Qualitative Research Methods: A Retrospective

This will likely be my final blog about my research methods class. It’s certainly been an enlightening, confusing, sometimes frustrating semester, but I thought I’d leave you (and myself, quite frankly) with a few of the things I’ve discovered this semester:

Responsibility – Not Just for Levinas, Diane Davis, and Dr. Marc Santos: One of the most vital discoveries I made this semester is that responsibility for and to others, especially to those informants who allow researchers into their lives, is not just an attribute of postmodern rhetorical theory. Rather, responsibility is at the heart of the postmodern research ethic articulated most profoundly by Patricia Sullivan and James Porter in Opening Spaces: “The postmodern research ethic… must do more than merely ‘respect’ participants in a passive or detached way. It must work to liberate the Other by naming and making space for that which is taken for granted or ‘routinely excluded and silenced’” (112).

It’s hard to define ethnography, but it’s kind of like pornography: you know it when you see it: This semester we read a number of narratives. Some called themselves ethnographies; some were given that moniker by Dr. Moxley, and others were problematically, fascinatingly difficult to categorize. I still don’t consider Mike Rose’s reflections on his time in Voc Ed to be ethnography, though I certainly consider it persuasive and important reading. On the other hand, Rebecca Nathan’s mass marketed My Freshman Year seems to me to be a good example of an atypical ethnography: it offers a breadth and depth of information about her methods and her subjects that makes it possible for me to consider repeating her study at my own university.

I don’t know if ethnography is the best way to make knowledge in my field, but I find ethnographies and case studies particularly compelling at this point in my career: I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve spent so much time over the last year thinking and writing about how to make things easier, better, more collaborative, more engaging, and more focused in our FYC program, but I find myself drawn to the stories of what works and what doesn’t. I can’t deny that some of the research studies I’ve read over the last 3 months have seemed a bit too neat for my taste, but I still find those stories compelling and useful.

Technology, especially the internet, has changed the way we write and the way we do research:  One of the most fascinating things about the work I’ve read from Dana Boyd and Heidi McKee is the degree to which digital technology and the digital mediation of text has changed research in Rhet/Comp. The more technology becomes part of our daily lives (IPhone anyone?), the more invisible it becomes. It has become increasingly necessary to make these digitally mediated experiences more opaque for the benefit of researchers and students.