Qualitative and Quantitative
I learned the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. It was easy to remember the difference between the two because I just thought about how quantity means a certain amount of something, like a number. So quantitative research involves numerical data, like statistics. Qualitative is "the other one" as I thought of it, one term was about numbers and the other one wasn't. To remember it, I thought, okay, what's the opposite of cold hard facts? Human behavior. Qualitative research looks for an understanding of human behavior by collecting more personal data, such as stories. Narratology sounds really sciency and serious, but really all it comes down to is storytelling. That's a lot less intimidating. And stories are more interesting than numbers because everyone has a unique story. There's always something new, there's opportunity to improve yourself. But numbers never change, they stay the same.
Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry is part of qualitative research, which makes sense because it's a way of understanding how people make meaning of their lives through narratives, or stories. Narrative inquiry isn't exactly storytelling, though, because storytelling is just telling a story, but narrative inquiry is a way of understanding through a story. It's a form of research not entertainment.
Reflexive and Reflective
Reflexive inquiry is a way of looking at your writing to improve yourself as a better, clearer writer and a person. “Reflexive” means going back and examining your previous work and “inquiry” is systematically working to understand. A writer who is using his mind looks at a situation from different perspectives, he continually rethinks and tries to understand his preconceived thoughts related to the situation, and by doing this, he will be able to write a well-rounded essay. The writer can then carry this ability of understanding to his everyday life and become an open-minded person capable of listening and reasoning with other people. To understand yourself, you have to look back on your own experiences and these experiences involved other people, so you have to look into their experiences and their experiences’ experiences. Understanding is a long, complicated process that, if you take the time, will bring insight into yourself. “Reflexive” is different from “reflective,” which is a type of understanding that doesn’t require awareness of other people. Reflection is unidirectional, information is going out only. Reflexivity is bidirectional, you send ideas out but also take another person’s ideas in. If the two ideas clash, you have to try to understand why. Being reflective is to be conscious, but to be reflexive is to be self-conscious. It’s best to see your initial opinions as tentative and to open up to other people’s opinions. All these parts, their opinion and yours, will help you discover a whole understanding . Reflexivity involves taking objective.
Yes, this was taken directly from my annotated bib, but I figured that it wasn't necessary to rewrite something that was already acceptable. It's a good overview of the difference between reflexive and reflective. Reflexive inquiry is what I did in the course blog, where I read an article and then wrote a response to the reading. I remember one reading we had where a lot of it was in Spanish and I tried to be reflexive when I wrote my response by pushing aside the fact that I was annoyed about not understanding half the article so that I could understand the point of it, which was that the author feels angry that America tries to force ethnic people to forget their native language and learn English. It was an interesting way to send this message to readers like me who only speak one language because, in all of my creative writing classes, the teachers always say "show, don't tell." If I had a penny for every time I heard that phrase, I'd have a dollar....that doesn't sound like much, but the point is that I've heard it a lot and by showing people how annoying it is to have a foreign language forced upon you instead of just telling us that it sucks, was a very effective approach.
Field Research and Notes
Field research for writing my Twitterive consisted of linking twitter.com up to my cellphone so that, when i wasn't near a computer, I could still tweet about my surroundings by sending a text to the website. I liked this kind of research because I didn't have to interact with other people, whereas for the collaborative research project, I had to ask students to take a survey that my group had written up to help our research efforts. It really wasn't so bad, I only had to ask five people, but I learned that strangers are very reluctant to take a survey, even if you tell them what it's for. They acted like I asked them to fill out an extensive report for the F.B.I. or something. And every single person handed me back the survey with an embarrassed look and said, "Don't judge me, okay?" because most of them answered that they ate fast food way too much. What college student doesn't? I wanted to say to them. It made me feel really bad, and I was glad when that part of the project was over. It was a really personal thing to ask someone, about their eating habits. Food is a touchy subject to most Americans.
Readings
The readings for this class win the grand prize for THE LONGEST READINGS I'VE EVER HAD TO READ here at Rowan. I'm a Writing Arts major, so I've been doing a lot of reading and writing over the past three years, but holy crap, these readings were on a whole other level. They were very dense too, so I had to reread every sentence, but I think that says something, that I took the time to try and understand. I'm sure most didn't bother, but I really did want to get something out of it. At the very least, I now know what reflexive, reflective, quantitatiev and qualitative mean. I found that it helped to write down every sentence that I did understand, rather than to focus too much on what I didn't understand because the latter was overwhelming and when I'm overwhelmed I get frustrated, and when I get frustrated my brain shuts down and then nothing will get through. So something was better than nothing, even if it was only a few vocab words.
