Case Studies

This week class discussion is on the case studies, technology studies and mixed method studies. Regarding case studies some social scientists said, case study does not imply the use of a particular evidence. case studies can be done by using either qualitative or quantitative evidence. The evidence may come from fieldwork, archival records, verbal reports, observations, or any other combination of these. My question is former sentence and later idea  seems to me ambiguous. Again Miles said case studies can be conducted systematically. So why people use this method.

Ethical Methods in Children and Young People

Heath, Sue and others wrote in their paper that one researcher should need consent from their research participants. If any researcher do his research without consent it is one kind of crime in developed country like the U.K. Moreover they again mentioned that on research which sought to identify contemporary practice in this area amongst researchers working in the fields  where research participants are often constructed as vulnerable within the research process, and where their potential involvement tends to be mediated by institutional gatekeepers.drawing on telephone interview and focus group data they focuses specifically on the experiences of researchers working with children and young people.Their study highlights the tensions experienced by many researchers between a personal commitment to an ethical framework which seeks to prioritise the agency and competency of children and young people, and the conditions imposed upon them by working within institutional settings where these principles may be undermined. On the other hand they suggested that the consent practices of child and youth-oriented institutions, however much frowned upon, tend to go largely unchallenged by researchers , to the detriment of rights of children and young people to opt in and out of research on their own behalf. In the University of Toronto, research ethics are also strictly maintained. According to research ethics of U of T, one researcher need to take permission to take interview from other area except Toronto. One can not take interview of the person under 18. So it is mandatory for the researcher. My question is if any researcher do not follow this ethics what will affect him . 

"Pragmatic" Research Timeline

Someone always say that you learn from work. That is very true. Even though, I have read Knight's Chapter 7 "Doing It" 2 weeks ago, it wasn't speaking to me until now I finally sit down to write my research proposal. Knight(2002)'s "Being Pragmatic" becomes my guideline in designing my research timeline. I find Knight's "nine common difficulties" in small-scale social science research very helpful in helping me to design the timelines of my research. According to Knight (2002), it is almost a "must happen" issue when data collection delays. I am not sure if I will be lucky enough to avoid this, but at least I can reduce the potential damage by planning at least one to two days extra to allow my some room between my schedules. Preparing for a rather low response rate, I will propose a sampling scale of at least 100 participants if I am planning to get 20 respondents. A friend of mine lately distributed her research survey on breast feeding through Survey Monkey via Facebook. Based on her feedback, she distributed 500 online surveys and stopped when she received 100 responses. However, her questionnaires were all multiple choices and the research topic was more general. My research topic, instead, is a salsa-dancing one that is targeted a specific ethnic community group. In other words, what worked on her would not work on me. In terms of this, the "snowball" method mentioned by Dean last week becomes essential for me to develop my focus group. Nonetheless, online distribution is still my primary method because majority of my research target group are cyber users.

An insider's perspective

I've read, among others, four books about participant observation (just for fun, nothing to do with the 5500-word research proposal that's due in three days). One essay in Anthropologists in the Field, titled "Doing Ethnography in one's own Ethnic Community: The Experience of an Awkward Insider," by Val Colic-Peisker, was very interesting to me personally. It is noteworthy the researcher, who is of Croatian origin, was not simply studying other Croatians, but Croatian immigrants in Australia, where she had immigrated to escape political persecution in her own country.
A truly touching section of her essay detailed her shock upon viewing a map from 1993 in a university library, and finding "a blank dark blue area" where her home country should have been. For the first time, she felt like a second-class citizen.
I identified very closely with her experiences as she described straddling two worlds, her simultaneous role as an outsider and insider, the tension between her role as an active participant and detached observer. It is an excellent case study of "auto-ethnography," defined as the moment the writer analyzes his or her personal experiences to be directly involved in “larger social formations and historical processes” (Stockl 2006, p.1). Once the object of research is or becomes an intrinsic component of the researcher's identity, it becomes difficult to differentiate the subjective and the objective. I have long rejected the stereotype of the scientist or researcher as some sort of observing robot, and as I will attempt to argue in my research proposal, what may be mistakenly perceived as hurdles to overcome when performing ethnographic research are actually assets. Yes, granted an outsider studying a foreign community can assume a detached role more easily than a member. Yet I would argue an insider/outsider like Colic-Peisker offers a balance of detachment and empathy necessary for a successful ethnographic study.

Ethical Considerations of Rare Disease Patients: The Benefits of the Private Sector

Following the lecture on research ethics and in particular my question regarding ethical obligations as they pertain to the medical data of international subjects, I began to worry. My concern was that according to the Research Ethics Board (REB), I may have to gain research approval by some ethics body. What I quickly realized following the lecture was that my case and site of analysis is interesting because it is not subject to the same medical privacy laws. In a patient-practitioner relationship, the practitioner is subject to strict privacy laws. For example section 33 of the Personal Health Information Protection Act prohibits health custodians from collecting marketing data for marketing purpose. When the health custodian is removed from the transaction, and the patient provides that data, marketing use of personal health information is permitted.

This shift of control and information usage raises some important questions regarding patient attitudes regarding personal revelation. I found it interesting that a question regarding ethics directly strengthened my claimsmaking or "so what" claims within my proposal.

Theoretical Framework for proposal

I've been perusing the blogs (not just ours but those from other groups as well) and I seem to be the only person struggling with the "theoretical framework" that I will be applying to my research, analysis and discussion. Is that true? Am I really the only one? I have been sitting at my laptop for hours, days actually, collecting relevant literature for my lit review and finding articles and citations that contribute to all sides of the discourse on my chosen topic. So, my question is, how then does this differ from the theoretical framework that I am going to use?

Doesn't it stand to reason that my framework will come from my literature review? Won't I be looking at all the information in front of me and selecting that which I believe applies most closely to my area of interest and the method that I've chosen? I think that this is right and it seems logical to me so I will forge ahead in this vein and should anyone get to this post before our class Monday, I'd love to get your feedback. Thanks and happy writing!

Lest we forget

I thoroughly enjoyed Dean Sharpe's lecture today and could completely understand how one could dedicate their career to the ethics of research.

While at times I'm sure this position can be rife with conflict, I was impressed by the passion he had for developing policy and protecting the rights of participants.

I couldn't help but think of those 'research scandals" he alluded to and in particular found myself thinking of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. I remember studying this case while doing my undergrad and being horrified at how these research projects could have been done. Forget the policy for a moment. How could anyone, let alone academics from reputable institutions be responsible for some of these outrageous and shocking cases? Is it because it is reflective of the innate evil nature of those with power to corrupt those without it? I'm not sure, but whatever the reason, I sit down to my research proposal tonight giving more thought than ever to the ethical considerations and the methods I am choosing.

Out of interest here is a link for a summary of the Stanford Prison Experiment http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Stanford:prison:experiment.html

And just as a reminder so that as researchers we never forget the impact that our research may have on a participant -- The Milgram Experiment on Obedience conducted at Yale University. No matter how important the research question, we cannot let academia and the search for knowledge cloud our judgements and thoughts on first what it means to be human.
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm

Now off to that proposal and the daunting task of "framing" my own research proposal.

Research Ethics

This week’s discussion of ethics will be important to my research proposal because I intend to study humans. It was informative to find out what kinds of research proposals require a RER. I had not previously known that RER’s are usually only needed for studies where human subjects have the role of research participant or subject. Other possible roles for humans include collaborators or members of the research team. Human data may also be used for secondary analysis, which is aggregated and anonymous.

Since my study will involve human participants, it is likely that I will need to undergo a Research Ethics Review. I plan to examine the University of Toronto Office of Research Ethics Guidelines and Practices Manual further while putting together my research methodology for Assignment # 4.

Post-Human Research

The ethics around researching "augmented humans" is something of particular interest to me, and will likely inform future research that I do. Human-centred research can be a minefield, and we should be thankful that we have to abide by particular strictures in constructing our research designs. As Heath and company point out, a substantial critique of obtaining informed consent is that research often changes significantly from beginning to end. Remaining tethered to a set of ethical guidelines can ensure that one doesn't stray too far from the path, no matter what new and revelatory findings might arise. (For an engrossing read, I strongly recommend the two-part piece on corruption in the two-part piece on corruption in the Toronto Police Dept. that has been running in Eye for the past two weeks. It focuses on what might be deemed a "research project" - an initial surveillance setup - that quickly spiralled into a massive, multi-year undercover mafia/drug bust that had to be abandoned when fears of early findings coming to light were brought up to the top brass.)

