Backroom Research

In preparation for our peer review workshop tomorrow and our peer review assignment due next next Monday, I have been giving myself a little crash course in content analysis. I want to examine the article on American newspaper coverage of Cuba and Fidel Castro, but after finding only a brief mention of content analysis in Luker's chapter "Field (and Other) Methods," I had to look elsewhere for more discussion of content analysis, and after reading further on the topic, it is a lot more interesting and varied than Luker would lead us to believe. Perhaps, despite her claims to be non-canonical and flexible in her mixed method salsa dancing approach to research, she has a blind spot when it comes to the richness and potential advantages of content analysis as a research method. Perhaps her canonical background is a stumbling block to being more open to how this method can be incorporated with other methodologies. For example, for my mock SSHRC proposal I would like to do a combination of discourse and content analysis of information literacy standards and pedagogical literature in combination with focus groups and interviews. I also believe there needs to be an acknowledgement and valuation of the different personalities and styles a research may have-- some researchers may feel more comfortable with unobtrusive research methods-- and the value of  those unobtrusive methods. I would recommend reading Earl Babbie's chapter on unobtrusive research methods in his book The Practice of Social Research and W.Lawrence Neuman's chapter on nonreactive research in Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.