Data Collection

Gratton & O’Donnell:

In this paper, Gratton and O’Donell first mentioned research was difficult to conduct in rural and remote area in Canada. Therefore, researchers collected data remotely. Most of the work used discussion listservs and chat rooms. However, using emails would cause the problem of being hard to develop rapport relationships and mutual trust with their participants. On the other hand, using emails to collect also has its advantage. Participants would have more time to think and to shape their responses. Researchers also found that lack of social presence is one drawback of using emails conducting research. Therefore, much of work discussed the necessity of using video-conferencing as research tools.

The model proposed in this work was to collect data by video conferencing. The data included quantitative and qualitative data. Participants’ videoconferencing with each other enhances their social presence. Questionnaires provided participants with opportunities to engage with deep thinking. On the hand, this method also has some drawbacks. Although participants could see others’ faces during video conferencing, the atmosphere is different than face-to-face session.

Matthews & Cramer

Being different than Gratton and O’Donnell’s piece, this piece of work discussed conducting research with undeserved population. Video conferencing tools provides new opportunities to complement the drawbacks brought by telephone interview in terms of people could see each others’ face. Non-verbal data becomes easy to collect. Another benefit by using video-conferencing tools is to have multiple layers of data at the same time. Audio data could be created at the same time as the video data.  Other data collection technique could be using internet based groups. However, as we’ve discussed before, there is risk of having persona and acting accordingly. Another method of collecting data online is to create web-based group. It creates a virtual community for special populations. It also helps to construct rapport relationships with participants.

Drawbacks of collecting data from internet are over-relied on internet. Some undeserved groups have difficulties of access to Internet or computers. Motivations and trust on researchers would also have an impact on the willingness to participate in the study. 

Paulus:

Qualitative researchers often need multiple data resources to triangulate your data. Digital tools made the data collection easier and more natural. It will also give researchers more nuanced way to analyze data. Like Matthews and Cramer, Paulus et al also mentined another good source for collecting “naturally happening” is online communities, such as blogs and social groups, but this would raise ethical problems as people might use real names and identities. 

Mendeley

I want to reflect my own history of using technological tools here. Dr. Lubke's experiences really resonates with me. I could use the technology for some purposes at some moments in my life. However, before I adopt it for my daily life, I need to find a role for it. For example,  I heard of people using dropbox before. However, I didn't use it until I found I need something to synch the desktop at home and the one in my office. Therefore, I began to use dropbox. It is hard for people to use technology for the using sake, well not for me at least. This phenomenon might also be understood from the perspective that people don't like to step out of their comfort zone. I used a flash drive before I adopted dropbox. One incident happened (the flash drive didn't work well) "forced" me to change to dropbox. Now I am enjoying using dropbox. I also upgraded my account by paying 99 dollars per year. I think that is worthy.

Same thing for me to adopt Mendeley (I will definitely use Mendeley; I have uploaded all my papers to Mendeley). I am in a review project. The Co-PI is a professor in Korea. We need to collaborate with her students. I found Mendeley is really good at collaborating. I am pushing my adviser changing Endnote to Mendeley :)

This reminds me my previous experience in educational technology. By learning the history of American's educational technology, teachers seldom adopted tools for the using sake. They need to have specific purposes for using tools. However, I am wondering how to push "boundary" (at the boarder line of using tools and not using them) people adopt new tools although it is not that necessary, such as my flash drive didn't work.

Literature Review and Technology

Kern:

Tools	Advantages	Drawbacks
Refworks	This could link with the library	Can’t be used without internet; it doesn’t import meta-data from PDF
End note	It is a desk top app, which ; it identifies mate-data from pdf	Although it could identify meta-data from pdf, however, they don’t have capacity to work with pdf. The price is a bit expensive.
Zotero	Easy to incorporate reference using drag and drop; allows researchers to collaborate; have the ability of recognizing and importing pdf data. It also works with google docs.	Limited spaces for uses. It is not a desktop program.
Mendeley	Easy to cite with drag and drop features; allows dragging and dropping into text editors; recognizes Pdf meta-data;	Some problems with the web version: not reliable of ingesting Pdfs. Attachment space is limited to 1 GB.

Anderson & Kaunkach:

The literature review serves to familiarize other researchers, not only with the results but also the process of conducting the study. Although the Internet changes our approaches to do literature review, the criteria of good literature reviews do not change. The internet also speeds up the process of publishing researchers’ work. It made the publication of preliminary findings much easier. However, making connection with our small group discussion, this also has problems of making researchers’ preliminary results vulnerable. Internet also enhances the relevancy of literatures located from the Internet. Personally, I don’t buy this a lot as I thought relevancy was what researchers should worry about. Although the researcher had found something relevant from the internet, it was his/her job to decide whether it should be added or not in the work. This leads me think of the points we brought up in class that technological tools sets a distance between researchers and the date. In literature review, our data are literatures. In this case, it is technology or the search engine who decides the relevancy of the data—literatures.

With the increasing accessibility from the Internet, people could publish their work online, which made the authenticity become a problem. This might also have a problem related to accuracy. One tip from senior researchers is to look at the references.

One thing that resonates me a lot is their mentioning of that due to “a bewildering and immense sea of information”, researchers feel more challenge to cite properly. I also have hard time to remember where the resources come from when I am writing. References organizing tools would make life easier by having a “my own” database. Technology has the affordance of organizing references better. It also has abilities of detecting plagiarism. Plagiarism was not a new problem that was brought with technology. It has been a problem since quill pens. However, technology could help with detecting it.

Paulus, Lester & Dempster noted the importance of reviewing the literature:1. Validating the research question had not be “researched” before or seldom touched; 2. Situating the work in a larger context and joining the conversation established by prior researchers. I like their points of literature could be one part of the introduction, and even the discussions and findings. As novice research, I had a very hard time to write the introduction part. I struggled with the scale of exhaustiveness . The mistake I usually made is the introduction is too detail-oriented. Thus, it looks like literature review.  