A different set of ethical concerns arise when studying the physical interconnection between humans and technology, whether one studies prosthesis or technology that breaks the skin. For those of you interested in the subject, I would strongly recommend that you jump over to the iTable section of the iSchool website and find the paper presented earlier this term by Dirk Rodenburg, a PhD student in the program. (The annotated copy, with notes from Brian Cantwell Smith, is particularly valuable.) Dirk writes about the ethics of the "enhanced human" athlete and, although his paper isn't necessarily a site for exploring the act of researching augmented humans, it offers great insight into how such a biological classification determines new ways of communicating with and about subjects. Katherine Hayles, in her book How We Became Posthuman, expands considerably on this subject. Do the same ethical guidelines we use with humans apply to cyborgs? At what point does an "augmented human" become a cyborg? How do we respect the human dignity of an augmented human, especially when there might be greater temptation to treat cyborgs as a means to an end in research?

What's interesting to me, is that a great deal of this knowledge is being hammered out by feminist technoscientists, building on the work of earlier post-structuralists (rather than traditional ethicists). Is the emergence of research on augmented or enhance humans a suitable locale for building in, at the kernel level, things like race/sex/gender issues, access, privacy, and agency? And what of informed consent? If new research in this area is increasingly being done on subjects with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, how does this impact the necessity of capturing informed consent? Consider, for example, the somewhat recent case of Stephen Hawking's wife. He, of course, has been the most prominent "test subject" of research on the augmented body. How does the introduction of a "controlling and manipulative" person in his life impact the decisions that are made around his body as a blank canvas?

Salsa dancing lit. review

After developing a bibliogrphy list of 20 books and articles that are not directly related to my research question, and an one-hour consultation appointment with the head librarian of the reference department at the 4th floor of Robarts library, I have finally accepted the fact that I am really doing a salsa-dancing social science research here. If the experienced reference librarian also hasn't got anything talking directly on my research question, what else can I rely on? Luker for sure, and maybe my skip reading skills that I have developed over the years.

2 months ago when I began to take the Research Method course, I have posted a sticky note on my fridge: "If you sit with your interest long enough, with enough kindness and patience, a research question will in fact emerge. Trust yourself and your work, and all will be well, eventually" (Luker, 2008, p.232). Now I have finally found my research question, and what next? Well, this time I write down this:"Once you have decided that yours is a case of Element A and Element B and Element C, you can answer the question, "What is this a case of?" and you can then go out and read books and articles by smart people that have nothing to do with your case per se, but are very illuminating about Elements A, B, and C in other situations, and better yet, about the interrelationship. Remember, the one thing that all social scientists are doing is looking for pattern recognition" (Luker, 2008, p.134).

After spending the entire Friday afternoon in the Urban Affairs library reading articles, I finally realized what Luker said that "if you specify the theoretically relevant elements and then go educate yourself about what otehr smart people have said about the arrangement of those elements in other contexts, you may well find yourself being surprised. If you can set aside your initial emotion of outrage or concern and specify the elements, bumping them up to a new level of generality, you may well change from whatever was our first, pre-research position"(Luker, 2008, p.138). My research question is why aren't the next generation of Chinese Torontonians using the Chinese Cultural Centre. My original perspective is that these second and greater generations of Chinese Canadians are lack of language skills to appreciate the Chinese historical heritage and civilization, but one academic paper dated back to the 1980s criticized the Canadian high school education system and that many high school teachers were not only lack of knowledge on Chinese culture or hsitorical heritage, but also held discrimination on Asian ethnic groups. My research subjects are Chinese Canadian next generations who are merely college or university students, who probably grow up with the said racist high school teachers. This has given me an insight to review the Canadian high school education system in Ontario as well. Luker's salsa-dancing theory is getting more and more practical now.

Narrative Research Processes

This week’s reading on narrative research is relevant to my research proposal because I want to investigate the subjective experiences of a vulnerable group -- that is, people with social anxiety. It is important that stories about life experiences be viewed as legitimate because they offer a type of natural contextualization that is not always present with other methods.

I am most interested in the problem-solution approach. According to Ollerenshaw & Creswell (2002), the process involves audio-taping interviews, transcribing them, and then reading and re-reading the transcripts to get a sense of the data. I like this kind of approach because it encourages the researcher to discover patterns in the data through repetition. This way, researchers do not begin by looking for specific elements, but allow meaning to naturally emerge.

The next step is to color-code transcripts for the elements of plot structure, to organize the color-coded transcripts into events, and to sequence the events until they make sense. The researcher rearranges the sequence until a resolution to the problem emerges. This approach to problem solving seems useful for complex puzzles and can help researchers discover creative solutions that might not be found using a linear process. I like the idea of rearrangements because it implies that several solutions could be possible, and this method gives the researcher a chance to consider and test each one until the most appropriate is found.

Netnography

Catchy. This is the term Robert Kozinets uses to refer to online ethnography. I admit it's a compelling read (as compelling as an instructional manual on bypassing the methodological challenges presented by virtual ethnography can possibly be). I realized it was not enough to conduct interviews with Internet cafe users or email/hand out surveys; to fully understand the impact of new media in the Arab world, it is essential to follow people's social activities, interactions, and usage of media technologies online. Is it really meaningful to present a study of the democratizing influence of the Internet without studying the content of political blogs, comments, online forums, even social networking sites? In another article, I read the story of a Facebook user named Esraa Abdel Fattah, who started a group in sympathy with a textile workers' strike that led to nation-wide protests against low wages and neoliberal privatization in Egypt. Guess Facebook can be used for non-trivial purposes!

Now the problem is choosing an online group. So many different avenues to choose from: Facebook, Twitter, blogs by prominent Egyptian journalists such as Wael Abbas, even blogs by Muslim Brotherhood members. I was surprised to learn what an active presence they have online.

This'll be fun, can't wait to write 6,500 words on this!

From Luker's "data reduction and analysis" to my research survey questiond design

In addition to our discussion on the difference between Luker and Knight in yesterday's class, I was in fact doubting whether it was relevant to my final research proposal at the very beginning. After all, I will not be actually writing the real paper even when I am articulating that 6,500 words of research proposal. Why bothered to think about it at this point? As I mentioned in the class this week, Luker's readings always provide me inspiration. It doesn't disappoint me this time either. As I read through the entire chapter and reach to the exercise section, I finally realize Luker's codebooks content outline: "code name", "brief description", "when to use", "when not to use", and "example" (pp.215-216). Just like a fresh light crashing on the dark night sky, I suddenly realize that the "data reduction and analysis" can be essential guidelines for my own research survey design. While designing my research survey questions, I definitely need to think about what kind of information that can be rich enough for reducation and valuable enough for analysis. Whatever answers that I am hoping to generate from those questions have to be diverse enough for categorizing and meanwhile directly related to my research question. I am not sure if this is the so-call "reverse thinking", but it seems that I am up to something that I am still lack of a clear picture.

I am also reconsidering the content volume of my survey. My original plan was to design a survey with 20 questions that will contain 15 multiple choices and 5 open-ended questions. However, by the fact that it takes me up to 30minutes to answer 20 multiple choices, I begin to wonder if 5 open-ended questions will be too much or not. The survey questions are designed to be distributed online through Facebook. How long will my participants be willing to hang around on Facebook to answer my survey questions? Can they stay for 30 minutes, or even an hour? According to Luker, these days online survey only has 30-40% responses (pp.147). A friend of mine has over 200 "friends" under her Facebook account and she has distributed a survey containing only 10 multiple choices that takes me no more than 5 minutes to complete on Facebook. The result was that she only got 20 friends who responded to her survey questions. Maybe I should only recruit "volunteers" for my focus group interview but merely rely on financial initiatives to secure survey takers.

