INF1240 Research Blog

 Hi everyone,  In preparation for the upcoming research proposal, I've been closely analyzing my current methods and reflecting on possible improvements. One improvement was provided by a TA, who suggest that I conduct my research in the form of a longitudinal study, with a study period beginning during the pandemic and ending after the pandemic and social distances measures have ceased. I think this is an incredibly good suggestion, as this type of study would reduce recall bias, as participants would no longer need to remember what kind of social interactions were occurring pre-pandemic.  As always, any additional thoughts, comments or questions are welcome!  Kaitlin  

I thought the Zimmer article from this week's reading list was interesting in light of our discussion on ethics a few weeks ago. I had written in that week's post about how current ethical guidelines are not equipped to deal with the ethical challenges the internet provides for researchers. This Zimmer reading provides a perfect example for these challenges. Despite receiving ethics approval, encoding names and personal data, it was fairly easy to determine who the people in the T3 study were. Based on the article, it appears that changes should be made on when informed consent is required for big data research. It is interesting how much the knowledge of individual review boards plays a role in causing issues with ethics approvals. Maybe one solution is including people who are experts specifically in emerging fields of ethics in online research for projects that deal with big data. Since big data evolves so quickly, it may be impossible for ethics experts who are not experts ...

Hi all! I hope you are all making good progress with assignment four. I am currently still writing the literature section and struggling to organize all the different academic articles by topic. There are so many great studies. I have to restrain myself from getting sucked in and going down a rabbit hole, reading other interesting looking papers cited in that particular paper. Also, I do not feel qualified and knowledgeable enough to intelligibly pick out the relevant articles for the literature review section. Please let me know how you are tackling this section!  In other news, I thought this week's readings about big data research was interesting but found that they did not directly tie in with my current research project. I believe the privacy issues related to big data collection have come up in previous readings this term, so the topics covered this week looked familiar. What was quite shocking (but at the same time not surprising) was how quickly people could narrow down t...

  Hi everyone,     I hope you are all doing well and pushing through the last couple weeks of classes and assignments! I found this week’s readings and pre-lecture content on case studies and observation very interesting and applicable to my own research proposal. Previous to this week, I didn’t realize what the formal definition of a case study was, so I found the reading Harrison  et al.  very helpful and insightful. However, beyond learning about the fundamentals of case studies, I found that reading about the disadvantages, specifically the how case studies can be very specific, and not generalizable, caused me to think back and reflect on my own research. Specifically, it stimulated me to consider how generalizable my research would be beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there may not be a viral outbreak on a global scale for a long time (hopefully), I realized that my research on communication and social support could be generalized to communities in an...

Hi everyone, One of the issues I found interesting from this week’s readings was the idea of generalizability. I found this was an issue with the paper I reviewed for the peer review assignment. I think that as researchers, we often want our research to be more applicable to other areas than it actually is. Harrison et al. from this week’s readings highlight the difficulties of generalizing case study research to other cases. Based on the peer review assignment, I think that Harrison et al. raise an important point about the importance of using multiple methods. Clear, convincing and robust evidence needs to be provided. I found when doing the peer review that it was difficult to take the paper’s word for the claim of generalizability because there was not enough evidence to determine if the study could be extended. I think for our purposes as small-scale researchers, generalizing our studies might be difficult. Based on Harrison et al.’s suggestion for generalizability, there is s...

Assignment three was difficult but helpful because it helped me understand how methods was different from methodology and how researchers sought to ensure validity and reliability in their projects. The article I reviewed used a mixed methods approach in an almost case-study (I say almost because the study did not observe study participants in their natural setting), using content analysis for the study's qualitative methods portion. This week's reading on how to use content analysis in case studies (Kohlbacher, 2006) was helpful because I could see how the researchers could have improved upon or did well in the content analysis portion of the study. Going beyond the readings a little bit, I thought it was interesting that there are parallels between classical content analysis in research and sentiment analysis in information technology. Classical content analysis is a technique that codes text to a standardized format. This is similar to what programmers do in sentiment analys...

One of the things that I found interesting from this week's readings was the discussion of the opinions and biases of a study's author in critical discourse analysis (CDA). The van Dijk article argues that the purpose of studies that use CDA is to further a social goal. They should therefore take a clear sociopolitical stance (van Dijk, 2016). In academia, we often view papers and studies as needing to be completely objective in order to be trustworthy. This principle seems not to apply to studies that employ CDA.  I think it is important in academia to have room for a discussion where the author does not maintain a strictly objective opinion. There are issues, such as systemic racism, that have direct implications on the lives of minorities. Academia can be a place where these issues are discussed and where evidence is brought to further a sociopolitical position. CDA is a tool that can be used to freely criticize the discourse of mainstream society and of those in power while...

 This week's readings and pre lecture videos were incredibly novel and interesting to learn about. As someone with more quantitive research experience I found it fascinating learning about critical discourse analysis as well as qualitative analysis techniques, including content analysis.  Specifically, I found learning about content analysis to be the most relevant topic for my own research proposal. Previously, I had briefly considered including qualitative and quantitative analysis but I ultimately decided to focus on qualitative findings when I constructed my HSERC proposal. However, after learning about content analysis, I feel the need to reconsider if it would be valuable to include qualitative methods in my research design. The reason why I think this could be beneficial is because qualitative analysis may be able to provide me with context surrounding the participants current state, which may allow me to have a greater understanding of the overall experience of the par...

This week's lecture and readings were one of the most interesting topics this term. And while my research methodology will be primarily quantitative, this week's readings on critical discourse brings to light how I can enhance my proposed research project (time permitted).  Many articles and chapters from this week's readings argued for the importance of critical discourse analysis. Although detractors may claim that this form of analysis is not objective enough, I found van Dijk's (1993) analysis of Mr. Marcus Fox's 1985 leading speech in the British House of Commons persuasive in elucidating its relevance and importance. It would have been difficult to parse out the discrimination in the speech as well as the implicit mechanisms that reproduce and publicize racism if one were to carry out a simple word frequency analysis. As someone who comes from an economics background, the trend towards computational/quantitative methodology in the social sciences and denigra...