Finally--I get to actually do something with data!

I am really excited to revisit my previously collected data.  At first, I was concerned about what type of data I was going to use, and my head was spinning on a hamster wheel.  Thanks, Journey, for discussing our 529 pieces.  I am anxious to see how the analyzing process goes with this type of data.  This is a round of firsts—the first time I will be looking at video data, the first time I will be transcribing in ATLAS.ti, the first time I will be analyzing data thoroughly.  Yaay! It’s about time.  I have been learning about how to do all of these things, and I am very glad that I get to have a trial run prior to doing this for a pilot study and for my dissertation work. This is exciting J

            I know how we discussed Rapley (2008) as a cookbook of sorts, but for someone who is new to qualitative research as a whole and just learning about DA, I am appreciative of his clarity and accessibility of the topic. I am interested in the readings and I like what I know about DA so far.  I am a bit sad—this is something I’d like to take up sooner rather than later—like in my dissertation, but I am not sure if I could do it justice. Here is what I like about it—it allows us to actually ‘see’ what we’re saying.  Our intentions come out through our talk (Rapley, 2008) and we can truly understand the situation.  This can be helpful in education—how we educate pre-service teachers, how mentors and pre-service teachers interact, how teachers and students interact (I know Journey is a Reading Recovery specialist, and how they interact with their students is discussed in great detail, following along the principles founded by Marie Clay)—DA is really cool.  I am not just saying that because I am in this course—I love words, I love how they are shape-shifters and world-changers on a micro or macro level.  Someday I am going to write a piece using DA as a methodology—I just don’t know when.  I am still trying to determine the difference between conversation analysis and discourse analysis…

            FYI—“chuckleable” is going to be my new word for Thursdays J Gotta love Sacks.

 

In chapter 8 Rapley (2008) discusses the idea that conversation analysis can say that context matters (use of social knowledge) or that contextualization doesn’t matter because one should only look at the words actually spoken After reading the accounts of the women’s focus groups on date rapes (or saying no) and the doctor/patient interactions—I am not sure what to think.  I think I believe that who we are determines how we talk to people—I am thinking how teachers will talk to parents, or how doctors may talk to patients (I have had personal encounters with both types of doctors portrayed), so, who is it that allows the ‘social inequality’ to remain?  The people speaking or the society that constructs it?  I am not sure if that is clear—I may have to revisit that again prior to class tomorrow.  I will think on it in order to be more clear…I have a thought, but I can’t verbalize it this second.  All that I know is that I want to know more.

Oops! I mixed up the readings, but I love the Rapley (2008) text!

            So, I realize now that I read the Hutchby and Wooffitt text a week ahead, and did not read last week’s reading.  Therefore, I worked backwards, and I am very glad that this book (Rapley, 2008) is in the syllabus.

I see similarities between this book and Paulus, Lester, Dempster (2013) with clarity of voice, organization, and key concepts.  I appreciate this book.  I am slightly disappointed that I did not purchase it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t at a later date.  Once I realized that it was free through the library, I didn’t give it a glance until it was required. I believe it is concise, accessible, and I can easily identify with the author and his presentation of how to conduct and transcribe this type of research (as discussed in chapters 1-5).

 I didn’t know that I could use newspapers, magazines, etc. for data. Really, there is no excuse—I didn’t make the connection when we looked at the MIT “annual brain research conference” flyer in our first class meeting.  With this said, I may be changing my data. I am debating on analyzing blog posts from my students—but I am not certain that I can do that, as it isn’t a conversation.  I am very interested in conversation, and I do realize that getting ‘participants’ (I don’t have an IRB approved, so this is strictly for this class, but I would like it to be somewhat useful) is difficult. I am still figuring out what kind of conversation I can become a part of and also record without being to invasive.  Also, Rapley (2008) discusses the idea of using research articles.  I realize these can inform your research (they help you situate yourself in the field, give current discussions about what is happening in the field of that research, etc.) but I never thought about analyzing them.   I am thinking of looking at the teacher education materials on our CEHHS website for fun (if I can use that, or even get around to it for my own learning).

