CAT Questions ~ CSO 302: Qualitative Research Methods, May-August 2016 Semester

UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

CSO 302: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS

May-August 2016 SEMESTER [Module II]

CAT QUESTIONS [Released: 12:12 a.m., 21^st July 2016]

INSTRUCTION: ANSWER A TOTAL OF TWO QUESTIONS, ONE FROM SECTION I AND ONE FROM SECTION II.

SECTION I:

1.     Discuss the procedures of naturalistic observation in qualitative data collection.

2.     What is thick description, and how does it work as a technique of data analysis? 

SECTION II:

3. Give an historical account of qualitative research and explain the major
   epistemological and ontological beliefs about social reality that underpin it. Use clear examples to illustrate your answer. 

4. (a)  Discuss the major ethical principles in social research.
   (b) What are the major ethical dilemmas that confront qualitative researchers,
   and how can these be resolved? Use empirical examples to explain your answer.

 DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION:  

Saturday: August 13^th August 2016, strictly by 11.00 a.m. [Submit your CAT paper IN CLASS through the Class Representative, and enter your name in the submissions register. Late submissions can be pushed under or over the door of office number GW 407E. They will be safe there. Late students should therefore not waste more time waiting to submit their CATs in person to the lecturers]

NOTE:

1.      Submit only word-processed papers. CAT paper should be: 6 to 10 typed, double-spaced, A4-size pages only.

2.      Answers which display originality of thought and critical thinking will be rewarded.

3.      There will be severe penalty for plagiarism (‘Xeroxing’ of published or other works). A mark of 0% will be given for plagiarism.

4.      Your answer should clearly demonstrate, through citations, that you have engaged in noteworthy library and/or online research for this CAT.

5.      Late submissions will attract a penalty of 5 marks per week after the deadline.

AFRICAN MUSIC: Gbemileke Remix ~ An Exercise in Thick Description

The article which appears here, below the video image, is a substantial update (a retro-update, to boot) of an earlier piece titled "Skuki and diva Tiwa Savage Sing Gbemileke". Today's piece carries material which was inexplicably lost to me in toto inside my own hard-drive, when I sought (when I 'rushed') to publish, without any ado, something on Gbemileke -- as I was itching to, following my tweet on the matter on March 14, 2015. Something which, all can see, had such 'zero' added-value as I had available, but which I nonetheless wanted to share beyond Twitter. 

I have only today found the 'lost' material. So I'm making amends. I have decided to publish it under a different title, the title which it always in fact had, and indeed had even while lost. So that my thoughts on Gbemileke, flawed as the reader may find them, will now appear under two different titles: the 'old' title that's already published, and the 'old' title only presently found (in the last 60 minutes or so) and which 'graces' the piece I am publishing today -- in 'a moment' from now.

Click here to watch the video

Gbemileke (Remix)[1] is a super allegorical piece of video music. I see that it has two narratives. One is anchored on the lyrics, and the artistes who sing the song or play the instruments. Another on the visuals that run parallel to the artistes’ performance on the virtual ‘stage’ and involve an entirely different set of, let me say, lay actors with a story-line to execute.

It is the story of a boy who had, since childhood, a great passion for football. He grows up in hardship, without the guiding hand of a father who died early of an unstated cause, and with a mother who worries constantly about what the future holds for him (and what he will possibly make of himself), and obviously despairs. That’s a familiar thread, but merits a re-telling.

Boy endures, wedded to his passion for the beautiful game, and a steeply declining interest in school work. He is finally signed up with an unnamed professional team, of one league or another, Gbemileke. All grown up, he makes good and buys mom a house beyond dreams. As one Jimmy King has not-so-finely put it in Donnett’s (2015)[2] blog, he rises from “grass to grace.”

All through the video, though, the artistic duo, who go by the name Skuki, and diva Tiwa Savage, take their lyrics and dance on a wholly different trajectory, in a beautiful flow of visuals. At the heart of this flow are, first, Tiwa Savage herself and, second, the anonymous guitarist in a sort of finger-lite, man-machine free-flight with strings.

The guitar adds some stand-out twist and zest to the whole thing, though it is more Zairois than Nigerian in style and execution.

For more comments on the video, see Ikeji (2015)[3]

---

[1] Several songs with the title Gbemileke have recently been sung in Nigeria. My comments here refer to the remix version of the song sung by Skuki and Tiwa Savage. The Skuki duo has a previous version – sans the storyline and the guitarist, and featuring Shizzi (https://youtu.be/63tgI5r94FE ) – which is quite fine too (see https://youtu.be/1fHDA_68oQo ). Gbemileke is a Yoruba word which means “God made me conquer” (see DJRuffee (2014) http://jaguda.com/2014/05/03/new-music-jay-smart-gbemileke-just-like/ )

[2] Jim Donnett (2015) “TX Review: Flavour –‘Olalufe’ ft. Chidinma + Skuki – ‘Gbemileke Remix’ ft. Tiwa Savage [VIDEO]  http://tooxclusive.com/downloadmp3/tx-review-flavour-ololufe-ft-chidinma-skuki-gbemileke-remix-ft-tiwa-savage-video/

[3] Linda Ikeji (2015) “New Video: Skuki ft Tiwa Savage – Gbemileke (Remix)” http://lindaikeji.blogspot.com/2015/02/new-video-skuki-ft-tiwa-savage.html

Telling

Telling is a re-enactment or codification of that which we or others have observed, done and/or experienced. It is thus the summation, of sorts, of all of ontology’s four manifestations, including itself, and all that ontology means and makes possible. Often, we interrogate in order to narrate, and do tell (and thus affirm) by way of an interrogation. A good telling is a “closing of the loop”, and a hard thing to do. Fast-forward and you realize that, in a sense, ethnomethodology is a wonderful kind of telling. So is thick description. So is mythology and poetry and drama and the novel. History is a telling, in its dialectical as well as chronological renditions and traditions. The epic and all the sagas of the world are a telling. Music and painting are a telling, and so is sculpture. Monuments are a telling, too. And thus all stories are by definition already told.  

