LIS570  Janes

Winter 2011

 

What to do this week (as of 2/21/2011

 

Week

Do

7 2/15

For class on the 22nd, Jill Woelfer, one of our PhD students, will join us to discuss her research and in particular her methodology.  She’s suggested you read these three papers (all in press, so you’re among the first to see them) in preparation.  Please be prepared to discuss and ask questions regarding her methods, choices, etc.

 

Jill says:

The first one is a reflection on the need for precaution when working with homeless young people. Here we used a value scenario as a tool.

 

Woelfer, J. P., and Hendry, D. G. Designing ubiquitous information systems for a community of homeless young people: Precaution and a way forward. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2011), doi: 10.1007/s00779-010-0341-5.

 

The second and third are empirical investigations.

 

In the second, we used semi-structured interviews and "portraits" (and a bit of statistical analysis!)

Woelfer, J. P., & Hendry, D. G. Homeless young people and living with personal digital artifacts. To appear in Proceedings of the 29th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI ’11).

 

In the third, we used mapping activities, value scenarios, group discussions, and coding (and some more statistics!)

Woelfer, J. P., Iverson, A., Hendry, D. G., Friedman, B., & Gill, B. Improving the Safety of Homeless Young People with Mobile Phones: Values, Form and Function. To appear in Proceedings of the 29th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI ’11).

 

Also that week, we’ll begin discussing surveys.  Please read chapter 13 of Creswell and chapter 9 of Babbie.

6 2/8

For class on the 15th, please read chapter 7 of Babbie.

 

For class on the 17th, we’ll be joined by Steve Hiller, who is the UW Libraries’ head of assessment and planning.  In preparation for his visit, you should read sections of the ACRL report on the Value of Academic Libraries (in particular, the executive summary as well as the chapters on definition, method, and then the 'what to do' and research agenda), though you may find other sections of interest as well).  Steve’s slides are available here.

 

5 2/1

For class on the 3rd, read Creswell chapter 8.  In preparation for class, I’d like you to think about one of the research questions we discussed under conceptualization and measurement:

 

What are important aspects of the information behavior of non-library users when solving a new problem?

 

For that question, think and make some notes about it in light of some of the qualitative data collection issues raised in that chapter.  How might you collect data to answer that question via observation, or interview, or documents?  What gatekeepers might be important in gaining entry to these participants?  What sampling techniques might you use?  Which of the pitfalls on page 257 are particularly salient (or not)?  What ethical concerns might be raised? 

 

We’ll discuss these on the 3rd.

4 1/25

For class on the 25th, read Creswell chapter 6 and chapter 5 (pdf) of Babbie.

 

In addition, please complete this short measurement exercise (link is to a WebQ) by 1:00 on the 25th.

3 1/18

For class on the 18th, read Creswell chapter 5.

 

Before class on the 20th, register for and take the CITI Social and Behavioral Sciences training course on research ethics (you only need to go through the section on schools).  Also read the Wikipedia article on the Milgram experiments (1961).

 

For class on the 20th, read chapter 4 (pdf) of Babbie The Practice of Social Research.

1 1/4

For classes this week and next, read Creswell chapters 1-3 and chapter 2 (pdf) of Babbie The Practice of Social Research.

 

For classes on the 11th and 13th, read these 2 articles from the Summer 2010 issue of Reference and User Services Quarterly: 

 

·      Instructional Strategies for Digital Reference: Methods to Facilitate Student Learning by Megan Oakleaf and Amy vanScoy

 

·      Social Tolerance and Racist Materials in Public Libraries by Susan K. Burke

 

In addition, find 2 research articles of interest to you; preferably one aimed at a scholarly audience and one at a professional or practitioner audience.  For each of the 4 articles:  identify the problem statement.  Is it explicitly stated?  Does it follow the structure that Creswell proposes?  How would you characterize the justification given?  Do you believe the problem merited the research endeavor?  What is the theoretical or conceptual framework being used?  Is the methodology qualitative or quantitative, and does that seem reasonable or appropriate for the problem statement?

 

You should know that I will be out of town on January 6; we won’t have class that day.