This piece is from my dissertation. It is a reconstruction of events, readings and weblog posts that shaped my understanding of the research ethics in relation to my PhD research.

I put it online for two purposes:

• as an illustration of how weblog is used at the different stages of developing PhD ideas discussed in the Chapter 3 of my dissertation (where this piece appears) and in the Hypertext paper
• as an annotated view into the ethical issues I struggled with in my dissertation

***

Spring 2004. It’s still early in my PhD research and I have not give much thought to ethical questions of doing it. What I did so far was relatively unproblematic: invite people to participate and anonymise the responses; no need to deal with formal requirements for an informed consent.

I work on a paper that uses conversation from my own weblog community as an example. While doing it I realise that my previous research experiences do not provide any guidelines about using and quoting publicly available weblog data in a publication.

27 April 2004 Weblog research ethics

• In this post I do not mention the paper, but I reflect on the dilemmas I face working on it, asking “what would you do when using quotes or stories from public weblogs as examples in your research?” that further breaks into three questions:
  • Do you inform people that you study them?
  • Do you quote anonymously or with attribution?
  • Do you ask for permission?
• I ask for a feedback and also inform the readers “once you are reading this post you are somehow on my radar – beware, I may be studying your weblog :)”

A few people leave comments to the post or provide input in their weblogs while linking back.

29 April 2004 Weblog research ethics (2)

• I summarise the responses:
  • Different opinions about informing the participants and asking for permission; main criteria used is whether weblogs could be considered a publication and treated as such.
  • In respect to quoting: distinction between weblog as a data source and as an information source (similar to any other publication) and protecting privacy and recognising the authorship as a researcher responsibilities.
• I also hint about my feelings in respect to a suggestion of not citing weblogs as a supporting source by articulating that most of my own learning comes from weblogs and not academic publications.

The discussion continues in several weblogs.

16 May 2004 Weblog research ethics (3)

• This post includes links to some of the follow-up discussion, examples of choices by others, and a reference to the ethics guidelines of Association of Internet Research.

Summer-Autumn 2004. I make choices for the paper and move on. After seeing references to the Association of Internet Research (AOIR) in different contexts I arrange for coming to its annual conference.

18 September 2004 AOIR 5.0. Workshop on qualitative research

• This post includes notes from the workshop on multiple topics. I also realise that “although I do internet research, this is not (yet?) my scientific community – unfamiliar names, methods, frames of reference… It feels like discovering the whole new world.”
• My notes in respect to the ethical issues show discovering the complexity of the subject, for example, realising that “private spaces in public” should not be treated as a publication even if the format suggests so.

Spring 2005. I read a lot on ethnography and write many posts attempting to make sense of the role blogging  plays in my research.

4 May 2005 Being researched (2)

• This is a follow-up on another post where I report on discovering weblogs of students who were studying me as part of their assignment. I reflect on the irony of being researcher who is researched and my uneasy feelings of discovering something that was supposed to be private. I relate my experience to the issues of “private spaces in public”.

Summer 2005. I continue my exploration of the methodological challenges that arise at an intersection between blogging and research, giving a talk about the topic at a research institute and writing a proposal for the next AOIR conference. The study of weblogs in Microsoft in July-September provides an another opportunity to make ethical choices. In October I present my work at the AOIR conference and participate in a workshop on ethics of online research, where I pick up additional themes and a few references.

12 October 2005 Good research…

• I write about being “in the middle of post-AOIR thinking on research methodologies, ethics and researcher’s responsibilities”, but only share a quote from the paper on ethics by Annette Markham (2006).

19 October 2005 On the role of theory, researcher accountability and translation

• This is a follow-up on an earlier post on the role of the theory in research: I pick up a reader comment to articulate my beliefs about the researcher accountability, adding in a footnote “Heavily influenced by conversations at AOIR”.

Spring-summer 2006. After disengaging from PhD work for a while due to other obligations, I work on multiple versions of the paper that presents the Microsoft study results (Efimova & Grudin, 2007, also reported in the chapter 6). There I make an implicit choice of not creating an anonymised persona for each of the respondents that have to be justified; as an input I read a collection of essays on the politics of ethnography (Brettell, 1993) mentioned at a AOIR ethics workshop.