Semistructured interviews
I didn't have to interview the people we used for our collaborative research project, but from what I saw in the Youtube videos, our interviews were pretty structured. The interviewer, Laura, asked the questions that she had and the interviewee answered them pretty straightforwardly. That was fine by me, because we got the information we needed about the students' eating habits, but it would have been interesting to get a few more in-depth stories. I think we were lucky just to have the interviews at all, though, because everyone else crapped out on us.
Oral History
This class focused more on qualitative research, especially for the collaborative research project. One requirement for the paper was that we had to have two interviews of people relevant to our research topic. One of our readings said that it helps to write up a list of interview questions before you get to the interview, but Prof. Mangini suggested to encourage the interviewee to tell a personal story involving the research topic. Memorable stories make for memorable research projects.
Research Questions/Interview Questions
My group went through a few research questions before we finally settled on the one that we did. I forget what the very first one was, but it was shot down fairly quickly. That was depressing. Then we came up with "How do college students perceive their health versus what their nutritional health is 'in reality.'" This research question was approved by Prof. Mangini, and we quickly wrote up eleven interview questions for our interviews (because the due date was sneaking up on us). The questions weren't very hard to write up, we started with the ovious, what year are you? do you live on or off campus? And then we went into eating habits, such as how often students eat fast food, or go home and eat home cooked food, and whether they prefer to drink coffee, energy drinks, or water. These questions were similar to what we wrote for the survey questions. After the interviews, we realized that it would be easier to just focus our project on Rowan students, instead of college students in general.
Annotated Bibliography
I don't think my collaborative research project group used any of the readings previous to the start of the project. We used some other sources that were related to our project only, but I don't think the annotated bibliography was a complete waste of time. It was a place to organize the sources that we did use. Through the course of completing this project, we found other sources, and without the annotated bib tab, I would have had these sources saved all over the place and may have missed citing one or two of them. It was a good organizational tool.
I learned the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. It was easy to remember the difference between the two because I just thought about how quantity means a certain amount of something, like a number. So quantitative research involves numerical data, like statistics. Qualitative is "the other one" as I thought of it, one term was about numbers and the other one wasn't. To remember it, I thought, okay, what's the opposite of cold hard facts? Human behavior. Qualitative research looks for an understanding of human behavior by collecting more personal data, such as stories. Narratology sounds really sciency and serious, but really all it comes down to is storytelling. That's a lot less intimidating. And stories are more interesting than numbers because everyone has a unique story. There's always something new, there's opportunity to improve yourself. But numbers never change, they stay the same.
Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry is part of qualitative research, which makes sense because it's a way of understanding how people make meaning of their lives through narratives, or stories. Narrative inquiry isn't exactly storytelling, though, because storytelling is just telling a story, but narrative inquiry is a way of understanding through a story. It's a form of research not entertainment.
Reflexive and Reflective
Reflexive inquiry is a way of looking at your writing to improve yourself as a better, clearer writer and a person. “Reflexive” means going back and examining your previous work and “inquiry” is systematically working to understand. A writer who is using his mind looks at a situation from different perspectives, he continually rethinks and tries to understand his preconceived thoughts related to the situation, and by doing this, he will be able to write a well-rounded essay. The writer can then carry this ability of understanding to his everyday life and become an open-minded person capable of listening and reasoning with other people. To understand yourself, you have to look back on your own experiences and these experiences involved other people, so you have to look into their experiences and their experiences’ experiences. Understanding is a long, complicated process that, if you take the time, will bring insight into yourself. “Reflexive” is different from “reflective,” which is a type of understanding that doesn’t require awareness of other people. Reflection is unidirectional, information is going out only. Reflexivity is bidirectional, you send ideas out but also take another person’s ideas in. If the two ideas clash, you have to try to understand why. Being reflective is to be conscious, but to be reflexive is to be self-conscious. It’s best to see your initial opinions as tentative and to open up to other people’s opinions. All these parts, their opinion and yours, will help you discover a whole understanding . Reflexivity involves taking objective.
