My Ending Post, Part 2

How time flies! When I write this blog, I remember the day starting to write my first blog. Just a few days ago I was still pondering on a question how I complete my weekly blog well, now it is the last blog post to end the research methodologies series.

Anyway, this week’s reading is “When students want to stand out: Discourse moves in online classroom discussion that reflect students’ needs for distinctiveness.” I was drawn attention to “Uniqueness-seeking and optimal distinctiveness” part, I think this part is one of the key parts in this article. It showed the importance of self-distinctiveness. Snyder and Fromkin considered that people are impacted by their desires to preserve a sense of modest self-distinctiveness. They experience negative feelings when they perceive themselves as being extremely similar to or different from others. Therefore, I think the uniqueness- seeking plays an important role, everyone wants to be special and unique. As Lynn and Snyder said, “as people perceive more similarity between themselves and others in the group, they become increasingly motivated to reaffirm their distinctiveness, creating a need for uniqueness.” Because of this situation, some researchers claimed the needs for uniqueness seeking and optimal distinctiveness are helpful concepts for comprehending human interaction. Lynn and Harris quoted, “consumers’ dispositional needs for uniqueness were positively related to their preference for unique shopping venues and to the desire for scarce, innovative, and customized products. Their hypothesis that needs for uniqueness would correlate negatively with consumer susceptibility to social influence, however, was not supported, suggesting that the needs to fit in and to be unique may function independently.”

About my draft paper, I am on the way to deal with my question, and I am considering if I should use qualitative or quantitative in my research. It is still deep diving here, but I complete my intro part. My intro still has some mistakes, so I may fix it many times. I WOULD LIKE TO SAY THANKS EVERYONE FOR READING MY BLOGS, ALTHOUGH IT SOMETIMES MAKE YOU GUYS CONFUSING. I CAN SAY THAT I HAVE A GOOD JOURNEY TO GAIN MY KNOWLEGDE.

Phenomenology

“A Research-Based Approach to Game Writing Pedagogy” is this week’s reading by Seth Andrew Hudson, Ph.D. When I saw the title, I thought it must be a complex article to understand. Because I am not really into games, I have no idea about it when I have to talk about something. However, I tried to complete my reading and I found some interesting information. I immerse myself in the “Data Collection and Analysis” part. It gives me information about how to collect and analyze data. The study involved one-on-one interviews with participants at industry events and email lists. The interviews were conversational, allowing for the co-creation of knowledge and interpretation through a conceptual lens. The interviewer coded responses in situ, allowing for interaction and identifying emergent themes. Open coding was performed to identify points of emotional intensity. The data was analyzed using meaning condensation tables from Brinkmann and Kvale’s (2014) framework. The process involved revisiting the transcripts and audio, extracting natural units that accurately portrayed the context of specific responses. This curated sampling of natural units was the final data set. The engagement with the data was particularly useful as an educator, providing immediate insights for classroom practice and enhancing game writing pedagogy.

I think it must be a hard part of research. However, it plays an important role in research. When I read this part, I seem to understand partly the way to collect and analyze data.

Comments On Grounded Theory

At first, I would like to say “thank you” to Brittney because her blog helps me to realize that I seem to study foreign language (the article) in foreign language (English) LOL.  Academical words are always something restrict me to understand some contents in “Reducing Confusion about Grounded Theory and Qualitative Content Analysis: Similarities and Differences” book by Ji Young Cho and Eun-Hee Lee. Anyway, Cho and Lee made the article clear by making the list of 6 areas when they drew comparisons between grounded theory and qualitative content. Within the limits of my understanding about this article, I searched Vietnamese article for more information, I’d like to make some brief comments.Grounded theory has a rigorous and transparent research process, especially in the stages of coding and forming concepts. However, the process of coding, forming key concepts and linking them to form theories is still decided by the individual researcher. So, do these processes reflect reality? Although the social context is mentioned in the research, according to the general opinion of the researchers, the data of studies collected by this method are often from interviews and observations. Furthermore, coding in detail does not show us the context and progression of the phenomenon. Grounded theory has been criticized: a) observation can hardly be neutral because it is affected by the researcher’s knowledge; b) can this theory lead to real theories? or is it just some concepts?) some main concepts of this theory are difficult to distinguish such as concept and category; d) This theory is an objective approach.