Gaining Momentum

Hey everyone,
I went to visit Claudia yesterday at her office and I am really excited about my project! I have decided that I am going to the conference and because of this am going to have to get my ass in gear. After our meeting, I got some clarification about what it was I needed to do exactly for this project. My friend is coming to see me with my mom and sister the weekend before spring break so hopefully I can interview her then. My roomate is going to college station this weekend to ask her bf (best friend not boy friend) if I can interview her. I am also going to make some flyers and distribute them around town (coffee shops, doctors offices, HEB, Walmart, Credit Union (?) to see if there is any one else that will let me interview them. I also am going to try to find a woman to follow around for a day or two to document her experience. It would be especially helpful if this woman happened to be going to the doctor and I could be there for that experience, though my being there may influence the outcome. I would tell the doctor, but not exactly what I was looking for until after, I would clarify specifically. This may be too much of a pain in the ass actually, as the doctor may be an ahole about it/think its a journalism/expose piece intended to crash the medical industry (which might be bad considering the state of the economy). That also may be super melodramatic. I am wanting to set aside a time to look up articles for my lit review but have to do ten hours of community service for parking in a fire lane. So, that's nice. Maybe I'll get that over Spring Break. This is my update.

Amanda

slowly but surely..

Hey guys...I feel terrible about not blogging in awhile, I just have had really nothing to blog about! I sent my IRB back in on Thursday and still am waiting to hear back from them...I don't want to send out the e-mail informing students about my interview if the IRB denies me again. So still waiting...However, there are a couple of people that hear about what I was doing through friends of mine and said that they would love to do an interview...so..if all goes well with the RB hopefully I will be able to start very soon! However, I did want to let you guys know that the frame of my topic has shifter just slightly. After seeing what the IRB had written to me, I realized that I did approach my topic with a huge bias. I already knew what I was looking for, and an ethnographer should have no idea what to expect a the beginning f a study...so instead of focusing on the reasons why so many people are using these concentration stimulants and the subculture that I believe is growing out of this usage, I am just going to be asking prescribed patient's experience with the medicine in general. There will be no questions leading to the positive or negative effects of the medicine, the illegal use of the medicine, or anything like that. The board said that they feared there would be students that would leave my interview questioning their use of the medicine, so I had to cut any sensitive questions. Thus, I will only be inquiring about their experience in order to understand what role this medicine plays within their lives and nothing more. If they want to tell me more that that would be great, but I will not pry into deeper matters that may relate to their use of the medicine. I am excited to see to get an answer back from the board and finally get things started!

First Interview

I had my first scheduled interview yesterday with a non-native Spanish speaker. The interview went very well. I also transcribed my first interview for the first time. WOW. Transcribing really is time-consuming. I looked at the clock and my computer screen and realized that it had taken me an hour to get a 6-8 minute piece. Geeze. I was so concentrated I didn't even notice.

Listening to yourself is no fun. I realized a lot of things about my speech and cannot believe no one has said anything about it before! I say, "um" and "like" way too often. Sometimes I don't even make grammatical sense!

I had the same problem Lizz mentioned: "like," "um," and "uh's" somehow don't register as easily and I had to continuously go back and add them into my transcription. I have my second interview today with a native Spanish speaker. One other interviewees has confirmed an interview, but we have yet to schedule a time. The final student has not replied to my email. Hopefully, I can get both of those interviews done this week.

Even after I added it to my to-do list I kept forgetting to announce in class that I am observing and taking notes about class participation for a class project. I either walk in a tad bit late to class or something else happens. I will not leave the classroom until I let them know (ha, a bit extreme, but I need to make a point to myself.)

Quick updates

My ethnography is chugging along slowly but surely! I'm working on getting my interviews set for the beginning of March - the scheduling is looking good! I've also been looking through the library and academic search complete for some more sources - I stumbled across an intriguing book called "Angry Women" that might have some interesting insight into feminist theory. I'm also working on compiling my notes from the readings so that they can further help me with my own work.

As for fieldnotes, here are a few highlights:

• I went to the Texas Rollergirls 2010 Season Opener today to watch the game and help work the will-call booth. I've been doing it for a couple of seasons now and it's fun to see all of the old regulars and to greet the first-timers. The games seems to attract a pretty diverse crowd - reaching a bitacross age, gender, and racial lines. For example, there are little kids and grandparents, there are rockabilly styled girls alongside "preppily" dressed women. There's also a pretty even amount of males and females in the crowd.

• The rollergirls are rather intense on the track - jammer take-outs (completely knocking the jammer from the opposite team to the floor [sometimes into the crowd]) are pretty common. The game-play is rough - our gear really helps keep us safe but it can only do so much. It definitely hurts to get the wind knocked out of you no matter how you fall. Tempers can flare at other skaters or at how the referee calls [or doesn't call/see] penalties. However, the announcer made a good point tonight - as soon as the whistle is blown, the game-faces are usually off and teams are reaching across the bench laughing with each other and playfully smack-talking. I always seemed to get spanked after the whistle is blown in our games - good times.

