I finally finished my major project for the last six months: writing and revising my 32 page guide on writing strategies for theses and dissertations, and have posted it to the Essential Edits site.

I argue that one has to unlearn undergraduate writing skills to learn a completely new skill set to survive.

Research suggests attrition rates of between 50% to 65% for PhD candidates and thesis-route master's programs. Interestingly enough, most drop out of the program after completing all the course work and all the data collection and analysis for thesis/dissertation, which suggests that the problem is in the writing stage—though this is seldom recognized in the literature, and often not even by the students themselves! Reorienting graduate students to the different nature of sustained writing projects could assist many more students in completing their graduate degrees.

The guide is available free from EssentialEdits.ca/ThesisStrategies.pdf.

Cross Cultural Research Conference (continued)

Given the previous blog entry, it should be no surprise that my favorite paper from today’s sessions was George R. Franke and R. Glenn Richley, Jr. (both University of Alabama) paper, “Mind the gap: The risks of bi-country comparisons in cross-cultural studies.” The basic thrust of the paper was that the very popular bicultural comparison format violates various principles of sampling and that at least 25% of the published papers using this technique were necessarily wrong. (Not that they could identify which were the wrong papers, just that given the nature of the techniques involved, statistically a quarter of the papers would have the reported relationship backwards.) Their analysis suggested that for even strong correlations, one needed a sample of at least 22 countries to ensure a reasonable statistical probability that one had depicted the relationship correctly.

But even here I still had the objection that they were using “country” as a proxy for culture, which may be acceptable for homogeneous cultures such as Japan, but very problematic for Canada – does a member of the Cree first nations respond the same way as a francophone Quebecer and a Mormon from Cardston, Albertan? Somehow, I doubt it! And given the very slobby sampling techniques often used (“I wrote to 22 of my colleagues on other campuses and asked them to survey one of their classes”) I am having a lot of trouble accepting the legitimacy of most of these quantitative studies. Scientific my ass! And yet the quantitative bozos that dominate management research have the nerve to question the validity of qualitative methods? what a sham!



Above: Tigana and Kasia in Christmas sleigh on Hilton grounds, one of innumerable Christmas decorations that make little sense in Hawaii's climate...

Cross Cultural Research Conference

Working day: We presented our paper at the conference, attended various other sessions. I found the presentations mixed: some were quite good, others kind of weenie. One I found kind of annoying analyzed articles on acculturation, but limited the study to three journals each in business and psychology, concluding that the majority of studies were quantitative rather than qualitative. There didn’t appear to be any rationale for the selection of the sample journals, and others in the room objected that even within business, how different journals approached acculturation could be radically different. I pointed out that sociology and anthropology might have something to say on the topic, and that those journals were more likely to have qualitative than quantitative methodologies. There just didn’t seem to be a point to such a limited analysis, which was too obviously a course assignment recycled for resume credit. I could even see the grad student doing it as a first experience at presenting at a conference, a legitimate use of conference time, in my view; but I found it pretty hard to take that the prof had added her name to this class assignment. If you’re a tenured prof and this is the best you can do, it’s a sad day.

In contrast, another grad student did a conceptual presentation, which she clearly identified as preliminary and informal, a kind of surrogate candidacy experience in which she was looking for feedback from outside the small circle of her own profs to see if she was headed in a fruitful direction. I thought her ideas insightful and likely to have very far-reaching implications, and we provided what suggestions and encouragement we could. In this case, the combination of her very current lit review and the introduction of her own ideas meant we were hearing from the very cutting edge in the field, and our time amply rewarded, in spite of the preliminary nature of the research.

The problem, then, is trying to distinguish between the time wasters and the relevant. Of course the peer review process is supposed to do that, but somebody signed off on that first paper, and I’ve been at other conferences without a grad student to be seen, as if no one below a PhD candidate had anything to offer.