For anyone wishing to write an IRB—read chapter three thoroughly.  This gives advice, examples of permission, and you can outline an IRB from this chapter.  I will revisit this after my comps are turned in as I have an IRB that is a work in progress, and the sooner I complete it, the better.

On a sidenote—if I were going to analyze the resources at the end of each chapter, I would note that each reference given for further reading is a Sage publication.  Did he do that because he had to? Does he feel that these are the most helpful resources? Does he work with the authors given?  This book is a Sage publication, of course they would want to self-promote, right?

I like how he tells us to write down (researcher notes) on the recruitment process.  This is something I need to do as well.  He makes a valid point that I failed to see until I read this in chapter 4.  Who participates helps shapes your data which in turn, shapes your analysis of the data.  How those participants came to be is important for transparency of your work as well as the analysis of your data. 

The author makes it seem as if videotaping is cumbersome.  The book came out in 2008, and advancements in technology may have made videoing easier.  I agree that it is still intrusive and people may act for the camera.  I have not videotaped anything for transcription or research purposes, but I have taken video on my phone, and my camera has a video function, and I haven’t encountered an issue.  However, if something will go wrong, I am sure I can count on things going wrong when I am attempting to collect data.

Although I troubled Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008) about Sacks being a deity, here is one reason why I do like the guy—“The tape-recorded materials offered a ‘good enough’ record of what happened.  Other things, to be sure, happened, but at least what happened on tape had happened” (Sacks, 1984, as in Rapley, 2008, p.49).  I situate myself in a constructivist/critical paradigm, and I sometimes take a post-positivist view (especially with recorded conversations—like Sacks said, that happened, therefore it is ‘true’ (small ‘t’)), but when I read Denzin and Lincoln regarding what is reality, it seems too radical for my views.  I have difficulty accepting that everything is determined by individuals and nothing can be really true—the message I have understood by those two researchers.  Things happen.  We may all see them slightly differently, we may all have our own perceptions of what happened, but I believe that there can be a thread of realism in what occurs, as long as we acknowledge our own and other’s points of view.  Words are spoken.  They are on tape.  That happened.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.  This is one reason why I am liking this subject (DA) more and more.

I absolutely love the Poland (2002) example on pages 57-58.  Why?  It gave me affirmation that the little transcription that I’ve done is akin to what has been discussed in a scholarly publication.  I am on the right track.  I understand it.  I also like that “Transcripts are living, evolving, documents—they are always susceptible to change and alterations” (Rapley, 2008, p. 58).  Somewhere along the line, I got the notion that once the audio was transcribed, you couldn’t change it.  I cannot pinpoint the origin of that thought, but it is welcome knowledge to read that sentence.

In the discussion regarding Jeffersonian transcription— I love his honesty.  I, too, will have to take the same approach (having the symbols laying next to me as I type, listening over and over, then reading aloud my own rendition) and that he says that it can be frustrating and extremely time consuming, but it gets better over time and practice (as does everything).

I have rambled long enough, but I am so very glad we have this book!

OH! One more thing--in my last post I discussed what we could maybe "all agree upon" as a definition of a mother.  I was wrong.  What about surrogate parents? Foster parents? Those mothers did not bear a child, but they are their primary caregiver.  Again, this is why I am troubling the issue of "membership categories".

 

 

Sacks must have been the wizard who invented unicorns--just sayin'...

“There is no other way  that conversation is being studied systematically except my way” (Sacks, 1992, Vol. 2: 549 as in Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008, p. 3).

            I have yet to read a textbook that gives such reverence to its subject creator (I am not sure how else I wanted to say that).  Although I am still digesting the ideas postulated in Hutchby and Wooffitt (2009), I am completely amazed at how highly Sacks is portrayed.  This is just an observation, but Sacks must have been a unicorn, or the mythical wizard that created them.  I am not taking anything away from the man, he obviously has introduced an entirely unique methodology into qualitative research, and he does deserve respect, but he is almost deified by the authors. 

