INF5220 - 2

1. INF5220 - 2 Lecture 28th of December 2005 Types of qualitative research

2. Types of Qualitative Research • Ethnography • Action Research • Case studies • (Contextual Inquiry) • Ethnomethodology • Grounded Theory • Conversation Analysis • Discourse Analysis Main emphasis on these two.

3. Ethnography • Coming from social and cultural anthropology. • Rich descriptions based on extended fieldwork of people (tribes, sub-groups) in their natural environment. • Aim: a ‘correct’ understanding of how the people you study perceive and organise their world. • Focus on cultural and conceptual phenomena, can also be behavioural patterns and material conditions. • Important principle: Immersion - researcher should spend a significant amount of time in the field. Participant observation is the basic resource. • Much used in IS and particularly in CSCW research, with the aim to inform design. • (Will be discussed more in detail on Friday)

4. Ethnography in CSCW/IS • From your reading list: • Bardram, J. and Bossen, C. (2005) Mobility Work: The Spatial Dimension of Collaboration at a Hospital. Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Work, vol. 14, pp. 131-160. (An example paper of an ethnography oriented towards design) • Rolland, K. and Monteiro, E. (2002), Balancing the Local and the Global in Infrastructural Information Systems. In The Information Society, 18(2), pp. 87-100. (An example of an interpretive ethnographic study). • Voluntary, but recommended readings: • Hughes, J., King, V., Rodden, T. and Anderson, H. (1994): Moving out from the control room: Ethnography in systems design. In Proceedings from CSCW’94, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (A classic paper for adapting ethnography to design-oriented purposes) • Harper, R. (2000): The Organization in Ethnography. A discussion of Ethnographic Fieldwork Programs in CSCW. Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 9,no. 2, pp. 239-264. (Some useful practical hints) • Forsythe, D. (1999) It's Just a Matter of Common Sense: Ethnography as Invisible Work, Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 8, no. 1-2, pp. 127-145. (Can non-ethnographers do ethnography? A critique of the simplistic uptake of ethnography in the CSCW/IS/HCI field.) • Zuiderent, T: Blurring the Center: on the Politics of Ethnography. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 59-78. • http://www.cs.aau.dk/SJIS/journal/volumes/volume14/articles/no2/7_Zuiderent_ss.59-78_.pdf (how can one handle the many expectations one meet when placed in an organisational context?) • Pors, J.K., Henriksen, D., Winthereik, B.R. and Berg, M. (2002). Challenging divisions: Exploring the intersections of ethnography and intervention in IS research. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 3-7. (Special Issue on Ethnography and Intervention) • http://www.cs.aau.dk/SJIS/journal/volumes/volume14/articles/no2/3_guest_editorial__ss.3-7_.pdf

5. Action Research • Originated in the social sciences after the second World War (“a therapy for social illnesses”) • Aims at contributing to practical concerns (for example a problematic situation, an organisation in need for change) and to generate new knowledge simultaneously • Collaboration of researcher and organisational members. Initiated by the researcher or by the organisation. • Active involvement and interventions, the researchers have a change agenda, a vision of how reality should be. • Phased and iterative (cyclic): Diagnosing, planning intervention, conducting intervention, evaluating, new diagnosis, etc. • (the topic for tomorrow’s lecture)

6. Action Research • Baskerville, R. and Myers, M.D. (2004) Special Issue on Action Research in Information Systems: Making IS Research Relevant to Practice - Foreword, MIS Quarterly, Vol.28, No.3. (An overview over Action Research in the IS field). • Jørn Braa, Eric Monteiro and Sundeep Sahay. Networks of action: sustainable health information systems across developing countries, MIS Quarterly, 28(3):337-362, 2004. Special issue on Action research. Link: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~ericm/misq.pdf • Lungo, J. H. and J. L. Nhampossa (2004). The Impacts of Legacy Information Systems in Reporting Routine Health Delivery Services: Case Studies from Mozambique and Tanzania. International ICT Workshop 2004, Dar es Salaam Tanzania. Link: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~leopoldo/Publications/Papers/Nhampossa_Lungo_LIS.pdf • (An action research study, where legacy systems were addressed)

7. Case studies • Not a specific method in itself, but a category of studies. Not linked to a particular method for data collection, can encompass several. • Studies a phenomenon in its real-life context (as opposed to experiments, simulations, or surveys or historical analyses, retrospective). Studies contemporary events rather than historical phenomena. (IS field: case studies of information systems in use in organisations). • Can be positivist, interpretive or critical. Various types, e.g. single case, multiple cases, critical case, exemplary case. • Exploratory (develop propositions for further use) versus descriptive (study incidence and prevalence) case study. (Yin 1994)

