Processing the Annual Review—2009

I want to write out some notes from my talk with my committee. Overall, my impression is that the actual researching (the doing of grounded theory) may be longer and harder than I envision. I got a better idea about the flow of doing the chapters, so I’ll summarize it below as a list:
• Come back to chapter 1 AFTER the research is complete
• Don’t wait until after research is complete to do the Lit Review section (this was something I had planned to wait to do)
• Chapter 3 may take longer than I anticipate because I may change things that I am doing
• Chapters 4 and 5 (findings and implications) will come more quickly after research is complete

We talked a fair amount about timeline and the flow of work. First drafts will flow through Rich until they are acceptable to go out to the whole committee. I expressed the desire to try to get an entire draft completed first and then work on revision. Now that I look at it, it seems to me that this goal may be wrong-headed. First, it puts a massive text in Rich’s lap, and second, moving chapter by chapter may be more realistic. Anyway, I have my first goal of getting a draft of the lit review done soon. I had the impression that the lit review is good for the entire committee. The most important thing about the timeline is that the dissertation needs to be all done at least one month before the defense (and preferably sooner than that). That means I should shoot for a January 1 completion data. Oh, my! I hope I have a productive summer.

We talked for quite a while about my research methodology. A big topic was the hybrid nature of my research where it is grounded in the traditional sense of analyzing slices of data, by hybrid in being able to go back to the massive database. One point that Rich brought up that I thought was interesting is about what a failed study would reveal. By failed he meant that what would be revealed if the findings from my by necessity narrow look at the database (I will actually be sampling a very small portion of what is available) and my findings were shown to be wrong or not to carry out? So much of our research in Composition is based upon making conclusions from small samples, but this result would indicate that this practice is perilous. We shall see. The big question is whether I will be able to take an emerged core category and query for that throughout the entire database. Right now, Fred says he doesn’t know how to query the text inside the database. The labor involved in taking out the separate texts and putting them into Atlas or Nvivo would be immense! Hmm… . I wonder about Nvivo. I believe it has a SQL database on the back end, so I wonder if I could import the entire database into Nvivo? Now that would make NVivo worth using. I can hardly imagine that it can do this large scale importing, but I’ll check it out.

Rich and I have talked about how the eventual methodology I will use will be noteworthy and worth an article when I’m all done. I have to admit that I don’t see it yet. I think it has to do with the back and forth of both sampling the database and then wide-scale querying of results inside the database. So it is how this database is used for research that is significant. That is what I am seeing at this point.

All and all I am beginning to see the enormity of the work to come like a large mountain to climb. I have to remember that mountains are climbed one step at a time. I think it helps to have a clear path, and though I feel pretty clear about my path, I need to clarify it more. And start walking!