Administrative

1. Administrative • Our Teaching Assistant: Janaki Srinivasan • janakis@ischool.berkeley.edu • Office hours – Thursdays, 1-2pm, room 107 • Reading for Thursday: • Bauer & Gaskell reading on ‘corpus construction’ can skim pgs 24-29 on language corpora, read the rest carefully

2. INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods Components of the Research Process

3. 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’

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

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

6. 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

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

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

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

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

11. 1) research topic/questions • 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)

12. 2) ‘corpus construction’ • 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

13. 3) data gathering • 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

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

15. 5) Final Report • 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

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