Is Anything Reliable?

This week's readings, both Knight and the focus groups articles, finally got into the meat of research methods. For the first time I felt like we were actually talking about practical ways to conduct research, ways that I had never considered employing in my past work. It was nice in that it began to really tie together for me some of the things Luker and Knight had discussed in the more introductory sections.

It was also incredibly intimidating. Every method introduced seemed to have absolutely no consensus on the meaning or value of its potential findings. No matter what you uncover, you can question it to the point where you might have to discard it. Trying to conduct meaningful research without a team of scholars to analyze both your methods and findings feels borderline hopeless. With the focus group example, you can spend absurd amounts of time and money organizing and executing countless focus groups, and when you're done, still have no idea what any of your data really means, and whether any of it is really usable.

So how do you go about finding the answer to a question, when every method you might consider using can be torn apart by your fellow scholars so that in the end you prove nothing? Do you simply accumulate data until you have achieved such a critical mass that disputing it becomes more work than it is worth? And isn't that abandoning the concept of "small-scale" research?

I suspect reading more Luker will restore some faith. Reading Salsa Dancing before inspired confidence in me that this could be done. Much of that confidence may have been undermined this week, but I'm sure it is not gone forever.