3.4 Qualitative research: grounded theory and par

Elbow:  We began class with Vanessa's presentation on Peter Elbow's take on how best to support speakers of nonmainstream English in learning Standard Written English.  Elbow points out in his introduction that writing teachers can feel torn between conflicting goals + obligations.  Specifically, writing teachers goal to teach "the written language of power and prestige" and their obligation to respect students' rights to their home languages.  The essay focuses on practices Elbow hopes will negotiate that conflict.

His approach - which is provided in detail - is to encourage/support students in writing in their home language by abandoning current traditional practices for focusing on "correctness" and shifting to practices for receiving an validating work written in home language, and fosterring concrete practices for working through successive drafts in terms of conferencing, copy-editing and modeling revision practices so that students cultivate a process for creating SWE - when they choose to.

He poses a (sort of satisfactory) answer to objections by linguists - that moving from home languages to SWE is NOT simply about copy editing - but rather a move from a mother tongue to a foreign tongue which will cause students to need to "rewirte much of the substance and even thnkihng of there essays" in order to approximate SWE.  This objection could be read as making the idea of conferencing -copy editing irrelevant - since students will essentially need to compose a new essay. Elbow claims this is not the case because 1) he is not talking about ESL speakers, 2) anxiety is a significant obstacle in composing, and writing in home dialect can reduce anxiety; 3) the use of a dialect is not necessarily a way of seeing the world (he cites the dismissal of the Sapir-Whorf view of language)- and points out that SWE is not the exclusive owner of academic writing. 

Vanessa questioned whether Elbow's approach -regardless of its intention - continued to overwrite students' home language, and we (sort of) addressed this concern in terms of Elbow's position (stated in the last paragraph).

This issue remains a thorny problem in teaching writing at all levels.

Qualitative methods.
The beginning of our discussion focused on what counts as a qualitative method and what features identify an approach as qualitative.


We noted that defining words for qualitative research included:

• observational, critical, descriptive => representations of individual experiences
• empirical, in the real world, complex, situational
• inductive discovery for focus/theory
• in-depth look at a microcosm

We then discussed how qualitative methods fit into the purposes/practices of the four paradigms (with a side-discussion of what we felt Merton's preferred approaches were).

We wrapped up with some quick-one phrase definitions of the methods Mertons covers in this chapter.

Ethnographic –describe-analyze of social/cultural practices in terms of systematic connections among different components of the system
Case study – study of a bounded system
Phenomenological research- individual-subject's study of (reflection on) unfolding experience
Grounded theory –coding, characterizing, constant comparison of data =theory emerges from data
Participatory research – everyone is a researcher-participant
Clinical research-application of qualitative methods to biomedical problems (we will not deal with it)
Focus group-patterns of interaction within the conversational presentation become part of the data

Evaluation of qualitative studies: Although I discussed features for evaluating qualitative research as part of our discussion of Castillo & Chandler, they really belong here.  Merton's discussion is on p 255.

Credibility (internal validity)=> prolonged persistent engagement, member checks(who has authority to be representative); accounting for/acknowledging what doesn't fit; reflective analysis of researcher's perspective; triangulation

Transferability (external validity); =sufficient detail so readers can guage applicability to other contexts – multiple cases useful

Dependability (reliability)=(the idea that the concept/context understudy will remain the same)=documentation of details

Confirmability(objectivity)= evidence so that data can be tracked to their source=> good fieldnotes/transcripts etc.

Perl

For our discussion of Perl, we started off by making a list of the points from her discussion that absolutely needed to be part of any useful summary of her work. 

Our discussion also considered Perl as an example of grounded theory and case study.  It is an example of grounded theory since the features that are the basis for the patterns and theory she described "emerged" or were "grounded" in her data.  That is, she looked at the talk alouds and the timelines they created, and named what she saw the unskilled writers doing.  She then made a list of all the actions/interactions/etc she had named, and placed them in groupings of similar features.  the names are her "codes" and the groupings are her "categories".  She then looked for patterns in relationships among the codes and catefories.  She connected patterns through correlating them with higher-order patterns in the writing process (planning, drafting, and revising).  Her findings were all about patterns described in terms of relationships within her coded material.

As a case study, Perl examined a small group of writers (a bounded case) and looked for patterns within each case. 

We then reviewed the assignment sheet for the reaction paper, and took a look at the student essay posted for Perl.

I posed thefollowing prompts:

• what does the writer need to add?
• what needs cutting?
• what feednback would you give the writer?
• what grade? (assess the focus, organization, development and depth of analysis)

You noted that this essay was all summary and no response, and that the summary was in many ways too extensive and all over the place in terms of its response.  I agreed. 

The summary in this essay needs to be focused in terms of how the writer plans to respond.  You were fairly generous in terms of grades.  I gave it a "R" : meaning that as it was written it did not meet the demands of the assignment.

Castillo & Chandler
Nikki gave an excellent presentation in a very short time.  She drew our attention to the features of participatory research that contributed to its reliability and credibility,  and asked us to take a critical look at the essay's use of language analysis (and close attention to narrative forms) as a way to discover connections to larger cultural constructs. 

For March 18
Read: review ethnography, case study and phenomenological approaches in Mertens, and read Bartholomae (1983), 523; and Heath (1983) => I am still working on finding the pdf - but it should be in your email by the end of the week.

In class we will discuss ethnography & case study, and work on data analysis for transcripts.

Thank you for your good participation in class, and have a great break.