Different research approaches draw from different epistemological assumptions that may render their methodologies difficult to understand for people from outside the "camp." Clearly, Joseph and I are both strongly influenced by anthropological approaches; however, I also think that pluralism can be a strength within a research community, so I would not encourage those who enjoy survey research to abandon it. Instead, try to understand the strengths and limitations of this particular instrument in contributing to a wider research agenda that hopefully includes a wider repertoire of methods. :-)
For example, ethnomethodology suggests that individual's accounts of their own behavior are socially situated... so any interviewee is obviously engaged in a process of accounting for their behavior in an "artificial" context, that is: making it intelligible to the interviewer. But that doesn't mean that I discount interview data. On the contrary, I depend on it heavily in my work because it also provides me with important information. I try very hard to understand the limitations of the method, so I am not blind to interviewees efforts to "give me what I want" and I generally use interviewing as one part of a larger research strategy that also includes participant and non-participant observation.
andrea
On 11/30/06, Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu wrote:
On Thursday 30 November 2006 07:51, Andrea Forte wrote:
One approach to the problem of finding a representative sample of ALL Wikipedia readers *cough* is to perhaps target some smaller populations that you are interested in.
This issue and the sheer size of WP prompted me to consider looking at smaller communities on the WP. However, my efforts weren't terribly productive.
[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/ethno/leadership.html
In this time I also sought out and considered "small neighborhoods" of articles and collaborators, eventually settling upon the corpus of Harry Potter pages given the project's coherence, liveliness and my own, earlier, experience of advocating for a reform in how readers should be warned of the possibility of spoilers (i.e., having a plot of a new book spoiled when consulting a Harry Potter article).
On a suggestion, I developed a brief questionnaire to engage with editors of the Harry Potter Project pages but, as expected, received few responses. Open content communities are, presently, often studied (with similar questionnaires) and participants might have little interest in taking time away from their actual (volunteer) work to respond to yet another. (As a participant, I have never responded to such a questionnaire.) Contacting actual participants can be difficult as well, as Lorenzon (2005) noted: "Many editors have their own user page which give information about them but few give out their real names and contact information." I made my solicitation on the Talk page for the Project as well as the Talk pages of a handful of prominent editors, without much success. Additionally, because most all the discourse is public and the community is otherwise so reflective, there is an abundance of existing data situated in actual practice. This is not to say such research discussions are not useful; once I developed my questions I was interested in receiving answers and the single response was informative. Fortunately, while responses to questionnaires can be hard to obtain, I also do not think them necessary to understand this community. Instead, one must follow (or even engage) in the practice: "A culture is expressed (or constituted) only by the actions and words of its members and must be interpreted by, not given to, a field worker" (Van Maanen 1988).
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