And speaking of idiot reviewers, I was kind of offended at the reviewers’ comments on our paper questioning whether our comparison of English and French Canada was truly a cross-culture paper because it wasn’t “international”. So here we are at the Cross-Cultural Research Conference, and the American ethnocentrism is so dense that they assume every nation on earth is a cultural melting pot in the American tradition. Paper after paper provided “bicultural” comparisons between two countries: US and Japan, Spain and Germany or etc. Well, I’m okay with any comparison between say “Japan” and “Korea” because those are pretty homogeneous populations. But between Canada and anybody else, I’m going to want to know about your sampling technique, because a 100 francophone respondents from Quebec are going to be saying something quite different from a 100 Anglophones from Southern Alberta! And what was laughable about many of these bicultural studies is the samples were entirely accidental convenience samples: the 60 students in the grad class the research taught on their home campus in the US and on their exchange semester in Germany. Yeah, the 50 students in an MBA class are pretty typical of all Germans, eh? I accept that the MBA sample is a reasonable proxy for managers for research on business, though I strongly suspect that the textbook learning of the MBA gets modified as they gain actual experience which is likely to result in different responses, but if the study focuses on some strictly managerial issue, I could go with it. But I constantly saw people suggesting results far beyond what the sample size or its representativeness could justify.

Unusually good conference lunch (well, it is at the Hilton) and engaging conversation with a Russian graduate student studying in US on a basketball scholarship. They did come close to poisoning Mary, but I was able to recognize the shellfish in the sauce before Mary took a bite, and they very efficiently substituted a chicken dish from the neighboring conference for her. Of course, as these things always go for Mary, the chicken was in a wonderful mushroom sauce, mushrooms being her other food sensitivity, but hey, they tried.

For supper, we went to Roy's (with the Basils -- we split a baby-sitter and dumped the kids for the evening). I tried raw Ahi (tuna) for the first time. I couldn't believe that this intensely delicious food was any relation to the white stuff that comes out of cans. And I can't believe that I was willingly (read 'greedily') eating up raw fish. That is so not part of my self-image. I've told people for years that I hate fish (except for salmon), but I now see that this prejudice was formed growing up on the prairies in the 1950s, before air freight allowed for anything even approximating the phrase "fresh fish". Eating week-old fish or frozen fish sticks does not come close to eating Ahi caught the same morning and marinated in Roy's special spices. I could get very used to eating at Roy's.

Handbook of Arts in Qualitative Research

The Handbook of Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues (Sage Publications, 2007, $130, ISBN 971412905312) is out at long last. I contributed Chapter 26 on blogs. Nice to see it in print.

Life Goals

A quote from a Dave Barry column (which I found on Life After York):

"So I visited my son at college on Parents Weekend, which is a nice event that colleges hold so that parents will have a chance to feel old.

I started feeling old the moment I got to my son's housing unit and saw a sign on the door that said: END WORLD HUNGER TODAY. This reminded me that there was a time in my life, decades ago, when I was so full of energy that I was going to not only END WORLD HUNGER, but also STOP WAR and ELIMINATE RACISM. Whereas today my life goals, to judge from the notes I leave myself, tend to be along the lines of BUY DETERGENT."

As my wife successfully completes her doctorate and launches her academic career, and I am coming up on yet another birthday, I can't help noticing that I'm less than a decade from retirement, and I have yet to start on, let alone achieve, most of my career goals. My self image is still that of the 'young turk', new to the faculty, about to start -- real soon now -- on one of my many major projects. So it is increasingly distressing to me that so many of my colleagues now seem to be considerably younger than I, and keep referrng to me as 'a senior member of the faculty'. When the hell did that happen?

So I keep looking at the various projects that I'm supposed to be working on and asking myself, is this what I really want to be known for? And the answer usually is, 'Not so much'. I mean, there is a tension between doing something because the opportunity to do it is there, and it will play well on one's annual report because it means a quick and easy publication credit; versus doing what I really am interested in, for which there is generally no market or career payoff. And the way life is, one thinks, "I'll just knock off this quick project to satisfy the annual report requirements, and then get on with the good stuff" but what really happens is that you're lucky if you have the time and energy to finish the 'quicky' and end up never doing the 'important' stuff....

It's obvious, of course, that academia is structured to prevent any of us from really making a difference. The annual report structure means one has to come up with a couple of publications a year, which are necessarily shallow because journal articles are too short to present any argument longer than 8000 words; are too specialized to be read by more than a handfull of other academics; and are controlled by a peer review process that rejects anything that challenges the paradigmatic status quo. So you can't get another Das Capital, because who has a lifetime to write one book? But I bet if you looked at who has an influence on our society, who actually changes the world and how we see it, it is the people who are writing books or movies, not the authors of research buried in overly specialized journals.

