15.347  Doctoral Seminar in Research Methods I (meets with 21A.861)

For those in the class who would like to see how a grounded theory exercise might produce an analysis of the content of advertising and the synthetic messages produced, we have uploaded a paper in progress by Shyon Bauman, University of Toronto.  It appears on the October 21 readings.

Susan, Anne, Kieran

As per our discussion last Thursday on the configuration of the stairs in the new Sloan building, I came across this marvelous passage in a book about Wall Street titled Liquidated: an Ethnograhy of Wall Street by Karen Ho, associate prof. of anthropology at U Minnesota.
p. 77:  "While working at BT, I continually underestimated the amout of time it would take for me to travel from one floor to another.  In order to get from the 22nd floor to the 45th, for example, it was necessary to return all the way to the lobby first and walk to its furthest end for another elevator.  Sets or banks of elevators, each serving a different part of the building, wer located in separate sections of the ground floor; that is, the elevators that connected only to the lower floors were the closest and most accessible from the lobby, while elevators to the higher floors were furthest away from the lobby.  At BT, three elevator banks served (in order of increasing prestige) the lower, middle, and upper floors -- which roughly corresponded to, respectively, the bank's back ofice, middle office and front office.  At first I presumed that such hierarchies were particular to this building.  Later, while doing fieldwork at other banks, I found every investment back in NYC organized its elevators in a similar way, with the lower floors occupied by less prestigious departments, the upper floors by the most elite workers."

Assignment for October 7th -- operationalization


For this week we would like to begin the process of developing your own capacity to formulate an hypothesis, identify relevant concepts and think about ways to operationalize them.  To this end we would like you to bring to class a one or two slide presentation of a causal statement about some problem in the world you find interesting.  This could be the start of your real research project, a question you find intriguing even if not the subject of your eventual research, or something merely illustrative.  You should be able to specify:

A hypothesized relationship you wish to explore; nominally define the concepts are going to explore; how you might operationalize the concepts (that is, what will be observed that will indicate or measure the concept, what might be collectable data for independent and dependent variables and controls if applicable. 

This could be as silly as "attentiveness in school leads to learning" with the various ways one might operationalize the concepts of attentiveness and learning, along with the kinds of data one might try to collect.  But we welcome this as an opportunity to begin exploring the kind of work you might write up in your final proposal.  Getting some early feedback on the feasibility of your ideas may prove to be very helpful when you begin your literature search in a few weeks time.

Secondly, come to class prepared to offer nominal definitions for the concepts in this week's assigned articles (since our work to this point has focused more on operational definitions).  We will expect everyone to share their thoughts during discussion.  Doing a close read of at least one of the assigned articles would be useful, too.  There are three substantive articles so perhaps A-F could take the Curhan, G-K the Castilla and the rest McCants.

best

Anne, Susan and Kieran

We have secured a new classroom that we hope will be more comfortable. Thanks go to Matt Beane for organizing this.
Please remember to come to E62-350 at 1 pm on Thursday and for all classes (except Oct 21).  We will send a notice for the
Oct 21 room when we have that confirmed.

See you Thursday, E62-350.

Susan, Anne, Kieran

We have posted the assignment for September 30, as we discussed in class last Thursday.  There are two postings with the same content, different titles. Redundancy that will be corrected.

See you Thursday.  Have a good week.

Susan, Anne, Kieran