SectionB

4:10 PM **These are my notes from the course readings:**
 * Section B: Readings: **This section focuses upon your insights, quotes, comments upon select readings in class, as well as your own readings in both qualitative research and on your own readings for your topic area.
 * Monday, 22 August 2011 **

**Systematically Scholarly research investigation includes:**

 * ===**Good question and types of questions** ===
 * ===**Grounded in theological basis** ===
 * ===**Scholarly methods** ===
 * ===**Thorough investigation of previous research** ===
 * ===**The lens – a perspective or theoretical frame – a particular way of looking at a topic based on background – same questions in different context** ===
 * ===**Factual – ethical – RIB – Institutional review board – researchers – mentors – American Medical Associations – American Educational Research Association – Psychological Association.** ===
 * ===**Peer review** ===
 * ===**Doctoral committee** ===

**What is Scholarly Research:**
=== **What is distinctive about qualitative research? (early understanding) – multiple realities based on constructivist or interpretives – beliefs rather than scientific fact form the basis of perception. It is dynamic rather than static. Focuses on meaning – how people make sense of their lives, what experiences, and how they interpret their experiences, and how they structure their social worlds. ** === === **Researcher is the primary instrument – all parts of the research process place the researcher at the center – reflexivity – subjectivity. (inter-subjectivity). The researcher is part if the lens. How you design and conduct the study – is your bias going to affect how you ask questions, gather data..etc. ** === === **Focus on inductive understanding. Deductive in quantitative – Inductive is qualitative – looking at specifics and work to generalization – grouping into broader understanding ** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Based on systematic investigation – key steps to take** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Represents key principals and assumptions of a research inquiry approach** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Formed and builds upon past research in the area** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Utilizes a conceptual/theoretical framework and related key construct definition – what the definitions were and what they are now** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Represents ethical, standard research procedures** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Seeks new information, insights, understanding** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Crafted for generalized validity and reliability or Trustworthiness – and represents the emic, holistic approach of a specific perspective.** ===
 * ===<span style="color: #0080ff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">**Qualitative research looks for understanding – the phenomenon for the subsequent action. Quantitative includes a reliability test – repeated over and over – gives the same results – Qualitative may not get the same results over time.** ===

