Focus Groups

I understand people's hesitance toward focus groups.  Their biggest problem, I think, is with the ungeneralizability of this method.  Somehow, focus groups don't feel like research because the "results" can't be measured and provide a priori truth.  Even case studies, though the results aren't generalizable, have a more legitimate feeling than focus groups.  The difference between these different types of specificity is, I think, a rhetorical one.  We as students and researchers have developed a pathos for logos; in other words, we like things that seem logically true more than we like things that seem momentarily so.  That said, if we can get over the Enlightenment hump, focus groups can provide truth and knowledge that we never imagined.  For me, the focus group functions much like a group brainstorm with the discussion and conversation of the group providing and creating new ideas.

I would certainly use focus groups to determine research questions/problems in an action research type scenario.  Any situation that I would research where I wouldn't necessarily know the subtleties of the situation would be a good opportunity for a focus group.  Even in my 111 class, I think it would be interesting to see what the students say (in a classic, no stakes focus group) about what helps and hinders them most in the study of writing.  Ideally, I'd get students from multiple classes and group them in terms of their own, broad social categories:  emo boys, jock girls, etc.  My results would be new ideas, hopefully, and even if they weren't, they'd be the jumping off point for further research.

Case Studies

I don't know if I would call a case study a research method.  I mentioned this in class, but in doing more reading for focus groups, and thinking about ethnography and more experimental studies, I think calling something a case study has more to do with scope than method.  I think that the reading for today, Hawthorne's study of tenth graders, could certainly be labelled a case study.  His was a small sample, and he triangulated matching the qualitative aspects of his focus group with a quantitative content analysis. 

Because case studies are small, it is difficult to generalize their findings.  A case study cannot make claims to universal human behavior simply because the field is too small and the behaviors noted may be unique to the group of subjects.  If I were to study my class, for instance, I couldn't generalize my results for students in rural Louisiana or New York City, or Athens, Greece, because the number and quality of variables that would change in the different situations.

I think that case studies are most valuable for their heurism.  Simply because a study does not result in generalizable knowledge, does not mean that that knowledge isn't valuable.  The specific knowledge from a case study can and should be used to inspire and inform further research, perhaps research whose results can make a claim for universality.  Case studies are heuristic in that they open spaces for new knowledge, sidestepping the assumptions of the researcher and possibly the literature.

Ultimately, I doubt the generalizability of any knowledge.  I think that all knowledge takes its meaning as much from its specific context and situation as it does from itself in the abstract.  There are many tools--statistical and rhetorical--that suggest that some knowledge can be objectively, positively true, but I think that all knowledge is simply a stepping stone to other knowledge...in other words a heuristic.

My research paradigms...

I like words.  

In fact, I believe (though not without hesitation, contradiction, and hypocrisy) that there is nothing in the world except words.  I believe that there may in fact be pure phenomenological experience out there somewhere, but that we can never have that experience, because in order for phenomena to register as experience they must be mediated by language.  

I also believe that language is fundamentally and inescapably social.  I believe that meaning happens in the readers' (listeners' viewers' ponderers') minds and is imposed onto text in an extremely complicated relationship with social and historical situation.  

I certainly believe in the linguistic and social construction of meaning and experience, if not the material reality we think we live in.  I also certainly believe that quantitative measures signify reductively; I think that words, with apparently fuzzier boundaries than numbers, do a better job of signifying our fuzzy reality.  This puts me pretty firmly in the qualitative camp.

But I also, desperately, want research to be practical.  Or at least my work.  I try to remember every day that though my work may seem disconnected from the "real world" it is my world and is as real as anything ever will be.  To that end, I locate myself with the pragmatists, and would not hesitate to research quantitatively if the rhetorical situation asked for it. 

So--I barely believe in positive reality, but I want to affect that reality through words.  The world is language, in other words, so what better than language to re-create the world.

My Blog

Here's the link to my blog: http://atexasbender.blogspot.com/

Rachel's Research Reflections

Here is the link to my blog: http://rachelresearchreflections.blogspot.com/

Matt's Research Blog

Here's the link to my research blog!

http://www.compandcircumstance.wordpress.com

I'm getting great research done!

I'm in!

Huzzah.

Thanks for setting up the blog, Seth!