Methodological Memo
It has been truly challenging trying to determine which direction I want to go with my research. While I want to understand student's perceptions about graduation and their sense of preparedness, I have found it difficult to identify a target population. It is my opinion that women (soon I will back this with research) that women feel less prepared than men for the post-college work force, non-White women may feel less prepared than White women, and first-generation non-White women likely feel less prepared than second and third-generation non-White women.
I have decided to narrow my target population to African American graduating senior women living in an honors community on campus. There are a total of 11 women living in this particular area of the residential community. I initially wanted to explore students of different ethnic background to determine if there were racial or ethnic differences in terms of students feeling prepared for graduation and the post-college workforce. However, I realized that within the scope of this research project, it is necessary to hone in on one population and focus on the experiences of the women within this particular population and to truly gain any depth of their experiences.
While in my head, I think I understand why I have selected one sub-population to work with, I realize that I haven't really examined what makes this choice purposeful. I have found it very challenging so far, in the three interviews that I have scheduled, to explain to the participant that they have been chosen for a set of particular reasons. I explain my rational for the study, I explain my ideas and desire to explore gender differences in preparedness for graduation and my interests in whether differences exist for women who are first generation college students and for women from different ethnic backgrounds. That's where I get stuck, I have a hard time explaining why I chose African American women--it's almost as if I feel like the participants assume that because I have selected an African American female population within the honors community that they are somehow less prepared or able than their peers from other ethnic backgrounds. No participant has indicated this at all, but I sense this non-verbally every time I engage in that initial conversation. I think I need to challenge myself both in terms of my presuppositions and biases consider whether these are accurate assumptions or fabricated because of my own insecurities. I think as I explore the literature more and continue to think about my study, these insights will become clearer to me.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Reflective Reading Log #2
CRESWELL (Ch. 8) – Data Analysis and Representation
Summary of Chapter 8
Chapter 8 of Creswell’s Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design focused on three major data analysis procedures, Madison (2005), Huberman and Miles (1994), and Wolcott (1994b). The general process of data analysis includes preparing and organizing data, using the process of coding to deduct themes from the data, using figures, tables, or a dialogue to represent the data and its themes. Creswell discusses the data analysis spiral in which the researcher is free to move “in analytic circles rather than using a fixed linear approach (p 150). The spiral begins with the organization of information or database. The researcher explores the data by reading it through multiple times creating short notes or memos of ideas. A few select categories emerge and the process moves to “describing, classifying, and interpreting” the information (p. 151). It is at this stage where codes or themes are generated, interpretations within context are developed, and the researcher is able to compare these themes to multiple databases. In the last phase, the information is presented through a table, figure, or other visual image.
Each approach follows its own set of guidelines and expectations for data analysis. While all five approaches begin with creating and all five approaches move towards reading through the text while taking notes and developing initial codes. It is the process of describing, classifying, and interpreting where each approach takes its own turn. Narrative research lacks the structure that each of the other four approaches has while grounded theory and phenomenology are the most procedurally detailed. Ethnography and case study have the have the most commonalities of any two approaches. Each approach uses distinct language and terms to describe each phase of the process that might be similar to another approach. The final product is representative of the approach and its steps involved in the analysis. Creswell ends with considering the various computer software programs that can be used to analyze the data; they provide organization, easier searching, provide deeper meaning, visualize relationships, and retrieve memos. However, these programs are expensive, require learning, separate the researcher from the data, less mobility, less accessibility, and lacking in desired features.
Reflections and Analysis
I found that chapter 8 was explanatory in terms of understanding the different procedures to data analysis, but by no means was it exhaustive. My expectations were that I would have a keen sense of how to approach the data analysis of my project using a grounded theory approach and the not quite two pages of text covering these procedures hardly did my curiosity justice. I think I was looking for examples of how the themes were extrapolated from the text transcripts and reduced to categories that explain the process of phenomenon being explored. Perhaps I was expecting too much. Creswell did explore the five approaches and how they are similar and different in terms of data analysis, especially in terms of how the data is described, how themes are categorized, and how perspectives and data are interpreted.
The data analysis spiral provided a visual representation of the steps and movement that exist and occur during the analysis process. The spiral allows the researcher to move around and focus on specific loops or steps in an effort to exhaust the necessary components of that loop before moving to the next, but with the option to move back if needed. The model gives the process purpose and meaning and identifies clearly the sequential order of the procedures. Though this tool is to be used for the purpose of understanding the general process of data analysis as the intricacies of each approach are not reflected within the spiral.