11 July 2006 When they read what we write: respondent identification

• I bring together my experiences as a participant in someone else’s research and as a researcher (Microsoft study) to suggest that “sometimes you don’t need a name to recognise that the story told in the research report is associated with a specific person“. I argue that person-centric narratives of weblogs make this situation very likely and relate it to my choice of not creating anonymised personas.
• I recommend Brettel (1993) for an in-depth reading on the topic and promise to “blog it one day“.

Summer 2007. After my maternity leave I get into the final stage of the research, where the work done so far should be integrated into the dissertation.

7 July 2007 Bibliography conventions when writing on weblogs

• I use the examples from other publications to discuss practical question of citing weblogs in my dissertation: distinguishing between different types of citations (weblog as a data source vs. as a reference) via citation placement and formatting.

Summer-autumn 2007. I work on the methodology chapter. Although I post sections of the draft to my weblog, the section on ethics doesn’t appear there. Partly because it heavily uses the insights already covered in the weblog, but also because I’m not happy with the way those are integrated.

Summer 2008. While working on this example I get a better idea what has do be changed in the ethics section and write on Twitter: “wanted to use a section from the Methodology chapter to illustrate something else. Now rewriting it” .

At the same time I work on a paper, on my choices for integrating blogging in the dissertation text, that has a section on ethical choices of representing bloggers (Efimova, 2008). While working on the paper I reread some of the essays on the politics of ethnography.

3 September 2008 Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report

• I blog on the parallels between the ethical challenges of presenting the results of a study of academics in one of the essays (Sheehan, 1993) and those that I face in my own work. The quotes I include, and the discussion of them, are important for my thinking on the issue, but they are tangential to the paper.

September 2008. As soon as I finish the paper I go back to the Methodology chapter and reuse the paper text to rewrite the section on ethics, now close to its final version.

• Bloggers cited in my dissertation
• Research ethics
• Complex domains and researcher accountability

I made a page to include references to the people weblogs of whom I cite or discuss in some way in my dissertation, this post is a shortened version of it. It is here to notify bloggers that quotes from their blogs (or links to them) appear in the dissertation text.

If you are the blogger listed here you might want to know that:

• I treat weblogs as a publicly available texts and do not ask permissions for citing them. The reasons for this and other choices in respect to referring to bloggers in my dissertation are discussed in the research ethics section of it.
• If you have a concern about your weblog being cited, I’m happy to share the text where it appears and remove the citation if you have a reason for doing so. This could only be done until the dissertation text is finalised (somewhere end of April-mid May 2009), so if you have a concern it’s the time to act.

Bloggers are listed in the alphabetical order according to their surnames (blog titles if I couldn’t figure out the name); next to the names I include blogs that (I think) identifies the blogger best at the moment of making this list (March 2009). Titles of the specific posts cited are linked to the pages where I originally found them or, if those were moved, where they could be accessed in March 2009. The list excludes bloggers cited anonymously and those, who’s academic work is cited without discussing their weblogs.

