Class Notes

Qualitative Methods

11.26.2013

We need to get the PowerPoint for the ethnography lecture and be prepared to interrogate during the presentation.

Hammersly and Atkinson Presentation

In discussing ethics, Hammersly and Atkinson note the differences between procedural ethics (IRB) and ethics in practice. They also write about microethics, which are the ethics for everyday choices rather than ethics that address big issues. When we have issues arise, they are referred to as ethically important moments.

One of the ways to deal with certain admissions (child abuse, sexual abuse) is to make a statement of what you heard and what the consequences of that statement are, asking if they really meant to say what they did. Our choices in responding to this are reflective of our paradigms. We have to be reflexive, particularly when reporting our research.

Ethnography

Hammersly and Atkinson use a very positivistic perspective in describing ethnography, asserting that you can make true or veritable statements.

Traditionally, ethnography was the creation of guides to other cultures. This was heavily linked to colonization and the exoticizing of non-Western populations. After WWII, the interpretive turn appears in social science, which starts integrating narrative, phenomenology, existentialism, social construction, and social action theory. This shift suggests a move from us understanding them to us understanding us. We use public texts to make claims that we know about social life. At present, we have participant observation, auto-ethnography, and long-form interviews.

When deciding whether something works as an ethnographic method, we must ask about certain aspects of the work. There must be an explanatory target—there must be enough there to constitute a true ethnography. The method needs to be connected to the target using warrants, rules of evidence, and conventions of practice (calendars, recording, participation, and reflexivity). There must also be certain recognized practices, such as participant observation/member knowledge, removed observation/recordings, protocol analysis (for activities that are not particularly visual), and interviews. Only objectivist measurement and statistics are excluded as an ethnographic practice.

Social theory is what separates ethnography from the other social sciences; it theorizes the self and social relationships. This is different than what we see in psychology, which privileges methodological individualism, finding all answers within the individual. Social theory is interested in the self, which is what is produced as an expression of identity (who we want to be) and subjectivity (who we are forced to be) in performance. The self is also incomplete. Cultural memberships move individuals into congregations, and the ethnographer is interested in finding their set of understandings (local social reality). We have ways of being in the world, and these are naturalized practices beyond our control (micro-expressions). We should also pay attention to durable relationships and memberships. The self is encoded in subjectivity, located in relationships, apparent through performance, and is an acting agent. The agent is always within a domain, situated within implications and understandings, and is in an improvisational performance. These all occur within cultural domains, which include disciplines (systems of practical training), apparatuses (resources and practices of social structurations), economies (systems of valuation appropriate to the subject position and performance), and hegemonies (cultural process of complicity, implication, invocation, and evocation). Invocation involves noting your own position/self, and evocation is the same done by someone else. We can use disciplines, apparatuses, economies, and hegemonies as aspects of culture to investigate in ethnography. The incomplete self desires completion and finds it within the other, creating both desire and resistance. This means that the completion of the self in the other breeds resistance because any completion occludes becoming anything else. We resist the process of becoming.

In social theory, the relationship is the fundamental unit of social life and it is the object of study. Relationships are always between two individuals in subject positions, which are invariable culturally coded components of the self that have rights and obligations of being. We usually will highlight the rights of specific subject positions and ignore the obligations (at least for those subject positions we like or aspire to). The relationship also allows for control.

The way that social theory treats action is through seeing it as a semiotic system of performance, on the same level as language. All actions are culturally encoded, and they include behaviors and acts, which form routines, rules of enactment, and rules of association.

Outside Reading: Leander and McKim's Tracing the Everyday 'Sitings' of Adolescents on the Internet

Kevin Leander and Kelly McKim’s Tracing the Everyday ‘Sitings’ of Adolescents on the Internet: a strategic adaptation of ethnography across online and offline spaces

Leander and McKim’s article is primarily concerned with how to integrate the online realm with traditional participant observation. Their particular population, adolescents, spend time interacting in the physical world as well as the virtual one, and so Leander and McKim are driven to follow their participants.

This article brings up a situation that seems to go unaddressed in many descriptions of internet ethnographies: studying participants both online and off. A great deal of the information on internet ethnography (at least that I’ve found) focuses on internet-only communities, and an important part of that work is in defining what is relevant to participant identities. With an online-only community, participants’ offline identities can be seen as largely irrelevant. In Leander and McKim’s situation, the participants are followed online, which means that it is important to tie both on- and offline identities together, fitting together the online participation with the everyday life, like two puzzle pieces.

