COMM552/Class notes

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Contents 1 Week 1, 13 Jan 2010 1.1 Quirks of Comm as a discipline 1.2 Nothing never happens 1.3 Biological factors 1.4 Ned Hall 1.5 Space 1.6 Social norms 1.7 Time 1.8 Carey on newspaper 1.9 Gross on multimodal education 2 Week 2, Audience studies, 22 January 2010 2.1 Investigating qual / quant distinction 2.2 Breadth, depth 2.3 Reproducibility 2.4 Conventions among quantitative research methods 2.5 Bias 2.6 Generalizability 2.7 Funding 2.8 Anthropology 2.9 Role of the researcher 2.10 Role of the informant 2.11 The "so what" question: Is it "important"? 2.12 Focus groups 2.12.1 Traditional focus group 2.12.2 Common focus group goal 2.12.3 Basic issues for focus groups 2.12.4 Resources you might create 2.12.5 Method, logistics 2.12.6 Moderator skills 2.12.7 Facilities 2.12.8 Group dynamics 2.12.9 Hints 2.12.10 Problems in focus groups 2.12.11 Activities for children 3 January 29 : Encoding/ Decoding 3.1 Syllabus changes 3.2 Focus group 3.2.1 Measuring intonation 3.2.2 Transcription note-taking style 3.2.3 To do 3.3 Political implications of various methodologies 3.4 Disciplinary convention 3.5 Types of discourse analysis 3.5.1 Critical discourse analysis 3.5.2 Thematic analysis 3.5.3 Conversation analysis 3.5.4 = Content analysis 3.5.5 Sonya Livingstone working across many many data sets 3.6 Four basic principles of Content Analysis (VISE) 3.6.1 Systematic content analysis 3.6.2 Units of content 3.7 Publishing 3.7.1 Articles 3.7.2 Books 3.7.3 Blogs, journalism 4 5 Feb, Case study, Grounded theory 4.1 Generalizability 4.1.1 Theory level 4.2 Grounded theory 4.2.1 Questions of context 4.2.2 "Waste of time"? 4.2.3 In practice 4.2.4 GT in social justice work 4.2.5 GT and quantitative work 4.3 "Real" research 4.4 Causality in case study/ qualitative 4.4.1 Areas of qualitative work 5 5 Mar 2010 5.1 Article selection 5.2 Take-home final exam 5.3 Anthro in comm 5.4 Why these readings? 5.5 Geertz 5.6 Role of theory 5.7 Theory will be replaced over time 5.8 Process, product 5.9 Storytelling and narrative in ethnography 5.10 "Successful" v "good" ethnography 5.11 Choosing sites 5.12 Reflexivity 5.13 Ideology 5.14 Ethnography and new technologies 5.15 Generalization 5.16 Coding exercise 5.16.1 Example coding frames: Work/life balance 5.17 Jump offs 6 26 March 2010, reporting on qualitative articles 6.1 Scenario planning as a method, Sandi 6.1.1 Process 6.1.2 Challenges 6.1.3 Strengths 6.2 Life stories, Neta 6.3 Alternatives for 'alternative', Ritesh 6.4 Self-presentation in online dating, Li 6.4.1 Theoretical sampling 6.5 Collaborative inquiry, Jackie 6.5.1 Process 6.5.2 Categories of knowledge developed 6.6 Grounded research on organizations, Andrew 6.7 Rhetorical criticism of visual texts, Shoko 6.8 Multi-site ethnography, Elisheva 6.8.1 Example studies 6.8.2 Strengths 6.8.3 Weaknesses 7 2 April 2010 more method presentations 7.1 Q methodology, Poong 7.1.1 Origins 7.1.2 First step 7.1.3 'R' and 'Q' methodology 7.1.4 How to conduct Q? 7.1.5 Relations to other qual methods 7.2 Fragmented narrative & bricolage as interpretive method, Ben 7.2.1 Evocation 7.2.2 Example: Go ugly early 7.3 Qualitative interviewing in internet studies, Jove 7.3.1 Contextual naturalness 7.3.2 Scheduling 7.3.2.1 Sync 7.3.2.2 Async 7.3.3 Recording quality 7.3.4 Non-verbal? 7.3.5 Virtual world? 7.3.6 Crossing media? 7.4 Narrative structure, Francesca 7.4.1 Narrative structure 7.4.2 Application to inner city storytellers 7.4.3 Benefits 7.4.4 Drawbacks 7.5 Brand gestalt, Stylés 7.6 Microhistory, Lana 7.6.1 Polyvocality 7.6.2 Example, a battle === 7.6.3 Not seeking representative sample 7.6.4 Not biographical 7.7 Concept mapping, Minhee 7.7.1 Six steps of Concept Mapping 7.7.2 Weaknesses 7.7.3 Strengths 7.8 Ethnography in community-based research, Zheng 7.8.1 Example 1, Gender, Migration, HIV risk among Mexicans 7.8.2 Challenges 7.8.3 References 7.9 The ethnographic revisit, Ray 7.9.1 Goals 7.9.2 Types of focused revisits 7.9.3 Applications? 8 9 Apr, Materiality 8.1 Photovoice, Nan 8.1.1 Lit 8.1.2 Yunnan 8.1.3 Training 8.1.4 Participatory analysis 8.1.5 SHOWeD 8.1.6 Strengths 8.1.7 Questions 8.2 Discussing Foucault and responsibility 8.3 Writing for "users" 8.4 Ambiguity 9 16 April, Global ethnography 9.1 Operationalization 9.2 Affordances of diff comm tech 9.3 Intersectionality, Crenshaw 9.4 ____town 9.5 Communication / Linguistics 9.6 Who is in and out of a research 9.7 Rationality bias 9.8 Trying to avoid Eurocentric biases (Miike) 9.8.1 Biases and characteristics 9.8.2 "[Asian communication] we reduce our selfishness and egocentrism" 9.9 Giddens 9.10 Jump offs 10 Apr 23, Internet 10.1 Housekeeping 10.2 Final exam 10.3 Final process 10.4 Line-editing 10.5 Temporality 10.5.1 Bio, physio feedback 10.6 Archives 10.6.1 Twitter experiences 10.6.2 Norms 10.6.3 Ethnics and archives 10.6.4 Genealogy 10.7 Privacy 10.8 Ethical matrix 10.9 Web spheres 10.9.1 Problem with stability metaphor 10.10 "Traces" 10.11 Is Bruckman too cautious? 10.12 Sense-making activity 11 Apr 30, Last day! 11.1 Neta, Minhee, intl student groups calling home 11.2 Sandi, How do businesses (creatively) react to turbulence in the marketplace? 11.3 Li, Homophily in couchsurfing.com 11.4 Ray, Anonymous 11.5 Andrew, problematic internet encounters + addiction 11.6 Jove, romance and SMS among chinese college students

Week 1, 13 Jan 2010

Quirks of Comm as a discipline

"What was good wasn't original and what was original wasn't good." - music critic aphorism

Academia gripped by "cult of originality"

• Likelihood of writing something that hasn't been thought about before approaches zero.

