technology and qualitative research
This special issue of Forum: Qualitative Social Research covers a range of topics in digitizing information for and in interpretive research.
Archive for October, 2007
CAQDA
This Coffey, Holbrook & Atkinson article, Qualitative Data Analysis: Technologies and Representations, touches on both the topic of computer assisted QDA and representations of knowledge.
Embedded Scholars or Cultural Anthropology Returns to Its Colonial Days
The United States government has embedded anthropologists in troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to help them understand local culture. Does this amount to militarizing anthropology or anthropologizing the military? There is no end of controversy and many anthropologists see this as using anthropologists in counterinsurgency activities, as happened in Vietnam and Latin America. The NY Times has a story today on the matter.
Triangulation
A key strategy for establishing the veracity of interpretive/critical research is triangulation. The term is over-used and often mis-used. Many researchers imply that triangulation will lead to the truth by eliminating bias and is not based on the presumption that there is indeed a single truth to be gotten to, but in reality the value of triangulation is more nuanced. Sometimes, data from different sources or collected by different methods do converge, but often they are inconsistent or even contradictory. Convergence is not more analytically useful (or closer to the truth) than inconsistence or contradiction. Triangulation provides the researcher with rich data from which to discern meaning, but this is a task for the researcher not an inevitable result of using a technique. For a more thorough discussion of what this means and some examples, click on the article link below.
