Sources from UC library:
O’Dea, Charlotte. “Me, my thoughts and I.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 29 Jan. 2009, p. L6. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A192745218/OVIC?u=ucinc_main&sid=OVIC&xid=c4db729e. Accessed 17 Oct. 2019.
Allemang, John. “Quiet, please: it’s a noisy world: cellphones, traffic, TV, modems, office chatter and techno beats at the corner cafe conspire to keep you from hearing yourself think.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 6 Apr. 2002. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A30250060/OVIC?u=ucinc_main&sid=OVIC&xid=1bf55fa7. Accessed 17 Oct. 2019.
- Field research is going out into the field and recording what you observe. The three ways that are listed is observations, questionnaires/surveys, and interviews.
- The challenge of using a monograph is that it is a book of a whole argument on a single topic so it is intended that you read the entire argument.
- The challenge of using an article from a scholarly journal is that they are aimed at readers in a specific scholarly discipline. They need so be scanned for accessability. They are published periodically, which also makes things complicated
Interviews:
- The different types:
-Face to face: beneficial so you can adapt your question’s to their answers
-Phone interviews: when someone is too far away or if they’re unavailable
Email interviews: useful because they are already in written format. Not as personal and you can’t ask follow up questions
2: Challenges for each:
-Face to face: have to get permission to record their voice. If they say no, then you need to write stuff down as they talk. Which can be hard and also can misrecord something they say
-Phone interview: Less personal. Can’t read their body language and get a gauge for how they mean things. Have to write down what they say unless you record the phone call with another device.
-Email: You don’t get to have a natural flowing conversation. Harder to ask questions off of answers and alter questions based on their responses
3: Things you should cover when setting up an interview:
- who you are
- what you want to talk about
- what project you are working on
- if interesting subject comes up that relates to topic, let it keep going
4: explain
biased questions: worded in a way that encourages people to answer in a certain way
questions that assume what they ask: type of bias: leads them to agree
double barelled questions: has two questions embedded in one and so a they can’t really answer one without answering the other
confusing or wordy questions: using indirect language
questions that do not relate to what you want to learn: test it out before and make sure you get the kind of responses you are looking for
5: 6 things to consider when surveying:
-decide who you will interview based on who you have access to and what your research is based on
-decide how many ppl you will survey: too many and you will be overwhelmed analyzing. too little and you won’t have enough info to support your data
-decide how you will conduct it: online, in person, or on paper
-decide how long is your survey going to be: depends on how much you want to find out. Some longer surveys will ask the same question in multiple ways to see if participants answers are consistent
-decide what type of questions you will ask: do you want open ended or closed questions? Open ended questions allow people to elaborate and closed questions are much easier to analyze
6:
- one example of analysis: Analyzing topics of discussion in chat rooms for patterns based on gender and age
- steps involved in an analysis: collecting documents, Specifying criteria that you are looking for, Analyzing documents for patterns, noting number of occurrences
7:
- How do the different types of participation effect an observation? The more you participate, you might skew the results but if you don’t participate enough then you may not get a full enough understanding
- What’s the advantage of using a double-column notebook? one column for observations and another column for your perceptions
- What’s the OWL’s advice on what to observe? DETAILs. Write as much as you can about specific things
8:
- What recommendations does the OWL give for analyzing:
- Interviews: go back through answers and decide how to use the
- Surveys: open ended questions: categorize into categories. Closed questions: use spread sheet
- Observations: organize notes into categories
- What warning does the OWL give about over-generalization? Don’t over generalize
- How does someone “triangulate data”? when a piece of data, a finding, or a generalization is able to be verified with several different research methods
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