Short-term disciplinary memory

• Two generations maxes out
• Benefit of short-term, easier professionally?

Knowledge in Communication is never settled

• Instability in relation to cultural characteristics
• Changes in one area have effects elsewhere

Mass comm emerged in response and alongside TV

• Literature was often a bit "too late"
• Missed opportunities for before-after study

How to avoid "catch-up" situation

• Originality is not likely because of centuries of study
• Circumstances in constant change, need for reconsideration
• Become embedded in whichever field/platform you consider
  • Entering the professional dialog via journals + history

Nothing never happens

Communication is always activity

• Always "giving off information"
• Always multi-modal
• Carey's ritual communication
• "Playing by the rules" (re: Goffman) to signal membership in a group

Biological factors

Centuries of evolutionary development

• Under very very different techno-social circumstances
• How might our biological makeup lag(?)

Until recently,

• Ppl lived in small f2f communities
• Rural, villages?
• Even well into the 20th
• Hardly ever saw a stranger

How are we like other species?

• Adapting midstream by modifying the environment (techne, tool-use)
• Evolution is not the same for humans as in other species
• Socio-biology occasionally lacks attention to this distinction

Ned Hall

Trained Anthropologist

• Hired by State Dept in the 1940s
• Wrote booklets for Americans traveling to other countries
• Trying to help people adapt and apprehend

Anthropology influenced by linguists

• Challenges of working in a non-native language

Proximics

• Personal space "bubble"
• Hall produced a handbook of proximic research
• Expectation for frontal space greater than back or side

Space

Spacial circumstances in which we live

• Matter of communication
• "Single best indicator of an important social phenomenon"

Space is

• Indicator of class, status
• Locus of regulation

Robert Summer, Personal Space

Social norms

"Unarticulated" within organizations

• Transparent
• Learned through experience (personal or secondary)
• Also plausibly deniable

Time

Measure of experience

• Punctuality and control, regulation
• Dispersal of timing technology
• 24 hour system
• Primary

Carey on newspaper

Newspaper as ritual

• Compares it to mass attendance
• Content may be unknown
• But form is expected, a given
• Participation
  • Is it illusory?

Why does the commercial newsmedia exist?

• At one time it was profitable
• News media sells audiences to advertisers
• One of many services that exists to connect hopeful advertisers to audiences

Gross on multimodal education

Modes/codes

• Dependence on lexical modes
• Even mathematical mode is not expected
  • Socially acceptable to be "illnumerate"
• Likewise rendering/drawing abilities

Pass/fail approach to non linguistic/ gestural modalities

• e.g. "I suck at math"
• e.g. "I can't sing/draw to save my life"
• Adults quickly identify students according to "talent"

Week 2, Audience studies, 22 January 2010

Investigating qual / quant distinction

• Zheng, what is "abstract" about qualitative work?
  • In what sense are common quantitative not abstract?
• Questions of "rigor"?
  • Is "rigor" tied to reproducibility?
  • Can we reduce qualitative work?
• Seeking the "taken for granted" in everyday lived experience
• What kind of knowledge statements might be produced from various methods?
  • Methods linked to outcomes?
• Various axes on which methods might be placed:
  • Breadth, depth
  • Causality, correlation
  • Time

Qualitative work as a pilot for a larger quantitative study

• Power imbalance, hierarchy
• Quantitative approach a "reduction" of the qualitative findings
• Why not an on-going investigation?

What is your variable doing right now?

• What are the relationships among variables?
• What is a variable in qualitative works?
  • Not only is the variable change but "it can talk back"
  • Can you use the word "variable"?
  • "Heuristic exercises" for qual researchers
    • Are themes, questions, variables the same?
• Variables are constructs, constructions
  • Dependent on the context
• What is significance in qual setting?

Breadth, depth

Consider racism

• Study of a racism in a single community
• In a family
• Across a state
• Among states
• What kinds of outcomes will we find?
• What kinds of future studies do the various outcomes enable?
• Different kinds of complexity acroos methods

Reproducibility

Two levels:

• Is the method reproducible?
• Is the outcome reproducible?
• Reproducible quantitative method means that the same parameters produce the same outcomes
  • Assumes a single reality
• Reproducible qualitative method means asking the same questions of the same people
  • But will you get the same outcomes?
  • Gray: same person under diff circumstances will return a different answer
  • One type of reliability: sense-making among scholars and participants?

Ray's adaptation of boy scout backwoods rule:

• "Leave the research site better than you found it."

Conventions among quantitative research methods

Content analysis reliability is about agreement

• If the rules are clear, you will have agreement among multiple coders
• Coding scheme can take over
  • Difficult to reproduce characteristics may be included as details, context rather than part of scheme

Network analysis has similar conventions

• Certain post-hoc tests
• What is the convention use in your discipline for your data?
  • May be a battery of tests
• In some cases, you might speculate
  • "One of two things is happening..."

Bias

• Quantitative methods tend to remove bias
• Qualitative methods tend to acknowledge, investigate bias

Generalizability

• Explicit goal of quantitative work
• How does this occur in qualitative reseach?
  • Theory building?
  • e.g. "recursive public" in Two Bits

Funding

• How do funding structures link to different methods/outcomes?
• Can you get a funding for ethnography? (PR says Yes.)

Anthropology

• Is the multi-year participant observation a sustainable life model?
• Professors are regularly "in the field" for years at a time
  • Students hardly see the faculty for this reason
• One reason for the long time frame is the challenge of learning a language

Role of the researcher

Researcher cannot escape his role as participant

• Reflexivity
• Pedagogy
• More active, perilous
• Revealing ones stakes, one's identity

Autobiographical information

• Marie Gillespie, teacher/researcher
• Valerie Walkerdine,

Role of the informant

Highly variable from study to study:

• "Ins" to give access to researcher
• Social capital
• Various roles:
  • Guide
  • Sponsor
  • Gatekeeper
  • "Friend"?
• Reader and writers need to make ethical assessment

Americans are "nonplussed", if not repelled by...

