Month: April 2015

For the third project update, I assigned myself to have completed approximately half of my final project, which will consist of a literature review of environmental justice ethnographies and an ethnographic research proposal focused on the oyster harvesting situation in Apalachiocola Bay. I have finished writing the lit review for U.S.-based ethnographies and am debating whether I should include international ethnographies as well. I still need to write my proposal for gaining access to the Bay community. What I have written so far is by no means a finished product, and some heavy editing and reorganization will likely be required before I’m finished. In the interest of saving space on the blog, I have sent my 3,500 word proposal to Dr. Kazmer via email for her input.

My annotated bibliography is heavily slanted towards theory. The following is the tentative outline of the major sections that will refocus my writing towards the method of online ethnography. The less formal section titles will most likely change.

What’s in a name?
This section will be a micro-history of online ethnography. There are several names for internet-based ethnographic studies: cyber-ethnography, virtual ethnography, online ethnography,, and netnography. Some of the names are a product of their time and rarely seen today such as  cyber-ethnography. One of the most attention grabbing is the portmanteau, netnography, which comes from a marketing research discipline. The choosing of a name can identify a researchers discipline.

Method discussion
This section will discuss the data collection and analysis techniques used. It will also include the advantages of this method such as the context is not created by the researcher.

Part of a mixed or multiple method study
Ethnography is sometimes used as a means to create a better quantitative survey or more focused qualitative interviews. The exploratory nature of ethnographic methods lends itself to strengthening other methods.

Ethics
Online ethnographic methods share similar ethical considerations to traditional ethnography. It also raises some new concerns since the researcher can be virtually invisible which might be seen as electronic eavesdropping.

What’s being studied?
Internet forums are well suited for online ethnographic studies, since forums can be viewed as a parallel to real-time off-line human interactions. The aspect of time and exchanges of information make online ethnography a great choice for information studies research. The topics of the forums being studied range from leisure activities (eg. hiking and rubber duck collecting) to individual coping with life changing events (eg. cancer patients and Bosnian refugees).

Since my last update, I have:

1.  Interviewed 2 researchers/professors

Dr. Tameka Hobbs is a graduate of Florida State University where she earned her doctoral degree in United States History, and Historical Administration and Public History. In addition to her teaching experience, she has served as a researcher, writer, consultant, and director for a number of public and oral history projects in Florida and Virginia, including the African American Trailblazers in Virginia History Program, a statewide educational program focused on celebrating African American History. Her professional experience includes serving as Director of Projects and Program for the John G. Riley Museum and Center of African American History and Culture, located here in Tallahassee….Fast forward: I was fortunate to work alongside her on a “Reunion & Remembrance” oral history project centered around Florida Memorial University, a small HBCU in Miami. I soaked up practical techniques but had never formally picked Dr. Hobb’s brain on theoretical or abstract concepts pertaining to oral history research. Speaking with her was a real shot in the arm.

Dr. Tiffany Austin received the BA in English from Spelman College, MFA in creative writing from Chicago State University, JD from Northeastern University School of Law, and PhD in English from Saint Louis University. Her teaching and research interests include African Diaspora literature; including African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American literature; Comparative literature; critical theory and gender studies. She is a prolific writer and consummate professional. I could insert a whole slew of top-tier publications and invited talks…To cut to the chase: Dr. Austin performed oral history research while documenting the life and work of social protest blues singer Willie King of and Aliceville and Old Memphis, Alabama (near the Mississippi border). I learned tons from my interview with Dr. Austin.

I was supposed to interview Dr. Anthony Dixon of the Riley Museum. I spoke with him in person plus emailed twice, to no avail. Thankfully, Dr. Austin had my back.

2. Dr. Hinnant’s talk

Dr. Hinnant raised good points about how qualitative and quantitative methodologies are usually intertwined. By way of example, he spoke about how oral history research is increasingly quantified through indexing/classification so that narratives are searchable through voice recognition technology. The issue of access is an important angle that I had not captured; I paid little attention to the curation and dissemination of oral history. I will work to include this valuable perspective from now until my project is due. Dr. Hinnant included in his Powerpoint a great article.

3. Added 8 more articles to my draft literature review

My oral history literature review outline has expanded. I am starting to really see the intricacies, benefits and limitations of the oral history technique.

4. Updated my taxonomy

I have added a few new constructs to my oral history taxonomy. 

