Sunday, November 22, 2009

Yonghwan's questions

1. It has been stated that “if the scholars who identify with the term qualitative are to show that they have formed a community, then they need to show some conceptual cohesiveness” (Potter, p. 249). What’s meant by conceptual cohesiveness, and what seem to be examples of showing some conceptual cohesiveness?

2. It is very interesting to see technical terms as barriers to enter qualitative research community. And I totally agree with a statement that neophytes must learn the specialized language consisting of technical terms that are the tools that scholars use to access the ideas that are important to the area; however, some languages exhibit characteristics that make them more difficult than others. It seems to me that it can be a very similar case in quantitative research; for instance, statistical knowledge is very important to the area of quantitative research and sometimes makes people who are not familiar with quantitative concepts hard to enter this area. Then what seems to be examples of technical terms we as graduate students or neophytes must know? I think we haven’t have many chances to get familiar with these important key technical terms (e.g., ideology—what kind of ideologies?, hegemony—what kind of hegemony and between which groups?, semiotics, symbol, deconstruction, signified and signifier, what else?).

3. It seems to me that technical term in critical studies is important given that the deconstruction (?) of meaning and power relationships is complicated so that it requires complex or complicated tool to analyze them. This is just my general sense. What is original purpose of (difficult to understand) technical terms in qualitative research? Why it should be that hard?

4. Continued to technical terms, then, who seem to be readers of qualitative research? Only for a community of qualitative research, not for ordinary public? I am not saying quantitative research is for both a community of quantitative research and ordinary people and ordinary people like to read academic quantitative research, even though I’ve been told that quantitative articles should be written easy to read for ordinary people. Qualitative research, however, seems to more focus on its own community.

5. It seems to me that both qualitative and qualitative scholars tend not to consider convergence of both paradigms that much when it comes to writing a research paper. If this is the case, what seem to be reasons of this? If this is not the case, to what extent and how convergence has been done?

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