• Whistle blower
• Informant
• Spy
• Undercover agent

What is the ethical implications?

• What will IRB allow?

The "so what" question: Is it "important"?

• Is research important merely because it is interesting?
  • Or does important require progress, change, or improvement?
• What is our standard?
• What counts?
• How do you decide which projects to take up?
  • "Life is short."

Focus groups

See Powerpoint on Blackboard

Traditional focus group

Size

• 6 to 12 people at a time
  • Smaller groups, tough to get conversation going
  • Bigger than 12 can be frustrating, difficult to get a word in
  • Bigger is difficult for moderator, recorder: cacophony

Group make up

• Relatively homogeneous groups
  • When ppl feel like the others are similar, they won't feel judged
  • Will increase likelihood of participation
  • e.g., women with women
• Multiple, heterogeneous groups
  • Researcher looking for subtle issue, tension to arise
  • Often used in educational research
  • If you desire a pedagogical experience
  • Find common experiences among people who think they have nothing in common

Dynamics

• As important as content
• Beyond personality
  • Interruption
  • Body language
  • Non-verbal cues
  • Annoyance
  • Withdrawal
  • Frequency of speech
  • Silencing
  • Domination

Moderation

• Be careful not to bias
  • Leading questions
  • Biasing respondents

Timing

• Stick to topic guide
• Leave plenty of time for interaction
• PR rule of thumb (2 hours):
  • One overarching question
  • Five probing questions

Technology

• The researcher MUST disclose
• Intrusive, cam + tripod
• Less intrusive, Laptop cam, small wall-mounted cam

Common focus group goal

• Lean and understand what people have to say and why
  • How do they "feel"?
  • How it fits into their lives, emotionally + materially
    • Emotional questions may take more time
• Alone or part of a project
  • Clarify issues, findings from survey research

Basic issues for focus groups

Info-rich participants

• How many groups, peoples?
• Anticipating difficult group dynamics

Discussion guide, outline

• Ground rules
• Agenda
• Including logical forks if necessary
• "Fallback positions"
• Guiding questions pre-written

Qualified moderator

• Study videos of experienced moderators
• Controlling the flow of conversation
  • Establishign norms
  • Structure
  • Redirection
• Stimulating discussion
• Credibility
  • People lose interest, investment if the study seems "low-rent"

Analysis, report

Resources you might create

Most of this ought to be shared with IRB

• Recruiting tools
  • Avoiding coersion
• Moderator, note-taker
  • Video taping
  • Audio tape
  • Written notes
  • Might put it visually on a flip chart
    • Everyone can see it
    • Keeps history, gives people a tool to refer to
  • Possible to hire pro moderators ($$)
• Prepped questions
• Participant demographic tally sheet
• Data-handling guidelines
• Participant thank you letter
• Incentives?
  • Key IRB issue
  • Bias
  • Coersion
  • Opinions differ across institutions

Method, logistics

Sampling and turnout

• Over-sample to assure turnout
  • Want 10? Confirm 12.
• Over-communicate the date
  • Letters, phone call (night before), email

Determine data-analytic technique

• What technologies will you need to gather the data you need?
• Multiple cameras?

Report to participants

• What exactly will they get?
• What will it look like?
• This will determine how you describe the study upfront!

Moderator skills

Basics

• Listener
• Quick content absorbtion
• Gauge personalities

Neither an expert nor naive

Explain the big picture

• Contextualize the data
• Why are we here?
• Why is this a valuable way to spend time?

In practice

• Give yourself 10 minutes to open it up
  • If it doesn't happen, introduce new structures
• If something amazing happens, let it flow
  • Don't be too strongly wedded to the guidebook
  • Make a change on the fly
  • Make time for this new topic
• If it seems like you're running out of time, what to do?
  • Ask participants if you add 10 minutes
  • Make staying late optional

Facilities

Atmosphere

• Comfortable (church rec room)
• Experimental (2-way mirrors)
• Common (office conf room)

Taping set up

• Video often done with 2-way mirrors
• Test acoustics for audio
  • Might need multiple (as many as for mics)
• Be sure to mic the moderator for precision
  • Speak NAMES often to help with transcription

Preparing a team

• You need to do a run-through/training with the WHOLE TEAM
  • If someone can't do practice, they can't participate
• Be SURE that there is water, tissues.
• Pens, paper for people to use

Group dynamics

Introductions

• First names
• Avoid job talk, other specifics
• State your purpose, position
• Encourage participation, state norms
• Ice breaker

Permission to tape

• Must be (re-stated)
• Must have taped acknowledgement

Confidentiality/anonymity

• Summary of group, not individuals

Hints

Write-downs

• Introverts AND extroverts can benefit
• Note-cards

Problems in focus groups

Dead subjects

• No responses
• Project, "What kind of person might...?"

Lively subjects

• Everyone talking over each other
• Take charge, promise more time
• Suggest structures to get everyone hard

Confusion

• Reframe
• Rethink
• Break it down
• "What if...?"

Talkative

• Leverage the energy
• Ask rest of the group to respond to talkative
• Suggest structures

Reticent

• Do they have no opinions/knowledge?
• Or are they holding back?
• Reinforce the value of their responses
• Probe short answers with open ended questions
  • "Tell me more about ..."
  • "That's interesting. Why do you feel ...?"

Activities for children

Manipulatives, tools

• Post-its
• Construction paper
• Glue

Activities

• Engage their bodies
• Moving around the room
• Playing games

Games

• Analogies
• Sentence completion
• List making
• Ranking

January 29 : Encoding/ Decoding

Syllabus changes

• Next week, do the

Focus group

Goal: approx ~10 min to transcribe

• Need to get multiple people talking
• Run each group twice (~40-45 minutes)
  • Two topics each
• Two people moderating each time
• One person responsible for
  • Note-taking
  • Technology
• Rest of people are respondents
  • Some are "ringers", prepped with special roles
• Transcripts witll be discussed and worked on in class

Topics:

• Pop media in our lives
  • Oscars
  • Reality TV
• PhD program
  • Work/life balance
  • Time management
  • Performance enhancing drugs
  • Finances

Qualitative data analysis software:

• ATLAS/ti, http://www.atlasti.com/
• Best content analysis programs
• Flexible
  • Importing, outputing data
• Tagging along numerous lens
  • Cloud paradigm
• Often used in concert with Excel, hand coding, or another more common tool
• Competitor (formerly known as) NUDIST
  • NVivo, http://www.qsrinternational.com//products_nvivo.aspx

Measuring intonation

• "Hardcore" analysis includes inflection, etc.
• Vocalization approximation: "um", "ah"

Transcription note-taking style

3 columns:

• LEFT: speaker, date, place
  • Speaker keeps changing
• CENTER: transcription
• RIGHT: notes
  • Attempt to interpret pauses
    • e.g., "confusion"
    • if you use abbrev, be sure to provide translation!

