Sunday, November 8, 2009

YUKUN's Questions

Question about self-consciousness
In page 162,”Interpretation reveals a self-consciousness by authors who acknowledge that their findings are not objective facts but rather products of his or her subjective decision”. In my opinion, even in quantitative methods, it is also possible for researchers to interpret data by their self-consciousness. It seems that self-consciousness should not be a basis for a qualified paper. Here Potter wanted to reveal that the basis of qualitative researches is on subjective judgment. But, in my thought, qualitative researches’ interpretations sometimes are still based reliable data, which are even not numbers.
Would it be possible for a researcher using quantitative research methods to be an action advocator?
In theory, the answer is yes. But in my personal experience most scholars becoming action advocators all have background of qualitative methods. Maybe the reason is that in the field of qualitative methods scholars have to make their own decisions in anytime, but in the field of quantitative methods scholars have to keep their judgments away from their studies as far as possible.
Question about contextualization
In page 184 “Contextualization is a major point used by theoreticians to differentiate the quantitative and qualitative approaches”. In my opinion or bias, no matter in quantitative or qualitative approaches, it is very hard to write a paper without any contextualization in the field of journalism study. Without contextualization, a paper will purely to find a causal relationship between factors. Though this is necessary for building a theory, journalism study is different from other fields such as psychology or personal communication studies. Without any contextualization, the research questions or issues studied by researches will be limited.
Question about the standard of writing a qualitative paper
One standard proposed by Anderson is generalizability. However, some qualitative studies are very unique. Generalization is not the goals for those studies. How can we fit those studies with this standard? Denzin also argued for reliability, validity and generalizability for major standards for qualitative studies. In my opinion, those standards can fit with quantitative studies not qualitative studies.
External qualitative and generalizability
“Generalizability is the concern about the degree to which the researcher can generalize his or her findings to other texts, people, or institutions.” Like what I wrote in the former question, sometimes the characteristic of qualitative studies is very unique. How can we make it Generalizability? How can we build a theory by those studies?

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