***

• Joshua Allen, Better Living through Software
  • (Chapter 6) Leaf Nodes, 26 May 2003
• Monica Andre, B2OB
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Gabriela Avram, Coniecto
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Alex Barnett, Alex Barnett blog
  • (Chapter 6) Why am I moving my blog? 2 September 2006
• Lee Bryant, Headshift
  • (Chapter 4) An interesting conversation about turning ideas into action, 1 December 2003
• Shawn Callahan, Anecdote
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Mark Dykeman, Broadcasting Brain
  • (Chapter 4) Self-linking could make you go blind, 10 September 2008
• Diane Greco, [narcissism, vanity, exhibitionism, ambition, vanity, vanity, vanity]
  • (Chapter 4) I couldn’t find the original quote longer online, appears as quoted by Mark Bernstein in Social, 4 December 2004
• Alex Halavais, a thaumaturgical compendium
  • (Chapter 3) Comment to my post Context and attribution, 12 February 2004
  • I also cite Alex’s academic publications in a various places of the dissertation
• Stuart Henshall, Stuart Henshall’s blog
  • (Chapter 4)
    • Actionable Sense, 3 December 2003
    • From Conversational Blogging to Jazz Communities, 1 December 2003
• Internet Duct Tape
  • (Chapter 4) The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion, 18 March 2008
• Gretchen Ledgard, Microsoft’s JobsBlog
  • (Chapter 6) The talent landscape, and why I’m ready to lose it, 1 June 2005
  • (Chapter 6) My thoughts on the CNET article, 8 June 2005 (The link redirects to microsoftjobsblog.com, where I wasn’t able to find this post. A copy of the original post is available at archive.org.)
• Josh Ledgard, evolvingWe
  • (Chapter 6) Prototype of Forums Instant Answers, 3 August 2005
• Julie Lerman, Don’t Be Iffy
  • (Chapter 6) What Raymond Chen wants to be sure we know (PDC), 15 September 2005
• Anoush Margaryan, Charting the Labyrinths
  • (Chapter 5) Blogs, information relations and imaginary friends, 22 November 2008
• Dina Mehta, Conversations with Dina
  • (Chapter 4)
    • Comment to Ton Zijlstra’s post Making Actionable Sense, 28 November 2003
    • Blogs – turning ideas into actions, 28 November 2003
    • Turning ideas into action (2) – corporate blogging, 2 December 2003
• Judith Meskill, socmediarocks
  • (Chapter 4) actionable cohorts…, 24 December 2003
• Brett Miller, Theoria cum Praxi
  • (Chapter 4) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Torill Mortensen, Thinking with my fingers
  • I refer to Torill and her weblog in the introduction sections of Chapters 2 and 3
  • I also cite Torill’s academic publications in a various places of the dissertation
• Dave Pollard, How to Save the World
  • (Chapter 2) The blogging process, 30 July 2003
  • (Chapter 3) Blogs in Business – The weblog as filing cabinet, 3 March 2003
  • (Chapter 4) Dave’s linking patterns in 2004 are visualised and discussed
• Martin Roell, Gute vragen
  • (Chapter 4) Unverfolgte Ideen, sichtbar, 23 November 2003
  • (Chapter 5)  summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Dave Snowden, Dave’s blog
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Euan Semple, The Obvious?
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Luis Suarez, Elsua
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teacher – Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson
  • (Chapter 6) Keeping it light, 15 August 2005
• Paolo Valdemarin, Paolo’s weblog
  • (Chapter 4) Not all feeds require the same polling frequency, 10 September 2004
• Nancy White, Full Circle Associates
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Volker Will, VolkerW’s WebLog
  • (Chapter 6), Intense desire to blog, 18 August 2005
• Ton Zijlstra, Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts
  • (Chapter 4)
    • Making Actionable Sense, 27 November 2003
    • Relationships above information exchange, 4 March 2006
    • Making Actionable Sense III, 14 December 2003
    • Ton’s linking patterns in 2004 are visualised and discussed
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices

• OKLC04: useful links for KM PhDs
• Personal knowledge management in KM Magazine
• Age of transparency: live your life well aware that everything counts

This is a slightly modified excerpt from my dissertation about the research ethics. Links and references to be added. [Update: see also final version of the dissertation]

***

Annette Markham (2006) suggests that ethical choices in research go beyond the issues of privacy, anonymity and informed consent; ethics serves as a compass that guides decisions throughout one’s research. For me ethical choices start from the question of whom the research results should serve. The driving force behind my research is an opportunity to go beyond academic settings.

My priorities of bringing research back to practice result in treating my respondents as co-researchers and as an audience to present the results. However, research reports shaped by the conventions of academic writing are not necessarily intended to be read by their participants. Since most academic texts are written for peers, they might produce unexpected outcomes when become accessible for the people studied, as papers in a collection “When they read what we write” (Brettell, 1993) vividly illustrate. Considering the participants of my research as readers of the finished work has direct implications for choices of how to represent them in the text.

Bloggers participating in my studies are public figures. They write in public spaces, often using their names and sharing professional affiliations. They also share traces of their thinking with anyone potentially interested rather than a small group of family and friends. When blogging I quote their words without worries about the implications of bringing them to audiences different from their own; often I hear that pointing others to their ideas is appreciated. I comment on their words knowing that it is easy to find that I did so and to follow-up on any misrepresentation; that the readers are likely to click through the links to find more about relevant contexts and history.

