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Week 10
Mar. 20th: Qualitative Research Methods
Dourish, Paul. 2006. “Implications for Design.” Pp. 541-550 in Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI). Montreal, Canada. ![[PDF]](http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~jantin/is203/wp-content/acrobat_pdf_icon_sm.gif){kind=icon}
Antin, Judd. 2006. “Cultural Assessment for Sustainable Kiosks.” in International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. Berkeley, CA.
Chapter 10 in Creswell, John. 2003. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Mar. 22nd: Qualitative Research Methods II
Prologue and Epilogue in Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and lifetimes : the world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Doorstdar, Alireza. 2004. “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: on Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan.” American Anthropologist 106:651-663.
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8 Comments Add your own
1. Ken-ichi | March 19th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
These readings on qualitative methods confuse me. On the one hand, there is Dourish bemoaning the use of ethnography for specific, pragmatic ends, lamenting all the rich and wonderful contextual understanding that researchers presumably foresake when they focus on excising cold, hard little facts from the unfathomably nuanced palimpsests of culture and society. On the other hand there’s Creswell, laying out his endless bullet points and procedures on the way to sociology-by-numbers nirvana. Perhaps their two views aren’t exactly antithetical, as you could be both procedural and sensitive to contextual understanding by having a procedure along the lines of, “Dance with the natives, reflect upon the experience, and then maybe conduct a survey.” Facetiousness aside, I still have difficulty seeing the benefit to all the procedural rigor if the goal is a very open-ended, narrative understanding of the subject.
I also took issue with Dourish’s attempt to claim that the subjective perspective of ethnography is just as biased as the selection of variables and types of observations in a quantitative study. While there is, of course, some bias in variable selection, at least subjectively selected variables can be objectively measured by other parties. How repeatable are ethnographic studies? Do independent observers make similar observations? In a perfect world, would ethnographers send 10 different researchers to 10 different communities and have them adhere to the same Creswell-ish protocols?
March 19th, 2007 at 9:17 pm |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 12. mcd | March 20th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
While I agree with Ken-ichi that objectivity and the ability to be repeated are admirable benefits of quantitative data, I think that part of Dourish’s point is that qualitative methods can be respected in that they embrace their subjectivity. I have often found that quantitative studies implicitly deny what bias might be present in striving (impossibly) to control for all externalities. That kind of control is impossible, and if it were, Coye has argued that studies performed under such control would not be generalizable at all.
Quantitative and Qualitative methods can both be used in attempts to explain phenomena or support hypotheses. The difference is in the “except for” sections. Dourish argues that qualitative methods provide richer and more nuanced explanations, and I think this makes them therefore more generalizable. Rather than saying altering a controlled variable changes everything, potentially undermining conclusions, a detailed ethnography, for example, might already have data to account for such altered circumstances. It’s true the data might not always be “actionable,” but that doesn’t make it less informative.
In the datafied world that is the iSchool, I think it’s important to keep in mind that things worth knowing aren’t always explicit and/or objective. Qualitative methods give access to gray areas, and therein lies some of their value.
28fd March 20th, 2007 at 9:04 pm |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 13. Ken-ichi | March 21st, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Andrew, admitting, embracing, and analyzing your own biases does not necessarily mean you have escaped them, and while it might go some distance toward mitigating the subjectivity of an ethnography, I don’t think it has the same power of proof that repeatability does. Like most methods of inquiry though, quantitative ones included, I guess ethnography a best effort given the resources. I mean, could you even find ten ethnographers to send to ten villages in New Guinea?
