Our Research Question, and Hypotheses of the Project

Before we begin writing a grant proposal, we should take some time to map out our research strategy. A good first step is to formulate a research question. A Research Question is a statement that identifies the phenomenon to be studied. For example, “What resources are helpful to new and minority drug abuse researchers?”

To develop a strong research question from our ideas, we should ask ourselves these things:

• Do I know the field and its literature well?
• What are the important research questions in my field?
• What areas need further exploration?
• Could my study fill a gap? Lead to greater understanding?
• Has a great deal of research already been conducted in this topic area?
• Has this study been done before? If so, is there room for improvement?
• Is the timing right for this question to be answered? Is it a hot topic, or is it becoming obsolete?
• Would funding sources be interested?
• If you are proposing a service program, is the target community interested?
• Most importantly, will my study have a significant impact on the field?

Think about the potential impact of the research we are proposing. What is the benefit of answering our research question? Who will it help (and how)? If you cannot make a definitive statement about the purpose of your research, it is unlikely to be funded. A research focus should be narrow, not broad-based. For example, “What can be done to prevent substance abuse?” is too large a question to answer. It would be better to begin with a more focused question such as “What is the relationship between specific early childhood experiences and subsequent substance-abusing behaviors?”

Detecting spam in Twitter Network

Now a days Twitter has become one of the biggest social networking sites around. Twitter has some useful features which make it especially helpful for research on almost any topic under the sun. This is because Twitter pages are viewable to anyone, even those without accounts, and the site has a search function which pulls in all recent posts dealing with a given topic or phrase. Twitter is a micro blogging service where users can post 140 character messages called tweets. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Twitter is directed, meaning that a user can follow another user, but the second user is not required to follow back. Most accounts are public and can be followed without requiring the owner’s approval. With this structure, spammers can easily follow legitimate users as well as other spammers.

As online social networking sites become more and more popular, they have also attracted the attentions of the spammers. In the article of First Monday, “detecting spam in twitter network” by Yardi and others, they mentioned that Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, is studied as an example of spam bots detection in online social networking sites. A machine learning approach is proposed to distinguish the spam bots from normal ones. To facilitate the spam bots detection, three graph-based features, such as the number of friends and the number of followers, are extracted to explore the unique follower and friend relationships among users on Twitter.

Unfortunately, spam is becoming an increasing problem on Twitter as other online social network sites. Spammers use Twitter as a tool to post multiple duplicate updates containing malicious links, abuse the reply function to post unsolicited messages to users, and hijack trending topics.

Peer Review Assignment

I have chosen the article for peer review is “Getting political on social network sites: exploring online political discourse on face book”. This article is about the social network site like Facebook for online political discussion. This article shows the impact of facebook in political discourse and this site give people a tool to interact online and extend their social lives beyond working hours. Of the many narratives exploring use and outcomes of social network websites, perhaps the most common explores the public sharing of personal identity information. Over the past four years, social network websites (SNS) have achieved strong market penetration with a wide range of participants. Sites such as Facebook.com are indicative of the phenomenal growth social network sites have seen in the past few years. The site was launched in 2004 and as of April, 2008 surpassed 70 million active. With the rapid popularization of social network sites, the potential for individuals to engage in online discussion about social and political issues has grown exponentially in a few short years. Due to the explosive growth of social network sites, scholars have little understanding of the nature of online political discourse as it is occurring in these new social spaces. This study explores how Facebook is serving as an arena for political debate among members. This research has shown that online political discussion does serve to expose participants to non likeminded partners. Yet, despite the potential of the Internet to bring opposing camps together in a common space and provide exposure to different ideas, some evidence suggests that this may not necessarily be occurring. I found this is very interesting subject in research.

-Meenaxi

An Introduction of Critical Discourse Analysis

While going through this week readings, I found Critical Discourse Analysis very different topic in research, I personally don’t know what exactly it is? So I went through the definition of CDA and found that it is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced by text and talk.

In my opinion the term ‘critical’ has become ‘little more than a rallying cry demanding that researchers consider ‘whose side they are on?’’. From personal experience I have found that it also seems

to cause the hackles of other discourse analysts to rise because of the implication that they are ‘non-critical’ or even ‘sub-critical’ and therefore somehow in favour of things like oppression, exploitation and inequality: by commandeering the moral high ground of being critical, CDA thus ‘others’ mainstream discourse analysis and performs the very kind of domination through language that it seeks to oppose.

Discourse analysis challenges us to move from seeing language as abstract to seeing our words as having meaning in a particular historical, social, and political condition. Even more significant, our words (written or oral) are used to convey a broad sense of meanings and the meaning we convey with those words is identified by our immediate social, political, and historical conditions. This is a powerful insight for home economists and family and consumer scientists. We should never again speak, or read/hear others’ words, without being conscious of the underlying meaning of the words. Our words are politicized, even if we are not aware of it, because they carry the power that reflects the interests of those who speak. The words of those in power are taken as "self-evident truths" and the words of those not in power are dismissed as irrelevant, inappropriate, or without substance as van Dijk mentioned in his article.

