[IxDA Discuss] [Iai-Members] Danah Boyd's response to the "social networks

[Mark Schraad]

This is exactly where the 'researcher as interpreter' gets a little troublesome in qualitative work and the positivist go wonky. When the perspective of the researcher is too far outside of the mainstream or what we often confuse with a 'position of objectivity' the validity of those findings will certainly suffer. The 'activist side' begins to work against the impact of your findings and any argument relative to your hypothesis.

Mark


On Friday, August 03, 2007, at 02:11PM, <andrew_hinton at vanguard.com> wrote:
>jjg wrote: 
>"You'd think Danah would've learned in graduate school not to frame her 
>opinions as research findings."
>
>Her followup is full of "mea culpas" on this point. 
>
>I'm no rabid Danah fan -- I do think her activist side gets the better of 
>her in this stuff -- but she does make it very clear, in the original 
>post, that this is in-progress ethnographic/qualitative research, and that 
>these are raw personal impressions. 
>
>Really, if you were a journalist, would you have cited it as real 
>published research? A document that starts off with "this is not an 
>academic article" and that ends with "Le Sigh" ??