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(a)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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