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. "Representative" really is the main guideline. The quote is supposed to really be an "ideal" example of the pattern that you have seen across the data. So it often takes time to identify one that illustrates the point you are trying to make, and one that you can easily explain the context of and that won't confuse the reader. And then while you do a line by line interpretation of that excerpt you are forced to be sure that your analysis is accurate - that it works with the excerpt you have chosen and illustrates it well enough to be convincing to the reader.
ReplyDelete2. This is an issue with all qualitative work - and it's why I personally don't consider content analysis to be qualitative work, because it still relies on numbers to convince the reader. And that's fine - numbers ARE convincing for a lot of people. I noticed in the mini-lit reviews that quite a few people found studies that call themselves DA but also do frequency counts. I did it myself in my early research and dissertation work. In next week's class we will actually be talking more about this issue of how we can determine the equivalent of "validity" and "reliability" in DA work - so stay tuned.