To do

• Await email regarding group assignment
• Book time at the ELC
• Assess needed equipment
  • Equipment check-out station on 1st floor

Political implications of various methodologies

Can a methodology be political neutral?

• Certainly some (esp natural scientists) believe that they can
• Can any science be "apolitical"?

Why is communication "tarred" with being socially, politically active?

• Sometimes the political stakes are explicit
  • e.g., thematic studies, participatory research
  • (Side note: participatory research in business: leaders have to get feedback before they make decisions. Research by the power structure.)

Disciplinary convention

Confidence intervals, alpha levels

• p = .05 was chosen because of computation tables.
• Converse challenge: sometimes using SPSS makes it hard to know what a given result means
  • Riley usually insists people learn to compute by hand
• Conventions of quantitative methods tend to transfer across methods
  • But discourse analysis tends to be more reliant on theoretical regimes

Theoretical approaches have their own set of conventions

• Postmodern discourse analysis
• Seeking contradictions
• Global view: nation-states are a modern invention
• Seeking "dialectical tensions"
  • Setting up a dichotomy
  • e.g., "feminist" v. "masculinist"/"positivist"

"Content analysis" can mean many (divergent) things

• Need to look to citations

Types of discourse analysis

"Discourse analysis" v "critical discourse analysis"

• Critical incorporates social critique
• e.g., Horkheimer, Adorno
• Critical doesn't take things at face value
  • Notions of "false consciousness"

Across approaches

• Combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies

Critical discourse analysis

Four characteristics

• One has a "critical eye"
  • Concerns about the world embodied in analysis
• Disciplinary issues
  • All interactions seen thru the filter of mediated activity
• Not assuming that people mean/know what they say
• Language carries "disciplinary power" (Foucault)
  • Politicizes the methodology

Bringing theory into the analysis

• Returning to theory ante, during, post analysis

Thematic analysis

• What is said
  • Not how it is said
  • Not why it is said
• Very different from discourse analysis
• (Side note: common error in journal articles. People say they are doing thematic analyses but the actual work is not concerned centrally with theme.)

Why does Foucault, and post-Foucault analysis tend toward thematic?

• Situations are changing thematically over time
• Historical: discourse as markers of social change and understanding
• Also Aristotle and topoi

Games research also often thematic

• Though it is occasionally called "discourse analysis"
• People spending a lot of time gaming
  • What themes emerge?

Conversation analysis

• Almost always associated with power
  • Inherent power relations in conversations
  • Most conversation is not among equals
• Assumption that a conversation is goal-driven
• Not all conversations are equally engaged
  • Need linguistic measures to assess engagement, attention
• Categories are often thematically related
  • But not discourse forms
  • Not about how lovely the metaphor
  • But how the metaphor fit to a particular content area
• Combination of quant / qual methods
  • Meta-analysis tends to be a quant procedure (Hunter)
    • Specific statistical procedure
    • Working across a body of literature with quantitative results
    • What can we learn across broad categories?
  • Otherwise, it's possible to do a "meta-analysis" thematically

= Content analysis

History:

• Designed to analyze news media
• Had to handle large amounts of stuff
• In contrast to ethnography (Geertz style)
  • Ethnography has massive amounts of data but is rooted in a specific location
  • Ethnographers use content analysis as a secondary method with artifacts of field work
  • Going to pick up this discussion later on Geertz day

Systematic way to do

• Mostly thematic analysis
• Discourse analysis
• Visual analysis

Strengths

• Large scale
• Multiple approaches simultaneously
• Large data sets
• Over time
• Content analysis coding schemes can be used in interviews

Checking yourself

• Don't lose the nuance that come from "thicker description"

Sonya Livingstone working across many many data sets

• Traditionally cultural studies, Hall, Foucalt
• How do you not lose that "thick description" when working with thousands of data points?
  • How do you stay "additive"?
  • Moving back from the large scale analysis to the details
• http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/soniaLivingstone.htm

Four basic principles of Content Analysis (VISE)

Many approaches to textual analysis

Systematic content or visual analysis

• Visualization: use adequate tools for handling data and stay focused on the data
• Integration: bundle all relevatn data nd interpretations into one unique project- the Hermeneutic Unit
• Serendipity: make relevant discoveries without searching
• Exploration: traverse the interpretive threads among data, codes, and memos

Systematic content analysis

MUST HAVE replicability

• Multiple coders
• Inter-coder reliability
  • Krippendorff's alpha (at Annenberg)
    • http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/dogs.html
    • http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/ahayes/spss%20programs/kalpha.htm
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krippendorff%27s_Alpha
  • Alternative: Scott's pi
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott%27s_Pi
• Unitization aproach
  • Unitize through a process with good inter-coder reliability on themes and tags

Units of content

Some unitization is easy

• But must be appropriate to the material
• e.g., paragraphs of vastly different lengths in journalism v. fiction

Examples

• Conversational turn
• Sentence
• Subject area
• Paragraph
• TV show
• News article
• Website
• Post in a forum thread

Publishing

Articles

• Rhetoritician
• Quantitative mass comm

Books

• Cultural studies

Blogs, journalism

"You are young. You have to do certain kinds of research to get a job and keep a job. You have the rest of your life to do what you want."

• If you write too many articles, blog posts, people will fuss
  • "Why weren't writing a grant proposal or revising your conference paper?"
• "Will this change over time? Absolutely."
• But self-published and not peer-reviewed

5 Feb, Case study, Grounded theory

Generalizability

• Need a case be representative
• What is the value of a unique case?
• Is the goal of qual "theoretical generalization"?
• Where as quant is generalizable to a population?

• Is generalization generally important?
• Is non-generalizable theory an oxymoron?

Theory level

• Level 3:
• Level 2: Move across elements context
• Level 1: Embedded in a single phenomenon

Grounded theory

Strauss / Glazer

• How is it like ethnographic methodology?
• GT connected to social change + quantitative theories
  • Quant seen as not respecting the people as individuals
  • Data disassociated from the people they represent
• Globalization in the 60s (moon landing, satellites, etc)
  • GT literally about bringing back to the ground
  • At the time, case studies used pre-existing theory almost exclusively
• GT is a rhetorical argument for giving up older theory
  • Pushing for change

Why did Strauss move away?

