While I am behind, I am making progress on my dissertation research. I have spent a lot of time during the last week working through the process of creating and analyzing a factorial survey instrument. Unfortunately a lot of this time was in reading and thinking and not actually accomplishing anything. But I am finally testing part of the process. The picture above is from an Excel spreadsheet.
This may not seem all that exciting but it demonstrates my success in negotiating the first stage in creating the instrument. This is a pilot version so does not have the same items as the final survey - which reflect some changes from the IPA interview process I mentioned in some earlier posts.
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Shown above is an excerpt from a passage I contributed to the report of a research project. You may disagree with how I stack up references (I sometimes think of this as 'puking citations') but it is arguably an efficient way to show that I have 'done my job' in reviewing the lit without writing a lengthy narrative that has more information than most people care to read. I can write this way because I use one of two word processing programs (increasingly MS Word although I was long a fan of Mac's Pages program) and set my normal template up for minimal interference. On the other hand, lots of people are fans of the citation management programs. Shown above is this same passage re-visualized as it might be produced by one of those.
I have given a fair amount of space to discussion about NVivo - which I have used for a few years now - but as a dedicated Mac user, I was pleasantly surprised by this news about MAXQDA.
I have been running NVivo version 10 via VM Fusion version 5 (ver 6 of Fusion is also available now) and a Windows 7 OS. On two computers. Needless to say this upped the cost quite a bit although I do have just one NVivo (full educational, not student) license that allowed installation on a second portable (notebook) device. But add up two licenses each for Fusion and Win 7, plus some add ons (I keep my 'virtual machine' separate so also have Office for Windows), plus some RAM and it gets pretty pricey. I took another look at NVivo today - both NVivo and MAXQDA offer student license at a greatly reduced rate - for MAX it is unlimted for NVivo it is 12 month. I think they are about comparable cost for a full (can install either on two units but not use simultaneously) educational license unless, like me, you have to also factor in the virtual machine cost to use NVivo. I want to mention that NVivo has been promising a Mac version for a couple of years now. I cannot say for certain that things would have gone more smoothly had they not turned down my request to be a Beta tester, but here it is 2014 and neither the 2013 Mac version, nor the promised 'free' Mac test version has yet materialized. Atlas.ti, one of the other big dogs, is promising the Mac version in July. I am pleased to see that they have a Spanish language version available, too. On the other hand, both Hyperresearch (has worked with Mac and Win for as long as I have known about it) and Dedoose may be sitting back and laughing about the scramble to become Mac ready. One more plus with MAXQDA - you can download a free reader - that allows you to look at although not access projects. I am increasingly impressed when comparing features to NVivo and I have heard from many people that MAXQDA is a lot easier to master. I am just about ready to take the plunge and purchase a student license, so I will write up some of my impressions later on. At present, I am having pretty good luck with MS Word, admittedly on small data sets and phenomenologically-oriented analyses. This resulted from playing around with Audacity. After writing the control post, I was reminded of 2112 by Rush - 'we have assumed control' is how side 1 of the (vinyl) record ends. I stuck some other noises under it and tried to play around a little with the tuning but I think I would need an actual piano to do a better job of this; I still lean a little toward being 'hands on.'
I had a pretty sloppy edit job on the ELO clip that I should have fixed before export. Ah well, this can remain as an early effort against which future (better) endeavors are assessed. Ice is one of those things that can be terrific in the right place - a drink glass, the Olympic skating rink - but horrible somewhere else. I particularly dislike ice having had a couple of nasty injuries as well as one car crash and some near misses that I can blame at least in part on frozen water in an unexpected or 'the wrong' place. Ice is one of those things, like weather in general, that forces us to realize how little control we have. And control has been a very critical element in the last group of interviews I completed for my dissertation work. Du Plock, S. (2004, January). What do we mean when we use the word 'research'? Existential Analysis, 15(1).
