Backroom Research

I come to this course and social science research in general from a humanities background, specifically English (B.A.) and Classical Asian (M.A.)  literature. The kind of research I did was text based, close readings, and critical analysis. The statistics course I took as an undergrad did not go very well, to say the least. When I think about social science research, the first things that come to mind are people, statistics, and surveys. I did not realize when I was applying to the M.I. program (Library and Information Science path) that I was applying to a social science program (duh!) that I would be required to learn about research methods. Over the course of last year, I became more and more interested in social science and I enjoyed reading articles about other people’s research, particularly Latour and Star. I am excited to learn about research methods, but I still feel hesitant about research that requires the study of people. And, I still have no idea what topic or area I am interested in, what questions to ask or even how to begin formulating a question, let alone what methods to use. I need to learn how to think like a social scientist!

What I relate to most in the first three chapters of Luker’s book, Salsa Dancing into the Social Science was her discussion of the post-Foucault landscape of research, including issues of power and power imbalances in researcher and subject relationships, and her discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “doxa”-- “those taken for granted ideas that are so much a part of our social world that we rarely even notice them.”  From researching in the humanities, I am familiar with the instability of language and how text functions as discourses of power, but somehow using these concepts to investigate literature seems safe and comfortable to me. Or even Susan Star’s method of ethnography of information infrastructure is not too much of stretch. But when I think about applying it to the world and involving other people in it, I feel uncomfortable. I am also not clear on some of the other concepts that Luker mentions in these chapters, including operationalization and grounded theory. How does one sample? What does it mean and how does one operationalize the variables? What is generalizability and how do you deal with it?

Luker makes research methods seem exciting and flexible, like, to borrow her metaphor, an expert dancer, but for someone who has never even gone on the dance floor, it can seem rather intimidating. Where do I begin? Will I hurt myself or someone else?