The authors problematize a few other factors of online participant observation. They acknowledge the problem posed by ‘lurkers’—the unseen readers of websites who do not post or interact. If an ethnographer needs to be fully aware of their environment, how do they account for those who cannot be seen? Leander and McKim also bring up the issue of the extent to which a researcher can participate in online activities, noting that simply lurking is not fully engaging, but making oneself known as an ethnographer can hinder or otherwise influence the behavior of the participants. It seems that this dynamic would be present anyway, online or offline.

Leander and McKim suggest reconceptualizing the methodology of connective ethnography (connecting the online and offline worlds) through Latour’s idea of flow as presented in Actor Network Theory. Though this suggestion seems intuitively correct (to observe a participant’s behavior flow from activity to activity and the malleability of their identity and cultural practices at each site), it does not seem to add anything that has not been done or understood already by an experienced ethnographer.

The authors conclude the article by listing different things for ethnographers to observe in online behavior. Looking through the list (flow/place-making, paths, metonyms, metaphors, and textual construction of space and self), I remain unconvinced that there is anything particularly unique about doing ethnography online. Leander and McKim make a good argument for why it ought to be done, particularly in conjunction with traditional participant observation, but their recommendations for methodology seem to be nothing new.

Class Notes

Qualitative Methods

11.19.2013

In terms of interviewing and information gathering, there is solicited and unsolicited information. There are questions of validity when you bring in equipment (cameras/recorders). However, this can be seen as a non-issue; the interview constructs a non-normal state anyway, and the camera doesn’t add anything that is necessarily more biased. Jackson uses the term ‘ethnographic sincerity’ to refer to the trust we establish between ethnographer and audience that reality is represented faithfully.

We are required to report to authorities any suggestions of child or elder abuse given by participants. It is also possible that the same is true for self-harm and suicide.

In deciding whether something is an artifact or document, we should look at how it is activated in a social context. We also need to be careful about assuming that any room is single purpose or that its artifacts are necessarily tied to the room. Often things are just around, but not used.

For the last class, we are going to each take a stand on issues about qualitative research. The proposition is that qualitative research is somewhere in between academic narcissism and unprofitable fiction. Our portfolio is due on 12/16.

Hammersly and Atkinson are fairly positivistic. Contemporary ethnography embraces a methodological holism, which is more concerned with processes of social interaction than the many individuals. While methodological individualism allows for static explanations of things like document (their existence is their own validity), methodological holism needs dynamic explanations that explain the document in use, made valid by its place in human interaction.

Our analysis of texts needs to look at facts, language/symbolism, framing, narrative structure/argument form, and discursive performance. Language always appears within framing, and narrative or argument is always some type of discursive performance. Texts are bodies of work, and sources are what we have access to. Sources are representative of the potential text. We should observe form, frame, language, narrative, and discourse when arguing that our source is indicative of the text.

Cases are sources that are evaluated for their qualities as a member of the congregation. This is the first step in coding. Units of analysis are pre-selected conceptual/formal properties of the text to be coded. We should report our units of analysis because it shows that the study is thorough. Codes identify properties, agents, actions, consequences, values, and theoretical propositions. A code is a piece of semiotic material and it establishes the interpretive demand of understanding.

Coding must reflect both breadth and depth. Breadth refers to the coverage of the material and depth refers to the layering of significance. Rhizomatic coding leads to overlapping codes, which is typically represented by the depth of coding. Through coding we can accomplish, describe, confirm, compare and contrast, change, entail, critique, and move an agenda.

Before coding, we need to acknowledge the burden of coding.  We must also understand that there are several types of work associated with different types of text, including things like digitization and work with QDA software. After this, you must assemble the needed resources, including hardware, software, services, and personnel.

When doing coding, we need to read sources several time, look for things like rhetorical force, intertextuality, and interpellation (hailing). Close reading is never the same as coding. There should be a classification of each case, and the unit of analysis needs to be established. We should avoid using a ‘shiny-thing’ approach to choosing units of analysis. Unitizing by paragraph or turn is systematic, but artificial. It is also important to collect statistics on your coding activity like the amount of time spent, the codes per unit, and the density of coding. This lets you estimate how long it will take on future projects.

In the second pass of coding—meta-coding—you codes the codes for things like convergence or divergence. The codes themselves become a text, with presences and absences. It should be emergent and theoretical.

If we are working with a large data-set, we shouldn’t be thinking of it all working toward a single coding exercise. Each level of coding can present one or two publishable papers before the coding is even finished.

