My initial crisis with the SSHRC proposal was that I felt it covered too broad a topic. It also seemed to me that a large-scale, mixed method approach (while ideal in my opinion) would be completely unrealistic for small-scale research. To remedy the situation, I reduced the scope of my research to a relatively small, specialized population.
I felt that a semi-structured interview was the most “suitable” for the kind of qualitative research I was thinking of. However, as a result, I feel that I'm in a position where my potential findings could be interpreted as “lacking generalizability” or, as Luker puts it, “spurious!” For a long time I was questioning whether or not it would be a struggle to draw greater implications from the potential research results, but I think addressing significance and specifying questions helped to alleviate that fear.
For me, the theme of the Kline article seemed to be that research is interpreted differently depending on the audience, and can be rendered subjectively insubstantial through this process. It seemed quite relevant to the concerns I had about my SSHRC proposal, because my topic also deals with legal battles around media freedom!
-Martin
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