• Collaborating with Cook, Corbin
• They didn't want to lose the possibility of doing meta work

Questions of context

• Classic GT less concerned with context
• More on abstract
• Newer GT incorporates more context

"Waste of time"?

• Outsider view
• Unusual approach
• Not "Clouding the mind" with previous work
• Jove: "keep minds open... not necessarily empty"

In practice

Olson, et al. (2007). Entrapping the innocent: Toward a theory of child sexual predators' luring communication. Communication Theory, 17: 231-251.

• Working in ignored areas of theory
• Trying to read materials from other disciplines through comm perspective
• Using secondary materials
  • Rules exist for this: historiography
  • But their GT approach loses these rules
• Why did they use GT?
  • Because they like how it moves across categories
  • But did better approaches exist?
• Was GT designed for this kind of data?
  • No. GT expects "live" data, changing, moving
  • No. GT is data-driven. In this case, the data is packaged with theory.

GT in social justice work

• Importance of process social justice
• That GT centers process, is it better suited to social justice projects?

GT and quantitative work

• How might quantitative study be incorporated into a GT project?
• Are the core premises of GT and quant work incompatible?
• Simply because a study is identified as "qualitative", it should not exclude other types of data
• Thinking qualitatively about and through quantitative
  • Laughing with, laughing at

"Real" research

• Learning about the subject
• Learning about the process
• Publishing, where, how, for whom
• Funding models
• Is there such a thing as informal or practice study?
  • Especially problematic with ethnographic
  • Pilot...
  • Discursive moves with the term "practice"

Causality in case study/ qualitative

• There is only one single case
  • No correlations
  • No casual relationship?
• Is there a time series analysis inherent in living people/communities?
• Thinking statistics as a type of argument for causality?
  • What other types of arguments might be made?
  • Reported, mythological, cultural understandings of cause?
  • Validating the narratives of groups outside of the research
• Differing understandings of variable, variance, causality, relationship

Areas of qualitative work

Causality/correlation as guiding principle

• neo positivists

Not seeking causality but relationships

• interpretivists
• critical theoristists
• post structuralists

5 Mar 2010

Article selection

• Pick an article
• Looking at how some method is deployed
  • e.g. Theater for distributing HIV/AIDS health info in Africa
  • e.g. Discussion of flip cam usage
• Critique, costs, benefits, opportunities
• Be sure that it is
  • Qualitative
  • Unique in class
• Literature review
  • Embedded in a tradition

Take-home final exam

• 3 or 4 scenarios to choose from
• We create a research strategy
• Set timer, 2 hours time limit
  • no war and peace

Anthro in comm

• Less lengthy engagement
• Tendency to work in more familiar communities
  • Making the familiar strange
• Acknowledging stakes
• Generalizability
  • Is it a goal? Different goal?
• Role of prior knowledge?

Why these readings?

• Geertz, Clifford, Marcus, Fischer
• Established the standards and core
• Used all over COMM and elsewhere when people get ethnographic

Geertz

• Start with guesses
• Turn them into interpretations
• Overtime, your process of guessing/interpreting adhere
• Filling in gaps, cracks, discontinuities of comprehension
• But it is never complete
• Always misinterpretation, evolution, changes

Role of theory

• Theory is instrumental
• Not the end or product
• Theory should help you understand what's going on in the field

Theory will be replaced over time

e.g. "fear of failure"

• Women do worse in class because they feel worse about their errors
• Was popular when Riley was in grad school but not sustained
  • Riley mostly in comp sci, stats classes
• Reflecting the context and historical moment
  • Very few women in higher ed (especially certain fields)
  • Observations, etc. were conducted among sophmore undergrads
• Today, repeating the experiments, we'd not find the same results
  • "It worked at that particular time"
  • Theory was not wrong in context
• Wrong were people who believed "fear of failure" to be innate, biological, natural

"Theories are timebound when they are about society ... not so true about math."

Process, product

• More agreement about the procedure than the product
• Various writing, filmmaking, documentary
  • Commercial production?
• Is it possible to share ethnographic data?

Storytelling and narrative in ethnography

"Thick description"

• Clearly writing is a critical component of Geertzian ethnography
• How does this square with the social science convention of "giving away the ending"?

Contrasting with journalism?

• Greater emphasis on context

"Successful" v "good" ethnography

• Competence means one thing
• But mere "success" is not enough necessarily to get crit mass of readers

Choosing sites

• Personal investment
• Must a site begin with some individual curiosity

Reflexivity

• How central is it to your work?
• Is there too much reflexivity?
• If you are writing ethnography, you are never an insider.
  • You may have had insider access or history but you are not an insider

Ideology

• Agenda: emancipation of the subaltern
• Unlike traditional anthro agendas: understand colonies
  • Researchers not necessarily selecting sites for their personal pleasure

Ethnography and new technologies

• Changes enabled and inspired by online technologies
• What is the role of space/place/net/games/mmo in these changes?
• Can you do ethnography "in" a virtual space?
  • Not so much to do ethnography "in" a telephone?
  • "In" a party line?
• Early party line research written under pseudonyms

Generalization

• How do researchers move from one ethnography to another?
• How do the things we learn in one environment transfer, move, or inform another?
• What kinds of generalization are possible? At what levels?
  • Any assertion about a group of people is a generalization
  • Where do you stop?
• When people say "generalization"? To what do they refer?
  • Sampling errors?

Coding exercise

Need to review related literature

• Use it to inform the categories you're coding for

Multiply coding?

• Distinction coding schemes
• Layers
• Enables frame comparison, frame analysis

Unitizing

• Is this one sentence or two?
• Important to train coders about unitizing to ensure reliability

Example coding frames: Work/life balance

Capacity

• Can do it
• Don't know
• Can't do it

Emotional control

• How do people talk about it?
• Dismissive
• Gravitas

Topical time elements

• Time on work
• Time on family

Specific issues

• Personal control
• External control
• Discipline w/r/t schedule

Meta-interpretations

Jump offs

• Bruner, Jerome
• Matt Hills, rants about autoethnography
• Whyte, Street corner society
• Miller and Slater, Virtual ethnography, from Christine Hynde book
• Bahktin
• Sand people in northern New Mexico, constantly revising knowledge, erasing the past

26 March 2010, reporting on qualitative articles

Scenario planning as a method, Sandi

• Not a futures method, not a blueprint
• Developing plausible scenarios and tactics for addressing them
• Shell has been using scenario planning since 70s
  • Both used as research and PR