If we believe in pure grounded theory, then we should be able to find the theory in the text. Coding is a process of exposing the theory within the artifact. This is different than emergent coding. Axial coding adds theory in the 2^nd level of coding, and interactive coding uses grounded codes in the case and then apply them to existing theory, aiming for a synthesis.  Two-phase coding involves first using emergent coding and then following it with theoretical coding. This is the kind most likely to get published.

When trying to get published, you need to be thorough in your analysis of your procedures and the statistics associated with your coding. The argument starts with the importance of the text, follows through with theory and literature, and uses multiple case warrants and should account for disconfirmations. We need to be careful when invoking the audience or author [of the artifact], and our conclusions need to be anchored within the text.

"I Quit!" Review Redux

To begin with, there is a typo in the abstract. It is missing an 'of' in the first sentence.

I don't see a thesis statement on the first or second page. I'm under the impression that it is far better to have a thesis early in the paper, even if it is only previewed and is given nuance later. I realized that the only reason I know what the paper is arguing is because I read the abstract first.

By page 10, I have noticed several typos (~5).

As I wrote last time, I feel like the participant pool is not diverse enough to merit the construct-building this paper attempts. They could really benefit from adding participants from multiple levels/socioeconomic statuses-- after all, employment (and quitting) can mean different things to different people, and this would influence the way that one chooses to quit.

The author is not very clear about what they mean when they say that they "employed two forms of verification, member-checking and thick, rich description." While I agree with the former, I'm confused by the latter. Do they mean that they wrote thick description about the interviews in order to clarify their thoughts or do they consider the information sourced from participants to be such thick description that it is a form of verification?

The three stages that the author suggests are certainly intuitive, but it seems to only conceptualize one kind of quitting: a generally amicable, planned action. They write about instances of individuals who do not exactly follow the three stages, but the information goes nowhere and is not incorporated into the model in any way. I suppose this provides falsifiability?

As I wrote last time, there seems to be quite a few questions that are in the interview guide, but not addressed in the paper. It makes me think that they might have been looking for something else, or at least something more concrete, and then tried to shoehorn disparate results into the paper.

Outside Reading: Karla Scott's "Communication Strategies Across Cultural Borders"

Karla Scott's Communication Strategies Across Cultural Borders: Dispelling Stereotypes, Performing Competence, and Redefining Black Womanhood

When trying to decide on an article for this week, I thought back to my Master's program at Saint Louis University and remembered that one of my prior professors, Karla Scott, did qualitative work, specifically with topics on gender, race, and discourse. I pulled up one of her articles, a piece that I had read through previously, and paid more attention to method.

Overall, I think the piece is very well-done. Scott uses a focus-group method in order to solicit thoughts and narratives from Black women who regularly boundary-cross into predominately white spaces. She uses convenience sampling, and this results in a participant population that is largely sourced from the university. Ideally, the participant pool would have had more people from outside the university, provided the goal is generalizability. However, Scott takes a phenomenological perspective on the research, which suggests that this may not have been the goal after all.

The method used for this research followed the three-step phenomenological process by first gathering lived experiences, reviewing them to gather themes, and finally interpreting and analyzing the themes. Gathering the experiences took the form of focus groups, though Scott also included the written responses of 3 participants who could not be present at any of the focus groups. In the article, the second and third step are clearly visible-- she states the themes and then provides unaltered text from the accounts of the participants. This does the work of showing that the recurrent themes exist, but also voicing them through the phenomenological accounts of lived experience. It is clear to the reader that the themes are apparent in these accounts, suggesting that the theme represents a commonly experienced phenomenon for the Black women participants.

The importance of this article resides in its ability to describe the why and how of certain behaviors. As Scott notes, the acts of code switching or border-crossing are well-established, but little research has been done into exactly why and how those behaviors are enacted. As a piece of research building on Communication, Scott focuses on communicative strategies, particularly ways that Black women mitigate the stereotypes they face when in predominately White environments. Scott also notes that her work is written to challenge essentialist notions of Black womanhood, because, after all, it is not meant to be generalized to represent the communicative strategies of all Black women. Although a metric perspective would tend to shun this inability to generalize and predict, Scott makes a good argument at the end of her article-- if Black womanhood is not a monolith, then it should be studied in a way that represents its heterogeneity and complexity.

NVivo Experimentation

Since the last NVivo update, I believe I've gotten video coding figured out. I finished coding the OUYA promotional video that I was working on, and I've started working on a few unboxing videos. What I'm finding interesting is that when working with both texts that come from an official source and texts that come from an audience, there are certain phrases that belong exclusively to each domain. Only the audience is concerned with pirates; only the officials at OUYA are concerned with fundraising. I'm also observing instances where phrases are used in the official OUYA texts and are later replicated by the audience.

