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Last January, AN published the first installment of our advice column, which we hope will help graduate students deal with some of the many practical challenges we faced in recently completing our degrees. Apparently, the problems we addressed struck a chord, because many readers have contacted us for further advice. Here we follow-up on some of the most pressing issues. We invite readers to send us their comments and questions to help@qualquant.net (yes, we are serious) or via www.qualquant.net. On Conducting FieldworkDear Qual and Quant,I am very lucky to have a world-renowned dissertation advisor. He is
known and respected throughout anthropology for his ethnographies and
has been influential in the field for his theoretical developments. I
am in awe of his accomplishments and only hope to contribute a fraction
of what he has contributed to anthropology. However, when I started asking
him specific, practical questions about how to conduct fieldwork, he didn’t
say anything. Instead, he just held up a pen and piece of paper and handed
them to me. I guess this was some sort of symbolic gesture to tell me
that I have to take lots of notes. I wasn’t sure what to do when
he did this, so I just took the pen and paper, thanked him, and left his
office. I’m still confused, however, and I still feel at a loss about
how to approach my fieldwork. What should I have done? Dear Awed,You should have taken the pen and paper and written “I need a new advisor who will train me to conduct research.” The Ethnographer's TaskDear Qual and Quant,I have a question that I hope you can answer. If the premise of cultural
discourse holds that reality is capable of truth then, in a sense, the
subject is interpolated into a Batailleist “powerful communication’’
that includes sexuality as a reality. However, the subdialectic capitalist
theory suggests that the task of the ethnographer is creating significant
form but only if narrativity is interchangeable with language. My question
is, in cultural discourse, do we have to choose between the neocapitalist
paradigm of consensus and dialectic poststructural theory? Also, is there
a choice between rejecting neodialectic deappropriation and concluding
that reality comes from the collective unconscious? Dear Nihilly,You would be surprised how often we get this question. One solution is
to test this with a series of competing structural equation models, defining
your latent variables as some combination of “consensus,” “deappropriation,”
“narrativity,” and “sexuality.” The measurement model
would consist of multiple operationalizations of the theoretical constructs
using constructed scales tested for reliability and validity. Because
these scales will likely consist of mainly ordered response variables,
be sure to calculate polychoric correlations and an asymptotic covariance
matrix for use with a weighted least squares estimator. Many multivariate
statistical packages have incorporated imputation methods for missing
data, so give that a try. Also, check for bivariate normality and see
if there are some variables that should be eliminated from the overall
analysis. Depending on your sample size you may want to conduct exploratory
factor analyses for latent variables to develop sub-scales for use in
the overall model. Of course this will depend on the number of bivariate
contingency table cells that have 0 values (but you probably already knew
that). Good luck! Let us know how it turns out. On Meeting ExhaustionDear Qual and Quant,I recently went to my first AAA Annual Meeting. I was so excited when
I read through the program and saw so many exciting sessions with such
attention grabbing titles! I tried to go to as many sessions as possible.
By Sunday, I was exhausted. I ended up going to 18 sessions in all! However,
my problem is this. I didn’t understand anything that any of the
presenters were talking about. Am I an idiot? Dear Exhaust,Are you an idiot? For going to 18 sessions at the AAA? Yes you’re an idiot. Send your “Dear Qual and Quant” questions and comments to: help@qualquant.net.
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Copyright©2002 Clarence Gravlee & David Kennedy. All Rights Reserved. Last updated 12.04.2003 |