Sari Thomas' Article

In, Sari Thomas’ article, Artifactual Study in the Analysis of Culture: A Defense of Content Analysis in a Postmodern Age, she sets out to show that content analysis is a valid method for artifactual study. She begins by explaining how “there are no sociocultural or humanistic research techniques that provide direct access to an individuals meaning-making and subsequent application process for everyday life” (p 685). Researchers merely interpret the information, and as such “when it comes to meaning and its social implications, all-available methods are approximations of the process we seem to want to uncover” (p 686). Thomas is not criticizing every kind of research method, she is merely pointing out that content analysis is one way to approximate.

Thomas’ explains in detail how cultural analysis of artifacts can give meaning and addresses to the “big ideas operating in a culture” (p 689). She points to Berelson’s definition of content analysis to begin her case, “Content analysis is a research technique for the objectives, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication”(p 689). Thomas breaks goes through the major critics of content analysis and explains why they are unjustified.

For me this article started off really interesting, I liked the justification for studying artifacts, like books, TV, media etc. However when it came to her discussion on content analysis she lost me. She spent allot of time explaining how the critics of content analysis have got it all wrong, but not enough information on how content analysis specifically benefits artifact study. Maybe I was just confused and I missed it.

The best part of this article is the first quote I mentioned above, “there are no sociocultural or humanistic research techniques that provide direct access to an individuals meaning-making and subsequent application process for everyday life” (p 685). I found this very insightful as I begin my research proposal. My research method will be interviews and case studies, but I am currently looking at different underlying theories for the analysis of the data. I have not come across any that stand out yet, but hope to find something soon! 

Has everyone found the methods/theories they will use to analyze the 'theoretical' data? 

Amanada,

It makes sense.  Especially the term "conditions of production" Maybe I am more sensitive to it at this time of year when I find myself making lists of things I need to "produce" before the term ends. How many papers?  how many pages? What does every class have the same formula?  Minor paper, group presentation/paper, major paper. Who decides what is enough to warrant an adequate amount or production? And I am always interested in what isn't counted.....

Your point about "sustain hegemony" smacks of gatekeeping, something that happens in other professions too.(physicians sitting on the physician review boards.)  It is the tension between needing expert knowledge and controlled entry.  I guess I'm looking for the term "separation of power."  But with the peer-review behind me, I can say that it was a worthwhile experience. While I do not envision myself ever publishing a paper,  nor being on a peer review committee, I think the process has helped me prepare to write my final research paper--I have developed a more critical voice.  I've learned to be that fish in the water studying the water and the other fish.  You need to swim around a bit--read, re-read, ask questions, take notes, swim some more....

Mary

The ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ Process: Did Roger Waters Read Althusser? And Other Incomplete Thoughts on the Peer-Review Process.

For the last couple of classes we have been discussing the peer-review process, and for the most part I agree that the benefits of the peer-review process far outweigh the negatives, but having read a lot of Marx, Althusser and Gramsci in my under grad, has permanently (for now, at least) made me question the role of ideology in any process.  In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser states, "The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production. This may be 'simple' (reproducing exactly the previous conditions of production) or 'on an extended scale' (expanding them)"(100).

 

I keep fighting with how the quote above applies to the peer-review process.  Especially after the Sokal Affair, it is important that academic journals have a rigorous review process, but something has to be said for reviewer bias, and more importantly, for the condition of production involved in getting one’s work published. 

 

Let’s start at the beginning: In our undergraduate days, we were taught how to distinguish between secondary sources that were “legitimate” and ones that some guy wrote.  We are also taught to write essays that use existing frameworks or theoretical lenses. In this class we learned how the peer-review process works and the benefit of this process, while constantly writing posts for blogs, writing about the peer review process and writing about research methodology. 

 

Couldn’t one argue that Althusser’s Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) is represented in the peer-review process by the journal editors and the various academic departments within universities who are constantly pushing their faculty members to produce (generate knowledge).  It goes far beyond the peer-review process as in order to be considered a successful member of the faculty (ideology alert!), the faculty member must publish books, essays and journal articles.  The conditions of production must be perpetuated in order to sustain hegemony, hence the peer-review process.

 

Does this make sense?  It makes way more sense in my head that it does typed.




____________________________________________________________________________________
Althusser, L. (1970), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (1971).

Participant Observation

I am just catching up on some reading, and finished Luker chapter 8. I really liked her discussion of   participant observation (PO). Luker explains that with PO you are observing a place you know well, but you can overlook what outside observers would find strange. When studying something within our own culture we tend to try to "highlight the weird and unusual, and faithfully document the trivial, but you are hard-press to see any connections between the two"(p 157). We cannot see the connections because we are too much apart of this environment. Luker suggests the point of participant observation is to document "practices"(p 158). She declares the reason for observing is not so much to test theory, but to build it.