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">Focus on process, rather that outcomes or products **
=== **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 90%;">Recognize that individuals may have illusionary understandings (developmental understanding) of their reality (their perspectives of reality) freshman and their academic success – starting a major and then realizing that this is not what it was what they thought. ** === 11:15 AM  5:30 PM  2:30 PM <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">10:00 AM <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">** I decided to take some detailed notes from the following class reading article: ** //__<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Balancing the Research Context by Considering Parts and Whole __// <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Max Van Manen <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Effects and Ethics of Human Science Research <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The pedagogically oriented human science researcher needs to be aware of the following: <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Plan and Context of a Research Project <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Working the Text <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Structuring One’s Research Studies: <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">10:00 AM <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Here are my notes after reading the article about __Grounded Theory Methods in Social Justice Research__: <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The strength of grounded theory not only resides in its comparative methodology but moreover, in its interactive essence (Charmaz, 2006, 2007,2008a,2008e,2009b). <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The grounded theory emphasis on theory construction influences how we interact with our participants and the questions we bring to the empirical world (see Charmaz, 2009a, 2009b). <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Using the Method: <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The logic of grounded theory involves fragmenting empirical data through coding and working with resultant codes to construct abstract categories that fit these data and offer a conceptual analysis of them (Charmaz, 2005; Glaser, 1978,1998).
 * Tuesday, 30 August 2011 **
 * Initially I am overwhelmed by the reading assignments. Many of the terms used in the article and in the textbooks are foreign to me and therefore slow to comprehend and absorb. After reflecting on the last class meeting I feel that many of my classmates have significant experience in research and that I need to “catch up” to be successful in this course. **
 * Friday, 02 September 2011 **
 * I just finished reading the Assessing and Evaluating Qualitative Research article by Sharan Merriam. I feel that this is the best article I have read as it lays out in detail the criteria for a good qualitative research study. One of the keys questions of Qualitative research is that of meaning, understanding and the process. We want to know HOW people do things as opposed to the surface opinions found in quantitative studies. Questions include: How might someone make use of the findings of the study? Who would be interested? How the data is collected? **
 * I especially like the Table 2.1 on page 23 Assessing the Quality of Quantitative Research. **
 * Monday, 12 September 2011 **
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif';">I found some books in the NCSU Library today to help me with my research on Teacher Evaluation: **
 * **//__<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Linking Teacher Evaluation and Student Learning __//****<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> – Tucker and Stronge **
 * **//__<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Teacher Appraisal Observed __//****<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> – Wragg, Wikeley, Haynes **
 * **//__<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Measurement Issues and Assessment for Quality Teaching __//****<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> – Gitomer **
 * **//__<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Teacher Evaluation Assessing and Improving Performance __//****<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> – Stronge and Tucker **
 * **//__<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Teacher Evaluation the Works! __//****<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> 2nd edition - Ribas **
 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Saturday, 17 September 2011 **
 * 1) <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The research may have certain effects on the people with whom the research is concerned and who will be interested in the phenomenological work. They may feel discomfort, anxiety, false hope, superficiality, guilt, self-doubt, irresponsibility – but also hope, increased awareness, moral stimulation, insight, a sense of liberation, a certain thoughtfulness, and so on.
 * 2) <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">There are possible effects of the research methods on the institutions in which the research is conducted. (ex. – health practices challenged or changed for the family after the birth of a child).
 * 3) <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The research methods used may have lingering effects on the actual “subjects” involved in the study.
 * 4) <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Phenomenological projects and their methods often have a transformative effect on the researcher himself or herself.
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What is the object of human experience to be studied?
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What is the intelligibility of the experience to be studied? (Have you experienced it in real life or only through literature?)
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What is the experiential situation which the researchers enters? (The researchers asks: What is this lived experience like? What is the meaning and significance of this experience?)
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Think carefully about the structure or form of one’s research study, even though that structure in its decisive form only emerges as one textually progresses with the work.
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Organize with broad brushstrokes the overall sense of the approach required by the fundamental question or notion one is addressing.
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Thematically (ex. Parenting – bearing children, preparing the child’s world as a place to be and to become, living with children as living with hope, exercising parental responsibility, the need to act tactfully toward children)
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Analytically (ex. In-depth conversational interviews can become reconstructed life stories, analyzed for anecdotes, incidents described in interviews to construct fictionalized antinomous accounts, etc.)
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Exemplificatively (illuminating a description such as parenting by considering various modalities of parenting: being an adoptive parent, being a stepmother or stepfather, parenting disabled children, being a young parent or an older parent, etc.)
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Exegetically (With the tradition of the field – engaging one’s writing in a dialogical or exegetical fashion with the thinking of some other phenomenological author(s) – addressing their works to put your own in context).
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Existentially (Weave one’s phenomenological description against the existentials of temporality (lived time), spatiality (lived space), corporeality (lived body), sociality (lived relationship to others) ).
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Inventing An Approach (Combine approaches, invent a different organization, approach is driven by the phenomenological subject matter).
 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Sunday, 25 September 2011 **
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Conduct data collection and analysis simultaneously in an iterative process.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Analyze actions and processes rather than themes and structure.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Use comparative methods.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Draw on data (e.g. narratives and descriptions) in service of developing new conceptual categories.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Develop inductive categories through systematic data analysis.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Emphasize theory contruction rather than description or application of current theories.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Engage in theoretical sampling.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Search for variation in the studied categories or process.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Pursue developing a category rather than covering a specific empirical topic. (Charmaz, 2010).
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Compare data with data to develop codes.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Compare data with codes.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Compare codes and raise significant codes to tentative categories.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Compare data and codes with the categories.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Treat major category(ies) as a concept(s
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Compare concept with concept (may include comparing our concept with disciplinary concepts).
 * 1) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Method contains tools for analyzing and situating processes.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Define relevant processes
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Demonstrate their context
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Specify the conditions in which these processes occur
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Conceptualize their phases
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Explicate what contributes to their stability and/or change
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Outline their consequences
 * 1) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Method can aid researchers in explicating their participants’ implicit meanings and actions.
 * 2) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Method can aid social justice research to increase the abstract level of conceptualization of their analyses. They can build complexity into their analyses that challenges conventional explanation of the studied phenomenon.
 * 3) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The constructivist version of grounded theory attends to context, positions, discourses, and meanings and actions and thus can be used to advance understandings of how power, oppression, and inequities differentially affect individuals, groups, and categories of people.
 * 4) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Method provides tools to reveal links between concrete experiences of suffering and social structure, culture, and social practices or policies (Charmaz, 2007; Choi & Holroyd, 2007; Einwhoner & Spencer, 2005; Rier, 2007; Sandstrom, 1990, 1998).


