martes, 10 de octubre de 2017

Starting to think about research methods...


  • What kind of topics are you interested in researching?
A: About technology and its impact on society, how everything is changing.. in particular: how it can help to have a more committed society in the long run? 
  • What initial research questions might be starting to emerge for you?
A: how technology can help people´s development?, how to make citizens participate in the long term? technology and empowerment?

  • What are you interested in researching - people, groups, communities, documents, images, organisations?
Everything, but I think I would start with specific people and groups and/or organisations, within certain context.
  • Do you have an initial ideas for the kinds of methods that might help you to gather useful knowledge in your area of interest?
Social Network Analysis, focus groups, maybe ethnography??
  • What initial questions do you have about those methods? What don't you understand yet?
How to apply it (gather data)? and how to create sociograms?
  • Do you perceive any potential challenges in your initial ideas: either practical challenges, such as gaining access to the area you want to research, or the time it might take to gather data; or conceptual challenges; such as how the method you are interested in can produce 'facts', 'truths', or 'valuable knowledge' in your chosen area?
Everything: practical challenges, gather data, how to produce knowledge...

2 comentarios:

  1. At the moment your area of interest is very wide - perhaps you could narrow it down to a specific group of people or a specific location and maybe also narrow down the forms of technology you research? For example, I researched the use of Twitter with a specific group of post-graduate students and used social network analysis to look at how they learned through networked connections.

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  2. I agree with Noreen's comment, and I also perceive a sense of “must be” in your wording (e.g. ‘how it can help to have a more committed society in the long run?... how technology can help people´s development?’) that I am not sure is proper in “social science research”, as if you were less interested in knowing and more on modifying.

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