The Interpretive Process by Norman K. Denzin (H&M Chapter 14)
The author presents us a very interesting research process which does not limit to the analysis of talk or conversation themselvesm, the focus of Chapter 11 & 12 in S. The 6 phases in such a process include:
Framing the research question
Deconstructing and analyzing critically prior conceptions of the phenomenon
Capturing the phenomenon, including locating and situating it in the natural world and obtaining multiple instances of it
Bracketing the phenomenon, or reducing it to its essential elements and cutting it loose from the natural world so that its essential structures and features may be uncovered
Constructing the phenomenon, or putting the phenomenon back together in terms of its essential parts, pieces, and structures
Contextualizing the phenomenon, or relocating the phenomenon back in the natural social world
We are quite famililar with the first two phases that normally and necessarily appear as research questions and literature review. Capturing the phenomenon can be considered as the talk taking place between the researcher and the subject in the study. It is through talking that the subject's personal experience is transplanted to the researcher. I like the metaphor "hermeneutic circle" which claims that the researcher circle and the subject circle can overlap, but never completely. How true! Unlike public facts, personal experience is hardly easily understandable, and some is only understandable if you have the same or similar experience. Thus, the researcher's ability to grasp what the subject intends to express is quite important. It's mentionable that while a subject only possesses his or her own unique experience reflecting the phenomenon, the researcher should possess an aggregation of multiple experience of different subjects so that universal conclusions can be drawn from the full exploration of the phenomenon. Bracketing and constructing go in opposite directions. During the former phase, the researcher decomposes the subject's original words into sub-sections that are easier to handle, and makes analysis of them; during the latter, the researcher put the insights obtained from each sub-section together, and the result is the researcher's understanding of the whole phenomenon. That's the very phase of analyzing discourse or conversation. The author, however, goes a little further by coming up with the contextualizing phase during which the researcher's understanding will be inspected in the real world. If right, such understanding successfully describes the phenomenon in ordinary people's eyes. To me, this "real world" - "research setting" - "real world" process is appealing and more dependable.
Photovoice, rural women, and life
Ms. Fitzgerald's presentation coincided with a TV program quite impressing on me, but I'm not sure whether they were talking about the same project. The TV program I watched was named as "five women's life changed by camera" (translated from its Chinese title). A group of feminists arrived at a small minority village in Yunnan province (southwestern China) and provided women there with cameras to capture their life. At first, most women tried to avoid these "strange" people since they were born to believe that woman should stay at home doing housework and farmwork. Later, led by the village head's wife, other four brave women accepted the cameras and began to take photo of the people, events, and scenes they liked. These five rural women, with no or little education, married or single, were between 20 and 50. They were invited to our capital Beijing and special photograph exhibits were held to display their pictures and the stories behind. Surprisingly, these cameras overthrew the traditional philosophy of life in that remote area. For example, the village head's wife started to commit herself to getting more women involved in photo taking and making them know more about the outside world, so that her husband had to share the housework which completely fell on her shoulders before; the youngest woman among them, whose original plan was to marry and be a mother of several children, decided to continue her education. I feel amazing that none of these women have good education and some even cannot speak Mandarin, let alone articulate their feeling of life, their photos, however, make this possible. Cameras become their eyes and the photos are the world in their eyes. The unique aspect of such photos is that they are taken under natural conditions, providing on-the-spot record of rapidly changing rural areas in China. I cannot find the original photos taken by rural women, and the above picture is from an exhibit of the photos.
Focus Group
Group vs. Individuals
"...by building on each other's ideas, a successful group can suggest more than the sum of ideas of its individual members" (G & C, pp 150). This notion makes a lot of sense to me. Since no two people hold exactly the same perspectives, grouped individuals tend to disagree while isolated individuals tend to agree (with themselves). Disagreement pushes the group members to respeculate on their own opinions, sometimes drawing the deviations back to the right path. More important, not all good results derive from the reconcilement of disagreement, but from the discussion of or even debate over the disagreement difficult to reconcile.
Introvert vs. Extrovert
Focus group is "a technique unsuited for introverts" (G & C, pp 149). Here the authors refer to introverted researchers or facilitators. What pop up to me is the hypothesis that introverted persons may not be suit for participating focus group as members. A case in point is the people active in virtual world on the Web but passive in real life. It is not surprising that a close-lipped person turns out to be a chatterbox, say through an instant messagning tool. We've heard quite many such stories. Isn't it a better way to employ computer and Web in focus group technique when we want to include these people in the group?
Focus Group vs. Nominal Group
As I understand it, the biggest difference between them is that nominal group technique also includes a stage particularly left for the individuals and generates a numeric priority ranking. This reminds me the Heuristic Evaluation in usability domain. To evaluate the usability of a certain system interface, each evaluator carries out his or her assessment separately against some heuristics. And then the researcher collects the results and makes a list of all the problems found by the evaluators. The evaluators are again presented with this new list separately to rate the severity of each problem.