Thick Description ~ CSO 302

"... : if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.

In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners (sic) do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.

What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description." ~ Clifford Geertz (1973: 5-6) [Quote from his book, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books]

Gilbert Ryle's concept of thick description, as popularized in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology by Clifford Geertz (see, also, this article), refers to the successive addition of layer upon layer of detail to a phenomenon or process or event being described -- building up from 'literal' (or simple or lay) to 'thin' (or journalistic) to thick (or 'deep' or scholarly) description -- such that, true to the second law of dialectics, the quantum (quantity) of descriptions progressively transforms into a qualitative synthesis of the 'totality' of aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is like adding pixels and mega-pixels, one measured 'spread' after another, to a picture until one achieves the highest possible level of clarity, or picture quality.

Thick description is widely accepted as a major qualitative data analysis method or technique. However, I have preferred to use the concept synthesis in the above definition, as it more satisfactorily captures what for me is the core purpose of thick description. There is debate, however, concerning the relative merits of analysis and synthesis in pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

Analysis, an anchor concept in both quantitative and qualitative research, which is used routinely and unquestioningly by nearly all scientists (natural and social), does not seem to be quite apt here. B.N Ghosh (1985: 23), for example, has suggested that “analysis plays a more important role than synthesis” during “the initial stages of a science”; but “as the science becomes more and more progressive, synthesis plays a more and more important role. But in every science both the methods are used simultaneously.” He (1985: 24) adds that:

“A science aims at not only arriving at the truth but also at expounding the truth. A synthetic method is necessarily expository because it puts together the elements of a phenomenon in a systematic manner. In synthesis, exposition is possible because the entire elements are completely known and, as such, they can easily be arranged in an orderly way. The discovery of truth, however, is made possible by the method of analysis.”

I think that the aim and effect of thick description is to expound in 'full' the details, the 'totality', of the object of description. However, the end-product of thick description cannot be touted as a "complete" exposition of that which is (to be or has been) described; and I suspect that thick description was never intended for such a purpose.

NOTE: For more on thick description read:
1.This article by Joseph Ponterotto
2. Fei-Wen Liu's article

PS: Quote at the top added on September 11, 2015

Teshome Gabriel and Fabian Wagnuster on the Concepts that Link Weaving, Computer Technology and the Internet

I first read the article by Teshome and Wagnuster titled "Notes on Weavin' Digital: T(h)inkers at the Loom" over ten years ago (perhaps even earlier than that), soon after the journal carrying it arrived at the Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Library of the University of Nairobi (UoN). I was very impressed and even surprised by the dexterity with which the authors weaved their narrative of the conceptual symbiosis between digital technology, which pervades the global village so much more now than it did just ten years ago, and the traditional craft of weaving that's still, quietly, widespread in the 'Third World' today, including Teshome's own motherland, Ethiopia.

Kenya has given kiondo to the world. It's all about weaving. And we have given M-Pesa to the world too -- which is all about digits and mobility and thinking locally and weaving assets into the villages, and into all other sorts of 'glocality'. Indeed, evidence from paleontology and archaeology clearly suggests that the earliest technology hubs (iHubs) set up by humankind, and dating back 3.3 million years to the stone age -- the age, it should not escape our attention, of not just stone tools but also stone chips -- were located in Lomekwi, in Kenya's Turkana County.

READ: World's Oldest Stone Tools Discovered Near Lake Turkana

I think I went back to the library a couple of times after that first reading, and re-read the article with undiminished enthusiasm. Subsequently, however, I was unable to trace the hard copy. But though my interest diverted to other 'things', I did not quite give up. Indeed, with the mini digital 'revolution' that was soon to begin its sweep of our varsity, I knew that the article was never going  to disappear. Yesterday afternoon, as part of an extended period of on-line research, I decided to secure access to Weavin' Digital, and today I have -- only to learn that Teshome died in 2010!

The two authors' thesis, or hypothesis, is straightforward:

"...despite the newness often attributed to computer technology, 

much of its vocabulary, as well as that of the internet, draws on 

relational concepts borrowed from back-strap weaving."

They proceed to adduce evidence to make their case in a way that I find persuasive. This is not an endeavour steeped in statistics, but is, instead, entirely qualitative. 'Thick description' is demonstrably their preferred analytical method. Are they, in all this, guilty of bad abductive thinking? I think not. Still, an intriguing question remains: What is it exactly -- in their culture(s) and learning, and perceptions -- that inspired recent digital designers to so collectively revert to the weaving vocabulary of the past?

Click here for details of the shared/borrowed concepts alluded to

It is the kind of subtle thinking that Teshome and Wagnuster engage in in this article that, I think, the increasingly computer savvy African youth need to be aware of in order to feel a deep sense of ownership of today's digital technology, and to weave their own magic. They are not outsiders. There should be no divide, certainly not at the level of conceiving/developing apps! You cannot be outside of what you are deep inside, and, conversely, is deep inside you; nay, that which is you -- except in a sort of "Life After Life" situation. 

One of the courses that I teach at UoN is Qualitative Research Methods. I believe that "Notes on Weaving Digital..." is a worthy addition to readings on qualitative data analysis in general, and "Thick Description" in particular. A more recent text that is likewise useful is, of course, Malcolm Gladwell's book titled Outliers, which I have indeed mentioned in class.

[Note: Some updating done on September 5, 2015]