Methods of Research

For those of you just joining us, it is my senior spring semester and as a Performance and Communication Arts major and to capitalize on my tenure here I at SLU I have come up with the thesis, does Computer Mediated Communication (texting, facebook, twitter) bring us as together as a community or tear us apart? To find the answer to this thesis (there may not be an answer, which is fine) I am going to create a documentary where I plan on interviewing students and faculty. This blog is going to serve as a way for me to keep you all up to date on the process of my project as well as have the opportunity to contribute to the conversation.

However, before I dive into conducting my interviews I need to do some research. I am not the first person to come along and think hey, is this really beneficial? No, there have been plenty before me, Marshal Mcluhan, who said the "medium is the message" and Joseph Walther who came up with the Social Information Processing Theory. So before I go around talking to people I need to understand what I am doing, am I preaching?

The first step is to understand how to conduct proper research, without letting your biases influence your subjects. Having a thesis is one thing but I cannot go into my research with a hypothesis. Instead I need to take a step back and approach these interviews with an open mind. According to Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss' research and The Discovery of Grounded Theory, researchers (me) must free themselves of all prior knowledge because this will allow me to conduct research in an unprejudiced way (Flick, Kardorff and Steinke 154). Although this sounds ideal, it is important to remember that you are never truly objective you just need to make sure you develop your theory at the end of the research not before or after. I don't mean to bore you much longer but there is one other crucial important thing I feel the need to mention, which is that having prior knowledge isn't necessarily bad, instead it gives us the capability to create meaning out of what we are observing (Flick, Kardorff and Steinke 156). Just always remember...

KEEP AN OPEN MIND!

Works Cited:

Flick, Uwe, Ernst von Kardoff, Ines Steinke. A Companion to Qualitative Research. SAGE Publications,
                2004.