Schedule

Today we're taking a broad view of the seminar. What are the core questions that we will be exploring together? How are we going to deal with these questions?

Today we're focusing on the characteristics of qualitative research - and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Please add your questions/comments/reactions here.

Core readings:

• Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  From the introduction to their book on grounded theory (which we'll read about in a later week), I've selected two passages. One is about the connection between world-view and methodology. The other is about what it means to do qualitative research.
• Creswell, J.W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  From Chapter 3 (Designing a qualitative study), there's a nice section about the characteristics of qualitative research - and how these characteristics are prioritized (or not) by different qualitative researchers.
• Denzin, N.K., & Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.). (2005). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  The Denzin and Lincoln is really the book to read, but it can be a bit dense at times, particularly for people new to the area. I've picked out a few items from the first chapter, including definitions of and tensions within qualitative research, comparison to quantitative work, and qualitative research as a five-phase process.
• Poggenpoel, M., Myburgh, C.P.H., & van der Linde, C.H. (2001). Qualitative research strategies as prerequisite for quantitative strategies. Education, 122(2), 408-413.
  A short paper that calls for a rethinking of the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research.

If you're looking for more to read, there are some additional readings here. This directory has the complete chapters for the edited items listed above. The directory also has a few other offerings. Chapter 1 from Silverman's Doing qualitative research: A practical handbook offers very straightforward overviews and critiques of quantitative and qualitative research. I've included Chapter 6 from the Silverman text (which focuses on the role of theory in qualitative research), and Chapter 2 from the Creswell Qualitative inquiry and research design text (which describes how philosophical, paradigmatic, and interpretive assumptions impact research). Theory is important, but we'll be focusing much more on methods in this seminar. The Palys (a Canadian text - as evidenced by the Canada-centric examples!) and other Creswell (written for education students) are fairly introductory chapters about research, and are included to offer other perspectives.

Today we're exploring the tradition of ethnography - its practices and ways those practices can be extended or reimagined.

Core readings:

• Creswell, J.W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  A brief introduction to ethnographic research - definitions, procedures, challenges.
• Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  Van Maanen's Tales of the Field explores the ways in which ethnographies can be narratively re/presented. In chapter 1, he describes the practices and limits of ethnography, and provides an overview of the rest of the book.
• LeCompte, M.D., & Schensul, J.J. (1999). Designing and conducting ethnographic research (Ethnographer’s toolkit, Vol. 1). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  Chapter 2 is aptly titled - when and where is ethnography used? This chapter provides several specific examples of ethnographic questions/work.
• Fielding, N., Lee, R.M., & Blank, G. (Eds.). (2008). The SAGE handbook of online research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  Chapter 14 from the Handbook is about ethnography with online communities.

For more background about ethnography, I've included Chapter 1 (What is ethnography?) from LeCompte and Schensul. For more examples, Silverman's section on ethnography provides examples from education, information processing science, and sociology.

If you're interested in online ethnography, there's a longer piece in the Denzin and Lincoln by Annette Markham, The methods, politics, and ethics of representation in online ethnography - I found the section starting at page 811 (Considering methods as ethics) particularly interesting. Finally, I've included two perspectives on autoethnography (representation of the self): Anderson's presentation of analytic autoethnography, and a response from Denzin.

We're mixing up the schedule a bit to continue the conversation we started last week about ethnography. This session we're going to look at a collection of ethnographic examples.

Choose TWO of the five articles to read (and skim the other three, time permitting):

• Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies
  Genevieve Bell, Mark Blythe, Phoebe Sengers
• How robotic products become social products: An ethnographic study of cleaning in the home
  Jodi Forlizzi
• Listening to a long conversation: An ethnographic approach to the study of information and communication technologies in the home
  Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, David Morley
• Reconstructing technologies as social practice
  Lucy Suchman, Jeanette Blomberg, Julian Orr, Randall Trigg
• The home of the future: An ethnographic study of new information technologies in the home
  Alladi Venkatesh

Here are four MIT theses that use ethnographic techniques. Read all four abstracts, and choose ONE to skim for mention of ethnography:

• Bodies of information: Reinventing bodies and practice in medial education
  Rachel Prentice
• The sharing of wonderful ideas: Influence and interaction in online communities of creators
  Elisabeth Sylvan
• Disco Jalebi: An ethnographic exploration of gay Bombay
  Parmesh Shahani
• Japan and Taiwan in the wake of bio-globalization: Drugs, race, and standards
  Wen-Hua Kuo

As you read/skim the examples, keep the following questions in mind (we're going to explore them on Tuesday):

• What questions are being addressed?
• Why is ethnography being used?
• How is the ethnography being conducted? (e.g. What is the context? What data is being collected?)

Bonus readings - a collection of hopefully helpful tables and lists from LeCompte and Schensul, Designing & Conducting Ethnographic Research:

• Steps in the research process
  An overview of research design from start to finish.
• Comparison of paradigms
  Last session we talked about how worldview can impact the approach one takes to research. This is a succinct summary of how five different approaches (positivistic, interpretive, critical, ecological, network) vary across a variety of dimensions (from concerns to knowedlge to researcher to goals).
• Standard qualitative designs
  A table comparing the different approaches we'll be discussing: ethnography, case study, narratives, action research.
• Ethnography and quantitative research
  How quantitative approaches can be involved in ethnography - and how ethnography can be involved in quantitative approaches.
• Data collection methods
  We talked a bit about what it means to do ethnography and we'll talk more about data collection in future sessions, but here's a table describing different methods for data collection (observation, interview, etc.).

