I know my professional blog has been quiet for a couple of months now – I spent much of the summer working on my porfolio and reading. I’ve suddenly been thrusted head over heels into my second year of graduate school. I’m teaching two new classes – an introduction to Sociology (soc 100) and Social Perspectives on the Family (soc 273) – but these feel like a natural part of life now, while I’m still in love with teaching I have plenty of confidence I can do it well. No, what scares me more is this whole independent study Masters paper thing. Most of the normal Sociology PhD’s here just write a paper that counts for their masters somewhere along their track to the higher degree but because of my transfer I need to finish it ASAP to begin my work in LIS. So I lined up an independent study and flushed out an outline to finish one paper, start two others, read oodles of sources, collect interview and focus group data, contact everyone around campus who has anything to do with what I do, and otherwise lose my mind. It’s terrifying.
At this point I have no idea if I’ve bit off more than I can chew. Being busy out of my mind is a normal state of affairs for me but this time the pressure is ten fold as high because I’m doing something I’m not so sure about and am very new to. I still don’t even know who all of my readers are because there are a whole two people directly related to what I do in Sociology.
In many ways I’m excited and enthusiastic – I have faith in my own abilities and motivation and have no fears about my interest in the subject. I know plenty of people who could help me out and have a plethora of resources among students and programs in the University. But at the end of the semester I’m going to be handing a paper to three individuals who’ve been trained for years in academe to be intensely critical and who have only a few minor connections to my area of study. It’s already a battle explaining to older professors the relevance of Facebook, it’s going to be an even bigger battle explaining it to professors who aren’t interested in technology.
But that’s okay. This is what I signed on for when I chose to go to grad school, and dealing with criticism, like it or not, is essential in an academe infiltrated by argument disguised as dialectic. I’m here to learn, I’m as smart and capable as I am, and only know what my experiences have taught me. Here goes nothing…
Tag Archives: sociology
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!”