Hmm, sounds like an interesting study.....but I can't even consider doing it because there won't be time to get it done before my next annual report.

You Read It Here First

In my current article/book chapter on the research implications of blogs and blogging, I make the point that since blogs automatically date stamp and archive each post, researchers can establish who had a particular idea first by simply mentioning it in their blog. So, let me take my own advice and mention a couple of neologisms regarding blogging and data collection that I coin in my article:

The sustained asynchronous focus group': researchers initiate their own topical blog to solicit postings or comments; the researchers direct the resulting 'conversation' as they would a focus group.

directed journal entries: researchers identify a sample population and request that they keep a topical on-line diary. (Getting people to keep diaries is a fairly common research technique, but only a couple of done this on line so far, but online provides all sorts of logistical advantages....)

Found data: pre-existing material created for other purposes that the researcher is able to access and analyze as data (in this case, blogs) The spontaneous commentary of a blogger is 'found data', in contrast to the 'created data' of the survey or interview where the subject's responses exist only because they were asked the question. We cannot know whether the issues we are asking the respondent about would be sufficiently salient in their lives that they would have spontaneously raised them outside the interview context; with found data, the subjects are more likely to write about issues that are salient to them -ie., less leading of the witness because there is no question asked....

Okay, those are mine now! Oh, feel free to use them. In fact, I'd appreciate you dropping those phrases into conversation whereever you can, so that they spread and come widely into use. Then once everyone is using my terms, I can prove that I said them first, and everyone will have to cite me whenever they want to use them in an article.

Okay, it lacks the money making potential of Trump copywriting "You're Fired", but same basic principle.

The Feminist Mystique for the 21th Century

WhoooHooo!

Mary had submitted her draft dissertation to her advisor last month, and been waiting on pins and needles to see how extensive the revisions required by her advisor would be. To her (and my) great relief, his suggestions have been very very minor clarifications. Instead, he has been exceedingly positive about the work, saying in part:

"This is wonderful stuff. I think that you have a book on your hands (post defence). It reads so well. I laughed my way through chapter 3 -- black comedy, but funny nonetheless. You tell a great (and intellectually sharp) story. ... What you have done with anecdotes was sheer poetry as well inspired."

And again on another chapter: "Simply brilliant."

Re, methodology chapter: "You should be teaching critical methods, you are so good at it. "

"I really enjoyed this. I see it as ready."

And my personal favorite:

"When the book is published and, hopefully, they ask me for a comment (or anyone else for that matter) I/they will call it the feminist mystique for the 21th century."

I knew the dissertation was great when she sent it off, but it is really validating to have her advisor be so enthusastic too. Considering how fast Mary did this work, and that she did it while having a baby and teaching full time and that she did it entirely on her own (with the exception of one chapter that was the basis for an article in Human Relations, this is the first time her advisor has seen any of it.)

And, she is still a major babe!

The Social Uses of Photographs

I'm still struggling to complete my article on blogs as a research methodology, but one of the side benefits is my looking around for examples to include, and coming across some really nifty studies. Here is a pretty nifty site: Professor Nancy Van House, School of information Management Systems, University of California, Berkeley is working on The Social Uses of Photographs and trust, credibility, and the internet. Here is her paper on Weblogs: Credibility and Collaboration in an Online World

Blank Page Syndrome

This week I've been struggling with writing a chapter on blogs for a research methodology textbook. It's frustrating because I have a pretty good idea of what I want to say, and even how I want to say it, but I'm still finding it difficult to get past the blank page and get down the initial paragraphs. I have made several false starts -- the first too informal, the second too boring, the third too obsolete (I realized that by the time the chapter saw print, and especially after it had been in print for a while -- since textbooks of this type hang around for a long time -- explaining what blogs are and how they work would be as redundant as explaining the benefits of word processing or of using a search engines to find journal articles) and I am finding it difficult to motivate myself to go back for try number 4. Thankfully, I'm up against a deadline, so motivated or not, I'll get it done sometime in the next week.