 

Social Networking Platform Usage in Intra-organizational Communication

In the short time in which social network platforms have been adopted in organizational contexts, they have been used in two primary ways. The first, and more commonly studied, way is for organizational communication with external parties, such as customers, vendors, and the public. Most organizations that use social networking applications to communicate with external parties have a multipronged strategy that crosses various platforms. For example, they maintain pages on popular public social networking sites like Facebook, and they broadcast messages on microblogging sites such as Twitter. Their employees also sometimes write blogs on news websites and, occasionally, they host social tagging sites.  Communication on these sites is faced externally. The second and less commonly studied way in which organizations have employed social networking applications is for internal communication and social interaction within the organization.  To date, most studies of social networking applications for internal communication have been conducted by scholars within the computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human computer-interaction (HCI) communities. These studies in CSCW and HCI have focused on special issues in social networking application use for organizational action and can be categorized into three types.

The first type of study emphasized the usage practice of a new medium (email, IM, wiki, social tagging system, blog, microblog, etc) in workplace. These studies usually combined participant observation, and content analysis (both quantitative and qualitative), and quantitative surveys as research method.

Participant observation, which was used in to examine how a particular medium was adopted and used by an organization, has been defined as a research method that involves participating in people’s daily lives over a period of time, observing, asking questions, taking notes and collecting other forms of data (O’Reilly, 2005). Similar to ethnography, participant observation is deemed the centerpiece of ethnographic research, because it avoids the artificiality of controlled experiments and the unnatural setting of surveys and allows access to first hand data that may be otherwise unobtainable (Kozinets, 2010; Murchison, 2010). Participant observers in ethnography can adopt four different roles: covert observer, overt observer, covert participant, and overt participant (i.e., true participant observer) (Schutt, 2006). As a covert observer, the ethnographer seeks to observe things as they are without participating and disclosing her/his role as an ethnographer. In contrast, the overt observer announces her/his role as an ethnographer. The covert participant acts like the people under study without identifying her/his role as an ethnographer, while the overt participant announces her/his research role and participates in group activities. The presence of overt observers or overt participants might alter the behavior of people under study. Participants can have the opportunity to experience others’ lives and learn from their points of view, but may take the risk of becoming native and losing objectivity. Observers can have enough time to record what happens and stay objective and scientific, but may fail to gain the insider’s view. Which role to adopt depends on the research topic, the ethnographer’s personality and background, the nature of the field, and ethical concerns (Murchison, 2010; Schutt, 2006). The ethnographer’s role may not necessarily remain fixed during an ethnographic study, but may change depending on the situations (O’Reilly, 2005). The participant observers in those studies mentioned above are either developers of certain platform (e.g., Yammer, one corporation-oriented social networking site) or research team members from the studying organization (e.g., IBM or Microsoft research center) thus have the convenience to serve as covert observer to minimize their influence to people under study. Although those researchers aimed at studying the usage practice of internet-based mediums, they didn’t conduct participation and observation using auto-netnographic approach, ranging from “reading messages regularly and in real time, following links, rating, replying to other members via e-mail or other one-on-one communications, offering short comments…contributing to community activities, to becoming an organizer, expert, or recognized voice of the community” (Kozinets, 2010, p. 96). Because of the research topics, they are not interested in being a real community member and recording and analyzing their own online experiences, which is the advantage of auto-netnographic approach, but preferred to take the content analytic approach lurking around an online setting to ensure their studies are unobtrusive.

Content analysis, which was used by those studies mentioned above to analyze posts and field notes to develop themes for specific research questions, has been defined as a technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts to the contexts of their use (Krippendorff, 2004). Content analysis can be classified into latent (subjective and qualitative) and manifest (objective and quantitative) (Babbie, 2007). Early content analysis was objective and generated quantitative summaries and enumerations of manifest content, but qualitative and latent analysis have found greater acceptance over time. Because those studies aimed at using post and field note content to emerge in the process of a researcher analyzing a text relative to a particular context (Krippendorff, 2004), they all used interpretive, relatively subjective, and less rigid approach to code the latent content, which is also indicator of contexts, discourses, or purposes, and to understand the underlying meaning.

The second type of study focused on specific aspects of media use, such as motivations or barriers. A related, but distinct, third type of study examined social networking applications, as organizational tools, for facilitating individual career advancement and managing communication and collaboration. These two types of study mainly used qualitative semi-structured interview method to collect data and then coded all of the interviews to identify major themes for each research question. Qualitative interviewing is a research method aims at understanding people’s points of view, experiences, thoughts, and feelings with the purpose of producing knowledge (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). According to Rubin and Rubin (1995), qualitative interviewing has three unique characteristics that distinguish it from other methods of data collection. First, qualitative interviews are modifications or extensions of ordinary conversations, but with important distinctions. Second, qualitative interviews are more interested in the understanding, knowledge, and insights of the interviewees than in categorizing people or events in terms of academic theories. Third, the content of the interview, as well as the flow and choice of topics changes to match what the individual interviewee knows and feels.