Problems in data collection
As I briefly stated in class, I want to explore the significance of social software in changing the way people interact with each other by analyzing the data collected from online interviews or surveys of real users. This data collection process, if well designed and implemented, will be a lot of help. However, after several attempts, I found it not so easy to catch the users' voice to the greatest extent. What I did was to start conversations (via instant messagings or blogs) with users reached randomly within a certain social network service, say, Wallop. According to small world phenomenon and six degree separation, two arbitrary persons in the world can be connected through no more than six other persons. So I tried to select users in different degrees of my friend network. On the one hand, one and two degree friends were willing to accept my conversations and responsibly answered my questions. But most of them were close friends of mine or my close friends, so that they could only represent a very small part of SNS users since they shared many common features. They are the small clusters connected through strong ties. On the other hand, few "friends" in two + degrees really paid attention to my adding them as friends. Actually, who ignored me were those might providing valuable clues to various perspectives on SNS. One way to avoid this problem and to meet the deadline of this class, I think, is to resort to web search to collect related opinions on SNS generally or on particular SNSs.
Chapter 6
What interests me most in Chapter 6 is the "variety of researcher perspectives" as illustrated in Fig. 6.1 on page 107. There is "a continuum of participtory involvement, moving from unobtrusive observer, through observer-as-participant and then participant-as-observer ot complete participant". Different results will be generated if the research stands in different positions in the continuum.
Because I'm going to deal with online communities in my SNS research, I need to reflect on observations beyond our real life. Can observation also take place in virtual envrionments? Is the continuum equally true in virtual environments? The answers should be yes. Isn't it? Take our blogging for example. The blogging activities reflect our social interaction, which may deserve studying. Each blogger is a subject whose activities, say when, why, and how often he/she make a post or comment, could be objects of observation. An observer can do so as a lurker, or in contrast, as a blogger contributing posts and comments.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5, to me, offers hints of what to do next if research topic is established. As a novice researcher who wants to do something about SNS, I really lose my head at this moment. What kind of research qustions shall I put forward? Which technique or techniques shall I employ to collect data?
It is interesting that Table 5.1 on page 97 help me find out the answers to large extent. The easist way to work out my own research plan is to decide the type of my research problem and follow the research questions and data collection techniques bundled with that type. This can be a good choice for an inexperienced qualitative researcher like me. My research will probably fall into the "predictive" type. What I want to make clear are the features of kinesics and proxemics since they may be of use. Are they techniques involving more face-to-face interaction between research and subject?
Chapter 5 Beginning fieldwork in information organizations
Chapter 6 Observation in information organizations
Chapter 11 Analysing qualitative data in information organizations
I really enjoy reading these three chapters which push me closer to down-to-earth research. Chapter 11 is concerning data analysis, an important but not the starting stage of a research. So I plan to re-read it when embarking on the analysis of my own data obtained by myself.
Doubtful Reliability and Validity
"When something produces consistent results it can be called reliable." (G&C, p.24)
"Validity refers to the extent to which something actually measures what it is intended to measure."(G&C, p.25)
The authors defined reliability and validity, and provided suggestions in order to assure both of them. But I wonder how much these suggestions would be of help since my former experiences lead me to feel that something unique to qualitative research is hard to be changed.
I have involved in a user testing research as an observer to evaluate website. Users were asked to find the answers to some well-designed questions within the given websites. The time limit for each question was 3 minutes - that's to say, any user had to give up if they didn't complete the task within 3 minutes because according to some previous research, users won't proceed if they cannot find their target information in 1 minutes. As a matter of fact, however, few users in our test gave up when 1 minute elapsed; they continued. Moreover, some of them were reluctant to stop after 3 minutes and asked me to show them where the answers lay. The reason, as I understood, was that they were always conscious that they were participating in a research study, not browsing websites on their own computer at home. Even the absence of oberver didn't result in any changes.
Another discovery from the same research was the subjects' ability to express what they thought. A person is perhaps an appropriate subject to our research, but not good at expressing, which leads to a departure from the truth.
I don't think these problems threatening reliability and validity we can overcome easily since they are inherent. I hope I don't go to extremes.
Guest speakers
The lectures given by the two guest speakers, Ms. Becky Hamilton and Ms. Sue Sterret, offered me much elightenment for my current independent study on social network service, especially the former.
In her research, Ms. Hamilton conducted Email interviews instead traditional ones. This approach, especially applied in a "Ping-Pong" form, can be good for both interviewers and interviewees. On the one hand, more time is available for the interviewees to reflect on the questions, structure their answers more explicitly, and they may feel more freedom. On the othe hand, time is also important for interviewers. The subjects' responses can provide certain elements eliciting new questions, but not necessarily obviously. So the interviewers have to take some time to assimilate the responses and further design deeper questions.
Actually, I need to conduct interviews to obtain data concerning users' evaluation of nowadays popular social network services (SNS), such as Wallop, Orkut, etc. As I designed, I would recruit no more than 25 users on campus and have them try out the SNS studied; then interviews would be carried out to collect their feelings and opinions. Two disadvantages were evident: the scale was too small; those willing to participate were not bound to be frequent users of the SNS. At present, I decided to introduce online interviews by communicating directly with real SNS users, in virtue of SNS as the medium.
Qualitative weblog
Weblog's link function is so wonderful that a network has already been established through our interlinkage for the purpose of this Phd seminar. "THINK ALOUD" was borrowed to nominate my weblog since the network is going to witness thoughts flow among us.
For lack of knowledge in qualitative methods, I thought they were something at a distance from me. But participating in the first class led me to a feeling that whether we are aware or not, most of our research work involves qualitative elements which can be combined with quantitative analysis to generate better results. I find myself lucky to access to such methodology course at an early stage of my PhD studies since I will certainly stand a good chance to put what I obtain from the class into practice. Plus, the diversity of the class and your rich background gave me much confidence in greatly enlarging my horizon after a semester's meeting.
