal caregivers might face the challenge of managing work expectations with their caring duties. Moreover, they might have their own family and manage expectations regarding them as well. And again: All of this takes place in a society, which we might further define as functionally differentiated. We might therefore note:
When thinking about digital technology and the context in which it will be used, this could serve as a visualisation of the assumptions we make about the context at hand, thus a visualisation of the project's analytical strategy. We suppose that all these are factors that moderate and mediate digital technology usage.[7] We can only understand digital technology usage, if we also understand how the narrative around it is fitted into the broader context's pre-existing semantic context.
One might wonder why this abstract modelisation of a context might be needed in research about digital technology in palliative (home) care. There is currently quite a bit of quantitative research[8] on this that repeatedly shows that technology adoption in this field is rather underwhelming, particularly in Germany.[9] Methodologically, this is all quite impressive, and factually, it is very interesting and revealing. However, these studies reveal the tip of the iceberg, as they are only pointing at the symptoms. There are also many studies that test the usage of a specific product or device by developing prototypes.[10] This is scientifically interesting and also practically necessary to help move digitalisation forward in this specific domain. Based on this, there still needs to be a better understanding of the more general usage patterns and even more importantly, the particular semantic potentials and possibilities in this field – professionals and lay people alike – might have to integrate technology usage not only into their daily routines, but also into their general discourse.
For palliative care, we are only at the beginning to understand, through which adoption patterns this context integrates or does not integrate technology. This will be important, as through this, the adoption or rejection might become more predictable, product development less hit or miss and more objective-oriented.
References
1. In (but not only) Luhmannian Systems Theory, Meaning is always given, see Luhmann 1984, therefore, there is never nothing and always something. Because of that, it is also interesting to look at how non-meaning is written about in literature, see Meyer, I. 2023: Erzählen um Nichts? Eine Perspektive der Gegenwartsliteratur (Rainald Goetz und Felicia Zeller), in: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 97, S. 1065-1079↩︎
2. Which does not weaken its knowledge status, as some still are all to eager to suggest, see Latour, B. (2005): Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press.↩︎
3. Andersen, N. Å. (2003): Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann, Bristol: Policy Press, p. IX. Also a classic reading regarding constructivism and the act of construction: Knorr-Cetina, K. (1989): Spielarten des Konstruktivismus, in: Soziale Welt, 40(1/2), S. 86-96.↩︎
4. Andersen 2003: pp. 1-32.↩︎
5. Which would make this an "observation analysis", see Sohn, YJ (2021): Four pillars of Luhmann's analytical apparatus: Applications for communication research, in: Studies in Communication Sciences, 21(2), pp. 1-18.↩︎
6. Groddeck, V. v. (2009): Organisation und Werte. Formen, Funktionen, Folgen, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.↩︎
7. The importance of this was once more pointed out here: Marent, B. (2026). Digital Health and Society: A Research Agenda, in: De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society, ↩︎
8. We should not forget about the recent qualitative research, e.g. Weisser, A., Öhl, N., Mahlein, A. K., Peters, J., Simon, M., Schmitt-Rüth, S., ... & Heckel, M. (2026). New technology must support, not restrict humaneness: a qualitative interview study on the potential influences of a new digital system on specialist palliative home care. BMC palliative care, 25(1), 87. or May, S., Gehlhaar, A., Stahlhut, K., Kamp, M. A., Heinze, M., Allsop, M., & Muehlensiepen, F. (2024). “Let’s put it this way: you can’t really live without it”-digital technologies in routine palliative care delivery: an explorative qualitative study with patients and their family caregivers in Germany. BMC Health Services Research, 24(1), 702.↩︎
9. Muehlensiepen, F., Darkow, R., Fink, L., Ignatyev, Y., Gehlhaar, A., Lauke, A., ... & May, S. (2026). Digital health in palliative care: use is largely limited to conventional technologies–a cross-sectional survey of healthcare professionals. BMC Health Services Research.↩︎
10. Grimminger, S., Heckel, M., Markgraf, M., Peuten, S., Wöhl, M., Gimpel, H., ... & Schneider, W. (2023). Palliative care as a digital working world (PALLADiUM)-a mixed-method research protocol. BMC palliative care, 22(1), 102.↩︎