Research Methods

Overview

As described in the Introduction, my goal in this project was to analyze factors that affect the ability of citizens to participate in developing technology. To do this, I examined a specific example of a technical project in detail: the development of the Budget Builder, a World Wide Web site created for the Seattle public school system. My analysis focused on the ways in which community participation was facilitated and obstructed during the development of the Budget Builder.

Community participation in a process implies that multiple people are involved, so it is by nature a social activity. Furthermore, the social relations model of technology suggests that it is essential to understand the social, political, economic, and technical processes and relationships in which a technology is created to more fully understand its possibilities. Therefore, the data for this project consisted of the social interactions of the participants, especially those which allowed me to understand the social structures in which those participants are located.

Examining social interactions involves the observation of everyday life, "the world people actually act in every day, the ordinary world in which the things we are interested in understanding actually go on.... As opposed to the simpler, less expensive, less time-consuming world the social scientist constructs in order to gather data efficiently, in which survey questionnaires are filled out and official documents consulted as proxies for observation of the activities and events those documents refer to." (Becker 1998) The data I have assembled to record the project's evolution include detailed notes from face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and phone conversations; electronic mail and voice mail messages; and interviews with individuals involved in the project. All of these both document the process of the Budget Builder development and serve to illuminate the participants' beliefs and reasons for acting during the development process.

Because of the social nature of the data, I chose to use qualitative methods, defined by Denzin and Lincoln as research which "is multimethod in focus, involving an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them." (1994, p. 2) Qualitative data offer insight into the relationships between people and between organizations, help illuminate the values and biases people hold and how those affect their actions, and examine how social situations and structures constrain and assist people. (Becker, 1993)

The research methods most suited to elucidating social interaction in the everyday world fall into the broad category of fieldwork, or field research, described by Emerson as "the study of people acting in the natural courses of their daily lives." Fieldwork attempts to provide an empirical description of the people studied. He elaborates that fieldwork is a balance of both "entering the ongoing worlds of other people to observe them firsthand," and "a method of study whose practitioners try to understand the meanings that activities observed in those settings have for those engaged in them." (1983, pp. 1-2) Contemporary field research views the fieldworker's "essential task to be identifying and communicating the distinctive interpretations of reality that are made by members of the group under study." (Emerson 1983, p. 19)

Qualitative research typically involves "multiple methods or triangulation... to secure an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in question" and "as a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, and depth to any investigation." (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, p. 2) In this study, I used both participant observation, or ethnography, and interviewing as ways to capture relevant data.

Overview | Fieldwork | Objectivity vs. Subjectivity |
My Role as Participant Observer | Description of the Data

Contents | Introduction | Background | Methods | Description | Conclusion | References