Developing a New Major

gotta decide pretty early on – what you want to find out a question, a topic

• use multiple data sources
• get emic perspectives (from the participant’s point of view, not just the researchers)
• in naturalistic settings (not in a lab, but real world, where people normally hang out/interact)

gotta think – seems silly to say – but it’s not reading and note taking and regurgitating – you have to think about what you see and hear and read and make some new understanding, start by thinking about what you know already about your topic

ethnography

• used to learn about the social and cultural lives of different groups with a shared culture
• good for building theory, defining problems, distinguishing patterns, evaluating, complements other data
• descriptive
• Franz Boas is the father of ethnography (he says everything is important when studying culture, collect lots of stuff, lots of different kinds of data, all cultures similarly developed – just different)
• central idea in ethnography is culture – the way things are done in a community, the way things or , the way things are understood by the community members, cultures is embodied in community practices and beliefs (beliefs have to be expressed in some way for researcher to see them of course)
• naturalistic – study culture in it’s normal setting. you don’t bring everyone to the lab, researcher goes to the community, hangs out in the environment
• interpret culture means report meaning, not isoalted physical happenings, (clifford Geertz = thick description which considers that there are lots of things going on in any culture below the surface, things not always evident/visible)

research paradigms – how we approach the work of research – how they ask questions, how they get answers

• positivism (quantitative, lab work, objective, truth is objective and bias free and value-neutral, develop generalizable rules for causation, do research from a distance, it’s all about the researcher)
• qualitative (naturalistic, interpretive, truth is socially constructed, get involved with participants, get them to talk about how they understand things, create shared understanding, all about the subjects, do participant observer – do what they do)
• critical theoretical (truth is arbitrary and defined by the people with power who oppress others, interested in helping people change their situation

her story about the lights on in the faculty offices late at night – suggests that good ideas come from our real lives, things that make us go why is that happening

researcher needs to be open minded, be flexible

have to be aware of your own subjectivity – affected by your knowledge, your prejudices

ch3

• define your research question it should be interesting enough to keep you going thru the project
• evaluate whether ethnography is best way to answer research question
• figure out your question
• figure out your community – do you have have access to the community, set some limit, group can be small, should be representative of the community as a whole interested in the typical group member so look at things they have in common
• decide what data you’re going to collect and how,
• read and get a theoretical background and do lit review – see if your study has already been done and to get osme idea about data you need
• actually collect the data

Bronislaw Malinowski – functionalist Ethnographer (anthro) – said social relations had to be studied in concrete cultural contexts, social behavior related to individuals’ motivations and they’re both rational (scientifically validated) or magical (religion, ritual)

look at parts of a culture system to see how htey work

ch4

shouldn’t just colect data indiscriminately – based on what you find from lit review set up a framework to organize your study

theory helps give ya framework, gives ya vocabulary and key term definitions

ch4 reviews several key theorists, each has something different to add to our understanding – Turner looks at symbols as helping put boundaries on group membership, Benedict – cultures made up of members’ similar beliefs & ideas, Geertz – purpose of ethnography is to decipher hierarchy of social strata, notice some researchers focus on individuals and others on groups and others on social organizations/social structure

lit review – can’t read everything, going for quality, not quantity, and don’t just read – be critical and ask yourself questions about how it fits in with your study, should be from good current peer reviewed journals, not writing annotated bib but rather organize around themes you see in the reading and categories in your frameowrk (from your theory), stuff you read should help you flesh out your research question

ch5 – IRB – not something we have to worry about too much in class but basic principles are important

respect your informants, don’t trick people into participating, ther emust be some benefit to them and harm has to be in relationship tothe benefit, usually we try to do no harm sometimes we have to decieve them about the true purposed of the study until it’s over, people have to be able to give informed consent to their participation, recruitment methods have to be appropriate (can’t lie to people)

ch 5.5 – be safe in the field – doesn’t apply to us at all this semester but in the future things to consider – sometimes you ahve to dress differently to fit in, have to eat differently – if you want to see how people really live you have to get close to them and you can’t do that if you stand out as an outsider, so there’s be safe tips and fit in tips – some people answer questions more honestly to someone of their own sex so you have to consider your gender when interpreting data

ch6 – data collection

data collection matrix – your question, why you want to ask it (relates more in depth to your research question might be something you read), what data sources you’re going to use (people you’re studying, artifacts they produce…), and how you’re going to collect hte data

everythign goes thru you – you’re interpretations and reactions, have to think about your own subjectivity and if there are ways to overcome or at least how the answer was affected, pay attention to anything that provokes a strong reaction (good or bad)

keep a research journal (our blog) – write down your reactions to things and how that might affect the interpretation

use multiple methods to collect data – triangulation

observation = structured watching – - need to come up with ways to organize your watching, she made a list of everytying she wanted to look for based on her lit review and theory, then go hang out and write down what you see happening and listen for how they interpret things, observe in different settings where your community hangs out

participant observation = gather data from teh inside, when you’re a member of the group you’re studying

