• Pigeonholing the Sample

    Photo of many coloured marbles
    Credit: Photo by Marsha Brockman (whodeenee) under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

    Image: Marbles, many marbles. I think I have lost mine in a sample of many marbles.

    I’ve been re-running analyses today on my population of survey responses. I decided to remove some more responses to eliminate some the scatteredness in the population. The majority of responses were from European PvE (player versus the environment) realm players, so I removed the four American realm players and then the five non-PvE players, leaving me with a sample of 30.

    The more I read about sampling, the more confused I am.

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  • Coding It Wrong on the Right Side of Town

    Photograph of Elephant and Castle on a rainy day in London through rain-streaked window
    Credit: Photograph by Keven Law under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

    Image: Photograph of street near Elephant and Castle on a rainy day in London through rain-streaked window

    I’m about halfway through my initial coding of the motivation essays collected last April.  I should have been done this months ago, but I’ve somehow been scared to do it.  I think the big reason behind that is I’m afraid that I’m doing it or will do it incorrectly.  As I am going through and creating codes, I cannot help but feel that I am not always focussing on the motivation issue, which is the primary question. I am generally coding for content or themes I see appearing in the essays.  As an example, an essay may express that the author is more likely to assist someone else if they feel that other person has put some effort and thought into their character.  That is not their motivation for playing, but I have still created a code for it as “assist others”.  When I get to the end and review the list, I will not be able to tell which ones refer to motivation.  Some probably are where a participant has expressed it as a motivation, but other instances, even of the same code, might just be a theme that was raised.

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  • Discourse Analysis Conversational Analysis

    Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

    Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

    I was reading Chapter 3 of David Silverberg’s Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook (Silverman, 2010 p.17-42) in September.  In it he gives three research diaries of Ph.D. students he had, detailing how they went from the start of their research projects, through methodology choice, and then through to data analysis.  While it was quite striking how coherent and “painless” the stories were, the more relevant realization I took away from it was the importance of having a framework around which to direct your research and to make sense of your data.  In two of the cases, the students used conversational analysis, a ethnomethodological approach.

    Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the study of talk in interaction (both verbal and non-verbal in situations of everyday life). CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional (in school, a doctor’s surgery, court or elsewhere) or in casual conversation.
    Wikipedia (2010a)

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  • Hermeneutics as Methodology

    I was reading through Chapter 4 of Silverman’s (2010) Doing Qualitative Research.  This chapter looks at the methodological approaches that different students take.  This is, of course, an important part of having a framework from which to hang your analysis.  There are so many choices.  He starts off with some descriptions of students describing their work as discourse analysis, narrative, analysis, and hermeneutics.  At first I thought this was related to something I’d looked up earlier in the month, heutagogy, but it’s just that they both start with “he”.  Wikipedia defines hermeneutics like this:

    Hermeneutics (English pronunciation: /hɜrməˈnjuːtɨks/) is the study of interpretation theory, and can be either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation. Traditional hermeneutics — which includes Biblical hermeneutics — refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law. Contemporary, or modern, hermeneutics encompasses not only issues involving the written text, but everything in the interpretative process. This includes verbal and nonverbal forms of communication as well as prior aspects that affect communication, such as presuppositions, preunderstandings, the meaning and philosophy of language, and semiotics.[1] Philosophical hermeneutics refers primarily to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of knowledge as developed in Truth and Method, and sometimes to Paul Ricoeur.[2] Hermeneutic consistency refers to analysis of texts for coherent explanation. A hermeneutic (singular) refers to one particular method or strand of interpretation.
    Wikipedia (2010)

    It’s apparently related to computational semiotics or used in computational semiotics.  That reminds me of James Paul Gee again because he talks about the semiotics of things in his What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2007).  Is it another sign that I need to be looking at Gee’s book on discourse analysis (Gee 2011)?

    References

    Gee, J.P. (2007) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, 2nd edition, New York, NY, United States, Palgrave Macmillan.

    Gee, J.P. (2011) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis Theory and Method, 3rd edition, Abingdon, United Kingdom, Routledge.

    Silverman, D. (2010) Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook, 3rd edition, London, United Kingdom, Sage Publications Ltd.

    Wikipedia. (2010) Hermeneutics, [online] web page, Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics (Accessed September 21, 2010).

     
  • Quantitative or Qualitative: The Eternal Question

    Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

    Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

    Chapter 2 of David Silverman’s Doing Qualitative Research:  A Practical Handbook (2010, p.16) asks students to consider why they believe a qualitative approach is appropriate for their possible research topics.  In fact, I had not initially considered a qualitative approach at all.  With my background in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and information retrieval, I was tending towards quantitative methodologies.  Information retrieval is very much about calculations and measurement, so that was a natural fit. Wikipedia (2010) describes the qualitative method as one that “investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when.”

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  • The Great Date Night Experiment

    When I last saw J, my supervisor, we were disagreeing about how to do the motivational essay coding for my first World of Warcraft survey.. My plan was to go through the essays first to come up with some themes. Then Basil and I would independently code them for theme. My reasoning was I wanted the coding to be free from subjective bias. If two of us agreed independently, then that would be better than just my assessment of the data. J. thought it was unlikely Basil and I would agree, so she set me the “Great Date Night Experiment.” In this experiment, Basil, my partner, and I would sit down on “date night” and test out my theory on a small scale. Basil would read one essay and summarize the main themes or ideas he thought were represented in the essay. I would independently do the same. Then I would report back to J.

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