 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Tuesday, 27 September 2011 **

<span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">6:00 PM <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Here are my notes and thoughts on the three Versions of Grounded Theory: Constructivist, Objectivist and PostPositivist <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Epistemological Differences in Versions of Grounded Theory: <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Mixed Methodologies: Researchers used mixed methodologies in practice for varied purposes including to: <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">8:00 PM ** Notes from Ethnography – A Way of Looking ** Qualitative researchers should make a distinction between doing ethnography and borrowing (some) ethnographic techniques. In borrowing ethnographic techniques, the fieldworker claims only to be using (or adapting) standard fieldwork procedures for gathering data. Participant observation research, descriptive research, naturalistic research, qualitative research, on-site research, field study – the set of activities common to all these approaches emphasizes the “field methods” or “fieldwork technique” employed in data gathering, not on how data are subsequently organized, analyzed or reported. Looking in a broad sense encompasses all the ways one may direct attention while in the field. Ethnography embraces multiple techniques. **Participant Observation** Can be used to refer to all the activities in which fieldworkers engage OR referred to as a way in which fieldwork can be subdivided – participant observation and interviewing. Interviewing – including everything from casual conversation to the formal structured interview. **Three Categories of Qualitative Research** **OR** **Experiencing** is a label for drawing attention to what is gained through participant observation. Participant observation is founded on firsthand experience in naturally occurring events. The researcher should recognize and reveal their subjectivity as best they can to maximize the potential of fieldwork as personal experience rather than to deny it. Observational research plays out almost entirely in what we see and what we hear. **Enquiring** – different from experiencing in that the researcher takes an active role in asking what is going on rather than being present as a passive observer of what is going on. The dilemma for the researcher is whether to intrude on or initiate activities and conversations with those among whom we study, or interject one’s own agenda into a setting, or remain silent in the hope that what one wants to know may (eventually) be revealed in some naturally occurring way. Both culture and personality enter into the equation of how each of us goes about fieldwork, influencing even the way we pose our problems or devise strategies for investigating them. **Examining** is where the researcher turns attention to what already has been produced by others. It includes archival research, but this can include personal letters, diaries, photographs, examining ordinary apparel or esoteric art objects, listening to recordings of speech and music, making or reviewing lists of household items – anything that the informants may have in personal possession that might be shared with the ethnographer but are not necessarily available to anyone else. **Experiencing – Distinguishing Between Observers and Participant Observers** “Non-participant participant observer” – self-ascribed label for researchers who make no effort to hide what they are doing or to deny their presence, but neither are they able to avail themselves of the potential to take a more active or interactive role afforded by participant observation. Concern – as long as an observer is present, the observed will put on an act and thus their behavior under observation is not “real”. Length of a study is over a long period of time – everyone (researcher included) will eventually assume a more natural stance. The possibility that people have acted differently in the presence of the researcher is a question that can be raised with those in the setting, sometimes helping to incorporate other views into the inquiry and futher validating the researcher as a thoughtful observer endeavoring to get as complete a picture as possible. People on their best behavior enact roles in what they perceive as //ideal// types. Witnessing such behavior can be extremely valuable to the ethnographer interested in teasing out beliefs about how people //should// act and the inevitable tension between what people feel they //ough//t to do or //ought// to say, and what they do or say in fact. A researcher can take an essentially passive role and remain uninvolved. The seasoned ethnographer might want to inventory the advantages and disadvantages of various levels of participation in terms of the situation, the problem under investigation, and his or her own personality and research style. Firsthand experience through participant observation is both the starting point and filter through which everything else is screened as we make sense of all that we have observed. It is a process involving three closely related but distinguishable outcomes of research: description, analysis, and interpretation. Descriptive data are the bedrock of the account; analysis is distinguished from interpretation by reason of what we make of those data. In analysis, we know what we are doing because we examine the data following agreed-upon procedures for reporting facts, figures and findings. Interpretations are what we ourselves make of the data, a sense-making that is attentive to carefully analyzed facts but not overwhelmed by them when controverted by direct dialogue with others. An ethnographer will variously emphasize experiencing, enquiring and examining during fieldwork, description, analysis and interpretation in the write-up, according to the purposes