It is difficult to remain focused and attentive to each approach’s unique language, procedures, available opportunities, and outcomes. Since we are focusing on only one approach for our project, I have to be reminded that the learning comes in understanding each approach, how they are unique or similar, and in what ways are they used. I am grateful that we are reading a book on ethnography as it gives us great insight into the value of describing, analyzing, and interpreting a cultural-sharing group. This is vastly different than the saturation, open coding, axial coding, and selective coding of a grounded theory approach. An ethnographer chronologically presents the information as an observer/participant making sense of how the culture works. In grounded theory, interviews are the basis for much of the data collection. The researcher constantly returns to this data identifying a single factor and the causes of this factor in an effort to develop a story. I only recently conducted my first interview and I am currently in the transcribing phase. While during the interview I was excited as I saw potential themes that could develop, at its conclusion and after reading this chapter, I am not so confident about articulating categories confirming evidence of them within the interview. I will revisit this process in my next journal entry.
Frankly, using a computer system to track all of this information and analysis sounds as cumbersome as doing it by hand. It is hard to imagine that a machine can search and explore the text identifying themes and categories and if it does, I cannot imagine not using it. Like Creswell articulates, understanding how the program works itself and taking the time to learn it is where its true value is evident.
MY FRESHMAN YEAR (Ch. 1-3)
Summary of Chapters 1-3
This is the story of one woman, a researcher and professor, who after 15 years of teaching anthropology and AnyU, embarks on a year-long journey to immerse herself in the culture of college freshmen. Having participated in traditional cultural anthropology in remote villages across the world, she found herself increasingly confused by her students in her academic experience. In an effort to understand her students better, she felt it necessary to become one, not simply observe them as a professional. In the preface and chapter 1, she discusses the questions that guide her research, reflects on some of the ethical challenges, and develops an identity as a college freshman.
Her research began in June 2002, long before the school year started, during summer Previews required of all incoming freshman. It is here that her accounts of being a college freshman over the age of 50 begin. Through her rich description locations, people, attire, conversations, lingo, information sessions, activities, and experiences, you begin to see Nathan’s transformation into a college student and the perplexities of college life that are gradually revealed throughout her narrative.
Nathan was intentional with her decisions, she moved into the dorms, signed up for a meal plan, ate her meals in the cafeteria of dorm lounge, enrolled in a full course load, fully engaged and interacted with her peers, developed relationships with other residents on her floor, joined student organizations, learned the college slang and language, and regularly played touch football and volleyball with her peers. Through these experiences she was able to capture the essence of the college student experience as a participant.
Nathan records her experiences daily interpreting events and behaviors and relating many of her findings to prior research and national averages. She reveals a great deal about students in today’s college “community” as well as today’s “individualistic and materialistic” society. Nathan is able to conduct field interviews, focus groups, and collect daily diary logs from various participants without revealing her identity or true purpose behind her research efforts. While her colleagues may ultimately challenge this, nothing compares to the intimate understanding she will develop out of her experiences with and as a student. So far her findings are sensational, compelling, and certainly worth our attention.
Findings include, an understanding of welcome week and getting acquainted with the university and her peers, life in the dorms, college culture themes as expressed on bulletin boards, resident doors, hallways, bathroom stalls, and in pictures, planned daily activities and hall involvement, classroom and homework demands, the phenomenon of studying less and socializing less, the reality of working more, the importance of organizational involvement, understanding how community is created in a system of options and individual choice (individualism in community), the phenomenon of failed diversity and same-ethnic social networks, and who eats with whom in the student dining hall.
Reflections and Analysis
When I first heard about this book in my masters program, I assumed it was purely a story, the account of one woman’s experience returning to school as a college freshman. To be honest, I had no idea it was a qualitative research study using an ethnographic approach. Once this was understood, the frame from which I viewed her writing completely shifted. I noticed that I was reading it trying to understand it as research with a design, research questions, observations, field notes, interviews, focus groups, rich descriptions, in addition to other forms of data. She was able to capture remarkable detail from notes and messages on doors, bulletin boards, and bathroom stalls to personal items in dorm rooms, attendance at meetings, participants in activities, and in her sheer interpretation of the presented data.
