Monday, November 25, 2013
My Thoughts about Discourse Analysis Course - Fall 2013
This was my first experience of taking a course in Educational Psychology department at UT and it turned out to be a good one. Also, this was my first qualitative research course. Although I learnt a lot in this course, I still have a long way to go until I get a good grasp of what qualitative research is.
One of my favorite parts of this class was the weekly blogging. It made reading the class materials more interesting and also motivated me to take notes while I was reading and made me reflect on the material as I was reading them because I knew I had to blog and as it's sort of a public social media, I had to post something that was really worth in terms of exposing my thoughts to the the public. Any ways, this experience was totally new to me and I am thinking of using it in the classes that I will teach in the future.
Another great thing about this class was that we were supposed to post a draft of our deliverable on BB a few days before the deadline. This was really helpful to me because in case something (e.g. the structure of the project) was not clear to me in some parts, I had the opportunity of taking a look at other students' drafts and get an idea of how other students have approached the project.
Honestly, even after taking this course, I haven't become a big fan of ATLAS TI. I have used QDA MINER before and I am still not sure what the extra values are that ATLAS offers that are not provided by QDA MINER. One of the very few things that I like about ATLAS is its family manager capability but its anchor setting drove me crazy several times. It is not user-friendly at all and is very confusing and time consuming. In addition, I think CODING in QDA is much more efficient than that of ATLAS. May be my exposure to ATLAS has not been enough; however, I am more in the dislike mode about it rather than in liking mode.
I found the session when we watched a section of a movie and applied CA and CDA to it in a group setting very helpful. The group exercise made it easier for me to understand how I should apply each of these methods to data and also helped me tease out the differences of the two techniques.
In general, I am excited about what I learnt in this course. When I signed up for this course, I used to consider a paragraph as a number of sentences that are linked together but now, a paragraph means beyond this to me. In other words, I have learnt about the rich meanings that underlie the structure of sentences in a single paragraph and also the ways people take turns in naturally-occurring talk. It's amazing that there are so much there even in an unplanned naturally-occurring conversations.
All this learning has happened in this class and I am truely grateful for Dr. Paulus who led us through out the course.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
My Thoughts on Hutchby & Wooffitt & Potter, et al. (2012)
Reading Chapter 7 of Hutchy et al. was helpful to me because part of the data in my mini-data project for this class is semi-structured interviews and reading this chapter helped me understand what aspects of the interviews I am analyzing, I should pay attention to; like to "state formulations" or if possible to use of insertions of "X" & "Y".
Actually, reading Chapter 8 reminded me of a discussion we had in one of our group activities in this class in which we were talking about the implications of DA and the "so what" of doing such research. What I read in this chapter implies that in such fields as political science, or those majors that deal with people with communication difficulties CA has some important applications in helping to achieve real-world objectives; however, in terms of my field of study - management & organization- I do believe that CA has important implications in cases where peers attempt to establish their power status in peer relationships via use of specific words, or taking specific turns, etc. Also, in terms of entrepreneurial identity which is my area of research, the use of words, their sequence of application by entrepreneurs, etc. can convey critical information about how they identify themselves as "entrepreneurs."
I also found the 8 points explicated in Potter, et al. (2012) about the way interviews are conducted, the role of interviewer, etc. very helpful. They've talked about some points that might seem minor but when actually conducting the interviews, they become critical because they influence the way the interview goes on which definitely impacts the way it is analyzed.
Actually, reading Chapter 8 reminded me of a discussion we had in one of our group activities in this class in which we were talking about the implications of DA and the "so what" of doing such research. What I read in this chapter implies that in such fields as political science, or those majors that deal with people with communication difficulties CA has some important applications in helping to achieve real-world objectives; however, in terms of my field of study - management & organization- I do believe that CA has important implications in cases where peers attempt to establish their power status in peer relationships via use of specific words, or taking specific turns, etc. Also, in terms of entrepreneurial identity which is my area of research, the use of words, their sequence of application by entrepreneurs, etc. can convey critical information about how they identify themselves as "entrepreneurs."
I also found the 8 points explicated in Potter, et al. (2012) about the way interviews are conducted, the role of interviewer, etc. very helpful. They've talked about some points that might seem minor but when actually conducting the interviews, they become critical because they influence the way the interview goes on which definitely impacts the way it is analyzed.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
My Thoughts on Lester & Paulus (2011) & Paulus & Lester (2013)
I really enjoyed reading this paper, especially the thoughtful use of students' blogging for this research purpose was quite interesting to me. However, I have two questions:
1. In drafting a paper based on a qualitative research, my co-authors have always asked me to pick some representative quotes of the interviews and put them in the manuscript to make our arguments around the themes of the paper. Lester & Paulus (2011) paper has used two excerpts (Gail's and Hannah's) to make the case. I wonder how authors tend to pick these excerpts? Any guidelines? or any shortcuts that make selection of the most representative excerpt easier?
2. I still have this issue with discourse analysis about convincing readers about authors' interpretations. For instance, in content analysis, word frequencies could be used as an evidence to strengthen authors' arguments. Is there a similar mechanism in DA or DP or only "trust" between authors and readers make authors' arguments convincing.
As I was reading through both papers, I found the following analytic steps discussed in the papers helpful in managing my tomorrow data session:
1. Read the texts out loud
2. recording the individual and joint reflections about those sections within the texts that were initially found most intriguing.
In my mini-data analysis project, I also intend to build on the questions asked by the authors in Lester & Paulus (2011) & Paulus & Lester (2013) to develop my DA method:
1. What are entrepreneurs accomplishing within their chats?
2. How are they constructing their discourse in order to achieve this?
3. What discourse resources are being used to perform these tasks? (e.g. surprise displays, "I don't know", extreme surprise displays ( I never knew).
1. In drafting a paper based on a qualitative research, my co-authors have always asked me to pick some representative quotes of the interviews and put them in the manuscript to make our arguments around the themes of the paper. Lester & Paulus (2011) paper has used two excerpts (Gail's and Hannah's) to make the case. I wonder how authors tend to pick these excerpts? Any guidelines? or any shortcuts that make selection of the most representative excerpt easier?
2. I still have this issue with discourse analysis about convincing readers about authors' interpretations. For instance, in content analysis, word frequencies could be used as an evidence to strengthen authors' arguments. Is there a similar mechanism in DA or DP or only "trust" between authors and readers make authors' arguments convincing.
As I was reading through both papers, I found the following analytic steps discussed in the papers helpful in managing my tomorrow data session:
1. Read the texts out loud
2. recording the individual and joint reflections about those sections within the texts that were initially found most intriguing.
In my mini-data analysis project, I also intend to build on the questions asked by the authors in Lester & Paulus (2011) & Paulus & Lester (2013) to develop my DA method:
1. What are entrepreneurs accomplishing within their chats?
2. How are they constructing their discourse in order to achieve this?
3. What discourse resources are being used to perform these tasks? (e.g. surprise displays, "I don't know", extreme surprise displays ( I never knew).
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