Process

• Scope
• Stakeholders
• Trends
• Uncertainties
• Initial themes
• Consistentcy and plausibility
• Learning scenarios
• Areas for research
• Quantitative modeling
• Evolve toward decision scenarios

Challenges

• Lacks strong theoretical foundation
• Tool v method
• Potential for bias, conflicts of interest

Strengths

• Useful as strategic tool
• Theory is being developed now
  • Narrative theory
  • Sensemaking
  • Organizational learning
  • Community issues

Life stories, Neta

• Charlotte Linden, coherence in life stories, professional narratives
• Life story as a social unit
  • Based on interviews
• Coherence on life stories is a personal as well as social demand
  • Adequate causality
  • Creating continuity, managing discontinuity
    • Meta-continuity, parts make up a whole
    • Strategies apparent break, self distancing, etc
• Definition of "life story" as a life-long process as compared with the version of a life story told in the interview
• Linden pays limited attention to the context of the interview

Alternatives for 'alternative', Ritesh

• Caldwell
• "Reconsider the concept of 'alternative media'"
• Working with Mixtecos de Oaxaca working in Escondido
  • 6 years of ethno
  • 4 film products
• Moving from "academic to lived" concerns
• Not hybridity but abutment of clashing cultures
  • 14-yr old living in hut, attacked by gangs
  • Legoland built near kid's camp
  • Such stories transformed the research question/concern
• Cautions against researchers trapped by search for "resistance"?
  • How do you not "go native"? Becoming part of "racialized status quo"

Self-presentation in online dating, Li

• Ellison, Heino, Gibbs (2006) "Managing impressions online, JCMC
• Importance of small cues
• Balancing accuracy and desirability in self-presentation
• Lies v ideal
• Establishing credibility

Theoretical sampling

• 34 in-depth telephone inteviews
• Coding via used Atlas.ti
• New issues direct future sampling
  • Related to grounded theory

Collaborative inquiry, Jackie

• Peter Reason, 1999
• Blurring subject and researcher into a blended "inquiry group"

Process

1. People assembled, common area of interest
2. Agree on set of actions, recording behaviors
3. Immersion in the experience
4. Re-assemble, re-consider questions in light of experience
5. Repeat numerous times ("6-10")

Categories of knowledge developed

• Experiential, first person
• Presentational, narrative
• Propositional, theory
• Practical, skill

Grounded research on organizations, Andrew

• https://prezi.com/secure/?lock=9f8dcdc18fabe031d38c75224a2b4dfbcaa79ace&utm_source=share&utm_campaign=shareprezi&utm_medium=email
• Ullman, S. E. & Townsend, S. () "". Violence Against Women.

Rhetorical criticism of visual texts, Shoko

• Palczewski, C. H. (2005) "The male madonna and the feminine uncle same: Visual argument, icons, and ideographs in 1909 anti-woman suffrage postcards. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 91:4, pp. 365-394.

• Rationalize your choice of texts
• Need not be contemporary
• Michael Calvin McGee
  • Seek popular artifacts
• Sometimes arguments are located in visual texts
• Author frequently justifying the choice of postcards

Multi-site ethnography, Elisheva

• Hannerz (2003), "ethnography is an art of the possible"
  • Oppositional piece to the traditional comparative approach
• Marcus, 1995
• Gloablization demands multi-site, "trans-local" ethnography
• Longer in duration
  • Could be 20 years or more!
  • Hard to know when you are "done"
• Each is less thick/deep
• Not about immersion
• Many different types of data
• Loss of subaltern?
  • "More horizontal", tends to be surface

Example studies

• Migration studies
• Foreign correspondents
  • Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Tokyo
  • Product of reporters is accessible even when researcher is not in same city
• Apple computer
  • Corporate culture across geographic sites
• Ballet
• Missionaries
• Sushi production
• Fortun, K. (2001) Advocacy after bhopal, http://www.amazon.com/Advocacy-after-Bhopal-Environmentalism-Disaster/dp/0226257207

Strengths

• Not bound by space
• Flexible
• Dealing w complexity and multi-sited phenomena

Weaknesses

• Not holistic
• No immersion
• Inattention to process
• Fuzzy
• How does one select the sites?
  • "Sampling" biases

2 April 2010 more method presentations

Q methodology, Poong

"Is the class half empty or half full?"

• No objective way to measure the disagreement space
• Q methodology attempts to address this subjective human interest
• "typically qualitative" (Watts & Stenner, 2005, p. 70)
• "primarily quantitiative" (P. Riley)

Origins

• William Stephenson
  • Background in Physics, Psychology, Statistics
  • Trying to bring Spearman's p rank-order correlation into human subjectivity
  • Student of Spearman
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_rank_correlation_coefficient

First step

• Looking at relationships between individuals
  • Rather than between variables

'R' and 'Q' methodology

• R
  • Objective
  • People have been measured by tests
  • e.g. bodily measurements, length of arm
• Q
  • Tests are measured by individuals
  • Person actively does something
  • e.g. personal significance, importance of eye

How to conduct Q?

• Preparation
  • Q-set, set of statements representation a broad diversity of opinions on the phenom under investigation
• Q-sorting
  • Participants respond according to agree/disagree
• Post-sorting interview
  • Participants are asked to comment on the statements, sorting
  • Interview
• Q-pattern analysis
  • Inverted factor analysis
  • Violating statistical conventions

Relations to other qual methods

• Social discourse
• Sense-making activities (q-sorting)
• "Launch pad" to further investigation (Brown, 1980)
  • Follow-up in-depth interviews, focus groups

Fragmented narrative & bricolage as interpretive method, Ben

• Goal: not to find truth but to convey a situation

Evocation

• Restructure experience
• Reassimilate, to reintegrate
• Different kind of results

Example: Go ugly early

• Markham. (2005) "Go ugly early." Qualitiative Inquiry, 11(6), pp. 813.
  • Unusual article construction
  • "Inspirational quotations" in the middle
  • Emsphasizing the reader's experience
  • "They can feel it"
  • "Gut level"
  • Goal is not to be right but to inspire a certain affect
    • Feelings traditionally thought untrustworthy
    • What affect or feeling is implicit?
  • Is it important to convey ambiguity?

Qualitative interviewing in internet studies, Jove

• (Kazmer & Xie, 2008)
• Trade offs associated with media selection
• Email, IM + f2f, phone

Contextual naturalness

• Asynchronous?
• If research concerns an internet activity,
  • Interview should take place in a place where people can use the language of that activity

Scheduling

Sync

• Timezone, scheduling conflicts

Async

• Scheduling easier
• But greater attrition

Recording quality

• F2f, more aware of "noises"
• Mediated interviews have less recorded noise
  • But more automated documentation
  • But interviewees may share transcripts with each other
  • Should be pointed out during informed consent

Non-verbal?

