Sun Ho's Questions - 10/12 and 10/19

Week 7: October 12 – Design, Process, Evidence & Analysis

1. Chapter 6. Nature of Qualitative Evidence: Before he gets into details in this chapter, Potters says that the use of their chosen techniques guides the nature of their evidence (p. 83). Then he adds that type of evidence, level of evidence, and the use of numerical evidence must be considered in qualitative research. I wonder how these two elements of a research, chosen methods and types of evidence, are generally used in our field. For example, if we were to do a textual analysis of newspaper articles, what types/levels/numerical evidences do we generally use? I understand that it all depends on the nature of the research, but I'd love to get a general idea about it just to gain some more understanding about the above statement!

2. Chapter 7. Issues of Evidence Gathering: It was interesting to see how this chapter goes back and describes different methods first and then expands the topic into researcher identification, researcher activity, and so on. I was particularly interested in the section where he explained about three different levels of researcher activities: passive observer, active observer, active participant. This was something I thought about during my first and second assignments. During my participant observation, I was able to add some "participant" aspects to the analysis but there were more "observation" due to the nature of the topic. But how free can a researcher be from including his/her own feelings if one has some experience about the research topic? For example, if I were to do another participant observation about how Asian female students consume online news, I would be much more knowledgeable about the topic. Other than trying to remain objective, what can be done during the process of designing the research in order to take advantage of that knowledge?

3. Chapter 2 also talks about sampling issues: access/relevance vs convenience. We had to encounter these issues during our focus group assignment. About the convenience factor, the text mentions about a professor using some of his/her students for research (p. 105). Now here's a very practical question: if one wants to conduct a research study with 4-5 focus groups and the only way to find those subjects are through UT, what's acceptable and what's not? Of course, we'll do our best to gather a group of people considering representativeness, but sometimes we find ourselves facing that access/relevance vs. convenience vs. "is this acceptable to reviewers" issue.

4. Chapter 8. Issues of Data Analysis: When Potter talks about generalization (pp. 130-133), he mentions about sampling issues/scientific perspective and how it needs to be seen differently in qualitative studies. Although he introduces specific examples of research with and without generalization in the text, I go back to this question: Is generalization that important when we talk about qualitative approach since the nature of the method is so different? Putting things into the context and looking at things with microscopes, rather than generalization, isn't that the beauty of qualitative research?

5. Chapter 9. Methods of Analysis: The author says that many of these methods of analysis are used in combinations so that the weaknesses of one can be balanced by the strengths of another. What are some of the examples of those combinations mostly used in our field?

Week 8: October 19 – Qualitative Content Analysis – Discourse & Ideological

1. Manning & Cullum-Swan (1998) article made me think about an article I read last semester. The article did a textual analysis of internal memos exchanged between the owner of a newspaper company and editors in the newsroom to study ownership control. I wonder what the results could have been like if one could draw indepth interviews just like authors did for the McDonald's experience. Just a thought...

2. Fursich (2008) concludes the article with something I always had in mind but couldn't really do: "It should not be a methodology de jour that drives research topics but original questions of the relationship between media and ideology in society in large." I agree. However, I find myself debating about his statements about repositioning textual analysis as text-only analysis. It's not that I am not strongly against it, but I don't find myself agreeing to his idea either. I am looking forward to hearing how others thought about this article.

3. van Dijk (1991) mentions that most of the integration of linguistic, semiotic, and discourse-analytical approaches has been taken in the UK but little in US. What could be the reason for that?

4. The example provided in the van Dijk article analyzed the textual structures. If the author wanted to add other elements mentioned in the article - i.e. relations between structures of text and talk, and of their cognitive social, cultural, or historical contexts - which one could have been most relevant for the analysis considering the news item?

5. When the author talks about implications, he mentions about how information in a text can be left implicit. I am particularly interested in getting to more about the analysis of "unsaid"; how do we distinguish the implications from those analysis of "unsaid" among various types of implications?