of the study. <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">10:00 AM **Enquiring: When Researchers Ask -** Typology of Interviews: Casual conversation Life history, life cycle interview Key informant interviewing (one or more informants is a major source of information in one’s research) Semistructured interview (open-ended quality, the interview taking shape as it progresses) Structured interview (each interviewee asked the same questions in the same way) Survey Household census, ethnogenealogy Questionnaire (written and/or oral) Projective techniques (Rorschach) Other measurement techniques (standardized tests, “tasks”) Questions involving ne Internet technologies now fuel the never-quite-resolved controversy over the role and legitimacy of using the phone or email, which be comparison may now become less objectionable, for they both facilitate direct communication. **Examining: Archival Strategies** The essential criterion for those who stake their reputations on archival research is their reliance on “intersubjectively veriable” data. Any document that proves valuable as a source of information can rightfully be considered an archive. Systematic bias in the enemy, whether bias in terms of what does and does not make its way into the archives (or get recorded at all), what does and does not get talked about, or what even the most attentive of observers may fail to observe and thus to record. Admittedly this problem of what does and does not become part of the permanent record is not restricted to archival work alone, but it is most glaring there. **The Appeal of an Ethnographic Approach to Research** <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">3:00 PM
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Constructivist: Views knowledge as located in time, space, and situation and takes into account the researcher’s contruction of emergent concepts.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Objectivist: Shares an emphasis on constructing emergent concepts but emphasizes positivist empiricism with researcher neutrality while aiming for abstract generalizations independent of time, place and specific people.
 * <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">PostPositivist: Places less emphasis on emergence than the objectivist and constructivist approaches, as it provides preconceived coding and analytic frameworks to apply to data. Yet, postpositivist grounded theory views reality as fluid, evolving, and open to change.
 * 1) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Objectivist grounded theory assumes that a neutral observer discovers data in a unitary external world. Data gathering does not raise questions about researchers’ tacit assumptions, privileged statuses, or the particular locations from which they view studied life. The researcher stands outside the studied phenomenon. Objectivist grounded theory aims for parsimonious abstract generalizations about relationships between variables that explain empirical phenomena. These generalizations constitute a middle-range theory explaining the studied phenomenon.
 * 2) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Constructivist grounded theory encourages multiple realities and the viewer is part of what is viewed. Subjectivities matter. Values shape what stands as fact. To the extent possible, constructivist grounded theorists enter the studied phenomenon and attempt to see it from the inside. Researchers and participants co-construct the data through interaction. Representations of the data are inherently problematic and partial.
 * 1) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Construct instruments
 * 2) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Corroborate findings
 * 3) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Reduce cultural and investigator biases
 * 4) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Improve clinical trials
 * 5) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Address research participants’experience
 * 6) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Demonstrate credibility
 * 7) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Increase generalizability
 * 8) <span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Inform professional practice and/or public policy
 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Friday, 30 September 2011 **
 * **Participant Observation**
 * **Interviewing**
 * **Archival Research**
 * **Experiencing**
 * **Inquiring**
 * **Examining**
 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Saturday, 01 October 2011 **
 * Can be conducted entirely by one individual
 * Does not require a license or insist on prior training
 * Can be carried out almost anywhere
 * Problem to be studied can either be taken to the field or uncovered there
 * A long-term commitment is assumed by there is no specific minimum
 * The researcher often has exclusive domain in the setting studied
 * Relies essentially on a human observer to observe humans
 * Researcher can draw upon personal skills and strengths to advantage
 * Can make research not only interesting but adventurous
 * Requires no expensive equipment
 * May present opportunity to learn and/or use another language
 * Offers opportunity to integrate professional and personal life
 * Role is recognized and usually accorded status associated with research
 * Can variously emphasize scientific or humanistic aspects
 * Flexible criteria for judging the finished product
 * Opportunity to develop writing (and photographic) talents
 * Presentation style can fit the circumstances
 * Provides rich database for further research and writing
 * End product results in a contribution to knowledge
 * Emphasizes working with people rather than treating them as objects
 * Can get you out of your campus office if you are languishing there
 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Sunday, 02 October 2011 **