Studying practices of other bloggers next to being one myself puts me in the middle of two conflicting practices when representing them in my reports. In the blogging world the rule is to attribute one’s words, ideally linking to the original post, while in the research world the rule is to anonymise to protect privacy of the respondents.

As a starting point to resolve this problem I use ethical recommendation from the Association of Internet Research (Ess & the AoIR ethics working committee, 2002): I treat bloggers as authors of publicly available texts and explicitly attribute weblog posts to them. Next to being aligned with practices in blogging communities I study, this approach allows me to honour bloggers as public intellectuals, who similar to academics “earn their living in large part through their ideas” (Sheehan, 1993, p.81).

However, next to public weblogs I also use data sources not easily available for others (e.g. interviews, participant observation or patterns in weblog data), so the need to protect the participants is still there. While weblog text is public and the blogging patterns could be easily discovered from it, aggregating and visualising those patterns adds an additional layer of information and it is not necessary of interest of the participant to share it publicly. As a result, the visualisations of patterns in personal blogging practices in my dissertations are treated in two different ways: when attribution to the real person is unavoidable or essential for an interpretation, permissions to include names and links were acquired, in all other cases visualisations are anonymised.

Weblogs also provide an extended visibility for their authors, who then could be recognised by specific details in their practices or opinions even if name is not provided, creating a challenge when using pseudonyms while reporting on sensitive issues. Having publicly known “signature” statements next to the responses on more sensitive issues could result in undesired implications for the respondents. In this case I take an approach similar to the one described by Sheehan (1993), representing bloggers through fragments that could not be connected to a single person by attributing some words and citing anonymously in other cases.

• 7 pages description of my PhD research
• Third culture kids and research kunstkamera
• Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging

Just finished and submitted :)

Efimova, L. (2008). Blending blogging into an academic text. Paper submitted IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge, workshop at Internet Research 9.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-18 October 2008.

Abstract. For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. As I work on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, blending blogging into an academic text to bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me, this paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it, and then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.

Looking forward to the workshop – the list of the workshop participants and their papers is intriguing…

• Soul searching
• #ht09: some thoughts on hypertext
• On blogging and book writing

Working on a paper on how I bring blogging in the text of my dissertation, I finally get to write a bit more on When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography promised long time ago. Although the book is well worth reading as a whole for anyone interested in relations between a researcher and those participating in the research, one of the papers is a must read for those studying bloggers:

• Sheehan, Elizabeth A. (1993). The student of culture and the ethnography of Irish intellectuals. In C.B.Brettell (Ed.), When they read what we write: the politics of ethnography (pp. 75-89). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

In the paper the author tells about the challenges of representing in a research report academics she studied: public intellectuals, “who earn their living in large part through their ideas” (p. 81).

It is a cliché to say that knowledge is power, but in the case of informants who are intellectuals, knowledge is also capital, symbolic and otherwise. Here too the boundaries between public and private forms of information become confused, merge, and cross over to opposite sides in the exchange between anthropologist and informant. As a results, ethnographic writing about academics and intellectuals raises serious issues of intellectual attribution. [...] As intellectuals, many academics create their lives through their work, and their work through their lives. Interviews with such information can provide exhilarating insight for the ethnographer (Yes! Yes! This is what I mean!), brought to a sudden halt by the realization that the ideas you are now thinking – and thinking of writing about – are not entirely your own at all but the product of mutual intellectual exchange. How to you correctly ascribe ideas that are offered within the context of an interview but which may also be the basis of new works, new publications? How do you separate the public thinker from the private, honour his confidentiality and intellectual property, and still offer a meaningful analysis? (Sheehan,1993, p.81)

This one has direct connections to my early questions on weblog research ethics in respect to he choices between protecting privacy of the participants and recognising their authorship. Browsing through the referrals to my post on attribution and ownership of ideas when blogging research I came across a nice summary of the issue from a research participant side in a post by Frank Carver (bold is mine):

One of my current concerns is the tension between perceived needs one the one hand for attribution, academic traceability and ownership of ones own words; and on the other hand for privacy. This is seen in sharpest relief in solicitations for academic surveys. Routinely such instruments come with a disclaimer pointing out that all answers will be anonymous. Well-structured surveys and questionnaires, though, often also contain a section for general comments and feedback. In most cases I do not want this to be anonymous – indeed I would rather it formed part of a dialogue between the researcher and subjects, allowing both to benefit, learn and develop.