Inter-Coder Reliability and Mechanical Turk

After the discussion yesterday regarding inter-coder reliability I had an interesting idea. There is a service that Amazon offers called "Mechanical Turk". This service allows businesses and developers to programmatically create what they call human intelligence tasks (HITs). An HIT usually consists of a simple task, such as identifying the object in an image to more complex tasks, such as language translation.

In the case of inter-coder reliability, a researcher could develop an HIT that requires a user to complete short coding examples, and then compare those results across (potentially) thousands of users. The only downside is that people expect to be paid for completing an HIT - but so do coders. Even more interesting is the fact that one could use Mechanical Turk to do other types of experiments as well. You can also choose your sample relatively granularly. In any case examples like this show some pretty interesting potential.

Complexity

I found Luker's discussion of data reduction and analysis (ch. 10) compelling. The motto for this chapter seems to be something like: 'reduction without reductivism'. Luker has mentioned the view that pattern recognition plays a fundamental role in social research in previous chapters and initially I was wary: the phrase 'pattern recognition' is often used to describe simplistic causal relations. While it's true that there are relatively simple social phenomena that can be explained in terms of simple causal relationships, I'm really only interested in the more complex, messier side of social research. I've become interested in actor-network-theory (ANT) -- particularly as it is described by John Law in the article "After ANT" -- which is fundamentally concerned with complexity. As I understand it ANT is an attempt to describe complex phenomena in their complexity instead of reducing the phenomena to simplistic representations. Law borrows Deleuze and Guattari's image of a rhizome to describe ANT's method: to borrow Luker's description of Ragin's method, a rhizomatic structure is "neither linear nor random" (pp.208). Like actor-network-theory then, Luker (channeling Ragin) wants to preserve complexity and wants to understand social phenomena rhizomatically and non-reductively. Qualitative comparative analysis is a means to that end.

I've written the above to demonstrate that I am both genuinely interested in what qualitative comparative analysis has to offer and that I understand why it's important (by way of ANT). I also have a good understanding of sufficient and necessary causes (I've read my Aristotle), of induction and its related problems (Hume), and, yes, I've actually spent time writing out truth tables (for a logic course I took once upon a time). With all of this in mind, and following a few hours of research on Ragin and QCA, I still have no idea how you would actually apply this to actual research. I mean, is it just what Luker presents in the exercise for this chapter? If so, I can't help but feel that the actual method bears no resemblance to her foregoing description of it. I've also spent some time reading about Cronbach's Alpha (mentioned on pp.203) and find it equally confusing: again, I understand the premise but I don't really understand how I'd calculate the alpha value for an actual research project. Also, the mathematical equation on the wikipedia page is terrifying.

Has anyone made any headway with either QCA or Cronbach's alpha? If so, I'm all ears...

Framing my research proposal

Now that I'm in the throes of developing my full research proposal, I've come to the point where I need to flesh out the theoretical framework for my research and provide a context for the niche that my research will cover. I admit I've been having great difficulty with this because I wasn't sure what angle to approach it from given that my research topic could have several aspects as a theoretical framework. In order to think about this further, I went back to Luker thinking that surely there would be something relating to this. And Luker didn't disappoint. On page 62 -65, I found some great examples of how other research has been framed. Luker also talks broadly about how it's possible that a research question will have more than one potential frame and that it's our job to figure out what frame best fits with our ideas, hypothesis and relates most directly to what it is we want to find out and what argument/discourse we are hoping our research will contribute to. I've found reviewing this section of Luker really helpful and am well on my way to finding the supporting research that I need for my own proposal. Now, maybe I'll do a little dance to celebrate.

Virtual Ethnography

This week I most enjoyed Taylor’s (2009)” article on virtual worlds. I found that this article provided me with a framework that I could use in my research proposal assignment. I was most interested in Taylor’s discussion of verifiability and reliability. I agree with his assertion that there is no significant reason to believe that offline interviews should be privileged above online ones in all cases. Taylor discusses the epistemological claim that the offline self consists of an authentic persona that is more “true” than anything that can be represented by an avatar. However, neither Taylor nor I believe this to be the case. I agree that we are always creating and recreating ourselves and controlling how we present ourselves to the world, whether in the online or the offline world. Although it may be more noticeable when we present ourselves as a cartoon, it is not philosophically different than when we present ourselves as an employee, student, friend, family member, etc. depending on the context of our surroundings. The online world is merely another context and environment in which we live.

Taylor also notes that there are some instances where online interviews can provide a richer data set, and that researchers should be prepared to engage in multi-modal information gathering. This is particularly relevant to my research proposal because I intend to study sufferers with social anxiety. It will be important to be flexible with the format of interviews because it will depend on what modes of communication participants in the study will be most comfortable with. Some might prefer e-mail or instant messaging, while others may be comfortable with telephone, video-conference, or in-person interviews. As Taylor points out, there are different types of information that can be revealed by each type of interview method, and one should not be privileged above the others. Instead, each research case and context should be considered independently.

Intent Versus Function in Research

I just wanted to clear up what I was getting at today in lecture. When I spoke of the issues of intent and function within the context of the macro-analysis of audience interpretation of methodology I was proposing that we shift the way we discuss research. In short, as much as the intent of a particular researcher's work is significant, perhaps, like art, what is mostly significant is the interpretation of that researcher's work. An important paper on this idea comes from studies of visual rhetoric, namely, Sandra Foss and her paper titled "Ambiguity as Persuasion: The Vietnam

Veterans Memorial".

This extends to discussions of claimsmaking. Is claimsmaking a limiting activity? How does interpretation of findings by the researcher limit further discussion of those findings? What if we simply provided the data, and let the broader academic community attribute significance to findings?

The Experiment in Flux

I saw Lucy Suchman and Natalie Jeremijenko weigh the meaning of "experiment" at the Technoscience Salon this past Friday. Philosophers of science grapple endlessly with the subject of "what constitutes experiment" in the context of traditional science, and many of the more orthodox types have a real problem affording the concept to social scientists, as if Latour, Haraway, and Suchman herself, haven't spent years wrestling with it as well.
I am less interested in this battlefront, as I am in exploring novel ways to consider the traditional experiment, especially in the context of developing a reflexive methodological approach.

Hine repeatedly focuses on this concept of reflexivity, emphasizing the idea of "immersion... by engaging in relevant practices wherever they might be found."
Jeremijenko blurs the lines between ethnography and experiment by immersing herself in her study subject. As Hine notes, "there are some interesting opportunities to be exploited by a move into more active engagement." This is the blurring of the lines Jeremijenko engages in: nearly every one of her "field sites" is situated in the body, in society, in the environment, in the spatial...

I am reminded of Feyerabend, who I'm going to paraphrase (very) loosely:  method needs to constantly be reinterpreted. It must grow and be reflexive, or risk being doomed. Stasis is the enemy of science. Feyerabend was postulating on the scientific method, but I don't think I'm out of line in applying his thesis here. The experiment, or the ethnography, or the case study... must grow and be adaptive. Feyerabend argued for an open and reflexive approach to epistemology. Both Suchman and Jeremijenko argue for no less.

Virtual Ethnography

It was interesting to see how many ideas we discussed in several courses all showed up in Hine's article. Salsa-dancing social science research, methodological flexibility, ethnography, technological 'indeterminism,' social constructivism....the list goes on and on.

Especially noteworthy is Hine's description of the Internet as having "many different social meanings" (5). Web 2.0 is alternately dubbed "social media." The collaborative nature of the Internet is built into its name. We define our Internet usage by how various online tools connect people over spatial and temporal boundaries (Instant Messenger, Youtube, Email, Facebook.....). A still-contentious issue is whether the Internet has altered the nature of social interactions, or vice versa. Another things I'm curious about, and which Hine also touches on, is what constitutes a 'field' to perform virtual ethnography. Does it have to be a physical space, like an Internet cafe or a library, or even an average Canadian household? Can Facebook be considered a field? If the ethnographer were to set up a Facebook account and observe his/her 'friends' interactions on Facebook, does his/her personal account satisfy the requirements of a clearly-defined 'field'?

I'll just stop rambling for now. Till next week...