I’d also like to say that I recently read a research paper on evolutionary biology after a hiatus from reading in that field and found myself decidedly more aware of the overconfident assertions quantitative researchers derive from their results. Very few conditionals, lots of jumping the gun on suggestive evidence.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:39 pm |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 14. Sean_Carey | March 22nd, 2007 at 11:43 am
I found the High energy paper to be interesting, but “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: on Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan” to be quite controversial. As I read, I reflected on my own interactions with web blogs. I worry about the english language somewhat breaking down into simpler dialects. I find misspellings in blogs and posts to be irritating when I read them. I feel there is a culture around misspelling when blogging. However, the article brings up the issue of freedom of speech. Ethically, anyone can post anything they wish, but I wonder about the breakdown of the tacit rules regarding good grammar.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:43 am |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 15. daniela | March 24th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
The Traweek reading was a pivotal piece for me personally in figuring out some of the reasons qualitative research can sometimes make me feel uneasy. It is very different to read a qualitative account of a population to which you are very close. I spent 90 percent of my life around physicists – my father (solar and high energy theorist), his friends, the dozens of graduate students living at my house, and my last three years working for an astronomy museum. My understanding of physicists comes from both non-deliberate observation and deliberate ties to their thought process in order to present their understanding to a general audience. That said, reading Traweek stirred me up. Her work felt more valuable for understanding how physicists can be interpreted (by a non-physicist like her) than in understanding the physics community itself. Explicitly focusing on experimental physicists, she presents a gross misunderstanding of the difference between two groups of physicists, namely that experimentalists are objective decoders, and theorists want to “see” the data experimentalists produce. In contrast to the objectivity of their “culture of no culture,” I’d argue theorists are some of the most abstract and subjective thinkers. In fact, testing this theory may be as simple as asking a group of experimentalists how they would characterize string theory. The experimentalist would likely debunk or critique the theory because of its lack of observational data. That is, to theorists, theory can be more important than empirical knowledge. I borrowed the full book and just began to understand her coding processes. I’m tempted to begin a meta-qualitative investigation of how qualitative research is done.
I also need to mention how helpful both Dourish and Judd’s papers were in framing the qualitative discussion for me. The papers explored the tradeoffs and misconceptions involved in “ethnographic style” research, and interesting to bounce between. Dourish points out the importance of the analysis and empirical components of ethnographic research, value added beyond “implications for design”; while Judd presents a “how to” - a framework for understanding how to conduct hci/it qualitative research, focusing on the cultural factors, both the use and meaning, of technology. I agree with Andrew’s point that part of the lesson from rigorous qualitative research is that it’s relationship to the persona/people conducting the research is instrumental in understanding the research. As Judd and others mentioned in class, maybe quantitative researchers could present more useful work if they were honest about their limitations and embraced the subjectivity involved in their work.
March 24th, 2007 at 12:41 pm |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 16. mattchew | March 24th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Beyond issues it raised such as the meaning of the world “vulgar,” how the adoption of communications technology has led to increasing informality in written communication, the cultural tensions between a historic intellectual class and a general population when anyone can publish, and who is the cultural gatekeeper in a society that has experienced a partial diaspora, the article “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging” caused me to examine my understanding and personal experiences with regards to blogging.
Being one whose experience blogging has been limited to here in i203blogistan, I found the Doostdar article illuminating, and it made me realize that the activity in which I am now engaging may not be representative of the activity of blogging in general. The salient differences between weblogestan (WS) and 203blogistan (2S) are:
* The participating community in WS is dispersed across multiple continents, whereas 2S see each other face to face at least twice a week. In WS, a set of blog posts may be the main instantiation of an individual s persona to others, but in 2S it is only a small part of our image of the other inhabitants.
* in WS, an entry has a “dialogic relationship with other texts on the internet.” In 2S, each entry is self-contained, and if there is dialog, it is extremely limited in scope and topic. Due to the dynamics of 2S, there imay be disincentive to engage in dialog therein. I have had fellow students tell me that they rarely respond to the posted comments of others when blogging for class as it unacceptably increases the workload involved in posting.
* in WS, blogging is voluntary, and the choice of topic is unlimited. There is small chance that someone in a position of authority will read the blog entry, although in some jurisdictions such as Iran the author may experience negative ramifications based on the content of the entry. In 2S, blogging is mandatory, and the choice of topic is limited. It is certain that someone in authority will read the post, but (hopefully) consequences will not ensue from the contents of the post. Rather, negative ramifications ensue from the lack of posting- it can affect one’s grade.
