Class Notes 4

Qualitative Methods

9.17.2013

Tracy Chapters 1-4

            Geertz’s Balinese Cock Fight piece came out in 1973, when academia was slowly turning from fully factual description to thick description. Mead led the movement toward eschewing judgment for understanding.

            In terms of feasibility, participant observation is not particularly good for graduate students. Even for faculty, it is quite possible that it isn’t suitable until after tenure.

            Generally, the smaller the units of data are, the more quantitative it is. The larger the units, the more qualitative it is. The text is produced by the researcher in quantitative work and produced by the subject in qualitative work.

            Behavioral perspectives suggest that behavior is trial and error based on stimulus and response. It is not intrinsically meaningful. Parsons challenged this by saying that it isn’t behavior, but action. Action is a connected scheme of acts that are meaningful in terms of accomplishing a goal in a context according to rules. There is no agency in behaviorism, and it is silent in the Parsons School theory. It wasn’t really engaged until the 80s or 90s.

            Gestalt is the principle of unity out of individuation; we see many pieces as a whole. Bricolage is the acknowledgement of the many pieces that make the whole.

            Any action line of an organization is a co-production of the individuals in the organization, whether they act with complicity or not. We have to be a bit skeptical or Tracy’s discussion of disguising herself because there is no way to know the real self.

            Paradigms must answer the epistemological question, “How do we know what we know?” Our data is thoroughly inhabited by theory, and it helps us understand how we qualify truth.

We ought to challenge Tracy’s work (and all textbooks) because it is, by nature, derivative.

We also need to update our websites earlier—aim for Monday afternoon to be finished.

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We need to find efficient ways to get our work done. We may not have time to do full participant observation, but we can do things like reconnaissance observation.

This week, we need to go into a public place for an hour to 90 minutes and write up field notes. First, we have to decide how to observe. What performance are we trying to observe? All performance is some kind of a text, after all.

There is a difference between constructed texts and found texts. Constructed texts have ideational elements, which are held together by rules of construction displaying intentionality, competence, and modality. They are assemblages of semiotic potentials with interpretive instructions. These can include genre, form, grammar, syntax, semantics, style, and execution. We cannot assume that any interpretation is viable for any text. The text governs the interpretation. We must answer what the textual warrants are. A text is not free form, and it will always follow certain conventions. Every text is produced by someone, and they leave traces behind. We need to parse out these levels within the text.

Found texts are elements in the world made sensible. It is a post hoc construction, and the text receives intention, competence, and modality through the interpretation. A found text provides the realization of semiotic potential. The interpretation is the text, and only discipline is resonance. We find commonality through aggregation (assembled without purpose or intent).

We can think of a text as a cargo vehicle. The surface of engagement gives us the facts of the text. It answers “What is?” This has clear boundaries and generate the immediacy of meaning and intention. It should demonstrate competence and capacity. The capacity of a text is its ability to carry cultural significance. After this, we should assess the breadth (tropes, figures, references, intertextuality), depth (cultural work, rehearsal, affirmation), and height (value, quality, character/ethical standard of the production) of the text. What tropes, cultural work, and value are within the text?

A text is any connected or connectable set of semiotic elements (anything). Value is set by the research question, and so not all texts are equally worthwhile. Texts are activated in the demands of the interpretation, and not all interpretations are equally plausible. The great reality constructors are action and language. The semiotic system engulfs the entire scene the entire time. Meaningfulness is achieved through action.  Language always appears in action. They construct and exist within hierarchical structures (cultural, sociological, societal, membership, relational, and individual). Every text is an improvisation upon certain tacit rules. Language and action also create and are affected by markers (cultural citizenship, dasein, sociological subjectivity, societal routines, performances, relational enactments, and individual expression). We must also pay attention to supporting casts of acts, reproductions, indexes, symbols, and icons. Furthermore, we have praxeme, pheme, phoneme, and grapheme, which are the individual units of acts, indexes, symbols, and icons. Intentional expressions of action or language are governed by goals, situations, and rules.

All of these things are potentials of a text. We can use this to decide whether we have truly plumbed the depths of the text. While not every research question leads to all of these things, a close reading means you encounter all of them. We are not going to be able to do this very often.

Participant observation is all about encountering action. It takes the form of enactments (specific expression), performance (line of action), procedure (outcome directed performance), routine (any named performance), structuration (self-sufficient routine), process (outcome directed routine), activities (routines of being), and systems (interlocked activities). We tend to engage the middle of this list. The more factual information you can bring out of the observation, the more disciplined your field notes will be. The field note is a narrative, which isn’t technically different from the writing of items in a measurement device.

We need to acknowledge linguistic textual forms. We should distinguish between industrial and personal forms of texts. These can include music, visual text, visual narrative, and audio-visual narrative. As an experiment, we should go on YouTube and try to understand the video without sound. Often the sound drives the narrative.