0119 Reading Reflection on Technology and Qualitative Method

I began my journey of this week reading from Paulus, Lester, and Dempster’s (2014) book.

In the book chapter, the authors pointed out those researchers were quite cautious of reporting the qualitative tools. They framed their reports of the qualitative tools to how they used them but not thinking of the concordances and restrictions.  In the first chapter of the book, the authors talked about the affordances and restrictions of technological tools. This sets the tone of this week reading: studying the affordances and restrictions of technology’s role in qualitative analysis. 

In Paulus, Lester and Britt (2013) piece, they want to examine the relationship between technology and the specific stage of conducting qualitative research and authors’ attitudes towards technology. Being a bit deviant from regular review articles, which were characterized by coding and counting frequencies along the coding scheme, the authors here used predefined categories and mapped the papers with the categories. For example, in the section of how technology was used for transcribing process, they surveyed the literature to show which kind of technologies were used for the transcribing process and mapped these categories with the stud.

There are several places that Paulus et al (2013) talked about ethical issues of using technologies to assist qualitative research. It is one out of the limitations of using technologies. However, they took a position that is more neutral than Merriam’s position. Merriam posited technology as no more effective than word processing tool (P.647). Their major argument were it is researchers who did the analysis (i.e. assigned the codes); what the technology does is to implement these codes and save the labor work.

When I read this article, I was also confused by the notion of technology sets a distance between researchers and data. Merriam suggested that the role of technology was no more advanced than word processor. If that were the case, how could we understand the notion of the distance between researchers and data? Technology should not be blamed; it is the analysis method (i.e. doing coding and counting frequencies without delving into the data). Technology does save our labor work and move our energies to works that need more energies. It is not technology which sets the gap between researchers and data. 

Their piece is interesting to me in terms of what Paulus and her colleague were doing is similar with what I am doing for my daily research work: searching the literature and put corresponding ones to categories. 

Being continuance with the critical position Merriam took in Paulus et al's article, Roberts & Wilson's (2002) piece also focused on the possible negative relationships between technology and qualitative study. At the beginning of the article, the authors made the claim that the purpose of qualitative research is to uncover meanings of discourse. This may be conflict with the way how have computer technology has been employed to assist qualitative analysis, which focused more on content analysis along a coding scheme. They further noted that ICT is designed to count, number and measure things quantitatively. This is in conflict with qualitative research goal, which features with exploring meanings from feelings, emotions and other subtle activities. They suggested that the qualitative data is fuzzy and not appropriate for quantifying them. However, this seems conflicts with the quantifying qualitative data method introduced in Chi’s (1997) article which features with doing and counting of utterances.

I was making connections when I read Coffey, Holbrook and Atkinson's (1996) piece.  At the very beginning of the article, the authors pointed out the instabilities of methods taken ethnography research. They pointed a dual process of destabilization: “taken-for-granted categories and methods of data collection”. However, in contrast to the “dual process of destabilization, there is a tendency that qualitative research tend to construct a consensus on ideal-type of qualitative research method, such as data collection, data storage and analysis.”

 This is so consistent with Roberts & Wilson's work  (2002) which was about the unfitness between technologies and the philosophy of qualitative research. 

  

In the section of exoticism, the authors mentioned the issue of feminism. At the first sight, I was wondering how does this relate to qualitative research? Borrowing the theoretical notion of not to treat women as “voiceless objects“, researchers implicitly pointed out less powerful group of people tended to express their feelings by non-articulated discourse, sometimes from activities. This also pointed back to Roberts and Wilson's piece in terms of the fuzziness of qualitative data. 

In the section of using technology to assist the process of qualitative analysis, Coffey et al specially alerted fellow researchers that qualitative research methodology has a trend of validating their research activities with grounded theory. They further suggested “if you want t do qualitative research using computer, you have to code your data.”This is the point that authors pointed out at the beginning that it was easy to develop take-it-for-granted mode of data handling. Therefore, at the end of the section, the authors reminded researchers that analytical strategies implied by code-and-retrieve procedures are tied to specific inputting requirements of computing software strategies. Researchers cannot alter their analytical methods in order to use computational software.