8. Contextual Inquiry/Design • Not a research method as such (not comparable to the other we discuss today) • A design-oriented approach aimed at getting a grip on ‘context’, what it is, how it interferes. Practical way to gather information relevant for design, used in HCI, CSCW, IS research. • Advocates a relationship model, the Master/apprentice model as fundamental for the investigation. Implies: No explicit teaching, just watching the work, detecting what matters, seeing details. Requires humility, inquisitiveness, attention. • Four principles: • context (go to where the work is, summaries versus ongoing experience, abstract versus concrete data) • partnership (help customers articulate their work experience, alternate between watching and probing, teach customer how to see work by probing work structure. Avoid other relationship models (than the Master/apprentice), e.g. interviewer/interviewee: you are not there to get a list of questions answered. Expert/novice: you aren’t there to answer questions either. Guest/host: it is a goal to be nosy. • interpretation: Design ideas are the end product of a chain of reasoning. Sharing interpretations with customers won’t bias the data, but teaches customers to see structure in work, and let them fine-tune interpretations. • focus: Clear focus steers the conversation, focus reveal detail, but conceals the unexpected (look for surprises and contradictions, when you nod, what you don’t know). Commit to challenging your assumptions and validating them.

9. Ethnomethodology • Ethnomethodology = the study of people’s methods. • (Central persons: Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel) • The study of people’s everyday ways to produce orderly social interaction: How do people give sense to and accomplish their daily actions (communicating, making decisions, reasoning)? The skills and artful practices through which people come to develop an understanding of each other and of social situations. • Ethnomethodology has an attention to details of talk-in-interaction. Focus on common-sense practices. Observable and reportable (speech and face-to-face behaviour). • The technique of disrupting the taken-for-granted. • Answers the how-questions rather than the what-questions (of contextual givens). • Central concepts: • Indexicality, reflexivity, sequentiality • Membership categorization devices. • (Moral) accountability

10. Grounded Theory • BarneyGlaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) criticised “the overemphasis in current sociology on the verification of theory and a resulting de-emphasis on the prior step of discovering what concepts and hypotheses are relevant for the area one wishes to research”. • Argued that any theory that is developed should be grounded in data, not be imposed from above. • Aim of grounded theory: to understand the phenomena in its own way, to generate theory from data not the other way round. (Inductive approach where no pre-conceived theoretical models are applied)

11. Grounded theory • Grounded theory as theory is: • ”inductively derived from the phenomenon it represents. That is, it is discovered, developed and provisionally verified through systematic data collection and analysis of data pertaining to that phenomenon. Therefore data collection, analysis and theory stand in reciprocal relationship with each other. One does not begin with a theory, then prove it. Rather one begins with an area of study and what is relevant to that areas is allowed to emerge. (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) Theory should ’fit’: the categories must be readibly (not forcibly) applicable to the data Theory should ’work’: be meaningfully relevant and have explanatory power

12. Grounded Theory • Emphasis on continued interplay between data collection analysis and interpretation/theory building. • Theory is to be discovered, developed and provisionally verified (middle-range theories, not grand theories). • Empirical material are consequently significant, and is usually gathered from a variety of sources and documented systematically (Strauss and Corbin 1990). • Substantive versus formal theory: • “A substantive theory evolves from the study of a phenomenon situated in one particular situational context. A formal theory, on the other hand, emerges from a study of a phenomenon examined under many different types of situations. … it is not the level of conditions that makes the difference between the substantive and formal theories, but the variety of situations studied.” (Strauss and Corbin, 1990)

13. Example of application of GT • Kari Thoresen (1990): Computer Use (PhD thesis, IFI, UiO), shows the activities involved: • Coding procedures • Open coding: The first step, linked with data collection. Looking for concepts and categories that helps to organise the data • Axial coding: Further work on the relations between concepts and connections established during open coding. Focus on relations: (causal) conditions, context, intervening conditions, explore similarities and variations etc. • Selective coding, new analysis after you have identified your core concepts or focus. (see also theoretical sampling) • Adjunctive procedures: writing of notes, memos, diagrams, (presentations, papers) • Memos are important tools to both refine and keep track of ideas that develop when you compare incidents to incidents and then concepts to concepts in the evolving theory. • In memos you develop ideas about naming concepts and relating them to each other. • In memos you try the relationships between concepts in two-by-two tables, in diagrams or figures or whatever makes the ideas flow, and generates comparative power. • Without memoing the theory is superficial and the concepts generated not very original. • Memoing works as an accumulation of written ideas into a bank of ideas about concepts and how they relate to each other. • In the next step memos are sorted, which is the key to formulate the theory for presentation to others. Sorting puts fractured data back together. • During sorting lots of new ideas emerge, which in turn are recorded in new memos giving the memo-on-memos phenomenon. • Sorting memos generates theory that explains the main action in the studied area. • A theory written from unsorted memos may be rich in ideas but the connection between concepts is weak. (Description of memo work taken from Wikipedia)

14. Conversation Analysis • From sociology (Sachs, Schegloff and Jefferson). A central method for ethnomethodologists. • Coherent discourse is produced according to some rules, the aim is to discover these rules, and describe the conversational structures they generate (The sequential and structural organisation of talk). How the participants structure their talk, how they use various resources. • Conversation analysis goes beyond a grammatical analysis of statements. Relies on detailed transcripts of conversation (naturally occurring or interviews). See symbols in appendix p. 376. • “There are recurring structural features in ordinary conversation, irrespective of the psychological characteristics of the participants. Converstaion in scontext-bound, such that it is both productive and reflects the circumstances of its production. These two properties characterise all interactions, so that no detail can be dismissed as out of order, accidental or irrelevant to the ongoing interaction” (in Alvesson and Skøldberg, 2000, citing Holstein and Gubrium, 1994).

15. Conversation Analysis • Some basic concepts: Turntaking and topic • General rule regulating turntaking: at least one and not more than one at a time • Utterances or turns as basic unit of analysis. • Conversation openings. • Adjacency pairs (e.g. greeting-greeting, question-answer, complaing-apology/justification). (NB. Phone greetings are differently structured from everyday greetings). • Utterance incompletors (‘but, and, however’). • Incompletion markers (‘if, since’). • Fillers (‘um, er, y’know’). • Where do interruptions occur? • Insertion sequences, side sequences. • Topic (tellability, newsworthiness). • Topic change, how does it occur? • Topic conflict • Story prefaces or floor seekers • How repairs are done. (to clear up misunderstandings, resolve disagreement etc). • The role of silences. • Symbols in appendix p. 376.

16. Discourse Analysis • Analysis of texts, talk, interviews: Concerned with what is performed in talk or writing, with the rhetorical and argumentative organisation of talk and texts, how text and talk is part of social practices. • Compared with CA, DA is often more concerned with topic closer to conventional social science, e.g. gender relations, social control etc. as well as more heterogeneous kinds of data. • Examples of focus in DA studies: • How are ‘versions of the world’ produced in discourse? • How are claims and versions constructed? • How are alternatives undermined? • How are each participants constructions accomplished and/or undermined? • How does a text tell the story and work up coherence and incoherence?

17. Discourse Analysis • Some DA concepts: interpretive repertoires, stake and scripts. • Interpretive repertoires (classifications and category systems). How does participants define their moral status and identity? “Interpretive repertoires are systematically related sets of terms that are often used with stylistic and grammatical coherence and often organized around one or more central metaphors.” (e.g. motherhood) • Stake: how is a particular type of blaming achieved? People treat each other as entities with desires, motives, institutional allegiances and so on, as having a stake in their actions. Referencing stake is one principal way of discounting the significance of an action or reworking its nature. • Script refers to the way participants construct events as scripted as instances of a general pattern, or as anomalies and exceptions. A script is a way of invoking a routine character of described events.

18. Discourse Analysis: Stake • David Frost, interview with Salman Rushdie on Public Broadcasting Service, November 26th 1993 on the fatwa: • Frost: “And how could they cancel it now? Can they cancel it – • they say they can’t?” • Rushdie: “Yeah, but you know, they would, wouldn’t they, as • somebody once said. The thing is, without going into • the kind of arcana of theology, there is no technical problem. • The problem is not technical. The problem is that they • don’t want to.” Potter (1997): ”The familiar phrase ’they would, wouldn’t they’ treats the Iranians’ claim as something to be expected: it is the sort of thing that people with that background, those interests, that set of attitudes would say; and it formulated that predictability as shared knowledge. This extract illustrates the potential for invoking stake to discount claims.” (Example taken from Silverman, 2001)

19. Discourse analysis: script • Example from (Edwards, 1997), a couple in marital counselling: Mary: ”I went out Friday night (.) and Jeff was working (.) on call (.) and (.) um (2.2) the place that I went to (.) like (.) closed at half past twelve and I got home about one o’clock.” Mary mentions the time the place closed and when she got home. It helps her to presented this as a routine set of events (a script) in which nothing extraordinary or morally reprehensible took place. Mary also explains the fact that she went out without Jeff: her evening out is not to be heard as some wilful action of a woman ignoring her partner but as something that was unavoidable (’scripted’) and therefore, morally acceptable. (Example taken from Silverman, 2001)