Sunday, November 1, 2009

Yonghwan's Questions

1. Regarding the politics of research, what seems to be examples of this politics of research (e.g., personality and institutional affiliation) may cause; and what seems to be results of this politics of research? What’s the implication of knowing the politics of research?

2. What could be examples of ethical issues when it comes to conducting various qualitative studies? In other words, one may confront with different ethical issues when doing qualitative research with different qualitative methods. For instance, when we do a participant observation research, to what extent we disguise ourselves in observation setting can be an issue; while others such as discourse/textual/semiotic/ideological analyses may have different issues. What seems to be examples of ethical issues, for instance, of discourse/semiotic/ideological analysis?

3. When we did a group assignment (Newspaper text and photo analysis), I confronted with this kind of issue. One of my group members mentioned that it seems an ethical issue to analyze a news article with a sort of biased interpretation. He contended that the article we analyzed seems pretty balanced and has a significant role in suggesting one of the aspects immigration issue may have; while I interpreted that the news article articulates immigration issue to only limited aspects—economic aspects, and even to low-SES people. Then, is what I did considered an unethical issue or an interpretative biases/flexibility based on my personal background? Or did I wrong, which may mean low validity?

4. As seen, this example may raise another important question, validity of qualitative research. It seems to me that validity and ethical issue conflicts each other in some sense. For example, when we do a participant observation, disguising researcher would be appropriate to get a better validity of the research. Then, in my case, given a raised ethical issue, which was considered too biased, what could be ways of getting higher validity of my interpretation? Mentioning the opposite side as well could be the case?

5. To sum up, what are the validity issues that have been raised in qualitative research the most especially in various qualitative methods; and what seems to be ways of overcoming these issues when conducting qualitative research we, as graduate students, should keep in mind?

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