After realizing just how long it had been since I had updated JAG-wire I read over my previous post and had a good laugh with myself. In the beginning of the year I had this idea of not only doing an MA paper, but doing three big papers – including data from surveys, interviews, and content analysis all while reading tomes in the kitchen sink. It would seem my youth is showing – I didn’t realize just how much work it is to research, write, teach, begin a PhD and try maintain a happy life. Beyond this it turns out I had more than enough material in my multi-year Facebook data set to push out a paper, even if it’s not a study as good as all of the ones I keep trying to find time to read. So here’s the thing: I’m losing track of my dream of an adventure in altruistic academe and really need to get it back.
All of this Facebook hubub is wonderful – I mean I even got to meet my quasi-heroes danah boyd and Fred Stutzman at the ASIS&T conference the other week (oh and turns out my STS theory might not be a load of crock!) – but what happened to my dream of getting a PhD in helping people? The first shock was finding out that Sociology here has little to do with anything domestic outreach related, the second was waking up and wondering how the crap I got so engrossed in my studies that I forgot about the basics of what I wish to do with my life. Sure I get the blessed comedic effect of saying I did my Masters on Facebook, but what I really want to do is tackle something tangible I can touch.
Studying campus climate, teaching students and helping to run the Positive Event Chain is not enough.
I can reconcile all of this with myself if I think of the Masters Paper as just a pit stop to what I intend to do with my PhD but I’m entrenched! Almost all of the connections I’ve made and material I’ve read – any small shred of expertise I’ve gained beyond Sociology isn’t having to do with the digital divide or technology-based community outreach, it’s all wrapped around social networking technologies and identity theory. In short I couldn’t be happy making a career or PhD out of studying Facebook but if I continue down my current path (starting interviews, doing increasingly intricate and informed specialized studies, teaching classes on the technologies of Social Informatics) that’s precisely what I’ll end up doing!
It’s not over yet, however. I’m going to make time to meet with Abdul Alkalimat this week (or next week if we have to) and just spill it. What he did at the University of Toledo with technology and community outreach needs to be done here. The wealth disparity in this town is greater than it is in Chicago and the amount the University is involved is atrocious. The best Library and Information Science school in the country has an amazing array of resources and talented people – my plan is to jump into that mess, set sights for the local community and see how much difference I can make. Time to get back to doing what I do.
Tag Archives: Shutup Jeff
Real Research, Silly Statistics, and an Enabler
So I suppose it’s a sign that I’ve managed to get myself knee deep in graduate school: I’m starting to do my own research. It’s funny, despite the fact I teach a class on research methods I’m quickly finding out how little I really know about real research process. Two methods courses and a statistics class notwithstanding none of my experience has been literal real world graduate caliber research. I learn so much by application – I wish I could see how professors do their own research. So as it stands I’m doing a lot of mimicking what books tell me and what I can discern are proper methods. In less classier words, fake it until you [hope to] make it. Thank God I found some help in an unexpected place: Survey Methods instructor Jane Burris.
I’ve begun to gather my own data for the Facebook project, with a formal DMI 1100 student random sampling and IRB’s blessing and all that jazz, and like any good researcher I of course find a couple hundred million questions I want to ask after my survey is released into the wild. I made an ultimate newbie mistake too – turns out the ambiguous category on the form builder labeled “number of responses allowed” doesn’t pertain to individual respondents but how many people can respond to your survey period. Cleared that one up this past week, I’m praying it doesn’t mar my response rate too badly. The UIUC form builder is insufficient to perform real survey functions – it doesn’t support skip logic, use of visual aids, or partial response records. In order to perform research at UIUC we have to use it, though. The 20$ subscription to Survey Monkey for my convenience sample my senior year was leagues better, you’d think the university could afford something superior. I know, I know, it’s probably like one LAS social science IT guy who gets tasked with that and 1800 other things. So make it an assignment in a CS class, problem solved.