Yes, another case study...

I don't know how I can top Brian's post on Yin's article citing Miles's scathing analysis of case studies. By no stretch of the imagination am I an expert on the topic, and I am speaking as a student forced for almost six years to read case study after case study in readings, assignments, etc. I understand the argument that a case study, unlike a survey, is structured as a story. The researcher observes, takes notes, recognizes patterns and similarities, and ends up compiling a representative narrative. Almost the exact same process a novelist follows, although the end result is not as gripping to read.

But during my undergrad studies in English, many class discussions were centred around answering the age-old question: to what extent if fiction 'fiction'? Does the label 'narrative' imply a fictional account? Why are canonical social scientists prone to dismissing case studies - too general? reductionist? unreliable? Why not quantitative research findings, where the numbers can potentially be fudged?

I liked Yin's metaphor of detective work, particularly the reliance on past 'crimes' for solving new ones. Maybe case studies are contextually-limited, but they are also great for recognizing and predicting future patterns of behaviour.

Personally case studies make research concepts come alive for me. I believe in their usefulness as a pedagogical tool.

Gender and Material Environment

I thought that this week’s reading on gender and the material environment by Van Oost (2005) was especially interesting because over the weekend a friend of mine showed me a “manly” lip balm that he had just ordered from the internet. This lip balm is entitled “Chap Fix +” and is advertised as specifically for men. Here is the link for anyone who wants to view this product: http://www.chapfix.com/.

I thought it was interesting how the product developers had conceptualized masculinity. The use of grips on the sides for “inclement conditions” seemed particularly amusing because it implied that its users would need chapstick when engaged in an extreme category – perhaps mountain-climbing or aerial snowboarding.

Over the years I have indeed observed the reluctance of men and women to use products designated as for the other sex. This is so even if they recognize that the gender of products is socially constructed rather than intrinsic. The owner of Chap + himself commented on it being a marketing ploy, but was still more than happy to join in, even stating that he had no choice but to reward such design dedication.

It is interesting to consider how the gendering of products can evolve over time. For example, something as simple as a pair of pants was once thought of to be a men’s product. Nowadays, women can and do wear pants on a regular basis, and the concept of “pants” is much less closely tied to masculinity. However, it is still loosely tied to it, as evidenced by popular sayings such as “She wears the pants in the relationship.”

There also remains a distinction between “men’s pants” and “women’s pants”, although it may be argued that this is necessary due to anatomical differences between men and women. This suggests that as researchers we should be aware of when the gendering of products is due to inherent differences between men and women (e.g. body structure) and when it is more artificially and socially constructed (e.g. the lip balm example).

The transcendence of story-telling

Reading Yin's "The Case Study Crisis" caused a mental outburst that has been building in my mind since the beginning of the semester. As a former humanities student I can't help feeling that a lot of the discussion that takes place in the social sciences is... well... pedantic. The idea presented in Yin (attributed to Miles) that case studies are on the whole unscientific and thus in need of reform only served to reinforce the feeling that a rigid adherence to scientific ideals may lead to babies being thrown out with their bathwater (or valuable methods being dismissed as unscientific). I understand that the accomplishments of the social and natural sciences are a direct result of this rigid adherence to method and system, I just can't see myself being the one doing the policing (the accusation of being "unscientific" sounds too much like the accusation of being "unamerican", as in "House Unamerican Activities Committee"). That said, my spirits are buoyed by Luker's statement that "we are doing theory generating" as opposed to theory testing (pp125). She uses this phrase in the context of sampling but I take it to represent her conception of social science more generally, something akin to Kuhn's revolutionary science. In both cases there is a realization that there ought to be some people working out the existing problems in all of their minutia and some people that are working on the boundaries of the discipline to create new problems. Einstein once called his method "combinatory play": he would take existing concepts -- or methods or systems -- and combine them or reshape them in new ways. To bring this back to Yin: I think story-telling is an important form of combinatory play, a method that sacrifices a degree of objective validity for the creativity that the story-teller imparts to the story, presenting the subject matter in a new and potentially fruitful perspective. In short, I think there is a place for Yin's case study as there is a place for the case studies of someone like Bruno Latour (his "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Door" is brilliant).

Is validity a methodological issue or a conceptual problem?

I have selected "Making the Most of Your Video Collection: Trends in Patron Access and Resource Sharing" by Bergman (2010) assignment#3. The peer review on this article has directed me back to the issues of validity, reliability and generalization issues in qualitative researches that we have discussed a couple weeks ago. In his article, Bergman has proposed university and college academic libraries to review their existing loan policies and procedures on video collection. Her research has included detailed literature reviews to present research findings from university libraries, focus group (university student as library patrons) data, 2 surveys conducted by herself, and a case study on her personal experience with the Minnesota State University library. From the perspective of research method, I cannot deny that her research is well designed with considerable efforts. However, in regard to my background as a student library assistant in two different UofT libraries for more than one year (UTSC library as circulation desk SLA 2008-2009; East Asian Library as GSLA at present), some of what Bergman believes as the causes on the academic library policies and procedures are almost the opposite of what I have learned from my own work experience. Even though Bergman's MSU case can be regarded as a successful demonstration, it cannot apply to my case because her assumption seems to base on a general and standardized collection and funding situation of all academic libraries. Besides, the media format conversion issues are heavily restricted by copyright causes. However, Bergman has clearly stated at the end of her article that copyright issue is out of concern here. In my eyes, a research theory with ignorance of the fundamental contexts on the research subject is hardly reliable. The problem that I find on Bergman's article is mainly a validity issue particularly on the concept of generalization. The Research methods listed in her article seem to be data manipulation tools. In terms of this, I wonder is "validity" a methodological issue or a conceptual issue? If the researcher's primary research theory is already biased, the research methods as it supplemental reinforcement will be invalid. Will it be too late to check validity when the research has already been in the middle of its process? Which one shall be criticized first, the research assumptions or the research methods?

Reflection on Consalvo & Dutton Article

Last week I discovered an interest in game studies and this week’s reading on Game analysis provided another inspiring read. This week’s article by Consalvo & Dutton (2006) provided more of a methodological perspective and was instructive on how to study games qualitatively. Consalvo & Dutton (2006) discuss four parts of a game that can be studied: object inventory, interface study, interaction map, and gameplay log.

I find that gameplay log is the most interesting dimension because it seems to require a nuanced attention to detail to be able to observe. According to Consalvo & Dutton, the researcher who studies gameplay log is looking for the “unexpected” in gameplay to see how potentially open the game is for players. They write, “The researcher is less interested in seeing what options are offered to the player than in seeing what can happen when the player does something the game maker did not intend – and with what result.”

I think that if I were to study games, this is the aspect I would be most interested in because I have long been interested in how humans explored new environments. Each game’s universe is a new environment, every time a gamer begins a new game, he or she must figure out not only what should to be done to “win” the game, but also what can be done incidentally, or “along the way.” I am especially interested in sort of person who wants to play a game subversively – for example, the person who wants to lock a Sim inside a room with no refrigerator or bathroom and see how long it takes for them to turn into a gravestone, or the person who desperately wants to shoot the dog in Nintendo’s Duck Hunt.

I think that despite programmers’ admirable efforts and successes in replicating or augmenting reality for games, it is the moments that are unexpected that ultimately reflect real life the best. A related question to this is how to build unpredictability into a game, but still make sure that the game will continue on? Indeed, game developers have a lot to think about, and that only means that as researchers, we have a lot to think about too.

Unobtrusive Methods

When I read the section in Knight about unobtrusive methods (pp108-109) I kept thinking back to my recent idea of incorporating observation as part of my research design. Knight states that it can be “hard to be confident about what the measures (of unobtrusive methods) mean.” (p109) He uses as an example students’ washrooms, the messy state of which could be due to any number of factors. Or the observation of gestures and use of public space – so much of this would be a matter of the researcher’s own perspective and interpretation… Therefore in this sense (and particularly in relation to my own research) I completely agree that these techniques would need to be accompanied by other approaches in a mixed-methods design, in order to help solidify one's analysis.

