Re: Units of analysis (was: Interaction/Artefacts/People)

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@lesley.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 07:48:23 PDT


At 9:39 PM -0400 8/17/00, Bill Barowy wrote:
>
>It seems that case studies in education traditionally take as the unit of analysis as with the individual, if based upon psychology, or various grouping of individuals and roles, if based upon sociology (Mirriam), and these units are close to what is readily observed. One thing to notice is that these traditional units mostly seem to constitute people only, whereas semiotic ecology includes "people" and "things", and, in parallel, activity systems includes "instrumentality" (artifacts) and "subjects". The distinction can be rephrased more generally as having an emphasis on mediated action (as most people on this xmca may deem obvious).
>

Simply hit [delete] if this is becoming tiresome -- it is essentially an exercise in thinking through my own work, and hopefully if any theorist's work is misrepresented, I'll be corrected.

A theory of mediated action is self referential. It can be used to explain how a researcher conducts an investigation with a theory, used by the researcher self-referentially to think of his or her own ecological interactions mediated by the theory that he or she is using, thus used by to understand the methodological issues of the investigation, and to develop methodologies appropriate to the investigation, developing what are appropriate interventions. It is, what Wartofsky terms, a tertiary artifact, and it colors 'the way we see the "actual" world, providing a tool for changing current praxis' (Cole, 1997b). Used self-referentially, the distinction between theory and praxis blurs. Self-referentially, the investigator is able to account for him or her self as an agent in the ecology, in the system, and provides a framework for addressing ecological validity. Take Bronfenbrenner's first condition for ecological validity: that the research must "maintain the integrity of the real-life situations it is designed to investigate" (Cole, 1997a). With interventions by a researcher however, the situations are changed, even if slightly, and one is left to think through whether, and if so how, those interventions change in any substantial way the integrity of the situations. It's a thorny problem.

One can adopt a strategy of developing qualitative cases that address the research questions being investigated, in which a major delineation is how much the investigator is involved, what was is the investigators place in the dimension of central-peripheral participation. Relatedly, the solitary researcher can change within each case the form of his or her interactions. These appear to be the two most significant variables that a solitary researcher can, with any reasonable degree of certainty, control. Selecting cases that are instances of the research question is another strategy to further define what is acceptable. Comparisons across cases, therefore, while being highly variable in many other dimensions, address the research question, and vary in the investigators influence.

Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College
29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
 and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 01 2000 - 01:00:45 PDT