Writer's block is pretty normal, of course. I've only met four or five people who do not suffer from at least that initial blockage as they face the first blank page, and I know a lot of academics and professional writers. But it is not part of the writing process that anyone sees or talks about. Most academics would like you to believe that they sit down at the keyboard and simply hammer out the finished product that you see in journals or books first draft. In reality, the material that sees print has usually gone through 5 to 10 major revisions; by which I mean, torn up and start over kind of rewriting, not just copy editing.

The problem with the pretense that we 'just write up our findings' without sweating over it, is that students or new faculty who are struggling to get something down on paper and failing, often feel like there must be something wrong with them, and believing that no one else is experiencing this level of angst, gives it up. I have on innumerable occasions seen thesis supervisors provide detailed guidance and support to their student in the formulation of the research question, the search for relevant research literature, data collection and data analysis, but once the student has their data ready to write up, they say, "well, go to it!" as if the writing process were not in fact as difficult or more difficult than all the other stages. We assume that because students have been writing papers for years as undergraduates, they should have no problem writing up their thesis, but the research I've seen suggests that it is at this stage that approximately 50% of graduate students in thesis or dissertation programs drop the ball and disappear from the program.

I am very grateful to Howard Becker's book, Writing for the Social Sciences in which he explains that the writing strategies necessary for the successful completion of a thesis, dissertation or published piece of research are almost the exact opposite strategies necessary to efficiently completing an undergraduate paper. To be successful thesis writers, students have to unlearn everything they think they know about writing. But since hardly anyone every tells them that, when their successful strategies from their undergraduate years fail them, they view it as their personal failure, and thinking they have lost it somehow, announce "I can't do this!" and throw in the towel.

I once had the opportunity of shadowing SF writer Candas Jane Dorsey for a couple of days to see how writers actually write. This was back when I was struggling to finish my dissertation, and I was working 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, yet found myself repeatedly bogged down in writer's block. So here I was following Candas around for the day, waiting for her to start writing, and waiting and waiting. First we had breakfast. Then she did some errands. No problem, I’m imposing on her time, I can wait. Then we go for lunch with friends. This takes half a day. Then we go to a movie. Then coffee with other acquaintances. Then supper…which turned into a bit of an impromptu party as other writers in the neighbourhood (Candas then lived in an artists’ co-op) dropped in. Finally, at about 8PM, Candas announces she has to go upstairs for a few minutes. She comes down maybe 80 minutes later and says, “Phew…that was a long slog!” I ask her to what she is referring, and she says, “Oh I felt it was time to get some writing out of the way. I did about four and a half pages of finished copy just then, That’s a lot for one day.” And went back to the party.

Considering that I was getting only one to two pages out per day, this was a bit of a revelation. “How can you spend all your time goofing and still be more productive than me!” I asked. (Okay, “wailed” might be a better adjective there.) And Candas explained to me that she had been working all day -- that for a writer, going to a party, listening to conversations, picking up ideas from peers, and so on, qualifies as her research. “You can’t have output without input, you know!”

The party/luncheon/movie research may not apply too directly to my writing (though as a sociologist, listening is a pretty useful skill), but I now certainly get the “no output without input” line. So if my brain has shut down the last couple of days on this article, instead of sweating it, I’ve learned that it is more productive in the long run to just take a day off. (*Went to see The Interpreter which I would recommend as a nice little thriller.*)

Of course, the trick is knowing when to take the day off to recharge, get a fresh perspective, and start over; and when to stop procrastinating and to exercise some self-discipline. My favorite NFB short is Getting Started, a painfully funny cartoon that hits way too close to home…

Hilarious Satire

Okay, this satire, forwarded to me by Thomas Phinney, destroys PBS documentries and NASA. I particularly loved the white academic who has to rephrase/qualify every word as he goes....

As Phinney notes: it's video, requires broadband, and the audio content may not be completely work-appropriate.

Research Tip

So I'm doing a chapter on Blogs for a research methodology textbook this month, but was frustrated by the lack of established literature in the area; the obvious disadvantage of being an early adopter...but the thing is, I knew people out there were doing studies in the area in which I was interested, and that these were in the pipeline, but it might be a year or more before those studies see print in journals. I needed to know what was happening now, so that my article would not be obsolete by the time itsees print...

