Reading and Writing

1
Reading and Writing

• INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
• 5 May 2009

2
A Double Iteration
1) research topic/questions
2) corpus construction
3) data gathering
Field work
4) analysis
4) more analysis
Desk work
5) write-up
3
Writing Style
4
Writing Examples

• Turkle, (1995) TinySex and Gender Trouble
• Spitulnik, (2002) Mobile Machines and Fluid
  Audiences Rethinking Reception Through Zambian
  Radio Culture
• Hutchins and Klausen (1996) Distributed
  Cognition in an Airline Cockpit
• Heath and Luff (2000) Documents and Professional
  Practice
• Woolgar (1991) Configuring the User the case of
  usability trials

5
Tales from the Field Van Mannen

• Realist Tales
• Dispassionate, third person voice (absence of the
  author from the text)
• Confessional Tales
• Techniques of fieldworkers, problems and
  bumblings
• Impressionist Tales
• Geertz Deep Play Notes on the Balinese
  Cockfight (also elements of a confessional tale)

6
Other Kinds of Tales

• Critical
• Seeks to reconcile a blindness to political
  economy, institutional structuring of other
  tales. Draws from economics, history, poly sci,
  psychology.
• Formal theory testing
• Literary a more theatrical than analytical
  writing style
• Multivocal informants write some part of the
  story.

7
Questions about Writing

• How do I handle quotes?
• What voice to use (1st person, 3rd person)?
  Multi-vocality?
• What verb tense (past or present or passive)?
• How do I give a sense of the whole (thick
  description) while making a specific, narrow
  argument?

8
Handling Quotes
9
Boring Reports

• Kvale, InterViews, chap. 14
• the subjects often exciting stories have
  through the analyzing and reporting stages been
  butchered into atomistic quotes and isolated
  variables.

10
Using Quotes

• The quotes should be contextualized
• The quotes should be interpreted lead-in text
  shouldnt just summarize the quote.
• There should be a balance between quotes and text
  edit quotes for readability (shorter is better)
  and for the main, important point.
• InterViews, Kvale - pgs. 226 267

11
Using Quotes

• Use only the best quote
• Interview quotes should be rendered in a written
  style
• There should be a simple signature system for the
  editing of the quotes (i.e. use of ellipses for
  what is omitted a way of indicating pauses)
• InterViews, Kvale - pgs. 226 267

12
Editing Quotes

• there is something really about this Internet,
  there is something that is really making my
  friends rich...
• Internet love, it happens.
• genuine people use the same procedure and it
  works.

13
Editing Quotes

• Avoid quotes taken out of context.
• Maintain an awareness of the shifts in meaning
  that result when quotes are edited minimize
  this.
• Dont clean quotes of qualifications, caveats,
  etc. to make your point stronger

14
Darwin a Creationist?

• To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable
  contrivances for adjusting the focus to different
  distances, for admitting different amounts of
  light, and for the correction of spherical and
  chromatic aberration, could have been formed by
  natural selection, seems, I freely confess,
  absurd in the highest degree Darwin, The
  Origin of Species

15
Darwin a Creationist?

• Yet reason tells me, that if numerous
  gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one
  very imperfect and simple, each grade being
  useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist
  if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly,
  and the variations be inherited, which is
  certainly the case and if any variation or
  modification in the organ be ever useful to an
  animal under changing conditions of life, then
  the difficulty of believing that a perfect and
  complex eye could be formed by natural selection,
  though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly
  be considered real. Darwin, The Origin of
  Species

16
Additional Pointers for Your Final Write Up
17
Referencing the Literature

• Demonstrating relevance to the community of
  researchers. What does your project say about
  some of the existing questions, issues raised by
  researchers?
• Draw from readings from other courses
• Spend a little time in the library
• Look for material with a similar methodological
  approach (ethnographies, sets of interviews, etc)

18
Beginning your write up LL

• If there are no clear themes start coding
• If you have a theme then work on a memo
• Could find something that exists in more than one
  interview (some similarity or a difference) and
  write about that
• Refer back to your data to check your write up

4) more analysis
5) write-up
Desk work
19
Summary

• Code to find and check themes
• Memo to develop interpretation
• Edit and use quotes thoughtfully, strategically
• Write a realist tale but do consider your role as
  researcher in the setting
• For Thursday carefully reread Becker. What
  jumps out at you on this second reading? What
  has new meaning at the end of the semester?