This blog is designed to serve as a platform for tracking my research ideas and growth as a scientist and an anthropologist. The first several posts will be directly tied to the work I am undertaking for Dr. Gravlee’s Text Analysis class at the University of Florida. My intent is to continue this blog beyond the conclusion of that class. My hope is that by engaging in a weekly write up of my research I can document my struggles and growth while forcing myself to thoughtfully reflect on my research.
Each week for class I will answer four primary questions:
a. What new steps have you taken this week in the analysis of data for your project?
b. What findings are you coming up with?
c. What challenges or difficulties have you encountered?
d. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the specific methods you have used this week?
My intent is to use the 72 semi-structured interviews my research partner and I collected in 2014 in Jamaica as the text to study for my class. These interviews begin in a structured format which focused on collecting household data. By design, as the interviews unfolded the nature of the interviews became more unstructured. The focus of the research was to understand how small-scale farmers in Jamaica were accessing and utilizing climate services (drought predictions, mitigation strategies, etc.). Additionally, we sought to understand sources of vulnerability in the communities we studied, Ballard’s River and Redland to determine how climate change fit into the overall causes of vulnerability. The assumption made by climate researchers and government entities was that climate change was a major threat to the island and as such small-scale farmers farmer recognized and prioritized climate change in a similar manner. We studied community vulnerability to understand if this assumption was true.
The specific techniques which will be used to analyze this data have not been determined yet. However, based on the approaches used to collect the data some techniques are better suited than others, while some are not appropriate to use at all. Using Figure 5.1 in Analyzing Qualitative Data by Bernard et al. (2017) provides a flow chart which has helped me narrow down my list of possible techniques. The data I have is textual and is not verbatim. The flow chart suggests that repetitions, similarities, and differences, and cutting and sorting are techniques which are appropriate for data which was collected in a manner like mine. I look forward to discussing the strengths and limitations of each of these techniques tomorrow morning in class.
Research Blog 