So, I used a trick taught to me by Holly Gunn, which is to do a Google advanced search set for PPT documents. And bingo, I hit maybe a hundred relevant power point presentations, mostly done for conference papers but also some inhouse stuff, by the various researchers in whom I was interested. Motherload! Some great stuff here which probably won't show up in articles / journal indexes for another year or three. With the added bonus that the pointform allows one to scan information even faster than in an article format, often with detailed notes in the 'notes' section of the slide if I need to pursue the matter more deeply.

Of course citation becomes a bit trickier....but most of the ones I'm citing are from clearly designated conferences, a few from course lectures; there are only a couple that are by "Mike and Judy" and no other clue as to identity...though I can always track down their server and sometimes backtrack from their to an institution and therefore faculty list, etc.

Of course, the other great source of information has been various research blogs...these are quickly becoming the way to develop and diffuse new ideas...journals now have to be thought of as secondary sources, solidifying material originally discussed (peer reviewed and anointed) previously in research blogs. With RSS feeds, keeping up with latest research developments is possible for those in the loop, but the digital divide is leaving a number of my colleagues somewhat behind the bleeding edge... I sometimes suspect my course content is two or three years ahead of some colleagues because I can google and blog, whereas they are waiting for the journals to come out.... Of course, the risk is that I will include some early data that will subsequently turn out to be in error, but it is a reasonable trade off....

Toy and Dissertation

My wife gave me a new toy for Father's day... a swiss army knife with a 64 meg data chip as one of the attachments!

This is amazingly cool. In the one "knife" I have a knife blade, a screwdriver, a pair of sissors, a nail file, a flashlight, a pen, and the USB 64 meg memory. It is way cool! And I am literally the first on my block to get one, since Mary had to import it from the UK (took only a week) as it is not available in Canada yet.

I got my Father's day gift several days early because I actually needed the 64 megs to facilitate transfer of the files Mary and I were working on last week: her dissertation. (I was helping her copy edit her first complete draft, due Friday June 16. No one can find the typos in their own writing, and I was glad to do it as it was the first time I had read the dissertation through from start to finish, though I have seen the various bits regularly over the last several years. But finally assembling everything into one complete draft gives a very different impression....!) When we printed out the hardcopy and put it into a binder, we were very gratified by its bulk -- it really felt like a book. At 250 pages (and that doesn't count the references, probably another 30-40 pages) it is a nice size for a doctoral dissertation.

I am obviously biased, but I think Mary's dissertation one of the very best I've ever read -- its of publishable quality, IMHO. And in the opinion of a bunch of editors and referees too, because she has already published 2 chapters of it in significant journals, and is sending out two more in the next couple of weeks. It is very very good stuff.

I am a little in awe of my wife's scholarship, both in comparison to the light weight stuff I've been grinding out lately on cyberculture (I think her stuff matters and has the potential to revolutionize her discipline, if her positivist male colleagues can put aside their ideological prejudices long enough to read it -- she actually got heckled at one conference by a group of 60 year old men who did not like her critique of their work, though all the women scholars in the audience subsequently came up to her and apologized for their behavior....), and that, well, that I got to marry her.... I mean, somehow you expect great scholars to be out there somewhere, probably at Harvard or Standford or, at least Queens, not lying next to you in bed. It's like one of those K-Tel commercials: "How much would you pay for this product? But wait, there's more!" Not only is Mary incredibly good looking (initial motivation for interaction) and willing to put up with me (astounding! ) but I find out a few weeks into the relationship that she is a fabulous cook and then a few years in she turns out to be a great mom to my kids (who knows this or even thinks of it as a criteria in the early days of a relationship?) and then I find out that on top of all that she is a significant scholar too. I'm telling you, it just doesn't get better than this!

I just wish I could go back in time to visit myself in my twenties and tell myself to relax, it all works out in the end. Because at the time, I was very envious of all my friends who seemed to be having much better luck then me....Turns out, I wasn't mistaken to wait until I got exactly what I wanted..... though of course, I have to admit in the end, I just lucked out....