Last session we split into groups and discussed several questions about ethnography in the context of several examples. Here are the groups and the particular examples from the last set of readings:

• Suchman - Shani, Amos, Drew, Jay
• Bell - Stephanie, Sajid, Selene, Yannick
• Forlizzi - Ryan, Micah, Nadav, Eric, Ian

The questions we discussed were:

• What questions are being addressed?
• Why is ethnography being used?
• How is the ethnography being conducted? (e.g. What is the context? What data is being collected?)

In Thursday's session, we're going to continue our discussion, and bring in issues of validity and reliability. The readings for Thursday are:

• LeCompte & Goetz, Problems of reliability and validity in ethnographic research
• Creswell, Determining validity in qualitative inquiry

We're now turning to action research traditions - and this session is focused on developing an understanding of what action research is and how it's different from the approaches/examples we've already discussed.

• The many faces of action research
  Herr and Anderson, 2005 - The Action Research Dissertation
• How is action research similar or different to other research
  McNiff, Lomax, and Whitehead, 1996 - You and your action research project
• Principles of community-based action research
  Stringer, 1996 - Action research - A handbook for practitioners
• Living in the basement of the ivory tower - A graduate student's perspective of participatory action research within academic institutions
  Moore, 2004 - Educational Action Research, 12(1), 145.

As you are reading, you might want to return to the questions that Micah raised for ethnography:

• What is action research?
• What are the tools of action research?
• What is the relationship between researcher, research subject, and research?
• Why is action research useful?
• When/how do we use an action research approach?
• What are the challenges to using action research?

In this session, we're going to continue the action research discussion, looking at issues of validity through examples.

• e-PAR: Using technology and participatory action research to engage youth in health promotion
  Sarah Flicker, Oonagh Maley, Andrea Ridgley, Sherry Biscope, Charlotte Lombardo, Harvey Skinner
• Issues of validity in openly ideological research: Between a rock and a soft place
  Patti Lather

If you're interested, I'm including two extra readings that underscore the messiness of research and the hazards of action-oriented approaches.

• Postmodern Research, postmodern practice: Studying the barriers to cyberliteracy among mentally disabled women
  Ann Travers
  I first read this paper in 2005, and I wondered how I would ever be able to do work with people. I still find it totally heart-wrenching.

  "I shared with her my changed perceptions of the mentally ill; I told her that I had been a little afraid of mentally ill people and that my research had given me the opportunity to understand that this fear was based on stereotypes. I told her how much I enjoyed working with the women and that I had come to understand there was no need to be afraid. I asked her if she had anything else she would like to ask me. Yes, she said. I expected her to ask me for more information. Instead, she asked me to share my changed perception of the mentally disabled with other people so that she and people like her would be less harshly treated by society. She asked me to act on what I learned to contribute to social change. I promised to do so."

• Feminist discourses of (dis)empowerment in an action research project involving rural women and communication technologies
  June Lennie, Caroline Hatcher, Wendy Morgan
  

  "Some feminists have found that, due to the close relationships developed with participants, certain feminist research methodologies can have unintended outcomes, including exploitation, disempowerment and exclusion."

In this session we're focused on stories as a central construct - how can stories be a form of data collection and a form of re/presentation?

• Narrative research
  Excerpt that introduces narrative research (definitions, types, procedures) from Chapter 4 of Creswell, Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches
• What do narrative inquirers do?
  Chapter 4 from Narrative Inquiry by Clandinin and Connelly
• From field to field texts: Being in a place of stories
  Chapter 6 from Narrative Inquiry by Clandinin and Connelly

Amos has provided an extra reading that discusses validity in the context of narrative-based approaches. Thanks, Amos!

• Validity issues in narrative research
  Donald Polkinghorne

It's the final session of readings! Last time, we explored how stories can be used as data and presentation. In this session, we're looking at interviews, and how interview data can be analyzed.

• Methods of analysis
  Chapter 11 from InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing by Kvale
• Ten standard objections to interview research
  excerpt from Chapter 15 of InterViews

For some extra readings, the Kvale is amazing and I've put up several different chapters. If you're thinking about using interviews in your research, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

• Chapter 1 - Interviewing as research
• Chapter 2 - The interview as conversation
• Chapter 5 - Thematizing and designing an interview study
• Chapter 7 - The interview situation
• Chapter 15 - Another part of chapter 15 that discusses the internal critiques of interviewing

I've also added two articles, related to multimedia data collection, that might be of interest to some of you

• Multimodal ethnography, Bella Dicks
• Reflections about images, visual culture, and educational research, Gustavo Fischman

As you may remember, we changed the schedule along the way, bringing in new topics and exploring others more deeply. In the process, we didn't get to explore three areas: case study, grounded theory, and design-based research. Here are some readings for those weeks.

What is case study?

• Case study research - Definition and background
  from Creswell's Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design
• Introduction to case study research
  from Yin's Case Study Research: Design and Methods, Preface and Chapter 1
• Designing case studies
  from Yin's Case Study Research: Design and Methods, Chapter 2

What is design-based research?

• Brown, Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings
• Kelly, Research as design
• The Design-Based Research Collective, Design-based research: An emerging paradigm for educational inquiry
• Schoenfeld, Research methods in and for the learning sciences
• Joseph, The practice of design-based research: Uncovering the interplay between design, research, and the real-world context

What is grounded theory?

• Grounded theory research - Definition and background
  from Creswell's Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design
• An invitation to grounded theory
  from Charmaz's Constructing Grounded Theory