* According to Doostdar, in WS temporal considerations result in short, provocative articles that are not necessarily coherent or logically sound as they won’t necessarily be subject to careful analysis. Although this may be somewhat true in 203istan, it is tempered by the knowledge that what is written will be viewed in an academic context by the class teaching staff.
This panopticonic aspect of 203istan lead some, such as myself, to spend too much time mulling over their posts. Unlike some others, I find myself compelled to read the entries of classmates. And comparing what I hope to write to that which is already written. On multiple times, I have spent considerable time taking notes on a reading, only to find that when time comes to blog, someone else has already covered my topic much more eloquently. Being burned several times by wasted effort on stillborn i203 blog entries has colored my perception of blogging in general. But the Doostdar article gave me an alternate perspective on blogging in general, and gave me hope as I realized that my experiences to date may have been atypical.
1d49 March 24th, 2007 at 4:29 pm |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 17. elisa | March 25th, 2007 at 12:33 am
I was intrigued by the fact that Traweek cited Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword, although I will confess that I am not entirely sure I understand the context in which she cites her. Is she an early example of someone using ethnographic methods and theories among communities ‘like us’ (i.e. the Western observer)? In any case, that’s an interesting book to cite: Benedict did not go to Japan, did not speak Japanese, interviewed Japanese who had been living in the US for many years, so usually remembered a pre-modernization and pre-nationalistic Japan, and worked on movies and printed material that mostly came from the Japanese propaganda ministry. She was on a quest to find the essence of Japaneseness, as if it were something that is immutable in space and time (which brings us back to the question we began the week with: what is culture?). The book was hugely popular in Japan, and the possibly spurious story says that it ‘poisoned the well’, that is so many people read it that when other American anthropologists went to Japan in the 1950s to do field-work, they discovered that many of the people they interviewed were repeating back to them what they had read in Benedict’s book. Even if false, the story is interesting, because it points out to the difficult (impossible?) balance between observing a community and becoming part of it and by doing that influencing its interaction (as Doostdar has done, without apparently giving it too much thought; I really wondered if her study wouldn’t have been equally, or perhaps more, effective, if she had stayed out of the dynamics she observed).
In any case, as we discussed in class I would have liked to read more content from the book, because the initial ideas she presented, especially the ones of physicists as semi-gods, and physics as a sort of religion for atheists, were extremely intriguing. By chance, on Thursday evening I went to see a movie called ‘Dark Matters’ (which should be out in a few weeks, highly recommended), that takes place in an astro-physics department and illustrates the battles between theoretical physicists and their different interpretations of the universe. It was quite interesting to realize how much speculation there was – they were more like philosophers, armed with better mathematics, than what we lay-people imagine physicists are. But it definitively resonated with the ‘culture of no culture’ described by Traweek (by the way, I read a remarkable article by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling who explores this issue of ‘culture of no culture’ from the viewpoint of a scientist, highly recommended to anyone who found Traweek interesting. Here’s how it starts: “In the course of almost 40 years of practicing biology and thinking about how it works, I have come to believe in my deepest core that scientific knowledge is a particular form of social knowledge—that the scientific and the cultural are inseparable.”). I think that we tend to see science as the source of rational truth, and the idea that this final truth might be the product of our interpretation is very disturbing: surely there must be a point where it all stops? Surely we can calculate our way to the origin of it all, and that will be final and plain for all to see? Surely we can at least assume that our object of study exists?
March 25th, 2007 at 12:33 am |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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SELECT * FROM is203_users WHERE ID = '1' LIMIT 18. Bernt Wahl | April 3rd, 2007 at 9:42 am
“The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: on Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan” brings to light that for many blogging is a place to vent ideas and anger. Who reads them? Poor grammar and miss spelling along with vulgar language and rants and ravings has a way of demising their values, ruins its credibility and diminishes readership. Credibility has to be earned, this is done by presenting information that at least seem to some degree to be credible.
April 3rd, 2007 at 9:42 am |WordPress database error: [Table 'i203.is203_users' doesn't exist]
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