So, before I begin I just want to say I wish this weeks readings were prescribed a week or two ago, especially the article on research interviewing. I did this reading after already conducting my interview, and I’ve written a reasonable chunk of the report already, so the information on how to conduct a proper interview would have been super helpful about a week ago, and its not so helpful now. I know I could have easily gone and read ahead, but realistically, who has the time for that? Also, similar to the first set of readings we had relating to our assignments (the ones about research proposals), the articles were definitely directed at persons aiming to write a far more formal report than what is expected of us. But, having said that, both articles were okay reads as they weren’t theoretically heavy, more guidelines for how to write the best report possible.
Anyways, I thought I’d focus more on Liamputtongs’ article “Writing a Qualitative Research Report” (as I wasn’t too interested in Weeakkody’s article seeing as I’d already conducted my interview) which effectively gives a synopsis on how to write a good research report. Firstly, as I noted before, a good chunk of this article seems to be directed at more professionals researchers, with topics relating to writing books and monographs as well as “Writing for publication” . Even in the more relevant sections, such as the bit on reports, a far more formal outlook is suggested (through the list of components – table of contents, executive summary, etc) which to the best of my understanding, is not required of us in this particular assignment.
Yet, excluding those sections, this reading was really helpful, not so much in creating a guideline of what to include (unlike the readings on the research proposal) but more in the sense that Liamputtong suggests certain things to keep in mind whilst writing. In particular, I found this list of criteria for the evaluation of qualitative papers very helpful. Although it is included to help researches determine the probability of their work being published, there is a lot of similarity between this list and our own marking criteria. Questions such as: Are the research methods appropriate? Is the research clearly contextualized? How systematic is the analysis? etc, are criteria universal to any strong analytical research paper. Moreover, throughout the article Liamputtong includes little comments on language appropriate for a research paper i.e. “language is not as objective…uses the first person” pg 318, which helpfully reiterates what we have learnt in class about the appropriate writing style for a media research paper.
Overall, I do not think this was a particularly amazingly helpful article in the formulation of our research papers, as a lot of it was irrelevant and that that was relevant just wasn’t that directive. However, there were some useful comments and I do definitely foresee myself using the criteria provided when looking over and editing my paper to make sure I’ve covered all necessary topics.
Hope everyones’ assignments are going well! Erica Berki