My current plans for this project include two aspects. For this class, I’m intending to run 1-2 online focus groups of dating site users who have previously composed profiles. In one of Dr. Newman’s rhetoric classes, I’m attempting a rhetorical analysis of a corpus of profiles, with a focus on invention/topoi.
Both parts of the project have some challenges at this point. I think I’ve got a decent site to hold online focus groups—it’s called DimDim. I checked out Adobe Connect (thanks for the lead!), but without a paying membership, they only allow 3 people in a chat, including the moderator. Dimdim allows up to 20, although my groups will be 4-5 participants, I hope. Here’s where the initial logical challenge comes in—I have to recruit participants. My initial intention is to subscribe to a dating site, and then send emails to a random set of other users requesting their participation. I’m a bit dubious about whether I’ll find enough willing participants. It appears that I need them to give me an email address to enroll them in a Dimdim discussion, unless I operate the conference as an open room, which makes me nervous about crashers. Alternately, if I cannot find enough participants, I could probably put together a less elegant snowball sample. But, my preference is the randomly selected groups to provide more control for selection biases. I intend to run two groups—an all male group and an all female group. I have the questions mapped out for the groups already, although I’m not going to post them here in the public domain.
Regarding recruitment, I’d be quite grateful for ideas and comments on my current plans. Also, if I wind up doing a snowball sample, I will probably be asking all of you for potential leads. :)
The second part of the study, the rhetorical analysis of profiles, is also tricky. Here I’m concerned most about building a reliable study without imposing intentionality bias. I can’t look at profiles and know what cognitive processes informed their composition. And, I ought not to conclude that all aspects which appear related to invention processes were created in deliberate fulfillment of invention heuristics. So, I guess here I’ll start coding and see what happens.
So now that I’ve rambled on too much about my own stuff, this article is tremendously helpful when thinking about the methods involved in formulating and writing up a study:
Smagorinsky, P. (2008). The method section as conceptual epicenter in constructing social science research reports. Written Communication 25, pp. 389-411. He writes from a reviewer’s perspective and sets a high bar in terms of accurately depicting methods, but also provides some useful tips for the methods design process itself.
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