• Sharing images, videos
• Playing games together
• Emoticons

Virtual world?

• Organizing visual cues
• Gestural

Crossing media?

• Starting in game
• Moving to IM or email

Narrative structure, Francesca

• (Labov & Waletzky, 1967, pp. 12-44)
• No participants had high school diplomas
• 600 interivews and observed "primary group" narratives
• "Danger of death" prompt
  • Prompted to think of a time when they thought that they might die

Narrative structure

• Abstract
• Orientation
• Complicating actions
• Evaluation - "so what?"
• Result
• Coda - precludes "what happens next?"

Application to inner city storytellers

• Demonstrating the narrative sophsitication of less educated storytellers

Benefits

• Mapping techniques
• Vocabulary

Drawbacks

• Requires complementary methodologies
• Dealing with exceptions

Brand gestalt, Stylés

• 3-year multi-method project
  • Investigating the American Girl brand
• Seeking interactions among observations

Microhistory, Lana

• Ginzburg, C. () The cheese and the worms.

Polyvocality

Ginzburg inspired by Tolstoy: To understand history, one must understand the experience of every single person who might have been party to the event.

Example, a battle ===

• No one person could have experienced
  • On-the-ground fight
  • Strategy
  • Historical impact
• Cinematic metaphora
  • Very local
  • Zooming out to the long shot

Not seeking representative sample

• Not generalizable
• Method that makes room for understanding the ordinary, everyday
  • History has tended to emphasize and record the extraordinary

Not biographical

• Looking for the "anomalous" not the "analogous"

Concept mapping, Minhee

• (Trochim, 1985)
• International Journal of Qualitative Methods

Six steps of Concept Mapping

• Preparation
• Generation
• Structuring
• Representation
  • Data entered into statistical software
  • Yields visual representation
• Interpretation
  • Facilitator helps group interpret, make use of software output
• Utilization

Weaknesses

• Low number of participants
• Problem if people are not inclined to visual thinking

Strengths

• Reflective opportunity for participants
• Creative means of engagement for researcher and participants
• Produce prompts for further qualitative inquiry

Ethnography in community-based research, Zheng

• Community-based participatory research (CBPR)
  • Academically rigorous
  • Socially responsive

Example 1, Gender, Migration, HIV risk among Mexicans

• Team includes community members, staff from community org, academics
• 1. Project proposal developed collaboratively
• 2. Putting concept into practice
  • Survey development
  • Participant training
  • Administering the survey
  • Checking in with ethnographers
• 3. Analyzing the findings
  • Group discussion
  • Collective interpretation of findings
  • Reflections

Challenges

• Time-consuming
• Complex
• Data inconsistencies
• Collective meetings

References

• Mykhalovskiy, E. & McCoy, L. (2002)
• McQuiston, C., Parrado, E. A., Olmos-Muniz, J. C. & Martinez, A. M. B. (2005)
• Stringer, E. (1997)

The ethnographic revisit, Ray

• Burawoy, M. (2003) Revisits: An outline of a theory of reflexive ethnography. American Sociological Review 68(5), pp. 645-679.

Goals

• Construct comparison
• Models of historical change
• Understand how observational frameworks can affect knowledge of the site

Types of focused revisits

• Refutation
• Reconstruction
• Empiricism
• Structuralism
• Rolling, over time
• Punctuated, historical change
• Heuristic, looking for parallel/comparitive accounts
• Archaeological, connecting the present to the past
• Valedictory, speaking with subjects of earlier research

Applications?

• Returning to sites of CMC
  • Dead MMOs
  • Services that are no longer as popular as they once were?
  • Friendster? USENET?

9 Apr, Materiality

Photovoice, Nan

• Similar but slightly different: "the empowered camera"
• Photovoice is best developed

"All methodologies hide as well as disclose" (Wang & Burris, 1997, pp. 374)

Lit

• Educ for critical consciousness (Freire)
  • Dialogue, think, tools, action
  • Visual image
• Feminist theory
  • "We learn ourselves through images made by men"
  • Power and voice
• Documentary photo

Yunnan

• Among poorest provinces
• Chengjiang, Liliang County
• Poor reproductive health

Training

"The spirit of rural women's lives"

• Day 1
  • Camera, ethics, power
  • Camera uses
• Day 2:
  • 36-exposure color film
  • Group discussino
• Day 3:
  • More discussion w photos

Participatory analysis

• Monthly group discussion
• How and by whom a problem is defined
• 3 stages
  • Selection (significane, preference)
  • Contextualizing (storytelling)
  • Codifying (issues, themes, theories)

SHOWeD

• What do you See?
• What's really Happening?
• How does this relate to our Our lives?
• Why does this problem / strength exist?
• what can we Do about this?

Strengths

• Connect with non-writing/reading, vulnerable pops
• "Theory failures"
• Empowering
  • Photographer, narrator, actor
  • Collaborative, collegiate, productive
• Critique
  • Personal judgement
  • Facilitators, high soucial resource req'd
  • Status quo, not changing but reinforcing?

Questions

• Is it necessary for the photos to be see widely?
  • Published, presented?
• Recruitment? Would introverted women participate?
  • Convenience

Discussing Foucault and responsibility

• Need critiques carry with them a solution?
• Ethics of advocacy?
  • What happens when a researcher is an advocate?

Writing for "users"

• Books as a "tool box"

Ambiguity

• How much ambiguity can you tolerate?
• Do different levels of ambiguity enable different conclusions?
• Where do you locate ambiguity?

16 April, Global ethnography

• Globalization discourse accompanying spread of mobility/technology:
  • Communication
  • Transportation

Operationalization

• Defining variables, constructs
• Necessarily a theoretical, political project
• Ensure that stakes are analyzed and made pro-actively

Affordances of diff comm tech

• Phones are more direct, 1-to-1
• Web enables more arbitrary, experimental

Intersectionality, Crenshaw

• "Slicing and dicing" according to single categories (e.g. race) is possible but is artificial

____town

• Relationship of name to population, business
• Historical context
• e.g. Westminster, Orange County
  • Major location of Vietnamese immigrants
  • People remember the period of transition
• Commercial value of remaining "Koreatown"?
  • Tourism to non-Korea, to later-generation Koreans

Communication / Linguistics

• Not traditionally as distinct as they are now
• Until very recently, PhD students were expected to study Classical Greek, Latin
  • In some cases, more "alive" languages

Who is in and out of a research

• Identifying who is not included
• Conventionally, quantitative work reveals its limits according to its own logic, epistemelogy
• Acknowledging limits of knowability, can you even know or apprehend the limits of a population?