I am considering taking up a habit of always adding my contact details to academic survey submissions to deliberately challenge the assumption that I wish to be an anonymous donor of information, and to encourage researchers to participate in a community of interest.

The stress on mutual benefits is important: often it’s not only the researcher who learns new things, but also people who participate in the research, when their thinking on a subject is triggered as a result of an interaction. Elizabeth Sheehan gives a nice example that the challenges of attributing the ideas in a case like this one may also exist on the participant’s side:

I might add that this process can work both ways, but with less ethical difficulty for the informant. I was both flattered and dismayed to see some insights of mine appear in the Irish Times, unattributed, under the byline of an academic I had interviewed a few days earlier. He had no need, as had I, to sort out his ides from my own in a setting which was, for him, just and interesting discussion with another academic. (Sheehan,1993, p.81)

Another issue that the paper touches is the one I had to deal myself: the need to represent research participants in a way that multiple parts of their input could not be attributed to the same person (in When they read what we write: respondent identification). An example from the paper:

…his identity had to be fragmented. In the dissertation he becomes several people, not my the questionable device of pretending he was really a number of different individuals, but simply by my failing to inform the reader that “one professor,” “another commentator,” and so forth who appear throughout the dissertation are actually one person. Consequently, this single individual is discessed as the unnamber center of the appointment controversy, as an anonymous example of the links between scholarship and party politics, as an attributed commentator on his research discipline, and as a published sources on his research specialty. (Sheehan,1993, pp.83-84)

• Wish I was there: Weblogs and Cross-Disciplinary Communication panel
• Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit
• Things that don’t fit

[From draft version of methodology chapter for my dissertation, slightly adapted for the web]

The table below presents an overview of verification strategies and their relevance to the quality criteria.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/10/25.html#a1950; comments are here.

• Research methodology: everything is relative
• Researcher vs. blogger: researcher influence
• PhD supervision: a bit of trust, a bit of imagination

One of the practical problem when writing scientific texts about weblogs is dealing with citations. Apart from ethical issues (e.g. blog research ethics, respondent identification) there is a practical problem of combining references to “traditional” publication sources with references to weblog entries.

In my case weblog entries are also referred to in two ways – (1) as a reference to attribute an idea or support an argument and (2) as a data source used for an illustration – and it could make sense to distinguish between those two. There are also references to my own weblog, which serves an additional role of research diary.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for my dissertation, but I’m collecting some inspirational ideas.

Vivian Serfaty in The Mirror and the Veil provides references to weblog posts quoted in the footnotes. Bibliography section is split in a several categories: works cited, diaries cited, archives and webrings, political blogs cites, miscellaneouss.

In Uses of blogs references, weblog links and notes are included in endnotes for each chapter. There is also a bibliography at the end that includes “key sources” (mainly published articles and books, but also a few online essays; weblog entries are not included).

The reflexive thesis by Malcolm Ashmore provides another example. It’s not about weblogs, but a good example of referencing all kinds of sources for his dissertation (published as a book in this case). Below is truncated version of TOC:

• Foreword, abstract, etc.
• Introduction
• Chapters 1-7
• Appendix. Nonbibliographical sources and other secrets

• Interviews
• Correspondence
• Referees’ reports
• Research proposals
• Early drafts
• Conferences: discourse and relexivity workshops
• Telephone conversations
• Sources of some of “my” textual techniques
• Other secrets

Any other suggestions?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/07.html#a1903; comments are here.

• Dissertation approved :)
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: connecting the dots
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging

As usual I’m bad in real-time coverage of interesting events, so some after-thought notes from DIRN workshop “Interaction in Digital Environments” organised by doctoral student network (Digital Interaction Research Network – DIRN) at Umeå University in Sweden.