Qualitative interviews can be categorized into semi-structured interviews and unstructured interviews depending on the degree of structure (Blee & Taylor, 2002). In unstructured interviews, without giving specific questions the researchers let the interviewee to direct the flow of conversation and introduce and structure the problem in her/his own words corresponding to the broad issues raised by the interviewer. In semi-structured interviews, the researchers create an interview instrument consisting of a list of questions before interviewing, which allows the flexibility to change the order of questions, ask follow-up questions, seek clarifications, and add extra questions during the interview. The researchers are supposed to play a more active role in leading semi-structured interviews than in unstructured interviews. The purposes of semi-structured interviews are to explore, discover, and interpret the meaning of phenomena. Compared to unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews can ensure the research questions to be addressed. The researchers could retain the flexibility to ask follow-up questions developed from content analysis or participant observations, seek clarifications, obtain explanations and background information, and tailor the interview guide to different interviewees (Murchison, 2010). Most studies mentioned above employed semi-structured interviews because 1) they have done previous studies using other research methods to develop interview instruments which include a list of specific, pre-determined questions; 2) they aimed at acquiring the same type of information from participants so can help to organize information more systematically and quickly; 3) the researchers preferred some flexibility in the process of collecting data.

 

References:

Babbie, E. (2007). The practice of social research (11th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Blee, K. M., & Taylor, V. (2002). Semi-structured interviewing in social movement research. In B. Klandermans & S. Staggenbory (Eds.), Methods of social movement research (pp. 92-117). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. Washington, DC: Sage.

Krippendorff, K. (2004). Conceptual foundation. In Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd ed., pp. 18–43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. Sage.

Murchison, J. M. (2010). Ethnography essentials: Designing, conducting, and presenting your research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

O’Reilly, K. (2005). Ethnographic methods. New York, NY: Routledge.

Rubin, H. G., & Rubin, I. S. (1995) Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Schutt, R. K. (2006). Investigating the social world: The process and practice of research (5^th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

 

The original intent of this update was to create an interview instrument to examine the reasons people frequent such events as FSU Pride’s Speak Out, in which individuals are invited to share their coming out stories.  However, in the process of attempting to write the instrument, I realized that in order to properly structure such interview questions, I would first need preliminary data.  As such, what is below is a draft of a survey with two qualitative questions which are intended to provide me with starting points for constructing interview questions.  The other data gathered will be used to provide a rough sketch of the audience/participants at the event.

Survey

Welcome!  The following is a brief survey about the recent Speak Out event sponsored by FSU’s Pride Student Union for use in doctoral research about the coming out narrative.  Your participation in this survey is entirely voluntary, and you are welcome to leave the survey at any point should you feel uncomfortable in any way.  There is no penalty for not completing the survey.  The survey is also entirely anonymous.  At no point are you required to provide any personally identifying information unless you should choose to volunteer for follow-up interviews.  The survey should take approximately ten minutes to complete.

Your participation is appreciated.

Question 1:  Age  ­­­­­­­­­________

Question 2:  What is your current year in school?

__Freshman     __Sophomore     __Junior       __Senior

__Graduate Student               __Not currently attending

 Question 3:  What is your current gender identity?

__ Female        __Transgender (Female to Male)        __Genderqueer

__Male            __Transgender (Male to Female)        __Agender

__Bigender     __Third Gender     __Genderfluid      __Transwoman

__Transman     __Two-spirit     __Other:  ______________________

__Prefer not to answer

Question 4:  What is the current sexual orientation with which you identify?

__lesbian         __gay       __bisexual       __asexual        __pansexual

__heterosexual     __queer      __same gender loving     __Prefer not to say

__Other:  ______________________

 Question 5:  How out are you currently?

             __completely out        __out only to some friends     __out to all friends

__out only to some family      __out to all family       __out only to self

__still questioning

Question 6:  Have you attended the Speak Out event in previous years?

 Question 7:  Have you attended other similar events, either in Tallahassee or elsewhere?

 Question 8:  Can you briefly explain in the space provided the primary reason you attended the Speak Out event?

 Question 9:  Can you briefly explain in the space provided any other reasons you attended the Speak Out event?

If you wish to remain anonymous, your participation is complete. If, however, you are willing to participate in follow up interviews on this topic, please enter your email in the space provided below.  Interviews can be performed through email, phone, or in person, according to your preference.  Thank you for your participation.

This survey was approved by the Institutional review Board at FSU.  Any questions you may have can be addressed to Dawn Betts-Green in the School of Information (cdb07f@my.fsu.edu) or her major professor Dr. Don Latham (dlatham@fsu.edu).