Survey Says...

Of the two readings this week, I was more drawn to the Kirsch article. I'll admit, after reading the Lauer and Asher text detail the various definitions, methodologies and strategies surrounding surveying, reading the phonebook probably would have been a nice break, but I liked several aspects of the article. The idea of pluralism within research methods is something that we've talked about fairly often throughout the semester as a means of bumping up our research to give it more clout, especially when looking at in the context of case studies and ethnographies. Usually, the sort of thing that they're suggesting is something that will produce a quantitative result, something that can be carried by numbers without much interpretation. In this weeks readings we got both ends of the spectrum: we got a big pile of numbers and then a big pile of data that begged to be interpreted.

What struck me about the Lauer and Asher text detailing the various sampling and survey information was that in order to make these numbers not only convincing but important, inferences and research had to be done painstakingly beforehand. I naturally compared the work between crunching a set of numbers and writing and rewriting survey questions with that of actually interacting with people and I began to wonder which could tell you more about a set. There are positive and negatives to both methods: qualitative could have some discrepancy with the observations and quantitative could have discrepancies with the representative results of a set. Constructing survey's to back up your qualitative studies though was one thing that I wasn't sure was totally addressed in the chapter. It s made very clear that survey's don't allow for very many inferences at all because they are solid numbers to represent a larger population, but what would you do with survey's received from your control group from your observation experiments? What kind of inferences could you possibly make about that information that would pertain to your numbers.

I guess what ultimately bothers me about the various ideas of numerics used throughout this chapter is that by taking these various random samples, you are supposed to some how take into account the methods of a range of different people. I wonder if I'm alone in being frightened by the thought that some random "integer" next to me could be selected to represent where I fall within this spectrum without me ever being consulted. It helps me see some of the gray area in the numerics as well, and depending on how charts and numbers are depicted, they can tell a story that may not be any better than a case study or ethnography.