The week 8 blogging topic is wide open, so I would like to continue
on last week’s post on ethnography, and discuss a bit about the tension in
discourse about the scientific method and generalizability.
We mentioned in class about ethnography, and interviews and
the process of data collection which may segway into including transcription
that could in a way be considered as artifacts themselves. To relate, as I
mentioned in my previous posts, my topic relies on gathering data from
YouTubers on the Internet and could potentially need some direct
communication/interaction with those YouTubers. The sort of data that I would
have to gather pertains to what the average YouTuber (those who do include
copyrighted content in their uploaded videos) understand about copyright
infringement and their rights on YouTube as a video sharing platform. This
question could turn my research into a grounded theory study by for example sampling
a variety of copyright infringement videos, that border on the line of fair use,
from parody to ‘educational’, or to simply commentary styled reaction videos.
Positivism, that questions could be verified by scientific method (or
mathematical calculations), therefore, may not be obviously used in my
research, but perhaps could lend force to a subsequent quantitative analysis. I
say this because the qualitative data collected could be quantified in terms of
dissecting the words used from the transcribed interviews (as can quantitative
data can be interpreted qualitatively too, for example the number of YouTubers
who know versus who do not and what commonalities/differences they have among
each other). As for the generalizability of such methods, it would be quite
dependent on the research question I end up pursuing, which at this point in
time I am still contemplating. But considering this post, I am getting closer
to zeroing into what interests me more (the appeal of either qualitative or
quantitative studies, or perhaps greedily, a mix of both).
Lilian Le-Dang
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