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
This week’s readings seemed especially challenging, and if that is a taste of how difficult the analysis portion of our projects will be, then I for one think it could be a bit daunting. I swung wildly about while reading the Thomas article on artifactual analysis, with my marginalia alternately very positive (Yes!) or suddenly in opposition – though I have to admit that a lot of the time I was awfully confused. What I settled on is a feeling that I can embrace her argument for the value of studying artifacts – and it seems to me that all data is a ‘production’ of sorts and so qualifies as an artifact. And I like her characterization of “cultural meaning” as a group or compound experience (I picture an insect’s eye with all the individual pixels combining to make up the mass phenomenon known as culture).
ReplyDeleteHowever, starting with her inclusion of Berelson’s definition of Content Analysis (even though she qualifies it somewhat), Thomas started to lose me – the claim for objectivity cannot be so easily made. I have to disagree with her assertion that “naming is (de facto) measuring”, and in any case latent things can be named, so does that mean they are automatically measurable? Her statement that “content analysis can only describe what is knowable” seems a tautology. The claim she makes for saving content analysis is that it “consciously and publicly” discloses the act of ‘typing’ or stereotyping – as if no other research method takes the care to do so, when what we have learned is that all researchers must reflect on their assumptions, biases and preconceived notions. Anyway, for me, content analysis may be one of the paths that lead out of the forest, but it is not the most appealing one.