They talked about the relationship between the recency and authority of resources. It sounds like to me that the more authority the source is, the less recent it is. This occurred to me as the affordances and limitations of technology. The affordances of new technology is to have more updated literature at the expense of loosing authority. 

Reflections on reflexivity

The first point that I want to reflect is the positionality and reflexivity. Qualitative researchers need to be reflexive. This is the biggest up-take I got from this class. Before taking this class, I had the problem of whether my standpoints were objective. We discussed this in our small group discussion. I brought up the question of doing the case study. Picking up an appropriate case from a pile of data is really hard. I was wondering whether I was biased by the opinions from other researchers who had been in the classroom and had created a rapport relationship with the student.Rebecca provided me with a good answer that the purpose of a case study was to highlight the ideal case rather than have a representative case. Therefore, it is ok to pick up the case based on the observations of classrooms.

The conversation I had in the group connected with my question at the beginning of the class: the relationship between positionality and reflexivity. Positionality means multiple identities are shaping our view of the world. It is not stationary. Reflexivity is the process that articulate our view of the world. It shapes our views of the world continually around the positionality we held. Thus, it is important for qualitative researchers being reflexive since qualitative researche is always descriptive. For qualitative researchers, it appears that there is no need to pursue the stage of being objective. Descriptions of the world can't be same from person to person. It is ok for researchers to start from their "bias". Reflexive provides a way of articulating the "bias". 

 

I like Jessica's reply of my last blog post. people performing is definitely be a standalone issue in online research community. in face-to-face research, people would also perform in order not to be embarrassed. This also happens on using questionnaire  as the major data source. Resolutions I could think of is to triangulate data and improve the validity of questionnaire and interview questions. 

Internet Research and Ethic

Personally, I am thinking the readings for this week could fall into two big categories, one part of the readings touch the issue of using a blog to conduct reflexive research and the other deals with the issue protect subjects under the backdrop of doing research with Internet tools.

Watt:

It tends to be beneficial to have research journals to keep records of every stage of doing research. Having ideas came to you written down is good and will stimulate more points. Writing down one researcher’s beliefs, thoughts, and feelings in a timely way could keep them tracking their bias and clear how do that affect their research. For me personally, this is also a “think aloud” process, which refines your thoughts.

In the following part of the article, the author listed the importance of having reflective blogs for every stage of doing research. One point that Watt made in the section that really resonates me is that there are challenges especially for qualitative researchers need to face. However, to me, they are the challenges that all researchers should face. Having blogs tracking people’s thoughts leaves openness for researchers to hone and refine their thoughts. I saw this openness from the journal the author made about her confidence about capabilities of participants and that her personal opinions’ inevitably imposed on participants. This also happened on my research. I knew which classroom might have better learning than other classrooms from my observing and data collection. If I were asked to do a case study, I would attempt to find potential cases from the classroom that I thought would be the stars.

One other risk Watt brought up in the article is to have rapport relationship with subjects. This may be risky as researchers might expect more from the subjects. This connects back to my own experiences that I would expect more from the class that I thought learn well.

Hardey:

Technological tools are important for researchers to collaborate with each other. However, the dilemma is it would publicize private information, especially for qualitative researchers. Hardey brought the notion of collaborative and collective to the fore. Being collaborative means the formation of personal social networks which means a place where research work could be shared exclusively to researchers. Whereas, collective is used to describe the broader social network in which all of the information could be shared. This is aligned with their caution of collecting data from blogs. They pointed one thing that is quite relevant to Watt’s article was that developing rapport relationships with your subjects. This could be risky at some time because this might violate the validity and objectivity of research. Becoming friends with research subjects may influence the objectiveness researchers should have.

The benefits of collecting data by using web 2.0 technologies could be understood from the perspective of situating participants in a natural environment. The data collected is seen as “real”. However, data collected from blogs tend to have problems of identity disclosure. Although researchers try hard to protect subjects’ identities, such as with pseudo names, subjects’ friends’ information could also be disclosed during the research process. Another risk raised by Hardey was the dichotomy of people’s identities of online and offline was not very clear. This could make data collection a bit difficult than traditional ways as researchers need to distinguish the authenticity of online subjects.

The major argument that Hardey made was new technologies brought the benefits of ease of sharing to researchers. However, it also brought some risks of conducting research. Although the overarching goal should not be changed: protecting research subjects, there should some attunements and nuanced way of protecting subjects under new situations. This is also reflected in Enyon’s article.

Enyon et al.

In this paper, the authors also pointed out the question of protecting the privacy of subjects.  However, their assumptions were a bit different than Hardey’s points that although internet research would bring us benefits, there are some risks that researchers didn’t encounter with traditional media. Enyon et al pointed that in general, researchers need to find a balance between the benefits and harm to subjects both online and offline. Personally, I lean more towards to Hardey’s points that new risks would be brought up by internet research tools. Therefore, I am a bit suspicious of Enyon’s points that online research is not intrinsic more likely to be harmful than face-to face research. With constantly making connections with Hardey’s article, which discussed the necessity of checking online identities, I saw Enyon also pointed out the importance of contacting the subjects offline although the research was conducted online.

One part of Enyon’s chapter struck me is the ethics of conducting researches on people who need to do “bad” things onto others who don’t exist and are simulated in the virtual world. However, it’s hard to predict how do these experiments impact subjects. One example occurred to me. We implemented our curriculum design to middle schools in New Jersey.  Our simulation was designed to simulate the pond system in which fish would die. We want to teach students mechanism of why fish die by asking them to explore the simulation. Most of the students felt bad because they killed the fish.