Publications and Research
Document Type
Book Chapter or Section
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
In this chapter, Bradley Bergey, a 2nd-year doctoral student, tells the tale of his ethnographic journey. He focuses on how he struggled to settle on a question for his project. Bradley had done a good bit of thinking about questions, their nature, and development prior to embarking on this study. In this chapter he explores the relationship between question development, data collection, and crafting an answer to his research question. He de- scribes how his question developed while he developed his own set of “eth- nographic eyes” as a researcher and how he worked to settle on a question that was answerable given the time frame (one semester), resources, and data he had to work with.
As a former middle and high school teacher Bradley had spent consider- able time wondering about the questions his students asked. Why did some of his students ask questions and others did not? What led a student to ask a question at a particular moment in time? What were students’ concerns in asking a question? When he entered graduate school he began to explore this topic in the literature and through projects in his classes. When he be- gan his first qualitative project he knew, therefore, that it would focus on student questions. What he came to learn is that the development of his own question for this particular project would take time as he learned what types of research questions he might actually be able to answer and which aspects of student question development were of greatest interest to him.
As Bradley details in the chapter, the selection of the site for this study is slightly unusual, because the site was not completely novel. As I noted else- where, it is generally not a good idea to observe where you work or in a site that is overly familiar to you. In this case Bradley was observing a professor he knew well at his own university. This class offered a potentially interest- ing design that would have been hard to find elsewhere: It is one of the few at the university that blends online student participation with live student participation. Initially Bradley was very interested in the difference between questions asked online and in class. In addition, he argued, he would be able to gain access to the questions students posed via e-mail as this particular professor agreed to allow him access to these questions. The opportunity to examine question-asking in this variety of modalities presented a compelling opportunity, one that seemed to outweigh the risk of being overly familiar with the site and the participants. While this aspect of Bradley’s project turned out not to provide the rich variety of question-asking strategies that he had hoped for, and the difference between online and live student questions did not remain his focus, at the outset this design appeared to offer a unique opportunity that warranted making an exception to my “rule.”
In developing the focus for his study Bradley describes three “blind- nesses” that he passed through on the way to settling on his research ques- tion. After first being unable to see what was interesting or noteworthy in the class he was observing, Bradley became “blinded” by all of the possible questions he could ask. Like a man coming out of the desert, he was over- whelmed by the water everywhere. Though flooded with possible research questions, he realized that part of settling on the right question is allowing other very good questions to go unanswered for the present. As Bradley describes this journey he provides insight into the important relationship between the data that has been collected, the many questions that could be asked and answered, and the interest and goals of the researcher. Along the way Bradley also allows us to share in his hopes and fears for his project and the way in which he learned to move through them as he developed skill as a qualitative researcher.
Comments
Published in E. M. Horvat, The beginner’s guide to doing qualitative research: How to get into the field, collect data, and write up your project. New York: Teachers College Press.