21st Century Scholar

This is the first of a two-part blog where I discuss the use of social media in research and practice. Today’s blog emphasizes methodological concerns. Next week, I will discuss social media in schools. As regular readers of the blog know, I am conducting an ethnography that focuses on the lives of 17- and 18-year-old [...]

In late December, Collegeology game designers Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard and I traveled to Texas  to conduct a case study at a Houston area high school. Our goal was to playtest the card game (Application Crunch) and soon-to-be launched online game (Mission: Admission) with a group of predominately African American, low-income students. We arrived right [...]

My interest in college readiness includes organizations and individual actors; therefore, the case study methodology is an appropriate research tradition. After receiving approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and gaining entrée and access to the respective case, the data collection begins. However, one of the first elements established for my projects is determining reciprocity: [...]

Today’s Thursday is TechDay is a critique and a celebration. I recently attended the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting in Charlotte and there is much to report about the role online communication technologies are (and aren’t) playing in the postsecondary research community. The critique is the obvious stuff: No wifi [...]

Credibility is the first (and most important) criteria for establishing trustworthiness in qualitative research. Credibility, like it’s step-sibling validity, is often the subject of much debate; scholars argue about what it can and cannot do and what strategies researchers should and should not use to ensure rigor in research (see “Varieties of Validity: Quality in [...]

Thursday is TechDay Today’s Thursday is TechDay blog is an introduction to the future of qualitative research software: the online platform. If you haven’t heard the news, there’s a new qualitative software player in town. It’s called Dedoose, and it’s worth a look for two reasons. First, within the qualitative research community, it pioneers the [...]

by Randy Clemens You don’t know until you know. That’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from being in a PhD program. And, if you do know, you probably aren’t doing it the right way. Earning a PhD is a struggle. There are ups and downs and downs and even more downs. When you [...]

by Randy Clemens I’m nearing the end of the written portion of my qualifying exam (thankfully), and I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot. In particular, I keep returning to a similar theme: Academics have short memories. Consider, for instance, the sad story of life history: Less than a century ago, life histories were [...]

By Randy Clemens Trustworthiness–frequently referred to as validity and reliability–in qualitative research involves two intertwined parts: process and product. What are the strategies necessary for a researcher to conduct rigorous research? And, how does a researcher present data in order to maximize trustworthiness? Reflexivity performs a central task to both process and product. In other [...]

by Randy Clemens This past week, Bill and I participated in a symposium about qualitative research and public policy in the 21st century. The panel went well and included a variety of perspectives from the field. Ed St. John considered the role of qualitative research as either a tool of the state or method for [...]