** Below are my thoughts and notes from reading //Ethnography: A Way of Seeing// **
==== Rorschach cards – you “look” at them and report what you “see”. If one invites a biologist, a hunter and a real estate developer to visit and render an independent appraisal of an attractive rural site, they will each see and appreciate something different. ====

** Following the Ethnographic Tradition in Anthropology **
==== Ethnography finds its orienting and overarching purpose in an underlying concern with cultural interpretation. A study must provide the kind of account of human social activity from which cultural patterning can be discerned. Culture is an abstraction, a perspective for studying human behavior that gives particular attention to acquired social behavior. ==== ==== The underlying purpose of ethnographic research in this traditional view is to describe what the people in some particular place or status ordinarily do, and the meanings that they acscribe to the doing, under ordinary or particular circumstances, presenting that description in a manner that draws attention to regularities that implicate cultural process. One can do ethnography anywhere, anytime, and of virtually anyone or any process, as long as human social behavior is involved (or was involved, in the case of studies made by archaeologists and ethnohistorians). ====

** What Is An Ethnographic Question? **
==== It should be clear what the ethnographer is to look at and to look for, at least with sufficient clarity to initiate an inquiry. It requires framing descriptive questions as to //how//, and underlying questions as to //meanings// imputed to action. We do not and cannot simply //observe, watch// or //look//; we must //observe, watch//, or //look// at //something//. ====

** The Scale of the Ethnographic Project **
==== Ethnography can play a role in //shaping// an inquiry: helping to identify common actors, dramatizing differences among cases in different circumstances, refocusing or sharpening the research question, or helping to prioritize questions in terms of time and resources available. ==== ==== The scope of the ethnographic question must be pared to what one individual, or a researcher working with a colleague or small research team, can accomplish in a limited amount of time. You also need to recognize personal strengths and preferences in conducting fieldwork, so that in whatever ways you execute the research role you make the fullest use of what you do best. ====

** Great Expectations or Mission Impossible? **
==== The ethnographer’s mission – the culturally oriented ethnographer I am describing here – recognizes culture not as something to be observed but as something ethnographers //put there because that is the way they render their accounts.// ====

** More Expectations **
==== Customary features – field oriented activity directed toward cultural interpretation. Ethnography demands constant selectivity on the part of the ethnographer as to what to put in and thoughtful reflection about what must be left out. ====

<span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'Accolade-Bold','serif'; font-size: 16px;">8:00 PM
 * <span style="color: #ff0066; font-family: 'BirthdayGreetz','serif'; font-size: 29.3333px;">Wednesday, 05 October 2011 **

** On Getting Enough Detail **
==== Context important in setting the study to resolve the tension between providing irrelevant or excessive detail and providing too little. Ethnography is a call for identifying and tracing interrelated elements and fitting parts together. Attend to detail in observations and notes – especially during the initial period of notetaking and render as much detail as possible in the preliminary reporting, at least in early drafts. Level of detail is a problem for anyone working in a qualitative/descriptive mode. The answer does not lie with detail itself. If the research question can be addressed by giving painstaking attention to certain facets of behavior, then close examination of a few items may best satisfy the research intent. ====

** A Cross-Cultural Perspective **
==== A cross-cultural perspective based on firsthand experience continues to be recognized as highly desirable for anyone claiming to do ethnography, but the idea of insisting on it as a prerequisite has been losing ground. The neophyte ethnographer should avoid the trap of mindless comparison by doing as little comparing as possible rather than as much. Ethnographers need to recognize that when they conduct fieldwork they are already comparing what they know, or think they know, with what they are discovering. Ethnographers should only draw explicit comparisons to the extent necessary to make a case, rather than allow themselves to be distracted by a mistaken notion that more comparison produces a more satisfying product. ====