One of the first points she raised was the unexpected difference in understanding the geography of the campus as a professor and now as a student. I thought it was rather interesting that she could not point out familiar buildings, or find her way around campus at an institution where she spent fourteen years as a professor. The back roads and faculty parking lots where she once hovered were far out of her reach now.
As a researcher, much of what Nathan observes and deducts is compared to prior research and national averages or statistics. Her interpretation of behaviors such as studying, joining organizations, working, and embracing community provides a great deal of insight into understanding the dichotomies that exist in American higher education between studying and socializing. I think it is fascinating that in her exploration of students’ study habits she surmised that while students these days, as compared to research by Moffatt in the 70’s, are studying less they are not necessarily socializing more. She found that most students were working either on-campus or off-campus paid jobs.
Community is a common theme among most colleges and universities across the nation. Building community is always on the residential life agenda as is fostering community and allowing community to be the guiding principal for the residential college student experience. However, Nathan makes an incredible point that I had failed to notice as a professional in what we call Community Living and that is “it is hard to create community when the sheer number of options in college life generate a system in which on one is in the same place at the same time” (p. 38). With all this emphasis on community and evaluative measures that indicate its not working, it is amazing to me that it never occurred to me how universities create the very trouble that they try so hard to avoid by giving students innumerable options to choose from. It is clear how paths do not cross frequently and how students have to intentionally build networks with peers because their schedules and involvements do not create those opportunities. “In this light, the university becomes, for individual students, an optional set of activities and a fluid set of people whose paths are ever-shifting” (p. 40). The opportunities for community that the university intentionally creates are often “mandatory” or “highly encouraged” and in the name of individualism, spontaneity, freedom, and choice, as Nathan explains, students inevitably opt out avoiding sense of obligation and limits on freedom. Students live in an individualistic society that focuses on choice and materialism, this indeed presents a truly fascinating dilemma in higher education community development programs.
This book was fascinating to read as a student affairs professional working in residence life on a college campus. I live among my students and I interact with them on the daily basis and I would argue that I have a pretty good handle on student issues, concerns, pop culture, and the mere realities of being a college student. But reading Nathan’s account reminds me of how much I am missing, even living beside and below juniors and seniors in the residential community. Because I am an authority in the community, students immediately relate differently to me than they do their peers. No matter how intentional and involved I am with my residents, there are just some conversations that will never happen, there will be things that I will never know about, and there will be times when my bubbly personality and genuine care for them simply won’t interest them in the least. It is energizing to read this as an ethnographic study that captures the true essence of the college student experience beyond what any professional could ever guess or experience.
I wonder how faculty members and administrators at large respond, or would respond, to this book. It seems that many would have a difficult time grappling with some of the realities that Nathan unveils about higher education and the American college system. It is truly challenging to read about failed diversity efforts and to realize that the university is responsible for many of the structures in place “that encourage early formation of same-ethnicity relationships” (p. 60). Her research is indeed unconventional and perhaps the books end will answer any looming questions of ethical integrity.
Summary of Chapter 8
Chapter 8 of Creswell’s Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design focused on three major data analysis procedures, Madison (2005), Huberman and Miles (1994), and Wolcott (1994b). The general process of data analysis includes preparing and organizing data, using the process of coding to deduct themes from the data, using figures, tables, or a dialogue to represent the data and its themes. Creswell discusses the data analysis spiral in which the researcher is free to move “in analytic circles rather than using a fixed linear approach (p 150). The spiral begins with the organization of information or database. The researcher explores the data by reading it through multiple times creating short notes or memos of ideas. A few select categories emerge and the process moves to “describing, classifying, and interpreting” the information (p. 151). It is at this stage where codes or themes are generated, interpretations within context are developed, and the researcher is able to compare these themes to multiple databases. In the last phase, the information is presented through a table, figure, or other visual image.
Each approach follows its own set of guidelines and expectations for data analysis. While all five approaches begin with creating and all five approaches move towards reading through the text while taking notes and developing initial codes. It is the process of describing, classifying, and interpreting where each approach takes its own turn. Narrative research lacks the structure that each of the other four approaches has while grounded theory and phenomenology are the most procedurally detailed. Ethnography and case study have the have the most commonalities of any two approaches. Each approach uses distinct language and terms to describe each phase of the process that might be similar to another approach. The final product is representative of the approach and its steps involved in the analysis. Creswell ends with considering the various computer software programs that can be used to analyze the data; they provide organization, easier searching, provide deeper meaning, visualize relationships, and retrieve memos. However, these programs are expensive, require learning, separate the researcher from the data, less mobility, less accessibility, and lacking in desired features.
