HI,
Let me try to share some of my findings. I don't think that the
participants have to share the coding or that they always can even
understand the coding, and yet I think that one may come very close to the
"acceptable level of ecological validity". Here is an example.
This study was conducted in the late seventies. It was an attempt to use a
controlled experiment to look at how small children (4 to 12 years of age)
learn meanings of words that never heard before. The experiment had two
stages. Children were first asked to point out which words were totally
unfamiliar to them (out of 20 nouns and verbs). The second stage consisted
of interviews in which the same children were asked to guess, i.e. to
construct meanings of the words with which they were not familiar, by
listening to a series of 6 sentences in which these words were used. This
was based on a 1950 study by H. Werner and E. Caplan in which they used
artificial words instead the real ones.
To cut the story short, a surprising result was that the number of "I don't
know" answers was steeply rising with age. This ran so contrary to the
original assumptions that the older children would be able to learn
meanings of the words in a more efficient way. We went back to the original
transcripts to analyze just the "I don't know" answers and came up with at
least four different functional meanings of the "I don't know" response:
(1) child does not want to communicate with the interviewer; (2) the child
does not really understand the test situation in general; (3) child does
not understand the particular sentence; (4) child uses a strategy of
"waiting" for more information in the following sentences before she/he
volunteers any guess.
In other words, we redesigned our coding to reflect diverse situations in
which an "I don't know" response might appear.
I am sure that for most of the smaller children this whole process would
stay totaly out of reach - they would not have to understand or to be able
to spell out our coding criteria. And yet, I feel that we went sufficiently
close to the "acceptable level of ecological validity" when we started
looking for different functional uses of "I don't know" responses.
I think that the participants should be involved in the qualitative
analysis (coding) whenever possible, but this is just not possible always.
Sometimes it is because of the age of the participants, but I assume that
there are other circumstances where such process would not be possible.
This whole issue resembles the quandary between "emic" and "etic"
interpretations -- does the research design have to reflect the
participants' understanding ("emic") or can it be based on the more
independent and phenomenological ones??
Ana
At 09:15 AM 7/8/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>On Monday 07 July 2003 11:36 pm, Mike Cole promulgated:
>
> >
> > Our interpreation was (mine is) that the initial coders formed an
> > idioculture which allowed them to anticipate their joint interpretations,
> > but its was a culture of two and very fragile. The codes did not cut
> > interactional nature at its joint, but hacked a usable concensus.
>
>since you also referenced Bronfenbrenner in your ecological niche picking
>paper,
>
> "the analysis must be consistent with the participants' definition of
>the situation, by which he means that the experimental manipulations
>and outcomes must be shown to be "perceived by the participants
>in a manner consistent with the conceptual definitions
>explicit and implicit in the research design" (1977, p. 35).
>
>what I'm wondering is how the ideocultured analysis could even come close to
>achieving ecological validity if the participants themselves had not engaged
>in the analysis/interpretation. Sure, this complicates methodology further
>-- are the coded interpretations what B. means by "experimental outcomes"?
>if so does it require participants to understand the codings? and then if
>so, can any study of the everyday ever achieve an acceptable level of
>ecological validity?
----------
Ana Marjanovic-Shane
215-843-2909 (h)
267-334-2905 (m)
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