Rationality bias

• There are some phenomena that ought not be measured rationally

Trying to avoid Eurocentric biases (Miike)

Biases and characteristics

• Individuality and independence bias
  • Collectivity and interdependence
• Ego-centeredness and self-enhancement bias
  • Connection and corporation
• Reason and rationality bias
  • Pathos
• Rights and freedom bias
  • Repaying debt and gratitude
• Pragmatism and materialism bias
  • Morality and harmony

"[Asian communication] we reduce our selfishness and egocentrism"

• Is it social roles, hierarchy?
• "Illicit copying" reflects assumptions re: Western understanding of individual creativity, authorship

Giddens

• You can interact, communicate "despite place"
• Not that place "doesn't matter"

Jump offs

• Robertson (1992) Globalization, good history of globalization
• Meta article about globalization in everyday lives
  • Ties among diaspora are not exactly global
• TCKs, transcultural kids
• William's syndrome, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William%27s_syndrome

Apr 23, Internet

Housekeeping

• Presentations next Friday are not formal
  • What's yr project
  • What are the goals
  • Handout rather than overhead materials
  • Short clips or internet materials are fine
• Make meeting w Patti regarding presentation evaluation
• Patti will send out an "extra reading" packing

Final exam

• Forcing ppl to think carefully about how to use various approaches
• Can you bring the readings to bear on a specific scenario?
• Typical answer:
  • Methodological approach
  • Lit review
  • Ethical issues
  • Implementation
• Query yr familiarity w key issues
• Ability to present a clear argument
• Constructing a narrative about a research project that will excite, generate knowledge, challenge theory
  • "Here's where I started. Where I depart form the norm is ..."
  • This is why you must know the "classics"

Final process

• Patti sends out exam questions on the exam day
• We should take 3 hours on our own
• "Open book" exam
• Last day, May 14

Line-editing

• dp, Dangling particible
• si, Split infinitive
• P, Paragraph
• ro, Run-on sentence
• av, Active verb
• huh, Confusing!
• cut, Not needed

Temporality

• Is time different online?
• Ben: ppl get to intimate convos more quickly
• Determining "cycles", periodicity
  • Are they stable?
  • Anthropologies standard "one year"
• Timestamps
  • Ignored?
  • Unreliable?
• Various types of instantaneity
  • Information discovery
  • Even when there are explicit timestamps!
• Time zones
  • As manifest on a messageboard
  • Place
  • Responding from phone (affordances of platform) v PC
  • "Sent from my iPhone" sig
  • Not just input but bandwidth
• "Slowed" conversation
  • One conversation "takes longer"
    • e.g. one-post-per-day messageboard
  • Conversation as IM
    • Not so "instant"
• Constant flow v periodicity
  • CNN news feed
  • "Real-time web" discourse
• Building archives?
  • Research may spend considerably longer on an event than the period of time over which the event took place
• Ritual time
  • Sunday paper

Bio, physio feedback

• fMRI
• Training
  • Mother, child
• Couples
• Eye-gaze
• Facial reactions
• Sometimes measuring in milliseconds

Archives

• What is public? What is not?
• What expectations do people have of ephemerality?
• Challenges as once ephemeral things return
  • Elisheva: newspapers being asked to correct decades old errors

Twitter experiences

• Ray: trade-off, possibility of archive v. desire to speak

Norms

• Changes happen at diff rates and on diff axes
• Certain professions, locations, social scenes

Ethnics and archives

• Open MySpace pages as a work-around to the IRB
• Are those kids informed about their publicity?

Genealogy

• Seeking the tweets of our forebears in the library of congress

Privacy

"Privacy is a legacy term ... get over it"

Ethical matrix

• IRB goal is to minimize risk of harm
• Ethics are about individual morality

Web spheres

• Helps to reveal "what is possible" in an environment
  • Helps to show links for which you are responsible, even if you aren't looking at them

• Structures, actors, discourses, archives
• Need to inject time
• Changes over time
• S&F tend to talk about pre-/post-

Problem with stability metaphor

• Change is talked about as disabling, chaotic
• Instead of a continuum?

"Traces"

• Does this "humanize" the automatically generated information?
• Not sufficiently problematized?

Is Bruckman too cautious?

• Esp. in terms of "credit"

Sense-making activity

• re: Karl Weick sense-making rubric
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_E._Weick

Apr 30, Last day!

• Marvin, when old technologies were new
• Fischer, america calling, talking about telefonos
  • Consumers drove use

Neta, Minhee, intl student groups calling home

Populations under observation:

• India, China, Korea, top-3 groups at SC
• Canada, only Western country in top-10 int'l groups at SC
• European students as a mixed group

Differences between and within groups

• Focus groups regarding use of comm tech

• Aculturation, media richness theory
• Ethiel desolo pool - history of telephone
• Technological visions

Sandi, How do businesses (creatively) react to turbulence in the marketplace?

• Business owners in LA county
• Survey
• Focus group
  • Some participants drawn from survey responses
• How does org lit deal w "creativity"?
• Emphasis on women-owned and minority-owned businesses

Li, Homophily in couchsurfing.com

Diversity should rule?

• "Third place", Oldenburg, 1989, 1991
• "Slippery online identity", Turkle, 1995
• People seeking "exotic", "tourist" experiences?

Homophily should maintain?

• People still people, subject to same psych
• "Generalized exchange" req "higher level trust" (Ekeh, 1974)
• Anticipating f2f contact

Method

• Interviews
  • Samples across demos
• Social network analysis
  • Traditional in homophily studies

Ray, Anonymous

• Operation: Titstorm, YouTube Porn action
• Shared fantasy themes
  • Shared vision
• Symbolic convergence theory
• Problems w relying on archives here?
  • How is this bounded?
  • What persists?
• Protest/ pranking
  • Purpose, mindless

Andrew, problematic internet encounters + addiction

• Lit review
  • Interviews w youth
  • Interviews w convicted felons
• Poly-victimization theory
  • Youth who have "problematic encounters" have other problems as well
• Structuration theory
  • Giddens
• Method,
  • Going to college counseling centers

Jove, romance and SMS among chinese college students

• Will SMS play a signifant role among Chinese students?
  • Considering cultural issues?
• Interactional order
  • Goffman, 1956
• Method
  • 40 semi-structured interviews f2f / IM
  • Collect 5days of SMS for content analysis