A couple of excerpts: "I would argue that, in important respects, the whole of training is a training in research. It is a mistake to think of research as a hurdle in the form of a masters dissertation to be got over. If we take this view then for many, probably the majority, it will be got over like the measles, never to be repeated" (p. 32). "There is a tendency among existential trainees to fall back on a few 'standard' methodologies - those of Colaizzi or Moustakas - which is every bit as mechanical as the unthinking application of a quantitative reserach tool" (p. 32) I do want to comment that, while I agree with above, I have no complaints about my class exercise in which I used a prescribed methodology (Moustakas, in fact) to work through analysis of an interview. I think the point du Plock is making has to do with not being limited to a boilerplate approach. The last theme seemed to take too long to load, so I changed it. The home page pic was taken in the Boston Public Gardens and the animal sculptures were in the yard of the Boston adoption center of the Mass Humane Society. I visited Boston during November and it was really very pleasant.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched a live performance by singer/songwriter Neil Finn (formerly of Crowded House and before that Split Enz) that was broadcast from what appeared to be his home in Auckland, NZ.
He also responded to some questions that were emailed before or during the performance. Some of the questions were interesting and some were irreverent, but most gave Neil an opportunity to demonstrate that he is charming, thoughtful, and has a nice sense of humor. By the way, echoing yesterday's post - it takes a lot of courage to broadcast a live performance of mostly new material, performing in a probably less than ideal environment, over the web with no delay. In this age of singers-who-cannot-conceive-of-singing-and-dancing-at-the-same-time, Finn, sadly, almost seems like an anachronism. You know, people have been singing-while-dancing for years and years - it's call musical theater and I even did a touch of it some years back (I have a 'chorus'-type voice, but I think that the world can always use more back up singers!). And going way back, people did this in large venues, not only without Auto-Tune, but also without any amplification. But enough of that. There were two great quotes I picked up from this performance; each was offered in response to questions about (song) writing. The first: "A series of slip ups and revelations." Yeah, I would say that characterizes writing for me sometimes, too, but more of the former and far, far fewer of the latter. And, the second: "Really hard except when it's really easy." I know that feeling, too. Again lots and lots of painful, eeking out a few words and very rare bits of that flowing, can't get the words down fast enough feeling. Watch the just over 1 hour video on YouTube, it is very good. Neil's wife Sharon sings backing vocals, one son plays guitar, and the other, who showed up late, plays percussion. I wish my family had been more like that! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxqE5Kt2NUI There is an alternate version with no talking, just the songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNTBmIJGeiU I saw a presentation at TQR 2014 written by Chris Brkich and Tim Barko (only Brkich was there to present) providing some background and excerpts from a paper written essentially in the form of a poem. The paper itself is titled: "Fictive reality: Troubling our notions of truth and data in Iambic Pentameter" and it was published in Critical Methodologies (2013, 13, doi: 10.1177/1532708613487869).
It was impressively clever but mostly I saw it as brave and courageous. Although the initial inspiration might have been more about being impressively clever, or even poking a little fun at 'serious' research, what I took away from the performance/presentation was: it was good; it was entertaining; the authors made some valid points.; It also inspired me to find and read the published work, something I probably would not have done had it been a 'normal' paper. Earlier this week, I took a look at some information about the background of Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. I was curious about where he had come from, since I did not know that much about him. (To be fair, I have followed only NCAA football closely for the past several years, pretty much ignoring the NFL.) One of the things that I read was that Carroll found more success when he decided to coach his team the way he wanted; in essence he decided to follow his heart as a coach. This I saw as another brave and courageous thing to do and it obviously paid off the other night when the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII (and, yes, I knew how to make 48 in Roman numerals without peeking). I am considering taking a risk in a paper that I am writing. Because I like writing and reading and literature, I often have an impulse to approach even academic papers (and, let's face it, that is mostly what I am writing these days) with a little more style than is the norm (although not, I am afraid, with as much panache as Brkich and Barko demonstrated in their work). Unfortunately, I only tend to imagine things I 'would' write if only I could. But, maybe it is finally time for a little bravery and courage in my writing. I made the miniature lion (he's about 4 inches tall) pictured above several years ago, to imitate a full sized (more like 18 inches tall) stuffed animal I made to give awa |
AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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