Seeing the movement of language from one population to another makes me think that a useful feature for NVivo to implement would be a visual timeline. This way, you could see how certain coded features get picked up and rise or drop in popularity of usage. In a previous project, I'd worked with internet memes which get picked up and combined with other memes as they gain popularity. I would have loved some way to visualize the different types of memes and their frequency of usage over time. It would really help in longitudinal rhetorical projects.

I also have to admit that I'd pulled up NVivo earlier in the week just to have fun-- a friend of mine was talking about the backlash against Sony that happened after they revealed that they were not implementing some of the media features on the PS4 that users had become accustomed to on the PS3. I captured the comments on the press release and ran them through NVivo, having it display the most frequently used words. Just by itself, the analysis was interesting because you could spot the most controversial features easily and the anger of the fans was easily spotted as well.

This project, too, led me to a problem-- the comments I captured were on a press release, and every time I switched to a new page of comments, the press release remained at the top of the page. This means that, even though I captured 12 pages of comments, I also captured the text of the press release 12 times. Short of manually editing that text out, I don't know how I could selectively capture only some text on a website OR delete that text within NVivo. This meant that any kind of automatic analysis would count the wording in the press release twice as opposed to each individual comment once. I'm still not entirely sure what to do with this.

Class Notes

Presentation on Hammersly & Atkinson

Terms:
Naturalism - the study of what has not been influenced or manipulated; what exists in nature; can be qualitative or positivistic
Ethnography - an approach that comes from a naturalistic perspective; a practice for observation
Positivism - perspective the relies on the theory and data being independent; the material world is separate and independent

Is naturalism theory-driven? Probably not, but theory can emerge from it. Ethnographers should shy away from making things too simplistic.

For ethnography, the researcher enters with certain ideas of problems, but they don't formally shape research questions until toward the end of the process.

While the complexity of quantitative methods occurs in the experimental design, while the complexity with qualitative methods comes in the interpretation of the data.

Research questions tend to either be topical or generic. Topical questions are specific to populations or situations. Generic questions look at a specific situation in order to address a larger population.

______

In material realism, the explanation resides in the materiality of things. Reality is trustworthy, and language represents reality in a trustworthy way. This is why participant observation works. Material realism exhibits methodological individualism, determinism, and atomism. A material realist believes that explanations of behavior reside within the individual. Individuals are secure and coherent, meaning that one's identity does not shift or change. Most research is guided by cognitivism, and researchers believe that behavior can be measured and described, and it can be used to understand causes, quantities, and rates. The final product is APA writing.

Ideational empiricism contrasts with material realism in positing that explanations reside in the ideas of things. Reality is a process of continual becoming, and the idea of being in the world is a socially constructed experience. Explanations of behavior are assessed holistically, and the individual has agency. The whole of society/populations/communities are more important than the singular individuals; the individual identity is just a personal expression. Research is done on the basis of Social Action theory, which is based on the idea that action is the sign of what is being done rather than behavior (the how rather than why). Questions are addressed by studying discourses, action lines, and narratives. The final product is narrative writing.

Without a theoretical position, ethnography is not secure. It can slip into simple fictional writing.

_____

Ethnography creates multiple levels of texts, starting with site notes and progressing through field notes and narratives. Texts can be reproduced-- we can reenact behaviors and recreate situations. Action is formal, meaning that it has a form. Any kind of formal action has acceptable and unacceptable ways to perform it. Discourse is extended symbol use with real-life consequences. It encodes power relationships within a society. Action also embeds these power relationships. We must look at any situation and ask what are the rights and obligations? Where are there opportunities and expectations?

Texts must be enacted-- one cannot simply access pre-made ethnographic texts. They are observed in process by an actor/author. We must observe how the behavior coheres into a text. Text is then activated locally and culturally in interpretation; coding is one such interpretation.

Texts are constituted of facts, language/symbolic material in use, framing, narrative structure/argument form, and discursive performances. We begin with the facts of the case, looking for the central premise that makes the disparate facts cohere or justifies all other parts of the text. We have to figure out which elements in our text are rhetorical, using textual warrants. Framing establishes the cultural location of the text. Narrative structures introduces concepts into actions (actions are given meanings). They always have an ethical component.

Once you recognize that you are in a ideological situation, it allows you to assume reflexivity. It allows you to re-enter the research.

We should read more fiction.

We should also go back to our reviews of the I Quit! article and figure out why it was  rejected.

On the homepage of our websites or through an email, we should let Jim know what we've done each week.