make field notes – examples on p. 66 or how to organize – what i see i one column and my reactions in the 2nd, or what htey said (quotes) in one column and how they acted in the 2nd

transcribe all your notes as soon after the data collection session as possible. A lot of our notes will be from inside sl so they’re already typed – you just have to select copy and price. make copies of your notes – could email them to yourself and file on your hard drive

go over your notes and look for things you want to ask informants about – things you didn’t understand, things you want to make sure you understand how the informant understands them (get their meaning), any idea about specific people or types of people that need to be included to be representative

ethnographic interviews = probing conversations, can be structured, open ended or somewhat in between , idea is to get them talking, get them to tell you what things mean to them, to help you understand something new, to get specific data — not normal conversation not just chatting – you ask open ended questions, you ask them to describe and rank and … questons should get informant to elaborate, tell you about their experiences,you could tell them something you saw while observing and ask them to expand on that, get htem to describe processes (step by step) get background info, remember to bring things to take notes

study artifacts – content analysis – research notes are one artifact, but also things used in the community or created by the community, could collect media examples letters brochures, radio transcripts or recordings

you’re done collecting when you start to get the same answer from different data sources – you’re “saturated” and can start analysis and write up on that point, move on to other parts of your question

ch7 – analyzing data

good to print out transcripts and your blog posts before starting to write your papers – mark them up, make copies and cut them up so you can put related stuff together and see the links

make backups of your data – mail to several addresses, put copy on nova, make sure everyone in the group has copies of all the data – in case of hardware failure

go thru everything – see hwat isn’t there – did you forget to interview someone important (or is that trnascriptout of place), did you get info on all the aspects of your question that you identified up front and thru out the project

goal of analysis is to break the big pile of data down to smaller piles of stuff related to subtopics in your research question

read thru and look for patterns, themes

sometimes we go back and ask people if the themes we think we see make sense to them – remember it’s their story you’re telling

can use computer tools to code and analyze your data, get your friends to help (especially if you have lots of hand written notes to type in or audio tape to transcribe), or you go thru it yourself (get really familiar with the data) and use low tech stuff like post its and poster board to organize your thoughts

organize data into “piles”, and analyze each pile separately - look for patterns, look for relationshps between those patterns, look for patterns across several data sources (mentioned by different types of people, shows up in interviews, observations, and artifacts)

we analyze at multiple points during the process – while we’re collecting data (stop and think about each interview when it’s done and what’s new/different, what you’ve heard before, any new issues or questions that are raised, think about how your reactions might be coloring your interviews or reactions., right at the end of data collection as you gather stuff together – double check lists of people to interview, read thru your journal – have you covered all the stuff you wanted/gotten answers to all the questions you jotted down as you worked, and then do the big analysis after organzing all the data

top down analysis – you come up with codes (from the lit review, theory, what you knew already, from your research question) and apply them to the data (and hten see what doesn’t fit into those codes), write the codes down in your notebook ahead of time and add descriptions, write down “operational examples” from the data, group your codes into categories (the example in the book shows work and gender codes on p. 89)
bottom up analysis (inductive) read and reread the data and generate codes as you work and apply them, takes time – you have to “play with the data” to get a sense of what it’s saying, codes may change as you work thru data – keep updating your notebook descriptions and be sure to reapply to the data as your understanding changes, keep notes about why your code understanding changes (part of the method)

physically put codes in the text – with pencil on teh printed copy, with color indicators in word docs

writing up results – go back to your theory and your research questions to help you get started, you’re telling the whole story, not boiling down, you’re trying to give context and meaning

Reliability

• reliability – can study be repeated by other people, in other places and they’ll get similar results
• internal reliablity – do the ideas we come up with (our analysis) match the data
• external reliablity – how similar are our interpretations to other who have done similar studies

Validity

• validity – did we really find what we think we found, how meaningful are the results
• internal validity – do the methods we use make sense
• construct validity – do the measures we used make sense for the things we wanted to find out, get at what we think they do
• external validity – can we use these same techniques to study other groups?

have to watch your own subjectivity – do some of the things you saw creep you out, do you think they’re just wrong, are you offended by some of hte language used by the subjects…our reactions color our interpretation (again, good to have multple sources and use multiple methods)

go back to subjects and show them your interpreations and write-ups – do they agree? do they have anything to add? – it’s their story after all that you’re telling

ch8 – writing up results

outline could come from your original research questions and themes

you have lots of data to dray from, lots of characters to bring in (disguise their identity of course), and thru your analysis you’ve created a story line – that’s what you want to try to get down on paper

can start with a good story from your data to set the tone or start with a history of the community, and give a summary of the big points that you’re going to cover in the paper

talk about each of your research questions one at a time, then for each question talk about each of hte answers that came out of your analysis

have to talk about how you collected data, how you analyzed it – the methods

can use the concept mapping to organize – main ideas, sub ideas, examples, data points – draw a picture of the paper as an outline (i think they should have talked about concept mapping earlier in analysis actually)

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