Showing posts with label Aurianne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aurianne. Show all posts

Ugh...Consent...this is a long one

Reading the required bits of the Toronto Office of Research Ethics Guidelines and Practices Manual while trying to write my proposal has been very informative yet also frustrating. So many things to consider! In my research I am looking at two age groups and unfortunately one of those groups is teenagers, 13 to 18. So don't just have to convince them to participate, I have to convince their parents or guardian to let them. For my proposal I have written a rough consent letter which I shall post here, please let me know if I've made any errors or left anything out...thanks!

Dear Parent/Guardian;

Your child has been invited to participate in an academic study run by a graduate student in the iSchool at the University of Toronto. This study will be supervised by Prof. Awesome of the U of T iSchool faculty and will follow all guidelines designated by the university of Toronto's Office of Reserach Ethics.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how a female's personal identity is internally constructed and perceived with the use of digital media. The study is examining two age groups of females, 13-18 year olds and 35-40 year olds and comparign the results. We hope to gain insight into the thoughts of women introduced to technology later in life as compared to those born into it. This study will contribute to dicussions surrounding women, identity and the use of digitla media. Following David Gauntlett's "Making is Connecting" method (www.artlab.org.uk), the participants will be able to create vsual representations of their identity both online and offline and then discuss and reflect on what they have created. The participants will spend 3 hours on a Saturday afternoon on the 5th floor of the University of Toronto Bissel Building and will be compensated in community service hours completed.

Your child has been approached because she is a female of the correct age and she uses digital media daily. If she chooses to participate, she will be working individually but discussing her creation in a group of 6 of her peers. In teh session itself, the participants will sign confidentiality agreements with one another not to share others' personal thoughts and feelings.

Your child's participation is completely voluntary and she may refuse to participate or withdraw at anytime. However, upon withdrawal the allotted community service hours will not be given. Photographs will be taken of teh visual representations created and video recordings will be made of the discussion. The photographs will be used in teh research findings presentation, but the video footage will not. Video recording will be used only by the researchers for identification of the participants in linking the person to what they say. The recordings are completely confidential and will not be used outside of transcribing the study. Some sections of the transcript may be used in teh findings presentation, but there will be no name or identifying characteristics attached to it. If you have any questions regarding any aspect of this study please contact the Office of Research Ethics at ethics.review@utoronto.ca or 416-946-3273 and the researcher at aurianne.steinman@utoronto.ca

Please sign below to allow your child to participate in this study.

Luker vs Knight

The combo of the readings this week were really interesting as both Luker and Knight discuss very similar things. So similar in fact, that it really shows how much their writing/teaching styles/method diverge from one another. Even the titles of the chapters are indicative of the differences, Luker's 'Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty' versus Knight's 'Research Design: Bringing it All Together'. Both discuss the synthesis of the research and method elements that we have learned about thus far. While Luker and Knight both use helpful anicdotes in giving examples, they part ways when it comes to their chosen teaching method.

Luker tends to kind of coddle the reader by repeatedly accounting for any negative feeling about their own personal research they may have. She discusses anxiety and reiterates important questions and information over and over again. Luker is a bit of a hand-holder, which I totally appreciate as most of us are going into unknown territory and may not even know exactly what we are studying until the end of our study. It is like she is prepping us for taking a leap of faith. Luker also leaves a lot of room for the creativity of the researcher by only making vague suggestions of what to do, how to do it and what has worked for her.

Knight on the other hand is a lot more pragmatic in all matters of research design and implementation. He provides great detail and excellent definitions for all aspects of small-scale research. Knight injects just enough charm so the reader does not die of dehydration. He does cram an insane amount of information into each chapter, so much so that it can seem a bit overwhelming. He is quite a bit more objective in his teaching method and writing style than Luker.

The truth is, I go to Luker when I'm feeling confused and like I don't really know what I'm doing, reading her is like getting a big hug and a pat on the head. I go to Knight for serious information and guidelines when I already have an idea of what I want to do.

I realize that the different ways that Luker and Knight tackle small-scale research is the reason that both of these textbooks were chosen for this class. I just find it really interesting how two people took basically the same method and design information and created such different but equally helpful artifacts.

