Methods to Madness

Today's entry - What research method am I proposing? I have to admit that I am puzzling over this a little. We have covered so many types of research over the past few weeks that it is difficult to figure out just where my project fits in. This blog entry will probably be less about the method I am proposing as much as it is a process I must go through to determine what the method will be. At its most basic level, the research I am proposing involves looking at several blogs and performing a genre analysis.

So let's start by trying to eliminate some of the obvious suspects. My first inclination is that this is definitely not ethnographic research. I am not immersing myself in any culture or organization to learn about how technical communication works inside that culture/organization. On the other hand, when I look to some of the uses of ethnographic research, I find that it includes identifying patterns of behavior "...that are important within a particular group" (Katz). Since I am performing a genre analysis, am I not looking for writing patterns within a particular group? There is no physical space to inhabit, so it would be different from an organization, and yet it is still a group or culture - cyberculture if you will. Therefore, ethnography is a possibility, but I am not sure if it is the primary suspect.

Second on the list is historical methods. This appears to be one of the front runners, since historical methods include using a variety of sources to gather information about something that has happened in the past. Haven't all of the blogs that I will be examining been written in the past? My job will be to examine those blogs and try to make sense of them through analysis. I kind of like this one. Surveys and questionnaires are third an the list and this is an obvious no. I will not be doing any type of surveys, questionnaires, interviews, etc. So let's scratch that one off of the list! In addition, I would have to say that this will most likely be a quasi-experimental design. It will be truly difficult to secure a completely random sample of blogs. Moreover, I will not be approaching the research from a feminist, cultural, or scientific perspective.

In the end, what I end up with is a quasi-experimental, possibly ethnographic, historical method of analyzing blog genres. What a mouthful!