Here’s the interesting part to me, though. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this research if I didn’t happen to take a flexible methods course this semester with an amazingly helpful instructor: Jane Burris. Not only is Jane not officially in sociology, but she doesn’t have any formal professorship standing – and she’s the best methods instructor I’ve had to date. Why? She guides the advanced students through whatever research they wish to do. No contrived artificial projects on far away unrelated countries or pretend ethnographies on environments we all know too well – I was told to design my own survey, collect my own data, and work to analyze it for an eventual publication! No other class in Sociology (that I know of) offers that kind of opportunity. Thanks to Jane I’ve been able to not only start the Facebook Project, but start it with a little confidence about my methods.
There are drawbacks though. I never really learned statistics. I mean sure, I can tell you about how to use and interpret a few statistical significance tests or even a little bit about linear or logarithmic regression. But I have absolutely no idea how to employ which statistical tests to my own data. In class we were taught the mechanics of a test, how to interpret the results – but not how and when to use it! I’ve picked up some basics from the crosstabs and Pearon’s Chi-square material I teach in 380, but I want to know when I should isolate specific variables to determine a causal factor. If I’m studying social capital and have all of these substantively defined concepts and conceptualized variables to represent this, how then do I take a statistics test and say something about them? I’m not just talking oh look the median number of friends on Facebook – I’m talking about controlling for race and year in school to identify if gender alone significantly impacts the ways Facebook is used as a supplement to social capital! We’re talking many variables that all intersect that I don’t know how to relate to one another with statistics in meaningful ways. So enough complaining, I just wanted to give examples. I’m hoping I can find a class or an individual who can tell me that Cronbach’s alpha would best illustrate the connections between my matrix of Facebook usage variables to say, perceptions on digital privacy. So that is, designing a plan of analysis for my data. I can coax a computer into doing the thuckethead statistics for me and check with a book to see what the results mean in technical terms.
A happy conclusion? Jane has offered to help me sort through my data this summer. I’m looking forward to seeing what results!
A Salutation to Teaching
The coming of the Spring semester has brought with it not only an array of opportunities for new studies and research but also an experience of an entirely different kind – teaching. I now teach a section for Sociology 380, research methods, and facilitate an intergroup dialogue session on race and ethnicity. I’m quickly finding that I’m really not as new to this instruction thing than I thought I would be – my students are essentially my peers and really teaching seems to be akin to organization leadership, my old friend. And herein lies a bit of a philosophy I’m discovering. Once you cover the basics of skills and motivation teaching seems to be more about communication, collaboration and most importantly, inspiration. Having taken the classes I’m teaching I find myself in the mind of the students – but with an additional perspective – that of graduate school. Realizing just how important concepts like dialogue and comprehensive knowledge of research methods are has been an integral part of my experience with the graduate school transformation.
So my optimistic tangential mind naturally aspires to introduce positive change into the mesh of academia. As a strong believer in technology as a learning tool I’ve already introduced web sites into both of my courses. Students seem to love the agenda and resource linking on the 380 site, and we’ve still yet had only one session for intergroup. Improvement in the realm of technology is just an easy first step. Working with the fabric of the courses is what I’m increasingly interested in. After attending the annual Latino-Latino Studies Program conference a few weekends ago I started sifting through ideas on how to integrate another crucial component of academia that all too often gets overlooked – activism. My methods course specifically presents a spectacular opportunity for students to volunteer around town for their ethnography project. I’d like to collect a list of some of the better places students might volunteer and observe at the same time in the CU area. At the same time if I can manage to figure it out I’d love to let students talk about their community organizations and involvement in a brainstorm session somewhere during the course – I’m sure they have ideas I don’t. And if nothing else I’d love for them to apply their critical sociology skills in new ways during their ethnographies – be it in a social group oriented categorical fashion (race, gender, ability, etc…) or from a standpoint of evaluating with theory models (Marxist, Weberian, structural functionalism, etc…). I’m not just concerned with the students learning the mechanics of the methods, but also the thinking that goes behind them. We’ll see where this goes, I’m relatively new to the teaching thing and have to first prove my worth. In the words of the great Mario, “Here we go!”