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INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
‘Corpus Construction’
‘Corpus Construction’

Defining the sites and subjects of in situ
work
 Making decisions about your field site(s) –
how a social phenomenon of interest is
mapped out onto spatial terrain
 Selecting people to follow, observe and/or
interview
 Selecting media / artifacts from the setting
for further analysis
Competence and Innovation

Competence (Bauer and Gaskell)
 Systematic
 Issues of public accountability

Innovation (Becker)
 Challenge conventional thinking
Doing Innovative Research

Starting Where You Are (Lofland
and Lofland)
 Commitment and Curiosity
 Access and ‘getting in’

Willingness to go where
others won’t
 The inconvenient and
uncomfortable
 The illegitimate
Approaches
Total enumeration (census)
 Statistical random sample
 Snowball sample (iteration again)
 Convenience sample (bad)

Random vs. Systematic

Random Statistical
Sampling
 Distribution of already
known attributes
 Sample has a
distribution of criterion
= population as a
whole
 Popular
misconception – the
greater the # in the
sample, the more
accurate

‘Corpus
Construction’
Typifies unknown
attributes
 Systematic selection
to some alternative
rationale (not a
convenience sample)

Unknowable Populations
Many populations of ‘individuals’ are
knowable, however…
What about ‘actions?’
 What about ‘situations?’
 Open systems (i.e. language) = infinite
populations

Mapping the Unknowable
Social strata, functions and categories (known)
Representations
(unknown)
Varieties of:
Belief
Attitudes
Opinions
Stereotypes
Ideologies
Worldviews
Habits
Practices
[Bauer and Gaskell]
Mapping the Unknowable
Iteration ‘til Saturation
 Don’t collect too much data [logistical
limits]

Reporting Practices

Public accountability
1) A description of the materials
2) A characterization of the topic
3) The initially defined social strata…
4) The social strata added later
5) Evidence for saturation
6) Timeline of data collection cycles
7) Place of data collection
How to carry this into ‘in situ,’
inductive, qualitative research
 Who am I missing?
 Looking out for social strata, categories
that define the social setting (and
variations)
Problems of Social Strata in CrossCultural Research
Demographic Form
Extending Selection Strategies: Sampling
for ‘Innovation’
Identify the case that is likely to upset your
thinking and look for it – (the counterexample) e.g. morphine, opium, heroin
addicts
 If someone says it has already been studied,
its probably time to study it again.
 Studying the non-serious and the ‘boring’

Description as ‘Sampling’
a selection from what is observed – we do
this implicitly [Becker]
 done well creates new categories and
ideas that ‘get around conventional
thinking’

Selecting Field Sites
Some work is clearly ‘sited’
 Some is not (amorphous social settings) –
and therefore locating such work will be
more involved
 Sites may be ‘open’ or ‘closed’

In Conclusion - Generalizability?
The problem of unknowable populations
 Rather than ‘representativeness’ seeking
‘range’ and variation in the social
phenomenon under study
 To what effect? Challenging notions of
what is ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ about a
phenomenon
 Social critique not predictive control
(remember Habermas)

For Thursday
Read Lofland and Lofland section on
logging data
 Read UC guidelines for protection of
human subjects