Dark Days

Last night my partner and I watched the Marc Singer documentary "Dark Days". The name of this film had been stuck in my head since Prof. Grimes had mentioned it in a class long, long ago, in October sometime. I know that this weeks readings focus on online research, which has absolutely nothing to do with this film, but they also discuss ethnography, boundaries and the fact that field sites do not exist in a vacuum.

This film is not a pure ethnographic study and Singer is not an ethnographer, neither claim to be so. But Singer fully immerses himself into a marginalized culture and is able to record his experience. He filmed bits of the lives and thoughts of a group of people that lived in a section of the New York city underground railway system. They built their own homes out of what they could find and had free electricity, but lived mostly in the dark.

These underground dwellings were Singer's main field site, he didn't stray from there much except to occasionally follow his subjects while they looked for food or tried to make money above ground. This culture was so small and unique, and Singer's access so complete and rare that I don't think he had any issues with defining where this project started and stopped. I suppose he could have expanded it to tackle issues like New York's crack problem, or effects of living underground, but he didn't.

Singer was specific in recording only these people (and later on some authorities). He chose to focus on their relationships, their back stories and sometimes their aspirations. He also took a personal interest in their well-being. Singer played a large role in finding a lot of the people actual housing. I suppose this could potentially be seen as similar to action research. Singer wanted to make a change for these people and by researching them and making outsiders aware of their plight, he was able to make a real difference.

Again, I repeat that Marc Singer is not an ethnographer nor claims to be one. But, this documentary really did show his immersion into a completely alien culture, a very bounded and precise culture. He was so immersed that he was able to entirely change the culture forever.

Science and technology

I found aspects of the article by Pinch and Bijker quite interesting this week. Written in 1987, its ideal for doing your own mental comparison study using contemporary thoughts. The part of the article that I became particularily engrossed with was their brief and admittedly partial discussion of the science-technology relationship. I feel like it could have been a contemporary piece. Nowadays, Science and Technology are still grouped together and people are still trying to define the distinction between the two, even though they are inextricably intermixed. Perhaps this is because technology has evolved at such an exponential rate. Pinch and Bijker dismiss some prominent philosopher thoughts that "science is about the discovery of truth whereas technology is about the application of truth" as overidealized and simplified. When I googled "what is the difference between science and technology" an answer that popped up alot was, "Science is knowing and technology is doing". One of the same prevailing thoughts as 23 years ago!
Pinch and Bijker take a social constructivist view of science and technology. "Scientists and technologists can be regarded as constructing their respective bodies of knowledge and techniques with each drawing on the resources of the other". All this time, well the last two months, I've been under the impression that the meshing of disciplines and blurring of classification lines was a new phenomenon. Obviously, it started long ago. The category of science and the category of technology are socially constructed, only now we have started to take down the barriers that we ourselves erected, or have we actually? Two decades later we are still wrestling with the same issues.

I'm an ethnographer and I didn't even know it!

Ethnography. I've gone from never really hearing the word before to it permeating my weekly readings and discussions. This word has popped up in all four of my classes, it must be important. I come from a humanities background, where personal research was not forgrounded or necessary to get one's degree (in my personal experience). Ethnography was a method reserved for those in anthropology or social sciences, those studying actual people...where as I felt I was just investigating the artifacts or output created by people. Now I see that this was kind of a silly distinction that I made up in my head. I saw studying belief and studying action as divorced from each other. However, as Luker points out, that when belief and action are combined we get 'pratices' and this is what good ethnography studies.