Reflections and Analysis
I found that chapter 8 was explanatory in terms of understanding the different procedures to data analysis, but by no means was it exhaustive. My expectations were that I would have a keen sense of how to approach the data analysis of my project using a grounded theory approach and the not quite two pages of text covering these procedures hardly did my curiosity justice. I think I was looking for examples of how the themes were extrapolated from the text transcripts and reduced to categories that explain the process of phenomenon being explored. Perhaps I was expecting too much. Creswell did explore the five approaches and how they are similar and different in terms of data analysis, especially in terms of how the data is described, how themes are categorized, and how perspectives and data are interpreted.
The data analysis spiral provided a visual representation of the steps and movement that exist and occur during the analysis process. The spiral allows the researcher to move around and focus on specific loops or steps in an effort to exhaust the necessary components of that loop before moving to the next, but with the option to move back if needed. The model gives the process purpose and meaning and identifies clearly the sequential order of the procedures. Though this tool is to be used for the purpose of understanding the general process of data analysis as the intricacies of each approach are not reflected within the spiral.
It is difficult to remain focused and attentive to each approach’s unique language, procedures, available opportunities, and outcomes. Since we are focusing on only one approach for our project, I have to be reminded that the learning comes in understanding each approach, how they are unique or similar, and in what ways are they used. I am grateful that we are reading a book on ethnography as it gives us great insight into the value of describing, analyzing, and interpreting a cultural-sharing group. This is vastly different than the saturation, open coding, axial coding, and selective coding of a grounded theory approach. An ethnographer chronologically presents the information as an observer/participant making sense of how the culture works. In grounded theory, interviews are the basis for much of the data collection. The researcher constantly returns to this data identifying a single factor and the causes of this factor in an effort to develop a story. I only recently conducted my first interview and I am currently in the transcribing phase. While during the interview I was excited as I saw potential themes that could develop, at its conclusion and after reading this chapter, I am not so confident about articulating categories confirming evidence of them within the interview. I will revisit this process in my next journal entry.
Frankly, using a computer system to track all of this information and analysis sounds as cumbersome as doing it by hand. It is hard to imagine that a machine can search and explore the text identifying themes and categories and if it does, I cannot imagine not using it. Like Creswell articulates, understanding how the program works itself and taking the time to learn it is where its true value is evident.
MY FRESHMAN YEAR (Ch. 1-3)
Summary of Chapters 1-3
This is the story of one woman, a researcher and professor, who after 15 years of teaching anthropology and AnyU, embarks on a year-long journey to immerse herself in the culture of college freshmen. Having participated in traditional cultural anthropology in remote villages across the world, she found herself increasingly confused by her students in her academic experience. In an effort to understand her students better, she felt it necessary to become one, not simply observe them as a professional. In the preface and chapter 1, she discusses the questions that guide her research, reflects on some of the ethical challenges, and develops an identity as a college freshman.
Her research began in June 2002, long before the school year started, during summer Previews required of all incoming freshman. It is here that her accounts of being a college freshman over the age of 50 begin. Through her rich description locations, people, attire, conversations, lingo, information sessions, activities, and experiences, you begin to see Nathan’s transformation into a college student and the perplexities of college life that are gradually revealed throughout her narrative.
Nathan was intentional with her decisions, she moved into the dorms, signed up for a meal plan, ate her meals in the cafeteria of dorm lounge, enrolled in a full course load, fully engaged and interacted with her peers, developed relationships with other residents on her floor, joined student organizations, learned the college slang and language, and regularly played touch football and volleyball with her peers. Through these experiences she was able to capture the essence of the college student experience as a participant.
Nathan records her experiences daily interpreting events and behaviors and relating many of her findings to prior research and national averages. She reveals a great deal about students in today’s college “community” as well as today’s “individualistic and materialistic” society. Nathan is able to conduct field interviews, focus groups, and collect daily diary logs from various participants without revealing her identity or true purpose behind her research efforts. While her colleagues may ultimately challenge this, nothing compares to the intimate understanding she will develop out of her experiences with and as a student. So far her findings are sensational, compelling, and certainly worth our attention.
