Research – Page 5 – Silence and Voice

Let’s Make Article Summaries! Thoughts on Ragged Edges

I have been tossing around this idea in various forms for some time now, and find a number of influences–Twitter Journal Club, #CLmooc (we make learning!), Shut Up And Read!, That new habit, and even #365Papers–all of which revolve around sharing some of the really great reading we do with others, specifically the academic, research-oriented reading we (I?) frequently do in silence.

I get new articles and read some of them every day, so why not Continue reading “Let’s Make Article Summaries! Thoughts on Ragged Edges“

Literature Review Tracking Tables (DRAFT)

UPDATED on September 22, 2013:

These tools were again revised, with the current version on my Research Tools page.
Feedback is always appreciated.

ORIGINAL POST:

In my ongoing work to help my graduate research students better understand, assess, and use research, I have updated two tools to help navigate and track the literature. As I recently did with my Research Evaluation Tools for Articles in the Social Sciences, I am also seeking feedback and help with getting these specific enough to be useful, though broad enough to be flexible.

The Method of Inquiry Table is meant to track what databases or sources are queried to ensure completeness and a systematic approach to the literature. As is often the case, when we search the database resources, we are not always systematic in the ways we track what we find, and in the process run the risk of searching one database for some keywords, while accidentally omitting the same process elsewhere.

The Literature Review Table is for the next step, namely once we find literature and have read some of it. Who can remember everything we read, and what we find valuable and want to use in parts of our write-up? That is what this tool is for, so we include in it aspects of our work for what we find when we evaluate the literature.

I have used these two tools before, and now want to share them in the spirit of gathering feedback to improve them so they more readily meet the needs of developing researchers. Feedback, suggestions, and comments are most appreciated in this mini-project.

Thanks in advance.

Research Evaluation Tools for Articles in the Social Sciences (DRAFT)

UPDATED on September 9, 2013:

These tools were again revised, with the current version on my Research Tools page.
Feedback is always appreciated.

UPDATED on August 21, 2013:

Based on some very helpful feedback, I revised these two tools:

Qualitative Research Evaluation Tool for Articles in the Social Sciences (DRAFT v12)
Quantitative Research Evaluation Tool for Articles in the Social Sciences (DRAFT v6)

As before, feedback will be most appreciated.

ORIGINAL POST:

I am in the process of creating 2 tools to help my graduate research students assess and evaluate research studies, and am interested in getting some feedback on them. They are:

While I have seen various tools for specific purposes, I have not seen many that were intended for general use in the social sciences. Furthermore, while these cannot be applied to every qualitative or quantitative study in the social sciences, they are intended to be applicable to most of them.

Do these work? Are they helpful? Is there anything major missing or that should be combined, edited, or refined? Any feedback at all will be most appreciated.

Once I finalize these, I will make them freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Successful Viva = PhD

As I mentioned in my Tweet on March 25, 2013, I successfully passed my Viva Voce exam at Lancaster University and was awarded my PhD in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning (Educational Research) forthwith. In the British system, passing a viva forthwith means I passed without corrections and was thus awarded the degree.

As a result, my doctoral thesis, entitled Navigating Liminality: The Experience of Troublesome Periods and Distance During Doctoral Study, is being printed and bound at the university.

I especially want to thank my supervisor, Professor Malcolm Tight, (standing next to me in the image below), and my examiners Professor Paul Trowler (in the left on the picture) and Dr. Margaret Kiley (who attended remotely from Australia). Alice Jesmont (also in the picture below) has been invaluable in her assistance while I attended Lancaster University, along with Dr. Gale Parchoma, who started off as part of my supervisory team before moving on to the University of Calgary.

I am now working at publishing some of the results of my work, so hope to have lots more to share. Thanks goes to all who have supported, guided, and helped me along the way, about which I will also speak more in the near future.

I Completed My Analysis

I am happy to say I have just completed the analysis of my data for my doctoral thesis!

Let me clarify what I mean. By analysis, I mean making sense of the 23 interviews I completed by coding them, grouping similar concepts together, and then putting these concepts in a coherent order to present for my readers. That may not sound like a lot, but with hundreds of pages of interview transcripts and over 1000 codes to navigate and organize, it is a significant accomplishment.

While I have written up my analysis along the way (cf. Richardson’s work on writing as a method of inquiry), I hope to have my full draft analysis completed in another week or so. As I am engaging in narrative inquiry, this will be, in all likelihood, my longest thesis chapter.

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I just sketched a tentative timeline of thesis work for the next week, so will keep my fingers crossed to maintain its trajectory (which I will do via Twitter).