** Ethnography As Idiosyncratic **
==== What results from any //particular// ethnographic inquiry represents a coming together of a personality and a personal biography in the persona of the ethnographer, interacting in a particular place in a unique way, for the purposes of preparing a study framed broadly by an academic tradition, and more narrowly by how the assignment is perceived by the ethnographer and others in the setting. ====

** The Ethnographer’s Task **
==== A cultural orientation can help the ethnographer define the outer physical and experiential boundaries of the lives of those being described: boundaries of time, place and circumstance. Share generalizations, taking care to distinguish between warranted ones and those put forward ever so tentatively. The important point is to state the basis on which generalizations have been formed and the extent to which they include impressions, emotions, and whatever other personal resources have been drawn upon. ====

** Culture and Ethnography Under Siege **
==== Rather than insist that ethnography //is// the study of culture, let me turn the argument to its gentler side to suggest that ethnography, both by tradition and by design, presents the opportunity and the challenge to pursue an inquiry in a manner especially attentive to broad social contexts. In times or places where the culture concept itself is in disrepute, there are other terms that one can employ (e.g. conventions, customs, folkways, lifeways, lifestyles, mores, practices, traditions) that point essentially to the same thing. The “idea” of culture in reference to the social context of behavior is not exclusively a property of the term //culture// itself. ==== 7:30 PM  **Here are my notes and thoughts after reading the** Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods - PAR: Origins, Approaches and Methods. Brazil – Paulo Freire (1972) Developed community-based research processes to support people’s participation in knowledge production and social transformation. He was particularly interested in the processes of conscientizacao (conscientization) through which poor and marginalized groups developed a heightened awareness of the forces affecting their lives, and then used this greater awareness as a catalyst to inform their political action.
 * Thursday, 13 October 2011 **

Proliferation in the early 1970s in Africa, India and Latin America. (Political development, integrating the knowledge and expertise of community members into locally controlled development projects, developing alternative institutions and procedures for research that could be emancipatory and foster radical social change).

Second wave in the 1980s – community development and international development contexts. RRA and PRA – Rapid Rural Appraisal and Participatory Rural Appraisal approaches created as alternatives to cumbersome development surveys and as a means to involve people as agents of their own development. PAR gained greater popularity by the 1990s.

Today, Action Research, Participatory Action Research and Action Learning are the most common terms to describe research that involves:

A participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview…[and bringing] together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with other in the pursuit of practical issues of concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and communities.

Some authors distinguish PR from AR by suggesting that it is more focused on learning as a vehicle for increasing citizen voice and power in a wide range of contexts, while AR is more focused on social action, policy reform or other types of social or systemic change. 8:30 PM And a continuation of my thoughts on PAR - PAR is an “orientation to inquiry” which demands methodological innovation if it is to adapt and respond to the needs of specific contexts, research questions or problems, and the relationships between researchers and research participants. PAR also values the processes of research as much as the products, so that its “success” rests not only on the quality of information generated, but also on the extent to which skills, knowledge and participants’ capacities are developed through the research experience. Ladder of Public Participation: Co-option, Compliance, Consultation, Cooperation, Co-Learning, Collective Action Ladder of Children’s Participation: Decoration, Manipulation, Tokenism, Children assigned roles but not informed, Children consulted but not informed, Adult initiated - shared decisions with children, Child initiated, Child initiated, shared decisions with adults Continuum of Participation: Passive participation, Participation in information giving, Participation by consultation, Functional participation, Participation for material incentives, Interactive participation, Self mobilization. Methods and Techniques: Focus on dialogue, storytelling and collective action – arts and media-based methods, visualization techniques such as participatory diagramming and mapping where participants create charts, pictures and maps to explore issues and relationships. When facilitated appropriately, methods within PAR embody the process of transformative reflexivity in which both researcher and participants reflect on their (mis)understandings and negotiate the meanings of the information generated together. This includes paying attention to their changing positionalities and subjectivities throughout the research process.
 * Sunday, 23 October 2011 **