Based on the research plan and goals you recently drafted, choose a third data collection method, use the method to collect data, and upload the data you collected by Sunday. Review the methods on the page Research Methods for Studying your Writing Situation if you need a reminder about the various auto-ethnographic data collection methods that might work well for your project. Week 3 Overview: Gathering Data You recently observed writing in the world around you and you posed questions about that writing to learn more about it. You also read about the Unit 1 Project and drafted an initial research plan for your project, identifying a writing situation, a research question(s) relevant to the situation, and research methods for collecting data related to your situation. Now you will begin researching your writing situation. You will collect textual artifacts and will use two additional research methods that will help you answer your research question. You’ll also begin to develop an initial analysis and synthesis of your data. Specifically, the course activities this week will help you to: Use research methods to collect data about your writing situation. Analyze data to identify insights about your writing situation. Synthesize (look for patterns in) data to identify insights about your writing situation. Collecting Data: Researchers’ Experiences Despite your experiences with researching for course assignments, which may suggest that research is simply coming up with an argument and then finding source material to support your position, research-in-the-wild often looks much different. Like the writing process, the research process isn’t always well-defined and can be messy, isn’t linear but is recursive. You don’t always know the answer to your research questions when you start. In fact, you may not even have a clear sense of what your research goals are when you start out. Or, you might find that what you thought you’d research is too difficult or uninteresting and instead choose to refine your research focus or question. The point is this: Effective writers learn to be comfortable with the messiness and uncertainty of research. They learn to embrace and respond to the emerging insights that research uncovers, and they are practiced at using new insights to refine, reshape, and even completely rethink their research goals. Research Methods for Studying Your Writing Researching Yourself: An Overview of Autoethnographic Research Methods What is autoethnography? To understand autoethnography, you first must understand two other terms: qualitative research and ethnography. Qualitative research is a method of research in which the researcher gains an understanding of the behavior or thinking of humans by studying them closely. Rather than using statistics, surveys, and other methods of collecting data that call for a large number of humans to respond, qualitative research relies on a much smaller sample of human participants—perhaps even just one human—to gain an understanding about human behavior or thinking. Ethnography is a way of doing qualitative research in which a researcher immerses himself/herself with members of a different culture for a period of time long enough to understand something about the other culture. For example, a researcher from the United States might want to go to another country and study the ways the people of that country raise their children. In this way, the researcher would understand something about human behavior or thinking in that culture by observing people in their real-world settings. When conducting ethnographic research, researchers will employ particular data collection methods that will give them valuable information to answer their research question. These methods will likely include a great deal of observation, along with interviewing participants and collecting artifacts that would help the researcher understand the humans living in that culture. Autoethnography is a method of researching oneself. Just as in ethnography, the researcher systematically collects and analyzes data to understand something about human behavior, but in autoethnography, the primary research participant is the researcher herself/himself. When you study one of your writing situations for the Unit 1 Project, you will be engaging in qualitative, autoethnographic research because you will be studying yourself as a writer. You will look at your thinking and behaviors through the eyes of a researcher and will collect data on yourself in order to answer your Unit 1 Project research question. Consequently, you’ll likely gain a new understanding of humans as people who use writing resourcefully to meet their needs and the needs of others. How do you do autoethnography, exactly? You’ll need to become familiar with several autoethnographic data collection methods in order to collect data that you can analyze to reach new insights about your research question. Different types of data collection methods return different types of data. Researchers must have clear goals about what they want to know and then choose methods that will return useful data for them. Research Methods (Data Collection Methods) The tabs below describe different data collection methods that may be applicable to your Unit 1 Project writing situation and research question. Collecting Relevant Textual Artifacts For this method, you locate and save artifacts—any objects that are relevant to your writing situation. For the Unit 1 Project, I require that at least three of your artifacts must be texts written by you. You may also want to collect relevant writing that has been written by others (e.g. written feedback others have given you about your writing, text messages, Facebook comments, assignment sheets, correspondence, inspirational quotes, how-to guides, etc.). This method of collecting data may include searching through digital archives, such as old email files, or looking through physical archives, such as the stack of papers you’ve kept from your high school days.