-Meenaxi

A face-to-face interview

Many of us have experienced with interview method which we had used in the assignment of INF1300. This assignment involves conducting an interview on the public's view of the library. Last week I have conducted the interview and have found that this class has really assisted me in determining the method I would employ as a researcher. The goal in this particular research is to discover what a person knows about libraries, library services and facilities etc. but while taking the interview , I had discovered that there is a lack of knowledge about the library gives a researcher valid information which can lead to questions of why there is such a lack of knowledge on the resources offered by the library. I have used an open-ended questions, it became apparent that there needed to be more structure than I had originally thought. The questions that I thought would have long answers were very short and I had to compensate by asking questions in different ways or being more specific without telling them what they know about the library and its services.
In other words, a face-to-face interview is the method most widely used in the research of any topic and based on a direct meeting between interviewer and interviewee. By personal communication it is possible not only to obtain much more information, but also to use visual materials (cards, pictures, logos, etc.) to encourage response.

Meenaxi

Visual Research

On last Friday, I had attended Visualization Workshop organised by Eleonore and Jennette which was based on Gauntlett’s visual sociology methods. We built clay models of our research idea and explore with each other. This exercise facilitates more abstract thinking and more direct communication. Our research work is to develop a system for clay modeling supporting ways of interaction that are easy, intuitive and pleasant. Clay modelling helps to express our response and exchange of verbal information. It was interesting to see different approaches used to specify the visual research. This led to attempts to clarify, reframe and explore the research.

Visual Research is a wide variety of technical and creative expertise.Visual Research features a powerful blend of talented people and the latest technology allowing us to bring a compelling visual style to each project while maintaining the highest levels of reliability and security.Visual Research has been researching Internet traffic virtually from the beginning. The tools available for analysis today are very advanced and can be customized to detail every movement.

Research Question

As Yuliya mentioned in her blog that ….lot of dots because lot of thoughts. I am fully agreed with her because Research itself means search again and find out in a systematically and scientific manner. As we got assignment on research proposal and everyone is in their research thoughts. Before starting with the Research Proposal, I found that Research process must be clear. As Luker define in chapter 4 that most challenging task of this kind of research is to transform the Research interest into a Research question. There are four features set off a true Research Question from a Research interest:
1) a true research process.
2) understanding the relationship.
3) permit’s a range of possible answers.
4) a good research question properly answered.

Once research question is frame, it easy to take out the research proposal.
As I learned from the Research class about the framing of the SSHRC proposal this Monday. Therefore, the most important part in the proposal grant writing is the way that you frame your project, to make it relevant to the current topics. Yet, we have to do our own research project under the guidance of Prof. Sara.

-Meenaxi

Salsa in Social perspective

I began this blog with the overview of Research. Research is the systematic process of collecting and analyzing information to increase our understanding. As Luker said that Social Science Research is a set of guidelines about to conceptualize and execute a systematic and that lets us rigorous intellectual enquiry into something which research can get as close to the truth as possible by adopting the research methodology tools and techniques irrespective of the research context be it social, business, political or scientific.

As per Luker's Research Methodology is challenging task as with the passage of time and change in the social orders the relevance of the research and as we pass through the era of the information scarcity to the era of information abundance and world wide web, where today the information available is beyond the human capacity to process and analyze , so Luker emphasis on the filtering of the information and having the validated and verified data for the qualitative and quantitative research.

The paradigms of research have been expanded to present a way of thinking that helps us to gain a clear idea of the different examples used in research, material on focus research group.

Salsa dancing into the social sciences research will be an interesting case study to evaluate our research methodology understanding about the subject and its application.Keep sharing your ideas.

Research Group Ideas and My Intoduction

Hi Everyone and Prof. Grimes!
I introduce myself as a Meenaxi Prasher, MI student.

Social and Academic interactions are very important to me, and I am always keen to meet new people. I also enjoy keeping fit and regularly go to my local leisure centre. In addition I enjoy computing and creating websites that allow me to communicate with people from across the world. I have always believed that education in itself is the most satisfying pursuit, a value instilled by my mother, herself a teacher for many years. Along the way I have learned to focus that value and match it closely to my increasing experience and desire to work on the current, most advanced issues in my field and research and research methdologgies is one of them.

Throughout the course of my education, the only field of my studies which I have valued, cherished is Library and Information Science. These lifelong interests had naturally primed me to pursue a Master degree in Library & Information Science with an emphasis in librarianship from India, and motivated me to further my academics with MI program programme at University of Toronto.

I found blogging very useful in Reseach to interact with the group and connect our thoughts with each other. The purpose of research is to have informed action. Thus, our study should seek to contextualize its findings within the larger body of research. Research must always be high quality in order to produce knowledge and consclussions that is applicable outside of the research setting with implications that go beyond the group that has participated in the research. The Reseach methods and resesech methdology is the key to have better decisions. I am excited to be part of the reseach group.