Friday, October 28, 2011

Week 7 - Content and Critical Discourse Analysis

Knight enables easy appreciation of the potential for contested understanding surrounding attempts at claims making based on image type artifacts. The author's summary of concerns on page 104 would seem to serve as a sound basis for a researcher's self-assessment; that is the list including reactivity, "getting access", "sampling", and framing.

The section on "post-empirical" research also resonated versus past readings; in particular, Luker's reference to "data cropping" as a means to leverage past data collection efforts while pursuing theory based, interpretive study. I similarly took note of Knight's reference to "research-as-thinking" as a serious realm of inquiry along side "research-as-data-creation".

Suffice to say, the tone of grievance so prominent in the van Dijk reading on critical discourse analysis, made engagement on my part a challenge. While the notion of social cognition was made easy to grasp as a framework to appreciate the dynamic influencing perceptions of the “talk and text” dialogue among those in society who predominantly consume versus shape that dialogue, I would prefer a less partisan discussion.

In stark contrast, I very much enjoyed the Thomas reading. From among many passages I highlighted, I’ll mention two, both from page 694.

First, the suggestion that text analysis absent an explicit effort toward systematic measurement is prone to “the possibility, if not the tendency, to build the desired case. “ Thomas continues, “I have been forced to abandon several investigations when the actual codings turned out not to substantiate my initially strong, but casual, observations.”

Second, the observation that “objective” content analysis is premised on an overt effort to articulate the foundation of assumptions upon which study related “sampling and analytic” decisions rest.

Michael Watchorn

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

A personal reflection on my patch work undergrad

In my bachelors I was a bit of an academic slut - or flighty could be the polite term - but it was called both ways by many an academic friend (we feminists seem to like to reclaim words, I turned several shades of red the first time it was said to me and then slowly accepted it as a large bit true). I was a honors double major in Classical Studies and First Nations Studies with a minor in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research. It started because I couldn’t decide what I wanted to study and then ended with me deciding that I wasn’t going to choose. While my many disciplines did didn’t get along on much, they all seemed to LOVE content analysis with a health dose of text analysis to help it out.

Having said all that, I think I was doing it badly all along. I have never actually seen content analysis separated out the way that the Thomas did it. The more that I look back at the undergrad approach, the more I realize that methods were more or less stumbled into rather than selected with a specific aim. To see what the aim and benefits and the problems and pit falls of this method makes me pause to reconsider much of my work. The field of Classics is truly a field of interpretation. It is based on translation of primary source text from ancient - and often dead - languages and plays connect to dots with archaeological finds. The aspect of First Nations Studies and Gender Studies that I focused on was film and pop culture representation and its relationship to government policy (exciting I know). Both of these seem to happily lead to content analysis but I worry about many of the ways I built research and arguments outside of a methods foundation. Prior to this class I think that I viewed methods a bit like the title page; something to come back to and think about after you had finished it. Now I think I might want to date a couple of methods and treat them to a drink or two.

A picture is worth a thousand words?

From this week’s readings, I was particularly interested in the image-based research method that was mentioned in Knight. The description was very brief, so I decided to Google the topic to learn more about it. This led me to a posting in the INF1240 blog from last year, where Professor Grimes posted some additional links about image-based research.


One of these links (Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change) brought me to photovoice, an image-based research method, which I thought was really interesting. Photovoice is a participatory research method, where participants take photographs to document their experiences. This method is generally used in research concerning marginalized groups, as it allows for these groups to represent their own experiences instead of having their experiences described and reshaped by others. So much is up to interpretation when it comes to research, therefore, what better way is there to gather data than from (literally) a participant’s point of view?

Image / Documentary Analysis

I found Knight’s descriptions of image-based research and documentary analysis to be very helpful in terms of my own research. It is likely as a result of my undergraduate work in History, but I was drawn to these two types of research from the beginning. It may have also partly been because I was nervous to try something new, actually interacting with people rather than locking myself away in some corner of the library nesting in a pile of documents; but I do really enjoy the interpretive nature of this type of research. As Knight says, “it is more about different ways of reading the same texts than it s with unearthing new ones” (Knight 110). My initial research has confirmed Knight’s observation that with newspaper archives becoming available online (usually with search engine features), research is cheap and fast.

It was helpful for Knight to point out the areas where these types of research methods are flawed. Specifically, how image-based research should include theories of ‘sign’ (Knight 103) that will not necessarily confirm what is in print (102) and that they are difficult to systematically analyze (102). The second point about it not confirming what is in print is important since I plan on doing both image and document analysis and so I should plan for them to not necessarily have supportive interpretations. His suggestion to face-to-face work with typical informants’ understanding of the images I select will be something I will consider, perhaps even as a way of breaking out and doing interactive human research!