The Myth of Objectivity

Following a brief discussion in class today and reading Thomas' article on the defense of content analysis in the postmodern age I was reminded of a common discussion topic during my undergraduate studies. I completed my undergrad in communication studies and a common trope was that objectivity doesn't exist. Thomas indirectly articulates this belief when he writes that "...to [his] knowledge there are no sociocultural or humanistic research techniques that provide direct access to an individual's meaning-making-and-subsequent-application process for everyday life (685). In other words, Thomas focuses on the issue of self-reporting as a technique for garnering information regarding personal meaning-making. This technique is valuable inasmuch as one recognizes it as an interpretive process.

I'm not positive but I believe this argument stems from Baudriallard's notion of simulation and simulacra. Baudriallard would suggest that reality exists in terms of various orders of simulation of an original artifact. At an extreme the simulation no longer resembles the original symbol. In that sense reality is constituted by simulation, and this is especially true within capitalist society. Mass production intensifies this idea. So where is the link? Recall is essentially an attempt at simulating a prior experience, which is always subject to difference in interpretation due to the fallible nature of memory and rationality. The same is arguably true when the researcher performs operationalization, even at the point of defining a research question. In the operationalization context the researcher is attempting to simulate reality within a mediated form: language.

Excuse my philosophical meandering.

Ethnography and Game Studies

I think that Boellstorff brings up some interesting points in his article about ethnography and game studies. In his article, he briefly unpacks the meaning of “participant observation” and its inherent oxymoron – “that you cannot participate and fully observe at the same time.” He states that it is within this paradox that anthropologists do their best work. He explains that participant observation implies a critical engagement that blurs the line between the researcher and the researched and that it is a method based on failure and learning from mistakes.

I think that it is very useful that he frames this method as a method based on failure. If you are going to study something that is unpredictable and complex, it helps to be unafraid of ambiguities, to be able to keep a steady pace without pausing too long in hesitation at potential bumps in the road. It has always seemed to me that games were a better metaphor for life than other types of art that are commonly thought of as imitations of life (film, music, drawings, etc.)

Games are so dependent on experience and engagement that they do not even seem to exist without participation. When a researcher takes it upon themselves to study a game, they must truly go down the rabbit hole – if they do not immerse themselves then they will not really be studying the heart of the game (which consists experience, involvement, action and reaction, emotion, and other human dimensions). They will merely be looking at superficial elements such as the graphics or the mechanics, and therefore might as well be studying a drawing or car. I think that it is important to make this distinction between games and other types of media.

I also think it is interesting how Boellstorff differentiates between three types of game studies: 1) game cultures, 2) cultures of gaming, and 3) the gaming of cultures. In Boellstorff’s description, each level of gaming study seems to broaden the scope of the game studies field. His description very much convinces me that the field of game studies in a complex, multi-level research area that deserves more attention.

I myself do not play any games and cannot claim particular awareness of the first category of gaming research, i.e. “game cultures.” I don’t think I can easily become familiar with a game culture unless I played myself (participant observation). However, I can easily relate to “cultures of gaming” and the “gaming of cultures” because these domains exist in the physical world, and I can also see them at play in my own life with respect to friends and colleagues who do play games. I think that there is an assumption that the only people who would want to study games are those who play themselves, but from Boellstorff’s explanation of the two other ways that gaming can be studied, I can see that anyone with an interest in culture (and not necessarily specific games) would be wise to consider game studies as an area for intellectual study.

Commodification of Academic Research

I just came across this interview with Hans Radder, a Dutch academic, on the commodification of academic research. Figured some of you might be interested.

Ethnographic challenges

This week's reading and today's class discussion has raised a lot of questions and challenges for me in terms of conducting my own research, although that is by no means a negative thing.

For instance, when we were discussing the difference between passive and covert observation, that got me thinking: which one would be applicable in an international context? For instance, if I mean to study the link between religion, politics and access to information in a traditional patriarchal society like Egypt, I'm going to have to study Al-Azhar in-depth or else my study is incomplete. Al-Azhar is by no means co-ed, and not to downplay the female section but the male section is where all the scholarly and political action is (unfortunately). So it got me thinking: how do I get in? I can't just "hang out" in a casual manner, nor can I sit in a corner taking notes. What is a way of overcoming this hurdle that doesn't involve disguising as a man or getting a spy-for-hire to observe and report back to you? Should I forget about first-hand observation all together and just rely on formal interviews? Interviews are no match for observing someone in their natural setting; people just aren't being completely 'themselves' when they are being interviewed. But I won't give up just yet, and all suggestions are welcome!

What I am looking at is actually "Why" but not "What"

Weeks ago when we were talking about "Focus Group" research method, I was struggling and debating with myself -- when I was doing my undergrad Management courses, one of my professors were strongly opposed to the idea of "Focus Group" in general and university students as sampling in particular. I bought in his idea that "focus group" with inappropariated sampling will lead to "group think", which will result in strongly bias. Therefore, within the past two weeks I kept struggling with myself on the sampling scope issues. Finally I have seen the light from Lucker's Field (and Other) Methods chapter. As Luker (2008) mentioned, "Regardless of whether things happened the way people said they did, what interests us is that people chose to tell us that they happend that way. Interviews are, almost by definition, accurate accounts of the kinds of mental maps that people carry around inside their heads, ad that it is this, rather than some videotape of "reality", which is of interest to us" (167). So what I should be looking at is not about what the interviewees have said, but rather why they would choose to say so. In this way, even there is a group think, by looking at the process for them to come up with the similar answers I can actually identify the social pattern thus locate the issues or conflicts.
Besides, Luker interview question design is also insightful to me. In my preliminary research project, I have designed to interview several senior managerial staff of my research subject organization. Now that I have read Luker's interview questions, I will have to redesign my own questions so as to make them lead my interviewees to the issues of the organization that they might not aware of or would not be willing to address unless I ask.

Let's take a poll....

Bill O'Reilly, in his now notorious appearance on "The View," cited a poll that said 70% of Americans were against building a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero.

I have only recently started to question quantitative research findings, since we began INF1240. How many times have we come across so-called 'research findings' in the news, newspapers, magazines, and actually asked ourselves, "How did they come up with this data? What questions did they ask? How many people did they sample? What was their margin of error?" Anyone reading this blog entry can easily come up with ten more questions.

The poll O'Reilly was referring to is an opinion research poll conducted by CNN:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/08/11/rel11a.pdf

CNN interviewed 1009 people over the phone. They felt that number was sufficient enough to issue a definitive statement that 70% of over 300,000,000 Americans opposed the mosque. Should the survey have asked them to list reasons for their answer? Does it matter what their reasons are? How much time did the respondents take to actually think about what the 41 questions were asking? Is it possible the questions were designed to illicit negative responses? Personally, I know if I'm forced to take a phone survey characterized by such long-winded questions, I respond mindlessly without thinking about what the question is really asking. I think, "Who cares? It's just a survey. I just want to get off the phone."

But to Bill O'Reilly and (judging by the thunderous applause he received and the video comments on YouTube) to many others, it is not just a survey. It amounts to rhetorical ammunition.

Guess the moral of the story is: never underestimate the power of a CNN poll.

Rare Disease Patients and Privacy Risk

It wasn't until I read Luker's chapter for this week and saw a guest presentation in INF1001 that I came to a conclusion regarding my sample – assuming it actually is a conclusion. Following a guest lecture in INF1001 regarding the social networking website for patients called patientslikeme.com, it sort of hit me. I've consistently been struggling with an exciting “place” online where I could carry out research regarding the relationship between altruism and personal revelation. I think I may have found it. Patientslikeme.com is an extremely interesting website that encourages patients of varying diseases to share their medical history. That data is stored, analysis on that data is done via some algorithm, and then shared with the community in an attempt to better understand diagnoses, symptoms, and treatments of similar patients.