Yes, this was taken directly from my annotated bib, but I figured that it wasn't necessary to rewrite something that was already acceptable. It's a good overview of the difference between reflexive and reflective. Reflexive inquiry is what I did in the course blog, where I read an article and then wrote a response to the reading. I remember one reading we had where a lot of it was in Spanish and I tried to be reflexive when I wrote my response by pushing aside the fact that I was annoyed about not understanding half the article so that I could understand the point of it, which was that the author feels angry that America tries to force ethnic people to forget their native language and learn English. It was an interesting way to send this message to readers like me who only speak one language because, in all of my creative writing classes, the teachers always say "show, don't tell." If I had a penny for every time I heard that phrase, I'd have a dollar....that doesn't sound like much, but the point is that I've heard it a lot and by showing people how annoying it is to have a foreign language forced upon you instead of just telling us that it sucks, was a very effective approach.
Field Research and Notes
Field research for writing my Twitterive consisted of linking twitter.com up to my cellphone so that, when i wasn't near a computer, I could still tweet about my surroundings by sending a text to the website. I liked this kind of research because I didn't have to interact with other people, whereas for the collaborative research project, I had to ask students to take a survey that my group had written up to help our research efforts. It really wasn't so bad, I only had to ask five people, but I learned that strangers are very reluctant to take a survey, even if you tell them what it's for. They acted like I asked them to fill out an extensive report for the F.B.I. or something. And every single person handed me back the survey with an embarrassed look and said, "Don't judge me, okay?" because most of them answered that they ate fast food way too much. What college student doesn't? I wanted to say to them. It made me feel really bad, and I was glad when that part of the project was over. It was a really personal thing to ask someone, about their eating habits. Food is a touchy subject to most Americans.
Readings
The readings for this class win the grand prize for THE LONGEST READINGS I'VE EVER HAD TO READ here at Rowan. I'm a Writing Arts major, so I've been doing a lot of reading and writing over the past three years, but holy crap, these readings were on a whole other level. They were very dense too, so I had to reread every sentence, but I think that says something, that I took the time to try and understand. I'm sure most didn't bother, but I really did want to get something out of it. At the very least, I now know what reflexive, reflective, quantitatiev and qualitative mean. I found that it helped to write down every sentence that I did understand, rather than to focus too much on what I didn't understand because the latter was overwhelming and when I'm overwhelmed I get frustrated, and when I get frustrated my brain shuts down and then nothing will get through. So something was better than nothing, even if it was only a few vocab words.
Semistructured interviews
I didn't have to interview the people we used for our collaborative research project, but from what I saw in the Youtube videos, our interviews were pretty structured. The interviewer, Laura, asked the questions that she had and the interviewee answered them pretty straightforwardly. That was fine by me, because we got the information we needed about the students' eating habits, but it would have been interesting to get a few more in-depth stories. I think we were lucky just to have the interviews at all, though, because everyone else crapped out on us.
Oral History
This class focused more on qualitative research, especially for the collaborative research project. One requirement for the paper was that we had to have two interviews of people relevant to our research topic. One of our readings said that it helps to write up a list of interview questions before you get to the interview, but Prof. Mangini suggested to encourage the interviewee to tell a personal story involving the research topic. Memorable stories make for memorable research projects.
Research Questions/Interview Questions
My group went through a few research questions before we finally settled on the one that we did. I forget what the very first one was, but it was shot down fairly quickly. That was depressing. Then we came up with "How do college students perceive their health versus what their nutritional health is 'in reality.'" This research question was approved by Prof. Mangini, and we quickly wrote up eleven interview questions for our interviews (because the due date was sneaking up on us). The questions weren't very hard to write up, we started with the ovious, what year are you? do you live on or off campus? And then we went into eating habits, such as how often students eat fast food, or go home and eat home cooked food, and whether they prefer to drink coffee, energy drinks, or water. These questions were similar to what we wrote for the survey questions. After the interviews, we realized that it would be easier to just focus our project on Rowan students, instead of college students in general.
Annotated Bibliography
I don't think my collaborative research project group used any of the readings previous to the start of the project. We used some other sources that were related to our project only, but I don't think the annotated bibliography was a complete waste of time. It was a place to organize the sources that we did use. Through the course of completing this project, we found other sources, and without the annotated bib tab, I would have had these sources saved all over the place and may have missed citing one or two of them. It was a good organizational tool.