Findings include, an understanding of welcome week and getting acquainted with the university and her peers, life in the dorms, college culture themes as expressed on bulletin boards, resident doors, hallways, bathroom stalls, and in pictures, planned daily activities and hall involvement, classroom and homework demands, the phenomenon of studying less and socializing less, the reality of working more, the importance of organizational involvement, understanding how community is created in a system of options and individual choice (individualism in community), the phenomenon of failed diversity and same-ethnic social networks, and who eats with whom in the student dining hall.
Reflections and Analysis
When I first heard about this book in my masters program, I assumed it was purely a story, the account of one woman’s experience returning to school as a college freshman. To be honest, I had no idea it was a qualitative research study using an ethnographic approach. Once this was understood, the frame from which I viewed her writing completely shifted. I noticed that I was reading it trying to understand it as research with a design, research questions, observations, field notes, interviews, focus groups, rich descriptions, in addition to other forms of data. She was able to capture remarkable detail from notes and messages on doors, bulletin boards, and bathroom stalls to personal items in dorm rooms, attendance at meetings, participants in activities, and in her sheer interpretation of the presented data.
One of the first points she raised was the unexpected difference in understanding the geography of the campus as a professor and now as a student. I thought it was rather interesting that she could not point out familiar buildings, or find her way around campus at an institution where she spent fourteen years as a professor. The back roads and faculty parking lots where she once hovered were far out of her reach now.
As a researcher, much of what Nathan observes and deducts is compared to prior research and national averages or statistics. Her interpretation of behaviors such as studying, joining organizations, working, and embracing community provides a great deal of insight into understanding the dichotomies that exist in American higher education between studying and socializing. I think it is fascinating that in her exploration of students’ study habits she surmised that while students these days, as compared to research by Moffatt in the 70’s, are studying less they are not necessarily socializing more. She found that most students were working either on-campus or off-campus paid jobs.
Community is a common theme among most colleges and universities across the nation. Building community is always on the residential life agenda as is fostering community and allowing community to be the guiding principal for the residential college student experience. However, Nathan makes an incredible point that I had failed to notice as a professional in what we call Community Living and that is “it is hard to create community when the sheer number of options in college life generate a system in which on one is in the same place at the same time” (p. 38). With all this emphasis on community and evaluative measures that indicate its not working, it is amazing to me that it never occurred to me how universities create the very trouble that they try so hard to avoid by giving students innumerable options to choose from. It is clear how paths do not cross frequently and how students have to intentionally build networks with peers because their schedules and involvements do not create those opportunities. “In this light, the university becomes, for individual students, an optional set of activities and a fluid set of people whose paths are ever-shifting” (p. 40). The opportunities for community that the university intentionally creates are often “mandatory” or “highly encouraged” and in the name of individualism, spontaneity, freedom, and choice, as Nathan explains, students inevitably opt out avoiding sense of obligation and limits on freedom. Students live in an individualistic society that focuses on choice and materialism, this indeed presents a truly fascinating dilemma in higher education community development programs.
This book was fascinating to read as a student affairs professional working in residence life on a college campus. I live among my students and I interact with them on the daily basis and I would argue that I have a pretty good handle on student issues, concerns, pop culture, and the mere realities of being a college student. But reading Nathan’s account reminds me of how much I am missing, even living beside and below juniors and seniors in the residential community. Because I am an authority in the community, students immediately relate differently to me than they do their peers. No matter how intentional and involved I am with my residents, there are just some conversations that will never happen, there will be things that I will never know about, and there will be times when my bubbly personality and genuine care for them simply won’t interest them in the least. It is energizing to read this as an ethnographic study that captures the true essence of the college student experience beyond what any professional could ever guess or experience.
I wonder how faculty members and administrators at large respond, or would respond, to this book. It seems that many would have a difficult time grappling with some of the realities that Nathan unveils about higher education and the American college system. It is truly challenging to read about failed diversity efforts and to realize that the university is responsible for many of the structures in place “that encourage early formation of same-ethnicity relationships” (p. 60). Her research is indeed unconventional and perhaps the books end will answer any looming questions of ethical integrity.
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