The interesting part is that the community tends to be more or less split up into two halves: those with common diseases and those with rare diseases. Each user has a profile, which takes quite a long time to fill out. Additionally, each profile consists of modules, which are meant to be filled out over time and with varying granularity. What I'm principally interested in is whether patients with rare diseases, in relation to those with common diseases, divulge more information more often – I would do my best to sample either population according to available statistics. The “so what” of this is to, as my hypothesis would suggest, potentially find that rare disease patients are more likely to participate in personal revelation in an attempt of empathetic altruism. In other words, they understand the systemic limitations of rare disease diagnoses and treatment. Perhaps a greater knowledge base could mitigate some of these failures. In addition, and most importantly, what that could suggest is that those on the margins of the “disease-occurrence spectrum” are at greater risk of personal privacy exploitation. Additionally, risk analysis could be extremely useful in such a study.

Research for the sake of research?

After this weeks readings --- experiment, quasi-experiment, sampling, confidence intervals, control groups, generalizations, surveys, pilot testing, I am in full data overload. Reserach on research methods, ethnography, small populations, niche populations, general populations, the list goes on. My head is spinning and yet at peace. Now, I completely understand more than ever that there is nothing... no sacred topic, nothing too small, nothing too big... that cannot in some fashion be brought to study. It is what seems to make the world go round. So this afternoon, I took to the newspaper and made a concerted effort to see how many front page news items were related to some research paper that has just come out --- the answer.... of the 3 front page news items....2 were directly related to presenting research facts. It's quite simply everywhere!! And so, no matter if my SSHRC is accepted or if I go on to do my thesis, these valuable methods if nothing else will help me enjoy and dissect the Saturday paper with coffee.

Ethnography

I'm pretty sure most people have seen Michael Wesch's video in which he and his students embark on an ethnographical study of YouTube. It got me thinking about the research methodology itself, and how it almost seems like an oxymoron. Researching anything implies a degree of detachment; otherwise, how can you be objective? But ethnographical research requires you to immerse yourself in the thing which you are studying. Does that detract from the scholarly integrity of your work? Or does it do the opposite and add to its authenticity?

I am also thinking about ethnography in terms of my own research proposal. In general terms, I wonder if it is even possible to detach yourself from what you are studying. Can I, a Muslim, be an objective or even neutral observer of Islam and Muslims?

Research Proposal Assignment

This week as I was working on my research proposal assignment, I found myself frequently referencing Chapter 5 of Luker's book, which deals with literature review. As I was searching through social science databases for articles relevant to my topic: "Social Anxiety Disorder and Online Support Forums", I often felt that I wasn't using the right keywords for my searches. I became apprehensive about whether or not there really wasn't much on my specific intersection of interests, or whether it only seemed that way because my search skills were poor. I ended up using Luker's method of creating a daisy. I used a thesaurus to make sure I had all synonyms covered, and I also tried to look at my topic not only from a social sciences perspective, but also from a technology perspective. The multi-disciplinary nature of research topics these days definitely forces you to be more creative when you think about ways to find information on a topic. It can become a case of not knowing where to begin not because there doesn't seem to be any logical starting point, but because too many starting points are possible.

Collaboration as Peer Review

I've had a few opportunities recently to explore how collaboration facilitates peer review, with a notable example being this blog! We quiet, shy, studious types, often batting ideas around the gymnasiums of our heads, too consumed to nod at each other in the hallways... somehow manage to deliver insightful, biting, and even inspiring comment and criticism to each other regularly. Initially with Mike's post about Open Data, we've managed to turn this blog into a real arena of shared inquiry.
Lately, I've been attending the iTable lunch series (Brian has, as well), where an author has a chance to receive fairly informal peer review from faculty and grad students. There's a bit of verbal jousting, lots of questioning, some exposition, and a really rich exchange of ideas in an environment where few seem apprehensive about expressing their thoughts. But is this sort of informal gathering the best way to throw balls at the wall? Does the fact that digital text is revisable make it less intimidating than the immediate judgment arising from sticking one's hand in the air? One interesting thing about active (live) collaboration, is it allows so many atoms of thought to smash against each other in immediate succession that a fairly anarchic explosion is possible. Cohesion might be missing, but the conversation, criticism, review, and what-have-you usually takes on a more organic form.
What does that mean for this class? For this blog? Are we missing the charged environment of a traditional graduate seminar?

Public libraries and social change

I admittedly scrapped several daisies while jumping from topic to topic, and I was pretty distraught with my inability to come up with a specific research question… I think I have finally narrowed down my ideas to something which may work for me though. I knew that I wanted to focus on the concept of the public library as a means for social change. So from there, I think the direction which might work well for me is exploring some of the core values of the public library (I think I will focus on Toronto, but maybe not) specifically with issues surrounding equity, diversity and participation, and what the limitations might be for librarians in terms of maintaining those values. I also thought that a good way to narrow that down would be to focus on newcomers to Canada… So in terms of methods, I suppose I might be relying largely on interviews, since I would be drawing a lot from people's (librarians') direct experiences.

Caitilín

Reflection of Lego Serious Play

I found David Gauntlett's research project on "creative explorations" very interesting and relevant to my interest in mental health. Visual techniques such as drawing and painting are already used in psychologists' offices to help people uncover and express their emotions. This is especially the case in offices that work with children.

Gauntlett explains that it can be difficult for people to synthesize their knowledge, thoughts, and feelings when put on the spot. In the traditional interview setting, people are often asked a question that they have to respond to immediately. Due to social norms, people can be uncomfortable asking for "time to think." This exercise solves this problem because thinking time is built in.

Participants can also use their products to cue themselves as they tell their stories. I think that this could be very useful for people who have difficulty speaking to unfamiliar people, such as those with Social Anxiety Disorder. It is very difficult to interview this segment of the population because their inherent fear of people makes them 1) unlikely to volunteer to be interviewed, 2) so charged with anxiety and other negative emotions that they often have difficulty communicating even when they want to.

I plan to explore Art Lab further and will also look into getting a copy of Gauntlett's book, "Creative Play."

Focus Groups and Reliability (or do you mean validity?)

Lunt and Livingston suggest that a focus group “...acts as a context that challenges, asks for elaboration, and demands examples of claims that people make. In rhetorical terms, the group acts as if conducting an inquiry, and there are, therefore, reliability checks in the operation of pragmatic norms for communication in groups” (93).

This is interesting on a number of levels. The authors appropriate the idea of focus group participants as agents of reliability. Assuming reliability is the accurate reproduction of findings in duplicate research then perhaps the authors meant to say validity, or more specifically, construct validity. Validity can be understood as a measure of representativeness of research findings outside of a controlled environment.

In this context, the authors compare focus groups to surveys, wherein it is mentioned that surveys can not provide for the same checks of reliability. How is it possible for any form of lightly structured interviewing technique to produce any form of significant reliability? It is clear that this becomes an issue of semantics, which in this case is quite apparent. It also appears to be apparent that the authors may have meant something different than they communicated.

Lunt and Livingston suggest that there “...are no such checks in survey research, which may be seen rhetorically as a highly reduced dialogue between researcher and researched” (93). If the claim relates to the truth value in participant responses, as the authors suggest, then there are indeed methods for controlling inaccurate, false, or misleading responses. Occasionally, the researcher may want to ask the same question, but reword it. This functions as a sort of double-checking, wherein respondents are tested on their focus during the survey. It is not as effective as face-to-face interrogation; however it is certainly possible.

Construction and Conveyance of Meaning

I was at an academic/social event the other day, and upon being introduced as someone studying "information" and consequently having to explain what I am "interested" in, I had a curious exchange that, I think, is relevant to topics coming up in both Lunt/Livingstone and Luker. While (mostly) blathering endlessly about my varied interests in the history of information architecture, the confluence of information and human-computer interaction, and the materiality of wearable computers, I managed to spark my listener's interest by bringing up something that was... surprise... topical! I had read, earlier that day, that a team of Japanese physicists have managed to create an information heat engine, capable of converting information into energy. Of course, when I tried to explain how this heat engine would work, and what was the relevance to 1) my research interests and 2) the study of information, I immediately stumbled, trying to draw constellations of disconnected ideas together in an attempt to seem as if I knew what I was talking about. I assumed that I kind of did when I brought the topic up, but I am not a physicist, or an information architecture professional, or a nanoengineer.
Anyway, upon later reflection I realized that, instead of making myself (and my research goals) seem interesting, I probably had the opposite effect. Luker referred to synthesizing research and preparing your "material" so that it would be presentable to your smartest, harshest critics and colleagues. Paraphrasing Lunt and Livingstone, "The audience is seen, not as an aggregate of atomized opinions or attitudes, but as individuals located in concrete social groups who construct meaningful social action partly through the discursive interrogation of texts." (Lunt and Livingstone, page 85)
This is, of course, referring to a television audience in a completely different context. But reading this description has prompted me to think about my "audience" and how I convey meaning that I have haphazardly constructed. When I describe my research interests, I get a lot of blank stares. I suppose I need to think about whether this is a result of trying to fuse disjointed ideas and cultures of knowing on my part. I also need to decide whether the "audience" I'm speaking with has ever come across what I'm discussing, and whether it might be relevant to their interests. Finally, I need to situate my presentation - because, make no mistake, that's what this is - in something concrete and tangible. I imagine the latter will come as a result of taking a careful look at how I derive meaning from the themes I am interested in.  

