Lesson for Week 6: Day 1
6:1
You are in the "invention" stage of writing you "discourse in your field" paper. The invention process for this process consists of your gathering information about the discourse practices of people in your field and writing an empirical research report about these practices. Last week, we saw that a paper of this kind needs a literature review, a section that usually resides in the introduction and defines a theoretical problem that you are investigating. That is why you were to write a summary of Berkenkotter and Huckin, of Porter, and of Borg and to document them as sources. This little lit review contextualizes your paper in a body of theory about discourse practices. An advanced paper of this kind would require you to do a great deal more research into theory so that you could identify an unanswered question in the theory. You don't need to do that for this paper.
Although you have to do some research into the theoretical grounding for your paper, your primary research area is your own field. You have begun to investigate that by doing some web research, looking for sites that describe your profession or discipline and that archive documents that represent your field's discourse practices. You sent me a list of promising URLs for today. The web is an ever-growing source of information, some of it valuable, some of it pretty dubious, so you have to be careful. For more information about using the internet for research, read the section titled "Internet research" (page 280 ff.) in HTW.
Qualitative Research. Having gathered some preliminary information about your field, you need to talk to people who are mature representatives of the field. The data you've collected on the web may help you generate informed questions for the interviews and questionnaires. Look at the web data as a body of artifacts that need to be interpreted by an insider. As an outsider, you may construct all sorts of erroneous explanations of what the documents are, what function they serve, what situations they spring from. This outsider, or ettic, knowledge needs to be supplemented with or corrected by insider, emic, knowledge.
The first task is to find someone to interview. Remember that people are busy, and they don't have to give you time for the interview; they are doing you a favor when they agree to be interviewed. Look for experienced people who closely match your future profession. You might find them in your home academic department. You might find them by looking up companies in the yellow pages. You may have friends or family in your field.
When you contact the person you wish to interview, it is important to tell her or him what the purpose of the interview is, how long it will take, and whether or not you will be asking for supplementary information. You should also assure the interviewee that you will share the write up of the interview when you are finished. Make the interview easy for this person: offer to come to their place of work (you should expect to do this); work around their schedule; if possible give them a list of some questions prior to the interview.
When you conduct the interview, thank the person for giving you time; remind them what the purpose is, and follow a list of questions you have developed. If you want to tape the interview, ask permission to do so; otherwise, take notes. Make sure to note the time, date, and location of the interview. Get the person's name, correct spelling, title, and company affiliation. Stick to your promise about time--don't go over. At the end, thank the person and let them know when they can expect to see your write up.
Developing a list of questions is the hardest part of an interview. When you interview someone, you are assuming the position of an uninformed person approaching an authority; therefore, it is appropriate to treat the person as an expert. On the other hand, you should not expect the interviewee to guess about the kind of information you need. Based on your preliminary research, write questions that will generate information for your research report. It is a good idea to start with questions that solicit general information and then move on to specific information. Although you may have a list something like the one below; you should feel free to generate follow up questions on the spot if you find that you are getting richer information than you expected.
Interviewing is one method of "qualitative" research. We call research qualitative if its primary purpose is to get information from one person or a small number of people. The emphasis is on understanding.
Quantitative Research. Quantitative research differs from qualitative because it attempts to generate numerical data based on larger populations of people. Although you do not have to create and circulate a questionnaire for this assignment, a more extensive research project could conceivably move on to questionnaires after the interview stage. Questionnaires contain specific questions based on the information you have already generated. The information you have already should generate uncertainties about some things--how common is this practice? does everyone do this? what variations are there at this point? do different kinds of people do different things? Questionnaires are aimed at answering these questions and at trying to find out commonalities and variances. In advanced research, they are aimed at determining correlations between different points of data, a process that involves discerning patterns among the data. Take a statistics class if you want to investigate this kind of research further.
Questionaires generate more reliable information the greater the pool of people who participate in the survey. Because questionaires generate numbers and percentages, the certainty of the data increases with numbers, assuring the researcher that she didn't fall into a little ghetto of unrepresentative data. Quantitative research is not one of my areas, so I would encourage you to look around on the web for some help. I googled the phrase "quantitative research" and came to a pretty good site almost immediately. See http://www.ryerson.ca/~mjoppe/ResearchProcess/SurveyTechniques.htm if it is still up. When I googled the phrase "survey design," I came to http://www.surveysystem.com/sdesign.htm, discussion that looks pretty good to me.
Although quantitative research can lend authority to your claims in a report, it tends to look for the "middle" rather than to investigate the whole field. As a result many researchers characterize themselves as either qualitative or quantitative researchers. Now and then, you find someone who does both.
1. Set up an interview with someone in your field. Generate a list of interview questions and send a copy of the questions (along with a note stating whom you plan to interview, when you plan to conduct the interview, and why this person is a good person to interview for this assignment) to me in the next day or two; if you want to use the questions I generated above, you may, or you may generate your own as long as they get at the same kind of information.
2. Conduct the interview and take notes. Clean the notes up after the interview and send me a copy of the transcript of the interview (here's an example of a transcript with summary) with the date and place of the interview; the interviewee's name, title, and affiliation; and summary of the questions and answers. The questions should be numbered and your summary of the interviewee's answers should appear in a paragraph under each question. At the end of the transcript, include a summary paragraph that explains what you learned from the interview and how you hope to use it in your report. Here is a good example of an interview transcript with summary by Jamie Thronson. The names of the interviewees have been changed. Send me a copy of the transcript by the middle of next week. I will add it to a growing archive of interview data collected by students in this class.
3. Preview Gary Goreham's power point presentation on sociological research he did investigating peoples' reactions to GMOs. Here's the completed paper: http://www.misu.nodak.edu/research/Ethical.htm.This presentation is useful first because it contributes content to the GMO paper that will come up AFTER the discourse in your field paper. Second, it exemplifies the research methodology and report structure (adapted to Power Point) that you are using in the present paper (discourse in your field).
4. Continue reading Dinner at the New Gene Cafe, at least chapter 10. Also take a look at a report on maize pollen contamination in Mexico. I found this report at IUF Website.