Things to think about:

• emergent social norms in online spaces (heavily triggered by “Reconsidering Emergence” talk by TL Taylor; see also notes by Jill and archived video stream)
• blogging and hierarchies: academic examples
• women in academia: role-models and not saying no
• new turn on online research ethics – dealing with risks of studying vulnerable groups
• narrative analysis
• concepts of identity
• Bloom’s taxonomy as a way to position research methodologies
• kid’s views on Internet uses and dangers (and not what adults think of them)
• (non)uses of technology: over time vs. situational

Apart from meeting interesting people and new insights the workshop had a funny impact of me: I came back much more confident that what and how I do in my PhD actually makes a lot of sense. Sometimes because of getting direct feedback on things, but mainly due to interacting with PhD students who are at much earlier stage in the processs and realising how much I already sorted out (e.g. how focused are my own “not properly focused” research questions ;). I realise now how much looking mainly at accomplished researchers (those whos work I admire) is the source of that “I will never get there” feeling that was hunting me through the summer and how much talking to struggling peers could help to get reassurance that struglling is just a normal part of the process.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/22.html#a1818; comments are here.

• Writing as a method of data analysis
• Weblog research: artefacts and practices
• Wish I was there: Weblogs and Cross-Disciplinary Communication panel

While reading a research report for the study where I was one of the respondents I realised that even while my quotes were identified with a nickname there would be quite some number of people who could figure out it was me if they get to read the whole thing…

This is something I has been struggling in my own research as well. Simple: when I report on interviews with bloggers shall I add a (nick)name to every quote/fact?

On one hand, it dramatically improves readability of the research results – readers could reconstruct what different characters were saying and how different aspects of their story connect to each other. On another hand, this is exactly something that compromises their privacy: sometimes you don’t need a name to recognise that the story told in the research report is associated with a specific person.

Sometimes you don’t need the whole story. In one of my interviews with Microsoft bloggers I brought in an opposing opinion of another respondent (“some people say so and so”) to get into a discussion on why differences were there. The respondent immediately identified the name of the person I tried to hide…

This could be just an exception, but I’m pretty sure that if I let quotes to be accompanied by nicknames (=allowing to trace that they belong to the same person) then many of the personalities behind them could be easily identified by their peers (and I’m not talking about the fact that I can’t quote anything from the respondents’ blogs – that gives them away immediately).

It doesn’t make a big issue when “the field” you study and “the academic audience” you write for are far apart, so the chances of someone from the field reading the results of the study is low. However, it’s not the case with my research – a weblog reveals personality and the blogosphere is interconnected enough, I choose to study lead users who often have an interest in the results and I actually find important reaching them – the chances that my respondents or people who can identify them read the results are pretty high.

And, while I’m strfuggling with my writing choices I have a book suggestion for those who feel like diving into these issues further: When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. So far this was the best to put my own experiences and thinking into perspective. I will blog it one day (if I’m bad this will not happen before writing the related section of my dissertation :)

Related from another angle: Weblog research ethics – 1, 2 3

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/11.html#a1799; comments are here.

• Metaphors for blogging PhD ideas: maps, mirrors and masks
• Finding confidence
• How blogging makes my life difficult

Two things coming from Sebastian Fiedler mould into my thinking on PhD methodology.

The first post What Is “Good” Education Research? points to an article by Karl Hostetler (.pdf) discussing the ethics and politics of education research (themes that much in my thinking due to all my ethnographic readings).

The second is a quote from Søren Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards.
In the meantime, it has to be lived forwards.

This one connects to retrospective coherence of complex domains (Dave Snowden/Cynefin, see the paper (.pdf)) and my attempts to figure out good methods of studying it.

What keeps bothering me is a misalignment of research methodologies that are perceived as “more scientific” (~easier to defend) and my own research values/interests (especially: complex domains and researcher accountability).

I’ll have to find a way for resolving it – this is the only way for completing a PhD without compromising my values.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/31.html#a1752; comments are here.

• Draft chapter for a review: Blogging PhD ideas
• PhD process
• ‘Those that belong to the Emperor’ (on weblog types)