Transcript introduction

INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
Project Bamboo
Join a qualitative research team to talk to
humanities scholars to inform the design of
“shared, interoperable tools, services, and
content to meet the real needs of humanities
researchers.”
 Please e-mail me if interested:

 [email protected]
‘Corpus Construction’
‘Corpus Construction’

Defining the sites and subjects of
field-based research
 Making decisions about your field site(s) – how
a social phenomenon of interest is mapped out
onto spatial terrain
 Selecting people to follow, observe and/or
interview
 Selecting media / artifacts from the setting for
further analysis
Competence and Innovation

Competence (Bauer and Gaskell)
 Systematic
 Issues of public accountability
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Innovation (Becker)
 Challenge conventional thinking
Doing Innovative Research
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Starting Where You Are (Lofland
and Lofland)
 Commitment and Curiosity
 Access and ‘getting in’

Willingness to go where
others won’t
 The inconvenient and
uncomfortable
 The illegitimate
Approaches
Total enumeration (i.e. census)
 Statistical random sample
 Snowball sample (iteration again)
 Convenience sample (bad)
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Random vs. Systematic
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Random Statistical
Sampling
 Distribution of already
known attributes
 What can be said
about the sample
generalizes to the
whole population
 Popular
misconception – the
greater the # in the
sample, the more
accurate

‘Corpus
Construction’
Typifies unknown
attributes
 Systematic selection
to some alternative
rationale (not a
convenience sample)

Unknowable Populations
Many populations of ‘individuals’ are
knowable, however…
What about ‘actions?’
 What about ‘situations?’
 Open systems (i.e. language) = infinite
populations

Mapping the Unknowable
Social strata, functions and categories (known)
Representations
(unknown)
Varieties of:
Belief
Attitudes
Opinions
Stereotypes
Ideologies
Worldviews
Habits
Practices
[Bauer and Gaskell]
Mapping the Unknowable
Iteration until Saturation
 Don’t collect too much data [logistical
limits]

Problems of Social Strata in CrossCultural Research
Demographic Form
Extending Selection Strategies: Sampling
for ‘Innovation’
Identify the case that is likely to upset your
thinking and look for it – (the counterexample) e.g. addicts of opiate drugs
 If someone says it has already been studied,
its probably time to study it again.
 Studying the non-serious and the ‘boring’
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Selection from Observation
Description (in field notes) is a selection
from what is observed – we do this
implicitly [Becker]
 done well creates new categories and
ideas that ‘get around conventional
thinking’
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Selecting Field Sites
Some work is clearly ‘sited’
 Some is not (amorphous social settings) –
and therefore locating such work will be
more involved
 Sites may be ‘open’ or ‘closed’
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Selecting text, images
Text produced in the process of research
vs. texts produced for other purposes
 Bauer and Gaskell’s simplified treatment of
newspapers, etc. – newspapers as…
 vs. Becker’s concern with the ‘sociology of
record keeping’
 in media studies, the ‘active audience’
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In Conclusion - Representativeness?
The problem of unknowable populations
 Rather than ‘representativeness’ we are
seeking ‘range’ and variation in the social
phenomenon under study
 For what purpose? Challenging notions of
what is ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ about a
phenomenon – theory building rather than
theory testing/refinement
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To Review
Population and the problem of unknowable
populations
 Selection for range/diversity of the social
phenomenon rather than
representativeness
 Selection for innovation
 Stopping criterion
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For Tuesday
Read Lofland and Lofland section on logging
data
 Read UC guidelines for protection of human
subjects
 We will discuss your first activity – a
participant-observation exercise
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