By the way: I realized that I haven't really explained yet how the game is played. Here's a pretty good intro to the basics: http://www.howstuffworks.com/roller-derby4.htm

Here's a pretty enjoyable clip recapping the Texas Rollergirl's 2009 season as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4gCJlpyMr4

questions on interviewing

So, as I'm going through and transcribing my interview, I am having a lot of trouble writing down every word that is said... I keep missing words that don't normally register such as "like" and "um" when they're in the middle of a sentence, and I've been going thru and listening a second time to try to put them back in, but is that happening to anyone else? Have you noticed? Also, I really am understanding what everyone was saying about hearing yourself talk over the person you're interviewing. There's a few times when I'm in the middle of asking a question and the person I'm interviewing just starts to talk and I miss a few words because I'm still trying to finish reading the question... Does anyone have suggestions on how to avoid that happening in interviews? I honestly didn't notice I was doing it at the time and it's only now as I'm going back thru it that I'm realizing...

Reading notes

"The ultimate goal is to produce a coherent, focused analysis of some aspect of the social life that has been observed and recorded, an analysis that is comprehensible to readers who are not directly acquainted with the social world at issue" (Emerson, Fretz, Shaw, 142).

• I have to admit that I was a little bit daunted by the technique of coding when I first heard about it. However, when I read on, it started to make more sense and I'm hoping that I will be able to follow the guidelines in a useful manner. Once again I'm pretty grateful for technology - what a difference that can make in one's college career...I admire all of those past ethnographers who cut up copies of their field-notes, sorted, and arranged them by hand!
  

• I liked the "Asking questions of fieldnotes" section - I found their sorts of questions to be useful bullet points. I also liked this quote: "These procedures keep the ethnographer aware of the complexities involved in pursuing members' meanings...they remind the ethnographer that there is no 'pure' way to capture what is important to members, their meanings or points of view" (Emerson, Fretz, Shaw, 147).

• While I will not have too many months of field-notes to look over, it will be interesting to see how my perspective changes/shifts/grows/etc. over this study..
  

First interview

I did an interview Monday evening with one of my sorority sisters that went really well, but as was said in class, it was very eye opening. I had a long list of topics/questions I wanted to talk about but when it came down to it, those only lasted for fifteen minutes. It was really interesting leading off of what she said and making up more questions as I went becuase she brought things up that I hadn't thought of before. I've now realized that the next person I need to interview has to either be a freshman to get a different point of view, or someone who is not Greek.
We chose to do our interview in the chapter room of our sorority because we knew it would be quiet and during that time nothing was planned so we assumed that people wouldn't be interrupting us. There was two interruptions during our interview because someone walked in and at the end right as we were finishing up someone walked in, but that means that I will be doing a follow up interview with her. I have to say, it was a lot of fun! Not to mention now as I walk around and hear all of the drama and everything floating around, I'm completely appaulled! I feel so bad when I say anything now cause I didn't think about it before, but now I do think before I say anything. You'd be amazed at what we say and why we say it when you hadn't thought about it before!

Reading Commentary

While I enjoy and benefit from Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, I am perturbed by a few things associated with this book. Number one: verbosity. While detail is good, they often say things that could be reduced further or that add very little understanding. The words of my high school teachers come up; they are "saying" rather than "showing" in their less-informative bits. This frustration will motivate me to try to be considerately concise in writing my own mini-ethnography. (This blog entry will stand as a glaring sign of my ineptitude in this.)

I am taking special care in reading their notes about how to write an ethnography. I must say that I think it will be a great challenge for me to refrain from falling back on age-old thesis-related writing. I do feel comforted by the case scenarios, though, because my observations feeling like they are coming to naught- or at least are outside the scope of my original study questions.

This idea of first coding, then making memos is also new to me, though coding sounds a bit like AP English Literature writing excerpt analysis. Am I wrong in thinking this? Can we analyze our own choice of words? Can we add our feelings as we go along? Also, are memos essential? I see myself coding first then rolling ideas around in my head to make a narrative chunk of disparate parts. Then, I might go back around and refine the topics of these narrative chunks.

The idea of finding (or "creating") processes and not causes for behavior was new to me, though I should have known based on the title of certain courses at this very school (namely Social Patterns and Processes). I think I would like to discuss the idea of a process-based as opposed to a causation-based analysis in class.

Whoever read all this deserves a gold star!! :)

Research Update

This Friday I was only able to go in after hours, but there was still a fair amount of activity. The tone definitely was different, though. Perhaps nightfall did not help. Darkness outside only seems to make people want to rush home- surprisingly, no? The clinic employees, though ready to go, were still jocular and kind (something I cannot quite understand!).

It was an odd day for me due to class gyrations. I noticed that my altered mental state changed my perceptions a bit of the clinic, making me think with a bit more of a judgmental edge that I am not used to.

I had been hoping to hear more Spanish while I observe. Alas, whatever I do hear is but unintelligibly fast snippets. Even if I could understand, there would be little hope for me to be able to analyze it. The use of Spanish might still remain important, though, even if the spoken content has to be culled.

One last remark: field notes take a lot of time! I think I spent as much time writing field notes as participant observing.

Now, back to transcribing that interview....