Part of the QualMIP series, introduced here.
Another short post this week because of a time crunch and my inability to write longer coherent things today (thanks, ADHD! Sometimes you just gotta roll with it).
Today was an analysis day -- project updates, studio time, collaborative analysis -- not a lot of scaffolding, more tracking where people are in their work and how to move forward. This post will likely be most useful for my future self as a way of tracking which topics are good to build more scaffolding around. Here are some:
Subject protection - using pseudonyms, talking with participants about how their data will be used, etc.
Positionality (yet again) - How does your prior exposure to a topic shape the analysis you do with it -- and the way you triangulate your analysis with others' when you're checking inter-rater reliability? Our group has a mix of people with extensive social dance experience to no social dance experience (with social dance as the chosen context of study this semester). This gives a great variety of perspectives and positionalities that become visible in projects -- and need to explicitly be pointed out (what terminology should you assume familiarity with, etc?)
Relationship between methods, results, and discussion - what you did, what you learned, and what difference it makes ("so what?")
Instrument design as a subjective act - a reminder once again that all surveys, all instruments, all scales, etc. are reflections of human decisions about meaning creation. This does not mean they are all created equal, but it does mean they can and should be tested and interrogated and developed themselves (for instance, the IQ scale has a long history of "what does it mean to be intelligent?" debates behind it).
Validity. One thing I wish I'd prepared -- and perhaps will prepare for next week, we'll see -- is a discussion on validity. In the context of qualitative research, what does it mean for a study to be "rigorous" and "valid"? (I have a lot to say about assumptions in this domain...)
It's pretty cool to see the projects shaping up -- intermediate artifacts are popping out. Emily has a nice table shaping up, which spurred a discussion on externalizing one's process and the iterative nature of instrument design. Cesar should be bringing at least one draft poster in next week so we can start the "so what?" discussion (the "discussion discussion"), and Paige will be going through her emergent analysis process and then working to articulate it. Just a few weeks left to go...