Critical Discourse Analysis

In the Dijk (1993) article, he discusses how the managing of the ‘mind of others is essentially a function of talk and text’. This presupposes an ontological statement regarding the legitimacy of the dominant group’s management over the masses. Groups may enact legitimate power over others, manipulating their minds in ways that are beneficial and necessary for the submissive group to function. Or, the dominant group may enact illegitimate power, manipulating and managing the group in a way that makes them entirely submissive and at the mercy of the dominant group. The function of a critical discourse analysis is to enact significant social change, Dijk even discusses that this metric is used to measure the success of a CDA project. But how are we to untangle what power or dominance is legitimate, and which are illegitimate? Also, how can we enact social change when we’re not sure of the function of the power relation?

Consider a news channel that broadcasts horrifying images of a war (this is a Completely and hypothetical News Network). We as CD analysts may view this as having power over the populace, managing their minds, and imposing dominance over them. However, if we unpacked this belief a little more, we may begin to see that these images are used to ‘rally the troops’, or to garner nationalism- which may hold significant value in an unsteady world. The news network may indeed hold power over the masses, and yes, they may even illegitimately manipulate the minds of the masses, but if we don’t understand the subtending goal of the news network – to promote nationalism – our goal of enacting social change may cause serious disruption to society.

Further, the notion of global communication channels was not addressed, and I feel these are of extreme importance to a discussion on discourses. Text and talk can travel instantly across the globe, but the values and meanings of these discourses do not travel similarly. How are we to enact social change when we a) need to figure out both the legitimacy of the power dynamic, and the ways in which the power dynamic functions, and b) how this discourse proliferates across the globe, and whether we would be creating injustices by projecting locally valid assumptions onto the ways of addressing those involved in these international flows.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Hi Everyone! And welcome to our new members!
This past week’s readings on ethnography were really very interesting to me. Although understanding some (very) basic elements to ethnography in anthropological terms, I had never quite thought about it in relation to any of my own research, partly because I assumed that it was something left for those anthropological folks to do!

I realise now that even if you are only doing a survey, or interview, etc, that there is most likely to be ethnographical elements to your research that need to be considered. To make my point, my research interest revolves around resettled coastal/ island communities in Newfoundland, formalized collecting institutions (such as museums and archives), and representation of these now extinct communities in their holdings. A component of the research would involve surveying resettled individuals because they are now remote and living no longer as a community unit (some remained in Newfoundland while others have gone to different parts of Canada). So, I am not dealing in a research environment that is bound to 1 geographical place, however the notion of being accepted by these communities now in diaspora is of great importance to me. Without their trust, I will not be able to gain a holistic picture of how they remember or want to remember their lost homes, and whether contemporary collecting practices in formal institutions is reflective of their culture/ traditions.... My approach to even structuring (both in format and tone) the survey, and follow-up interviews, is changing and my approach to accessing these individuals will have to be thought out very differently.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Week 6 – Interviews, Focus Groups, and Observation

Truth be told, I knew from the get-go that my sensibilities would predispose me to research questions suggesting a fit with canonical based methods of inquiry and analysis. That said, I read portions of this week’s reading list with an easy sense of appreciation and empathy.

While Luker’s discussion concerning the refinement of an interview schedule (question clumps, turn signals, and “cool down” questions), the need to create “slots” as a means to test schedule related relevance and breath, and the need to be mindful of one’s appearance was of general interest, I felt a greater sense of engagement in the follow-up discussion concerning focus groups; for example, the comment (p. 183) concerning their capacity to enable an abundance of “slots” leading to a rich flow of data and very likely, a satisfying experience for the researcher (p. 187). I also found useful the comment concerning content analysis as a means to recognize “discursive shifts” – those times when an alternate frame of reference underpinning a particular dialogue becomes the norm (p. 189).

The effort to stay engaged with the Shaffir and Stebbins readings was, as a function of the illustrations (faith, football, and baseball) also an easy effort. I found myself easily absorbed in the balancing act each described while working to build trust and a credible projection of competency concerning subject-relevant knowledge, versus the understanding that sound research necessitates discernible detachment.

Michael Watchorn

Interviewing

Maybe it was just me being a little naive, but I never thought that there would be so much prep work that goes into using interviews as a research method! This may be because the only type of “interviews” (operationalization!) that I have had experience with are those of the job and volunteer positions variety. For these types of interviews, it seems that they have a rigid interview structure, consisting of questions and a predefined list of suitable answers. In this way, it is not at all similar to interviews used for research, where it is often valuable for the interviewer to discover something new and unheard of.


On the other hand, “fitting in” is something that can be applied to both types of interviews. When interviewing for a volunteer position, it is important to establish a connection with those who you will be working with. When it comes to conducting research, being able to fit in is essential in gaining the trust of participants so that the interviewer can hopefully extract the most honest responses from them.

Week Six

Monday, October 3, 2011