Today’s Plan:
- Framing Methodology
- Affinity-Based Analysis
Framing Methodology
Today I want to talk about research methodology a little bit. We will dive into this topic more as the semester progresses. As I’ve been reading folks’ bibliographic analyses, I’m seeing a bit of inconsistency when it comes to summarizing methodology.
So, let’s look at some articles together and think about the following questions:
- Is the research quantitative, qualitative, or hermeneutic?
- Quantitative: numbers as direct result of measurement
- Qualitative: words, numbers as a process of measurement
- Hermeneutic: words as a result of reading and interpreting texts
- How did they collect their numbers?
- If they collect their material from people, how did they find those people? Was the sampling “random”? How did they choose which subjects to include? How many people did they “sample”?
- What did they do to the data they collected? Did they synthesize or code it? Did they do frequency analysis?
When I ask you to summarize a study’s methods, I’m looking for answers to all these questions.
Affinity-Based Analysis
We’ve now come to the third mode of analysis in Mueller’s worknet. Here’s the heuristic we developed when we reviewed Mueller’s article:
- Looking for other works
- If books–what do you learn from the acknowledgements? From the last section of the preface or introduction?
- Collaborations / co-authors
- Dissertation (title? What do you learn from the abstract? What names surface in the acknowledgements?)
- Graduate school / dissertation committee (can you find the CV/vita of the people on the dissertation committee? Do they work on similar things?
Think of this activity like a scavenger hunt–we are looking for materials and connections that we might explore later.
Homework
Conduct the Affinity-Based analysis; add that material to your individual/working Google Doc.