In December of 2006 I began on my own ethnographic study...without even knowing it. Like many fresh graduates from university, I was unsure what to do, so I moved to Asia. I situated myself in a small town named Hualien in Taiwan to be an English teacher. Admittedly, I was very much overwhelmed at first. Reading Luker's explanation of living in a different culture actually made me laugh out loud, because it was so true. Everything was a puzzle, I couldn't read, write, speak or listen. I never ended up getting a bank account, because it was too confusing. I had local friends, but I still lived completely on the periphery and was recognized as an outsider just by how I looked. Obviously, I was not aware that I was doing an ethnographic study so I didn't keep field notes, but I did keep a sketch book and a journal where I recorded my thoughts about my life there. After living there for almost a year, being 'let in' to the culture to a certain degree, I believe that I can say I know a very minute bit about the Taiwanese small-town practices. In retrospect I wish I would have paid closer attention instead of just being in awe. It would have been interesting to study more of the subtle practices, rather then just the big obvious ones. For instance, I was the only foreigner working at my school, it was unclear to me how authority worked there. I was told in a very round-about way if I was doing something incorrectly. Using ethnography to study power structures would have been really neat (and probably have helped me out, as I was confused most of the time).

Using ethnography to study library and information science seems like an odd fit at first glance. But if you look at both libraries and information as the products of practices or entities in which particular practices happen, ethnography seems like a logical method of study to use.

Interpretive research

In reading (most) of the Kline article, I was reminded of my undergrad that I did in theatre and film studies. Audience research was often referenced, but I remember profs complaining that there was never enough audience research and it was never conclusive.
Then I was reminded of my research proposal that I had just completed. It is essentially a bastardized (can I say that?) version of an audience research study. I'm looking to see how internet usage affects the identities of 36 women, comparing digital natives with non-digital natives.

I know that internet usage is exponentially more interactive than passively taking in a film or tv show, but there is still individual meaning-making going on. My aim, to look at the diversity of reponses of two particular groups to one cultural artifact...the internet, is similar to that of audience analysis. And I'm using a survey, focus groups and interviews with participants to inform my research, which are all methods of audience analysis.
Some of the complaints against these methods are that they are overly 'interpretive', and...well...they are. But how else can you measure feelings and responses? Some things just aren't easily quantifiable, that's why the 'media effects' debate that Kline investigates is still raging, it's impossible to directly link personal meaning-making with generalized causal effects.

So how can I make my study seem more substantial than me just asking 36 women about their feelings? Luker comes to the rescue, as she often does, with the suggestion that we can choose a sample "in such a way that logically, if not statistically we can generalize to some larger population" (pg. 125). While my particular study will not yield results applicable to the world as a whole, it would not be unsubstantiated to say that it may be generalizable to technologically active women in Toronto, Canada, maybe even North America. There is no reason not to believe that the 36 women chosen at random from around Toronto are not typical of the rest of the country. This puts the onus on the critic to disprove that logic...which comforts me.

Music SSHRC Proposal

Since I'm tearing my hair out trying to get this research proposal to make any sense, I figure for this weeks blog I will deconstruct the hardcopy SSHRC proposal example that I have and am currently using as the template for mine. Maybe it will help me to break it down further. And other people wrote about their proposal examples :)

I like this proposal because it is broken down into very clearly labelled subheadings: Program of Study Statement, Context, Objectives, Methodology and Contribution to the advancement of knowledge. A nice clear template that I can use for mine.

Program of Study Statement: This person is a fellow master's student with a passion for music. She/he wishes to use their own experience with music to inform their proposed research of how musical knowledge is being transmitted through the use of information communication technologies.
-it sounds like this person has a keen interest and know-how on the subject matter

Context: They then go on to write about where they came up with the idea, what relevant courses they've taken and a current collaboration with a specific professor in the field. Other research that discusses issues in the same realm but are different than the proposed research are also mentioned.
-I'm having a problem with this section as I have no names to drop, I feel like naming a professor you have already set up a working relationship with would give you more authenticity (brownie points). Since I'm not actually applying for a SSHRC, maybe I can make it up to sound more convincing?

Objectives: This is where the applicant discusses the focus of the research: where, what, who. What they want to understand from the research and the concepts that they are going to apply to their research. Also, they discuss what they are going to do with their findings.
-I have no concrete concepts of which to apply, in fact I'm a little foggy on what exactly that means. The concepts that this applicant mentions are not discusessed in any detail nor linked to any actual part of the research. This bodes well for me as I excel at being vague.

