I remember asking my advisor on the day those 14 unneeded fancy chairs and whatnot suddenly filled our lab: “Hmm, can’t we just resell that junk to hire actual brains?” You can guess the answer…

This also seems very relevant to IRBs (which I’ve been thinking too much of lately) in that IRBs typically want a hypothesis and such before you’re given permission to begin an investigation. IRBs clearly need some mechanisms in place, other than protocol amendment, to allow for dynamic qualitative inquiry.

This issue is coming to head actually in a hard science: network research. There, it’s hard to convince researchers that what they’re ultimately studying isn’t IP addresses but people (Simson Garfinkel’s rule of thumb seems apt here: if you could do it without humans, do it; otherwise, you need to think hard about human subjects issues and get IRB approval). However, network research often finds very interesting stuff during the course of research. This often leads to recording way more data than one would normally need so as to not loose any possible sources of “interestingness”. Unfortunately, even something as simple as recording both IP addresses at the ends of a connection can be very sensitive (with or without other context). So, here too, there’s a need for informed revision of experimental protocol.

Sorry, I wondered.

Management of the Dublin Airport Authority Capital Investment Programme, Presented by Liam Gaffney, Dublin Airport Authority

http://www.engineersireland.ie/sectorpapers/GetSectorPaperDetails.pasp?SectorPaperId=217&MenuID=7

I saw Liam deliver his presentation and it blew me away. It made me realize just how feckless my own crew had been in managing not so large sums for construction. Lessons to be learned I fear, hard lessons.

I fully support this direction in your work Danah. Just because academic research is on the other end of the spectrum I speak about, doesn’t make it any less fundamental and urgent. Alan Kay is one of the lone voices I have heard myself, in recent times articulate this problem. Charlie and myself had a right old tangle over it here:

http://aceshardware.freeforums.org/roi-in-the-datacenter-t800-15.html?sid=db03e03ca1e373aee13c45dc7ca501e3

Until he linked me to Ddos history lesson. Very interesting. It must be intriguing to work in some high quality research and development environment. Where so many urgent questions are being asked and solved.

Brian O’ Hanlon

The NSF finally recognizing that there is a place in knowledge construction for qualitative research is the good news; not being able to appreciate the structural differences in how the knowledge is produced is the bad news. And “qualitative” spans research paradigms from post-positivist through constructivist to critical/radical. I’m guessing that the NSF will stop at the very conservative end of post-positivist research, rendering it not much better than simply sticking to what they know – quantitative, with perhaps one or two “open questions” at the end of a survey.

Here in Canada, there are actually three federal funding agencies that cover three distinct approaches to knowledge: Hard science and engineering (NSERC), social sciences and humanities (SSHRC), and medical & health (CIHR). Each has its own criteria and preferred methodologies. In particular, SSHRC grants specifically provide for teaching relief funding (as well as hiring grad students), but typically, little in the way of equipment (especially computer technology). A better proposal would be for NSF to recommend a new agency akin to SSHRC with people who actually know how its done on its advisory and review boards.

I have a slightly different take on the conversation. I believe Howie has it right: “that its sponsorship by the National Science Foundation may lead unwary and uncritical readers to think that all the problems of qualitative research methods have now been definitively settled and the 2009 report, and especially its introductory sections, can be recommended to unsuspecting colleagues (and, worse yet, to students) as an authoritative settling of all the outstanding contentious questions.”

In particular I’m concerned that the change it will bring to my discipline (albeit to which I’m perhaps a bastard child) is the rise of mediocrity. H. Russell Bernard (perhaps inadvertently) enabled a focus on method as the core of the discipline that has enabled a field full of recipe followers, rather than the old school researchers like Becker describes here. What Bernard started, NSF will finish off. It is known that power follows money, and it is clear that big money is at stake (at least for social researchers it will be “big”). Becker implies, and I will state, it is likely that the people most likely to apply to the NSF would adopt the methods of NSF uncritically. In short, NSF will give money (and power) to the mediocre. You’re excellent posts points to this problem equally well, in that in social science, the key to research is the researcher. The day that NSF funds research like “Whyte and Goffman and Duneier and Hughes and Vaughan and the others cited above” is the day I’ll rejoice. Until then, this seems like black day for social science research.