Monday, 1 October 2012

Face-to-face inquiry method


Knight reading this week talks about various face-to-face methods, and I’m excited to learn about these real methods and their pros and cons. I appreciate the humanistic approach to research taking interest into subjective interpretation, as I always feel that qualitative methods have the tendency to overlook the beauty of individual uniqueness. A good face-to-face inquiry is also a highly controlled process, largely relying on the interview/interpersonal skills of the researcher. As Knight suggested, the role of interviewer plays, his/her body language and physical emotion, the technique of facilitating interviewee(s) to elaborate while keeping them stay on the topic, and the flexibility to empathize… I can only imagine it takes a lot of training and experience to become a good face-to-face method researcher.

I’m also interested in the feministic method, memory work mentioned in the reading. It seems to be a highly subjective and even personalized approach. I wonder what kind of research needs to adopt this method, how to select sample (for it requires a certain level of commitment and trust among the participants, as well as towards the researcher), and how research can control the reliability and validity of data.

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