Mathemagenic

Some quotes that are not likely to be included in the Methodology chapter of my PhD, but pretty much explain how I think about methodological choices:

…the validity of scientific claims is always relative to the paradigm within which they are judged; they are never simply a reflection of some independent domain of reality (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1994, p. 12)

…methods rest on philosophical presuppositions. These remain embedded in them, even if they are not taught or discussed or attended to explicitly. (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2006, p. 370)

No context is value-free. Academic disciplines promote particular ways of observing, dissecting, measuring, interpreting, and otherwise making sense of the phenomena under investigation. One’s decisions may emerge within or resistant to these disciplinary structures. One’s decisions also derive from one’s research goals, which are seldom acknowledged in research reports but which meaningfully affect the design, process, and outcome of a study. (Markham, 2006)

…all research is a practical activity requiring the exercise of judgement in context; it is not a matter of simply following methodological rules (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1994, p. 23)

References

• Hammersley, M. & Atkinson, P. (1994). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. (2nd ed.) Routledge.
• Markham, A. N. (2006). Ethics as method, methods as ethics: A case for reflexivity in qualitative ICT research. Journal of Information Ethics, 15(2), 37-54.
• Yanow, D. & Schwartz-Shea, P. (2006). Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. M.E. Sharpe.

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A little side-trip before I get back to work. Two quotes from two books; something I has been playing with for a long time, but still has to find a proper way into my formal research writing.

Jan Gehl, Life between buildings, on ‘excursions as excuses’:

Among the requirements that are satisfied, in part, in public spaces are the need for contact, the need for knowledge, and the need for stimulation. These belong to the group of psychological needs. Satisfying these is seldom as goal-oriented and deliberate as with the more basic physical needs, such as eating, drinking, sleeping and so on. For example, adults seldom go to town with the expressed intention of satisfying the need for stimulation or the need for contact. Regardless of the true purpose may be, one goes out for a plausible, rational reason – to shop, to take a walk, to get some fresh air, to buy a paper, to wash the car, and so forth.

Perhaps it is wrong to speak of the shopping excursion as a pretext for contact and stimulation, because very few people out shopping will accept the fact that the need for contact and stimulation plays any part in their shopping plans. The fact that adults who work at home on average spend nearly three times as much time shopping as those who work outside the home, and the fact that the shopping excursions are distributed evenly throughout the week, even though shopping once a week would perhaps be easier, make it natural to assume that the many daily shopping excursions are not only a question of getting supplies.

It is general characteristic that basic physical and psychological needs are satisfied at the same time, and that the basic and easily defined needs often serve to explain and motivate the satisfying of both sets of needs. In this context the shopping excursion is both a shopping trip and a pretext, or occasion, for contact and stimulation. [pp. 117, 119]

Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, on ‘props and facilitators’:

The English constantly form clubs and societies for exactly the same reason that we have so many sports and games: we need props and facilitators to help us engage socially with our fellow humans, to overcome our social dis-ease, and we also need an illusion that we are doing something else, that we have come together for some practical purpose, to pursue a specific shared interest, to pool resources in order to achieve something we couldn’t manage alone. […] the real purpose of all these clubs is the social contact and social bonding that we desperately need, but cannot admit needing, not even to ourselves. [p. 251]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/05.html#a1840; comments are here.

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