At first I found this a bit confusing, how can you really use the data (and build theory) if you cannot see the connections between the things you are observing. However when Luker explains Howard Becker's guidelines in making sense of PO data, it becomes more clear. Becker argues " that you start by discovering if the events... are typical and wide spread, and seeing how these events are distributed among categories. Then you try to decide how central these events are to the thing you are studying: Next, you try to find other pieces of evidence to validate what you think you are finding theoretically; and finally you try to build on a model of why the people are doing what they are doing" (p 159). The last step of building a model of why people are doing what they do is the point where it became clear. This is how to build theory from PO trying to understand the why.

I think this is a really interesting method for research, and like the idea of building theory this way oppose to testing it.

Academic Writing

Perhaps I am completely out of it but I had no idea what “Fab Labs” were before I read the Troxler article. I found myself scrambling to figure it all out. But then again, I often do that when reading a new subject area. I hear myself repeating in my inside voice: “what the hell is he trying to say”.  I hear it an awful lot. Now this may not be always because the articles are over my head or outside my comfort zone of understanding. Though, sadly it is often the case. Sometimes though (quite often in fact) academic articles are obtuse, rambling, jargon laden pontifications. In these cases, I do find it hard to delve into the topic and become interested. As a previous English major (I'd rather be reading Chaucer if the truth be known), I find a lot of academic writing is difficult if not impossible to suffer through. Not exactly junk, but often there are great ideas disguised with excess wordiness. While I really am fond of theorist’s like Judith Butler, I cringe at the memory of plodding through these theories in my undergraduate years. It reminds me of those crazy attempts at showing academic writing to be more farce than substance, like Alan Sokal’s nonsense article hoax in the mid-1990’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) that was jam packed with postmodern and deconstructionist babble and fooled the best and the brightest academics. The communal efforts of altruistic creation in the Fab Lab article also reminded me of some silly open source projects such as the Postmodernism Essay generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/), which is a lot of fun when you have some spare time between assignments. Ok - lots of fun but, let’s get back to the reality at hand. Academic writing isn't all bad. And, all that being said, I actually enjoyed the three peer review options. Don’t get me wrong … there is definitely some criticism to be had but going through the articles made me think about writing styles and of why we write the way we write when writing for academia. What makes us want to say so much that we end up saying so little? When I have to think about critical reading tips that help me get through articles, I guess the most helpful and effective tip that I continue to stick with is the practice of asking questions about each section of an article. "Does this make sense?" "What is the writer trying to say?" "What is the writer attempting to prove?" Writing down these notes in the margins is probably the best reading advice I have ever learned and have stuck with throughout grad school.

How to read a book...a situation

Thanks for sharing the How to Read a Book, v4.0.  As I read it, I couldn't help think that it could be re-written for researchers to the tune of How to Read a Situation using the material from Stebbin's article entitled, Fitting in: The Researcher as Leaner and Participant and Shaffir's Doing Ethnography, Reflections on Finding Your Way.

Read the whole thing

Decide how much time you will spend

Have a purpose and a strategy

Read actively

Read it three times

Focus on parts with high information content

Use personal text language markup

Know the authors and organizations

Know the intellectual content

Use your unconscious mind

Rehearse, and use multiple modes



Participant as Observer as Nonmember

Learn the social world--values, lore, codes of behavior...how things work, understand the process, respect boundaries

Have commonsense, and humility.

Use personal text language markup--take lots of notes.

Have a purpose and a strategy--but be flexible, recognizing that these is no best way.

"Have enough knowledge about the settings or persons you wish to study to appear competent to do so."  (Stebbins, 105)

Be enthusiastic

Plan for the time consuming aspect of research

Focus on targeting sources of information--what can you learn  (the paths that do not lead out of the forest--Shaffir, 677)

Build trust, credibility and acceptance

Know your mind--the cultural assumptions and experiences that you bring to the study.

Hang Around--learn the how, whys and whats...

Mary Power

Reading Technique & the Peer Review

As I get into the peer review assignment I have been thinking a lot about how I read and engage with the material. Our instructions for the assignment include (emphases are my own):

For this assignment, you will engage in a peer review exercise, by carefully reading and assessing the research design and methodology of an as-yet-unpublished social science research article.

Before I began, I picked up a reading from another course titled "How to Read a Book, v4.0" by Paul N. Edwards from the School of Information at the University of Michigan. It has helped me get my bearings as I launch into the peer review. Edwards provides a list of reading strategies and techniques that include:

• read the whole thing
• decide how much time you will spend
• have a purpose and a strategy
• read actively
• read it three times
• focus on parts with high information content
• use PTML (personal text markup language)
• know the author(s) and organizations
• know the intellectual context
• use your unconscious mind
• rehearse and use multiple modes (Edwards, 2000). 

If you want to get a better idea of each of the strategies, there is a handy little table on the second page of the article that summarizes each one.

One of the strategies that I find really helpful during my process is to read it three times (at least). First I quickly read the entire document (overview), then I read the article very thoroughly, and finally I re-read it while making notes in the margin that summarize the ideas in my own words. For documents that I will be reading multiple times over and evaluating, I like to have a hardcopy. I know that there are lots of document markup programs for computers, but I know that I work better with a hardcopy.

Does anyone else have any reading strategies or techniques that they find successful?

Edwards, P. (2000). How to Read a Book. Retrieved from http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf