February 16th

I wanted to talk a little about qualitative research as it relates to my field because I realize I haven't done a very good job with my research practices, I've just never been one to follow methods very well!
Sociology is full of quantitative research, where usually surveys are administered to a random sample of people in high numbers in order to find statistical significance that can be applied to the population.
Qualitative is different, in that data is non numerical and you can purposely select who to study and interview. Also, qualitative is aiming at discovery of a phenomena, where quantitative is more for testing a hypothesis. The methods for qualitative are a little more loose, and as long as you can justify what you're doing and why, then you're pretty much good to go. A lot of this has to do with the groundwork or theory in your research in order to give support to the way you are looking at your research.
There are many ways in which we can gather data, some of which we went through in our workshop on Friday, which include photography, interviews and group discussions, observations, observation/reflections etc. Some of the methods I will be using are group and individual interviews, mapping, and reflective observation. In my methods practice I wrote down what I observed and my reflections on it. It's extremely important to separate or somehow mark your reflections in order to separate them from what actually happened (I didn't really do a good job at this).
I also plan on doing some mapping, where I map out all the weaving houses and I want to mark family relationships within houses and between houses so that I have a good idea of who's related in order to interview them. For this type of research it's important to talk to a lot of people to make sure that your data is correct and be able to have them help you with your map.
Group interviews that I want to do include family groups that work together, and then the weaving house groups. While doing group interviews, it's a little harder to get personal data, so I plan on doing individuals as well. It's important to assure your interviewee that the interview is confidential so that they feel comfortable sharing things that they wouldn't want others to know. It's also important to take good notes, and also to let them see the notes and make sure that what you wrote down accurately reflects their attitudes and beliefs.
After collecting this kind of data, you can code and put a value to responses and then analyze them using statistics, but I will probably use more of a recursive abstraction of my data, where you summarize your findings and draw conclusions from your summaries.