            Regardless of the iconic portrayal of Sacks, I am intrigued by what I am reading thus far, and this text is not what I expected.  We were told that students either love Hutchby and Wooffitt (2009) or hate it, and, to my own surprise, I am in favor of it thus far.  I am intrigued by the examples given in the texts, and the illustrations of turn-by-turn conversations, adjacency-pairs, and preferences, the organization of turn-taking (all discussed in chapter 2).  These portrayals of conversation and their analysis are clear to me.  However, I am also still trying to clarify my own understanding of what ‘context’ means in this text. 

            Chapter 1 discusses three criticisms of ethnography (a methodology of interest to me).  The first criticism is that ethnographers use “insiders” in order to gain information instead of the activities.  I have read and reread that, and I still cannot make sense of that.  Ethnography studies the context and the people within that space—along with their actions (field observations), and often times the researcher is the participant.  The second criticism is that ethnography depends on the “…commonsense knowledge on the members of society as a resource… not as a topic of study” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2009, p. 23) So does that mean that ethnography should be looking deeper into what that group of people deems as common knowledge and only focus on that?  Then it would not be ethnography, right?  Again, I am just thinking aloud and trying to think these ideas through.  Finally (and this is the last criticism that I found the most difficult to grasp) is this:  Sacks wanted his research to be replicable—so that the person could have the exact words spoken and reanalyze the conversation in order to find the same results.  This is difficult to digest.  Why does that matter?  The idea of qualitative research is not about replication—however, maybe he (Sacks) felt by exploring conversation (naturally occurring, exactly transcribed) in this manner, that it would be more valid--he even said that it was "...more concrete than the Chicago stuff tended to be" (Sacks, 1992, Vol 1:27 as in Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2009, p. 23).  Here is my view (critical as it is—and context matters here).  In our first text, we read that people construct meaning together.  Also, that collective meaning is socially constructed, and therefore contextual.  So, although I read the examples and the turn-by-turn analysis in the later chapters, and it made absolute sense, it is because someone told me what it meant.  I do not know for sure if I read those conversations without the analysis that I would come to the same conclusions as the authors, so is CA replicable?  If it is, why does it have to be?  Is it supposed to be? That is the impression that I got when reading this section.

            Also, what about “membership categories”?  Would not this term be akin to positionality or intersectionality as I learned about in Critical Race Theory?  When you assume someone’s membership category as a wife and a mother, those categories do not have the same meaning for all of us, but as I was reading, it seems that Sacks assumes that there was an agreed upon social meaning of those terms.  In which society?  Female has more than one connotation or social meaning in different cultures, one example that comes to mind is within Muslim, Christianity, and Wiccan practices—so, whose social construct are we relying on here?  The dominant culture?  In no way am I trying to cause trouble—I am only trying to understand what I am reading.  I do accept the idea of a socially universal term in most cases—a mother is a person who has borne a child.  That, I believe is something on which everyone can agree.  However, within the conversation on page 37 with the boy talking about a “chick” he was hanging around with, the analysis assumes that a ‘chick’ implies a ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ person.  On a personal level, I can see that, because I am white and that is my definition of ‘chick’.  When slang terms are brought into the conversation, assumptions may not be that easy, as like language itself,  colloquial terms are fluid, and I feel even more so, especially with the advancement of technology.  New words such as “googleable” , “facebooking”, “trolling”, or “trolls”, “lurking”—they are either entirely new to the lexicon, or some words are reinvented.  This is something that is not addressed.  What does a conversation analyist do with that?  Would not context matter? 

            Again, I do like what I am reading, and I love the idea of CA—I am having difficulty making sense of it, because it seems contradictory—the words matter, but we assume there are social assumptions being made that may not be true for all groups.