The Bedraggled Daisy vs. The PhD Dent

Did anyone else see the "Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D." meme that made its way around the internet a few weeks ago? If not, I invite you see it here: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/.

Luker's "Bedraggled Daisy" immediately brought this to mind. I think (hope?) that the author of the Ph.D. Dent may have had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek when writing it, the thoroughly demoralizing line "keep pushing" in particular. Still, it seems that the Ph.D. Dent may serve as an accurate representation of Luker's conception of canonical research and a contrast to the image of her Bedraggled Daisy.

I'm happy to see that the Bedraggled Daisy is working for some of you: I've been dutifully following the exercises that Luker provides at the end of each chapter though, to be honest, I haven't much benefitted from them -- the Bedraggled Daisy included -- despite my best intentions. Like Gabby I'm a natural inter-disciplinarian (or multi-disciplinarian, though these are slightly distinct in my mind but that's a post in itself) though I do value time spent in deep focus on a single subject: I wrote a thesis on a very specific subject as an undergrad (a particular image that Nietzsche used discretely throughout his writing) and it turned out to be one of my greatest accomplishments. Regardless, I'm finding it difficult to find that focus this time around and I've found that the Bedraggled Daisy has only compounded the problem.

Of all the exercises that Luker has proposed, her insistence on establishing a research question has been the most helpful for me. I don't normally frame research projects in terms of a guiding question but, at Luker's insistence, I'm attempting to do so this time around. And though it hasn't been a clear success just yet, the contortions that I'm forcing my mind to go through feel like good exercise. I've been asking myself questions like: how do things like contracts and agreements inhibit or constrain creativity, innovation, and rational behaviour? Is the info-glut phenomenon compromising our capacity for meaning-making? Is our ability to engage in productive, creative play being inhibited in the 'Information Age'?

Each of these questions reflects some aspect of my research interests (interpretation, meaning-making, play, and the contemporary limitation thereof) but none adequately encapsulates all of these interests. Still, I feel like this line of questioning is circling around something and that I'm getting closer to articulating a strong research question. That said, I'm sceptical that I'll be able to find a single, stable question that will guide my research from beginning to end, though I don't think Luker is necessarily advocating such a question. Is anyone else struggling with the research question?

Refer to the Goodies

It is really useful to look at how others have done to win the SSHRC so as to give myself a clue on how to write my own proposal. The SSHRC Number 2 ( musical knowledge) is a well organized example, so I would use the following reviews as a reminder for my own SSHRC proposal:

1. Program of Study Statement
In this section,the applicant has stated his/her personal live long endeavor in the research interest on music. The statement here has connected the writer's undergrad background with the current MI post-grad program. In this way, readers can at least ensure that the applicant is not researching on an alien field.

2. Context
The applicant has smartly framed his/her research method course as "a fruitful collaboration" with the course instructor, who is a specialist in ethnographic research. In this way, the applicant tries to give an impression that he/she has teamed up with the professor. Personally I don't like such claim, but apparently the SSHRC buys it.

The applicant also clearly identify the research needs, which is to fill the current research gaps.

3. Objectives
This is the part for the case study. The applicant has chosen a hot and sexy topic: flamenco guita. Even though I don't have a musical background, the flamenco guita at least sounds fascinating. Moreover, the research target is an RCM professor's studio, the students and the professor. The academic background of the research targets also sound like strengths of the research topic.

4. Methodology
Here the applicant refers back to the research method course instructor again. This time, it is not "collaboration". Instead, it is "under the supervision" so as to reassure the professionalism of the research methodology. Besides, the applicant has presented multi-layers and interdisciplinary research methods, which further ensure the plurality of the research project.

5. Contribution to the advancement of knowledge
This is the "why" section. The applicant mentioned that this research project can further inspire other researches on broader interdisciplinary fields such as "information science, ethnomusicology, music education and system design".

As learned from the Monday class, it matters the most on "framing" in the SSHRC proposal. The review on this music knowledge research proposal has reminded me one thing -- the SSHRC funders might know something about everything, but not necessarily aeverything about one thing. Therefore, the most important part in the proposal grant writing is the way that you frame your project, to make it relevant to the current and hot topics. Yet, do we have to do our own research project "under the supervision" of Sara?

Research woes

I admit I felt unsettled after reading the sample SSHRC proposal, which is intimidatingly organized and focused compared to my half-hearted attempt. My two passions are Islamic and information studies (my private fantasy is to achieve the impossible and become the first female librarian of Al Azhar's library, revolutionizing the entire collection to include liberal, revisionist views of Islam, and thus paving the way for reform in the Islamic world). Hey, I can dream!
The problem I am facing is developing a research question. The connection between interpretations of Islam and the dissemination of information, the monopolies of knowledge and intellectual freedom (or lack thereof) and censorship, Muslims' limited exposure to books versus their primary exposure to oral forms of communication (Friday prayer sermons, speeches and lectures by clerics) and the ensuing and corresponding mentalities / mindsets...these are all areas, not questions. And how do you study something so vast? Focus groups, one-on-one interviews, participatory research??
It's true that conducting research without a question is like groping in the dark; I have a lot of interests, but what am I really asking?

SSHRC Review

At the end of class on Monday we were asked to give our thoughts on a particular SSHRC proposal. The one that myself, Brian, Caitilin and 2 others from Group 4 received related to researching the people of the Stikine Plateau.

The author of this proposal clearly states the interest of study and it is clear that this person has a vested interest in the historical processes and development of the Stikine. Beyond geography, the author wants to take on recounting the historical process of colonialism and landscape change to the region. With limited research available on the topic and the region, it would appear the author has a vast amount of information to deal with and that the scope of this study seems enormous.

The method to be used is a review of literature available in the archives of British Columbia and in Ottawa. The author will also use personal papers of key individuals with connections to the Stikine throughout history which will be sourced at the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs Library and the Department of Indian Affairs RG 10 files which are housed at UBC Library. The author also cites references needed from Hudson's Bay Company, Archives in Winnipeg, the Alaska State Acrives in Juneau and the University of Washington Archives in Seattle. The author also plans on holding interviews in the region of the Stikine.

The author's intentions are clear: to contribute to the environmental history of Canada through the Stikine and make a significant contribution to Indigeneous-state/settler relations.

It doesn't appear that the author has left gaps, if anything it seems that the author has included every possible angle which may lead to some very confusing moments in the future as to what specific direction to follow. After reading this, not only do I feel that I have a lot more thinking to do about my own research project, but I want to be sure it will make a significant contribution to furthering the field.

Is it How or Why?

After the lecture on Monday and after reading both the article by Lunt and Livingstone on the use of focus groups in Media and Communications Research and Knight Chapter 3, I felt even more confused as to what "method" I should be using or proposing for my research proposal. So, I started by doing the following -- I took Eleanore's approach (through Luker) and created my research "flower". (see above). This has been really helpful in helping me to define the scope of what I'm interested in studying but now I'm left to ponder...do I have a "why" question which would call for more qualitatitive methods or a "how" question calling for more quantitative methods? I won't take you through the various iterations of my question, as I posed it on paper but I'm left with the following: How does the use of social networking sites, for children under the age of 13, affect their feelings of empathy toward their peers and the world? How do they understand the terms of use for the site and how do they perceive the open access of information that they are providing to their peers (among others)? I think I have a questionnaire in my future (and a whole lot of consent forms!)