Methodology: Here is where the applicant informs us about the methods they will be using to conduct the research. This person prefers an ethnographic approach. They state how they are going to document the research both in real life and online. They state again who their testing group will be.
-this part was actually okay for me...I think. However I got confused in the proposal example when they cited a name after every method, do we actually know who made up the unstructured intereview?

Contribution to the advancement of knowledge: This section is exactly what it says it is.
-I'm having trouble with this section...

All in all I thought this proposal was interesting, but not super ground-breaking, which actually gave me hope for mine. I like that they mentioned Paco de Lucia in it.

Serious Play

Eleonore's post about the Lego Serious Play Research Project peaked my interest in the subject. I know it was a recommended reading, but there is A LOT of reading as everyone knows.

I grew up with an artist mother and went to art camp all through my youth, so I understand that some things are often easier to represent through art or visualization, especially when it comes to personal thoughts or feelings. It sounds like a "touchy, feely", super subjective method, and certainly not a quantifiable one, and it is. However, it's a method that may be able to tap into a person's psyche in a way that other methods don't have the power to. It's a method that allows for revisiting and revising as well. I like David Guantlett's personal work regarding the individual's identity, I think that I could use it to inform my own research choice.

For my research question, I'm playing with the idea of online and offline identities and how users feel about themselves in those different spheres. Are they different spheres? Or just extensions of one sphere? Do they require different identities? Why? I think that having a person build a representation for their identity in both their online and offline lives would be really interesting and revealing. Seeing the similarities and differences in the two representations would be very telling about a person's true feelings towards their contemporary identity (ies).

I was also thinking about having online and offline focus groups with the same sample and comparing the results...but perhaps that's for a different post.

Thank you Eleonore and Jennette for being so enthusiastic about such an interesting method, good luck on the workshop!

Specialized Generalists

I'm not going to lie, I was a little terrified when I realized that taking this class was manditory. To me, "Research Methods" meant rigidity, dryness and worst of all statistics. Some how I managed to make it through my undergrad without taking any kind of statistical analysis, I figured now, in graduate school, was my come-upance.
Is it ever refreshing to read Luker and her casual eloquence regarding the study of social science. She eases you into slowly thinking about and building your own research project, without striking fear into your heart. But as Martinus discussed in his post, the parameters (or lack there of) that Luker suggests are seemingly endless, and its a little difficult to see how there is any "science" involved at all when everything seems so subjective.
However, I'm finding lots of overlap in the literture that I'm reading for other classes. There seems to be an explosion of blurred distinction or outright cross-over between disciplines. The openness and lack of singular catagorization that Luker speaks of, seems to be everywhere and is something that academia has been and currently is grappling with.
I think this makes learning all the more exciting and well-rounded. To be able to share thoughts and ideas with those that previously would not have been connected to your research at all, is pretty incredible. So many different perspectives! In her article "On Translation and Transformation: Media, Education and the Continuity of Culture" (2009) Twlya Gibson, paraphrases another thinker and claims that we are entering the age of scholars as "specialized generalists".
I'm okay with that and working on becoming one myself.

Hi Everyone!

Hi guys and Prof. Grimes!

Thank you so much Elizabeth for setting this up. I finally have a google account now...oh the things I can do!

Anyways, for the first post I believe that we are just supposed to introduce ourselves and our interest in the MI program/this course.

My name is Aurianne, I'm from Tavistock, ON, renowned for it's cheese, feed mills and nursing homes...quite a potentially disgusting mix if you think about it. I did my undergrad at McMaster University in Theatre and Film. Afterwards I taught English in Taiwan, worked at a gallery in Stratford, ON and had the pleasure to work deep in the bowels of the Natural History Museum in London, England for two years. There is where my affinity for libraries and the people that work in them grew. I'm very excited to be on the LIS path. Not sure where I want to go or what exactly I want to do with it, but it's the first time that I've thought about actually having a career. As for this course, it seemed necessary (turns out it actually was) even though I might not do a thesis. The ability to analize data, how and why it was retrieved and its relevance to other literature or just our own research seems invaluable. I'm very much looking forward to it!