Administrative  Our Teaching Assistant: Janaki Srinivasan Office hours – Thursdays, 1-2pm, room 107  Reading for Thursday: Bauer & Gaskell reading on ‘corpus construction’ can skim pgs on language corpora, read the rest carefully

INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods

Outline  The relationship between qualitative and quantitative research  Two versions of steps and sequencing in the research process – (1) linear vs. (2) iterative  Discussion of Becker’s ‘The Epistemology of Qualitative Research’

Questions to be Answered  What are some of the possibilities and problems of mixed methods (qualitative + quantitative) approaches?  How is rigor defined in qualitative approaches that use an inductive analytical approach?

Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative 1. Quantification also involves qualification 2. Statistical analysis requires interpretation 3. Interpretative approaches can involve systematic procedures (see grounded theory)

Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative  Methodological pluralism?  Time ordering: Qualitative to define concepts  Quantitative to refine, test Quantitative to test  Qualitative to explain/interpret results  The question of rigor

The Linear Model 1) theory/model 2) hypothesis 3) operationalization 4) sampling / recruiting 5) data collection 6) data analysis 7) validation [adapted from U. Flick, An intro to qualitative research, chap. 4]

The Iterative Model movement back and forth between these phases 1) research topic/questions 2) ‘corpus construction’ 3) data gathering 4) analysis 5) write-up

The Iterative Model movement back and forth between these phases 1) research topic/questions 2) ‘corpus construction’ 3) data gathering 4) analysis 5) write-up 4) more analysis Field work

A Double Iteration 1) research topic/questions 2) ‘corpus construction’ 3) data gathering 4) analysis 5) write-up 4) more analysis Field work

 academic setting: contextualized within the major debates in your discipline  ‘the boy with the hammer’ (law of instrument) = match between research questions and methods used to answer those questions  (does not mean that questions always precede choice of method, nor does it mean that you will not tend to favor certain methods) 1) research topic/questions

 recruiting people for interviews  selecting texts or images  Field site selection Why not ‘sampling?’ how to start, where to look, when to stop – meaning saturation but more generally, the search for data richness and the visibility of certain cultural processes 2) ‘corpus construction’

 interviews (transcripts)  participant- observation (field notes)  collecting texts/images (from the field) expediency technique - how the communicative process between researcher and researched influences the data produced 3) data gathering

 Comments in your field notes, emerging themes  Established forms: Discourse analysis Rhetorical analysis Content analysis Semiotics  Grounded theory 4) Analysis

 Writing involves committing claims to paper/screen and is therefore an extension of analysis  Coping with heterogeneous data (tip: start with the most interesting bit)  Closeness to the data 5) Final Report

A Double Iteration 1) research topic/questions 2) ‘corpus construction’ 3) data gathering 4) analysis 5) write-up 4) more analysis Field work