Reflection on Luker, Chapters 4-5

I found Luker's warning about the difference between a research interest and a research question very eye-opening and also worrisome. In the beginning stages of research, it can be hard to figure out a specific question, especially if your area of interest is broad and the literature expansive. It seems especially confounding for qualitative research that aims to answer subjective questions. Coming from a Psychology background, I have a strong interest in mental health issues. Concepts such as mental well-being often seem quite abstract, and to define them brings about issues of interpretation. For example, how does one measure self-esteem? When the variables and effects that you are studying reside internally within human beings, how do you observe them?

Self-report measures are the only option I can think of at present, although I will need to investigate this further. Is this method valid? Certainly asking someone what their level of "well-being" is makes more sense than to observe their behaviour and assign a level of well-being to them. Internal thoughts, beliefs, and feelings often do not translate to behaviours, which are motivated by many other things such as social expectations and external goals. On that note, reporting a feeling can itself be considered a behaviour, and is very different from the actual event of emotionality. This is an issue that does not seem to have an easy answer.

Avoiding the Pigeonhole

On page 56, Luker touches on the attractiveness of using a "linear" research model to mask one's social science as "normal science." Over the past decade (or so), there has been a calculated push toward multidisciplinarity in many of the social sciences, and a resulting backlash has emerged recently. The backlash is, of course, predictable, and echoes many of the arguments made in the quantitative vs. qualitative wars. At the root is the search for relevance. Relevance leads to - or helps persuade people of - big t Truth, or so we're led to believe!
I'm an unabashed multidisciplinarian. I changed my major 7 times while pursuing an undergraduate degree, then returned 10 years later to take what were, on paper at least, totally unrelated courses. I am now pursuing graduate education in a field seemingly unrelated to my background, and I plan to pursue research that has no real "home" in Information Studies, but draws from a number of different wells.

What I am worried about is something that seems to happen to multidisciplinarians as they mature: they get pigeonholed into publicly commenting on whatever area of their research they become most known for, and often end up becoming grounded in said area.
Someone who I have been inspired by over the years is Donna Haraway, a multidisciplinarian to the truest letter of the word. Haraway is a trained biologist who resisted the path of a "true" scientist by, first, emerging as a primatologist - but also as an historian of science at the same time - and then as a cyborg theorist/cyborg feminist, and later as a feminist technoscientist and cyberculture theorist. Now, Haraway is a "theorist" to some, a "feminist technoscientist" to those interested in feminism... but never a primatologist, or a biologist. Why? Because she defies classification? Or, specifically because she is claimed by constituents of particular fields? Is Haraway no longer a scientist? Has she been pigeonholed into the category of "feminist theorist" because it produces the sexiest headlines? Why is she not a scientist AND theorist who happens to have a very broad understanding of biology, constructivism, feminism, and cyborg anthropology, and can masterfully draw links between these fields in her research? I worry that inter/multidisciplinary is becoming a dirty word again. Why does an academic or researcher have to be an "expert" in one narrow, and some would argue limited, field? Does a lack of peripheral vision and an adherence to specific rigid methodology really produce the best and most easily quantifiable "results." I reluctantly acknowledge that there is careful dance between the ideas of exploration and explanation, but I honestly wish that academia does not trend back toward the narrow. More Issac Asimovs! More Grace Hoppers! Let the age of the polymath dawn again!!

Truth, Poststructuralism, and Salsa Dancing

As a former philosophy student I couldn't resist wading into the big-T Truth debate. The history of philosophy is more or less a reflection of the debate that took place in class: a multitude of opinions, some of them interesting but, in the end, none more conclusive than the other. Conclusiveness is important: a lot of the time "Truth" (big-T) is used as a synonym for conclusiveness in so far as "Truth" is taken to be something that is the case everywhere and for all time. But if you asked someone the question 'is there anything that is the case everywhere and for all time?' you are bound to get answers that are wildly different than if you asked 'what is the Truth?'. Many of the responses that were elicited in class wouldn't really make sense if they were elicited in the context of the former question rather than the latter. So when Professor Grimes asked people about Truth what did they take the word "Truth" to mean? It seems that everyone has their own private definition. For me this is the key to the problem: the word 'Truth' has no referent, or has too many referents, and yet we make no effort to establish how we're using the word before we try to define it. In short, I think Truth is an utterly dysfunctional word that is loaded with so many associations and meaning for most people that using it only creates problems (and adresses none). The sooner we stop using it the sooner we can start discussing questions that are interesting and potentially meaningful.

Which brings me to Poststructuralism. Mentioned by Luker on page 34, Poststructuralism more or less takes the position that I present in the above paragraph: that there isn't really anything that is the case everywhere and for all time (and therefore, truth is relative and Truth irrelevant). But that's not to say that truth is entirely relative: rather, what one regards as being true is determined (or informed) by one's context: one's time and place, knowledge and beliefs, etc. Poststructuralism seems to be an essential component of the method proposed by Luker. As such, salsa dancing is a metaphor for the contextual awareness theorized by Poststructuralism, the same kind of situatedness required when dancing. Luker's list of associations with salsa dancing (page 3) include: "holistic," "attentive to context," "conceptually innovative," "methodologically agnostic," "socially embedded". One word I might add to this is dynamic: when I imagine a salsa dancing or a poststructuralist social researcher I imagine someone that is situated in a constantly changing environment but who has the dynamism required to constantly adapt themselves and their methods in accordance with the given environment; someone that can, in a sense, go with the flow.

And that's really all that Poststructualism is proposing: that the world is more like a dynamic salsa dance (or perhaps more like a packed dance club) than it is like a stable, well-rehearsed ball (you know, where all of the canonical sociologists hang out). Therefore, the pursuit of stable, static concepts such as Truth in a dynamic, poststructuralist world is a bit like trying to perform a very stuffy ballroom routine in a sweaty, surging club -- to do so is to ignore the rhythm of the time and place.

There's hope for librarians yet!

Since starting at the iSchool two weeks ago, during most class and tutorial discussions, a certain question keeps popping up: what does the future hold for librarians? Most of my fellow classmates are of the belief that the Internet has effectively rendered a librarian unnecessary.

Since we are literally unable to keep up with the constant overflow of information, I feared I had just committed two years and almost $20,000 only to find myself with no job and no prospects. Until I read Chapter 5, page 85-6.

Luker devotes nine paragraphs to urging prospective salsa-dancing social scientists to make friends with a reference librarian as an essential component of their research. She subverts the previously mentioned argument to say that, in the age of "info--glut," librarians are the only ones who can navigate the haystack and help a researcher locate the proverbial pearl.

If the future of research is salsa-dancing, there's hope for me yet!

What exactly does " salsa dancing social science research" mean?

Further to our in-class discussion on the capital truth in the past Monday, I have looked up the Oxford and Longman online dictionaries for the identification of “truth”. Here are my findings:

(Oxford) “a fact or belief that is accepted as true”

(Longman) “an important fact or idea that is accepted as being true”

All I am trying to say here is that “truth” has to be “accepted” to be “true”. In my eyes, the most important part is about the notion of acceptance, which is contextualized by the truth believers based on their own social, cultural or political perspectives. Therefore, I am not surprised to see all kinds of “exceptions” alongside the “truths” all the time. To me, it is the perspective that matters.

So what kind of perspectives shall I hold to become a “salsa dancing social science researcher”? What exactly does “salsa dancing social science research” mean? Luker (2008) has briefly introduced the ideas of “public sociology” and “critical sociology” at the very beginning (2). Now that I am reading her book all the way down to Chapter 5, along with my exploration of her fascinating “working smarter” research methods and the various innovative online research databases, I cannot help tracing back to the identification of this “salsa dancing social science research”. Luker mentioned that a salsa dancing researcher is “the pioneering person” in his or her research area (83). Does it mean to challenge the main stream “truths” by bringing up those deemed as “exceptions” or “leftovers”? Does it need to have a political and anti-mainstream nature?