Refining our Research Questions

Last week, we read Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies, edited by Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan. In Chapter 3, Selfe and Hawisher encourage researchers to view research as meaning-shaping that researchers and participants mutually do. They remind researchers that they are not the sole story-tellers (p.36). We talked about how we must be reflexive about our positionality as co-constructors in the research process (p.79) as we build and do interviews, and in the data analysis that follows.

​Narrative. People who participate in research projects want their words and interactions to be seen as meaningful narratives that represent their experiences in the world. How can we create interviews that allow for authentic conversation, and through that conversation, mutual meaning-making? One classmate suggested focusing on less formal structure in our interview practices. We all agreed that we wanted to create interview environments that allowed for participants to genuinely share.
 
Everyday Literacies. We decided to include in our research the everyday literacies of UWM students. Haas, Takayoshi, and Carr (Ch. 4) argue for the importance of this in our readings for this week. They write that “understanding everyday literacy practices can, in turn, suggest ways that academic practices and writing instruction could be modified in order to better teach students the composition and communicative skills needed in an increasingly digital world” (p.53). Sheridan (Ch. 6) echoes this when she writes that “writing mediates the lives of everyday people” (p.75).
 
Ethics. McKnee and Porter (Ch. 19) give a heuristic for staying ethical in internet research by reflexively reviewing the rhetorical situation of the research, especially where the participants are considered. This should include the participants’ perspectives, expectations, and assumptions.

We discussed how this ethical guide translates to our own research. There is no one clear process (online or offline), but we can strive to have clear guidelines to maintain our ethical integrity, which is one of our group goals.
 
One ethical question that came up was if we could include ourselves as participants. There were hesitations about how objective we could be in analyzing ourselves. Triangulating data gathering and analysis is one way to complicate our findings and gain a fuller perspective of the people we will be trying to represent, especially if some of us will also be participants.

One classmate also reminded the us about how qualitative research studies vies for researchers to be participant-observers (We read this in Qualitative Communication Research Methods). Rachel shared how we could keep our study rigorous by not requiring it to be mandatory for any of us to take part in, and by analyzing each other’s data instead of our own.

I think we all felt relieved to narrow down our research questions:
1. What experiences and literacies do UWM students utilize for communicating across contexts?  
2. How might mapping the landscape of students’ linguistic, rhetorical, and composing practices inform and shape community engagement at UWM? 
3. How do UWM students rhetorically navigate academic and nonacademic spaces?

What’s Next? We were placed into groups in order to begin filling out the IRB information. As this process continues, I think our group communication will be paramount in how well we do both collectively and individually. We are committed to doing our best to represent the lived experiences of UWM students. 

Check in next week for new questions, considerations, and complexities as we learn what it means to do collaborative research and to engage with the community here at UWM!

​~DK~