This is sadly my last reflection and
final post (with exception on the post with my comments throughout the course)
and it is with mixed feeling I am about to press “publish”. Of course will it
be nice to publish the last post and receive an additional passed course to my
resume, but it will at the same time feel kind of sad. The routine of attending
seminars/lectures, making a reflection on the current
weeks subject and finally begin with yet another subject has been something
that I am used to do, and might even miss in the future.
As my final two chosen papers am I
particular satisfied with the one concerning Cyberbullying with Slonje, Smithand Frisén. It is the one I chose to highlight a qualitative study, and even
tough the authors made the study far from flawless did I find it extremely
interesting. So interesting that I already have received a couple of comments
on the blog about it, and further discussed about cyberbullying on my “spare
time” with people face-to-face. The fact that I found a couple of flaws in a
text I loved might be a direct effect that this course has taught me something.
I am not so sure that I would read with the same amount of critically thinking
when doing research if I had not attended the course. My other text on the
other hand, the one about cross-pollination of information in online socialmedia by Jain, Rodriguess, Magno, Kumaraguru and Almedia, did not give me as
much. To be honest, I do not remember to the fullest what the text exactly was
about, a grading that never can be good for a paper.
During this past week did the first
seminar give me a lot, I got divided in to a group where I did not know the
other group members so well. That contributed to a more heated discussion and
points of views I had not experienced much earlier. It was a close call which
article we chose in our group, but the text: Situating Internet Use:Information-Seeking Among Young Women with Breast Cancer finally won and was
the one we published on the course’s wiki page. The main reason for us to give
the selected text our attention was not because it had an excellent conclusion
part or a super interesting subject. It was because the authors used a
relatively different methodology to gather empirical data – narratives.
We discussed about narratives in
detail, a methodology previous unknown to me, and made up a summery that we
wrote under the tab “other methods” on the course wiki. It is exactly seminars
like this one that brings value to me – it opens my eyes to other methodology
choices than the big popular ones i.e. interviews and focus groups for
qualitative research and surveys for quantitative studies. To use a diary or a
narrative method would for me be totally unacceptable before the course,
especially to use in my upcoming master thesis. But is a scenario that would be
possible today, that is if the study allowed it and it would fit in good with
the overall impression obviously.
Good afternoon Adam!
SvaraRaderaGreat to stumble upon your text, since I've never heard of the narrative method before neither and wouldn't have considered it being a valid source of information. But then again, maybe statements in an interview doesn't differ that much from the autobiographies since the amount of truth to the story is still a responsibility from the interviewee/writer. In one way I think autobiographies might even be more reliable since many of them are critically reviewed by several people, not just the ones doing the research. Of course, as always, it depends on the case. You wrote that you didn't think that the conclusion part was that good, was it due to the narrative method that they used or was it because the ones writing the paper did a bad job drawing conclusion from the material?