Research & Survey Stuff (Classic Question Skirting)

My long term research interests lie in embodied rhetoric and the rhetoric of bodies (not the same thing, promise). This is research I believe is critical to the way we talk about the social construction of bodies through language and vice versa. There are important questions to be asked about how language constructs suitable bodily experiences, especially within the realm of difference. I came to embodied/body rhetorics from Women’s Studies and Fat Studies, where I came to understand the application of queer theory to the body after my own experiences as a self-identified fat woman. Further, I started to see the potential of critique in discourses of disability and Western medicine that create boundaries between and project meanings onto bodies. That said, I wanted to do research that not only facilitated understanding of embodied rhetoric, but I wanted to critique existing written/oral/textual rhetorics concerning the body. Why? Because I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

That said, there are words I simply will not use to describe my body. Words associated with the body are generally value laden and emotional. There are certain values I choose not to express in reference to the body. For example, I dislike the use of “curvy” or “voluptuous” to describe a fat (female) body because they are justifications through fetishism. It’s ok for this body to be larger because it appeals to a certain kind of person. Likewise, I dislike the use of “fluffy,” implying the fat body is inherently soft and, therefore, less durable than its thin counterparts. These are ideas that would cause me to lead respondents in the words they choose for their own bodies. While these are words I would intentionally omit from any survey, the omission of these fairly common words denotes my bias and skews my results. I would be irritated if my results showed that fetishizing the body made it more socially acceptable or made women feel more comfortable in their bodies. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do with research like this. If I asked a research question and it led me to results I thought were harmful to participants or fed into hegemonic stereotypes, I would be very, very tempted to chuck the whole project (but I realize this would be very impractical).

As Jen has pointed out in my second blog post, I’m a social constructionist wresting with action research. I mention this here because I’m not sure if I care if I reject conclusions that don’t work for the population being studied. I’m certainly not interested in doing anything that reinforces systems of oppression. I’m not even too sure I care how much my biases or positionalities influence my research. I don’t believe I can be objective; I do believe research should benefit its participants.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are distinguished from other methods of research because they tend to be less formal than interview or survey, although both may be used in addition to focus groups, and they tend to be participant led rather than led exclusively by the researcher. The focus group is meant to mimic conversation and allow participants to freely discuss a topic and respond to each other. This may give participants more room to talk out answers that might be complex or confusing.

Focus group data may be less generalizable than other forms of data because there are so many factors, it would be difficult to reproduce a similar focus group and produce the same conversation. Furthermore, as MacNealy suggests, focus groups may be more effective if the participants share similar interests or personality traits. This limits the populations that the results may be applied to. To ensure that focus group data maintains some aspect of generalizability, researchers should be should to provide some structure for the “conversation” and incorporate a moderator who is familiar with focus group protocol as well as the topic at hand. It may be of interest to a researcher to foster diversity in focus groups, rather than the homogeneity MacNealy recommends. This might allow for more diversity of opinions and a more representative sample, but may also make data collection and analysis difficult.

Focus groups may be more effective for tackling complex issues that affect specific communities. Because there is a moderately free flow of conversation, participants may feel more comfortable discussing and hashing out these issues, especially if they find that other members of the focus group have similar beliefs or experiences. Furthermore, participants may feel more comfortable in the informal focus group setting than in a more sterile, research-oriented environment. Used in tandem with interview or survey, focus groups may offer a deeper, social, and interpersonal explanation of the subject matter and participants’ experiences concerning it. However, it seems to me that collecting, transcribing, and analyzing data from focus groups may be difficult and time consuming. This would require research teams or partnerships. Moreover, I can easily see myself getting lost in a focus group and letting the conversation stray too far from the topic of interest. It is imperative to have a finessed moderator (and that moderator could probably never be me).

CFP

http://swtxpca.org/CFPs_2011/Special_Topics/CFP-The%20Apocalypse%20in%20Popular%20Culture.pdf

This CFP comes from the 33rd Annual SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference. This panel is specifically looking for papers related to popular culture and apocalypse. I’m drawn to this call because the apocalypse, and the way we talk about and predict it, has always fascinated me. I am especially interested in post-apocalyptic or dystopian representations that involve the abuse of rhetoric (think Children of Men, Hunger Games, Repo the Genetic Opera, etc.). This call is open to writers from many disciplines, such as poetry, literature, religious studies, and film, and the audience seems to be cultural studies related. The knowledge valued at this conference is critical investigation of shared cultural knowledge (such as apocalypse scenarios) and the way shared knowledge shapes cultural norms. This particular call, unlike the others, is pretty sparse. But, I may be able to appropriate words like “depiction” and “prolific.”

I'm Heather and I'm a Social Constructionist

By Wednesday at 6 p.m. please post a paragraph or two about where you think you fit regarding the researcher paradigm/worldview we have been discussing. Think of Creswell's categories (post-positivist, social construction, advocacy/participatory, pragmatic) and Johanek's contextualist stance. Try to respond to your partners' posts before class on Thursday.

Basically, I’m a social constructionist. I view the world through a lens that tells me there is not Truth, there is no essential self, and even what we think of as biological difference is socially constructed and manipulated. Creswell makes a distinction between social constructionism and action research, which I think is unnecessary. I believe the research should strive to be action-based and that a social constructionist worldview assists the researcher in finding and correcting social injustice. There is a lot of difficulty inherent in social constructivist viewpoints, especially as we strive to take social and power structures apart and best navigate ways to proceed from there. I also consider myself a feminist scholar, which tints what I think research is, how it should be deigned, executed and interpreted. I value narrative and ethnography and other methods that allow participants to be given voice and to illuminate subjective experience.

Johanek’s contextualist stance doesn’t really jive with me. Although I understand her claim that the research question should dictate the research design and methodology, I have a difficulty accepting her view that methods and design can be chosen free of political ideology. I further disagree with her assertion that one might choose feminist research methodologies solely based on political ideology. Johanek is almost right; we need to be mindful of bias in choosing research methods and to be sure to choose the research methods that best fit the question, but we cannot completely displace ourselves from those ideologies in order to choose objectively.