Going over my methods section yesterday in class I have more clarity on how to go about my research and my coding sheet. Thankfully, we decided to completely cut my characterization section as this section is way too subjective. This was the section that was causing me the most trouble with my coding process during the initial viewing period because I had to keep adding sections to it as well as keep thinking of flaws within the section as I coded throughout the seasons.
The major issue I have at the moment is organization. While I have all the information on the demographics of each of the characters from each season, I need to better organize all the information into more specific subsections instead of just listing the player's name and their demographics. This will be helpful for the results section as the data will be easy to follow as well as have the information organized in a useful manner. Since this takes a bit more time than simply coding an episode I plan to dedicate next weekend (January 28 and 29) to organizing all the demographic data I have so far and moving forward I will organize all the data for each season in this way.
Additionally, I plan to research more on scattergraphs over the weekend to figure out the best method to display my data in and play around with these methods throughout the week on some of this data to see how successful it. Right now my number one priority is refining my methods section and literature review (a task that I am dedicating my Monday to as well as any other time needed for it) and if that means taking away time from my data collection that is ok as the data collection is now moving faster and my schedule is based on my previous time it took to code episodes. I am confident that I will be done with data collection on February 15th (or before then) like my schedule plans for.
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I think the main key for you is going to be to consider how to analyze the data, because without that, I fear that you'll be collecting data that you can't really analyze. Therefore, I would prioritize looking at how a scatterplot might work and what sorts of information you need in order to do the proportional analysis. Particularly with the demographics section, it seems like a LOT of information to convey, so we need to start thinking how to concisely articulate all of those things.
ReplyDeleteFor example, are you going to look at the proportion of race, age, and location separately and then all in conversation? I think you'll want a lot more clarity on this. As a goal, for our meeting on Friday, get the best understanding that you can on how you'll break up and analyze all of the different subsections of data.
As always, your blog is incredibly funny and your taste of Gifs is impeccable. I am glad that you were able to use the methods critique to refine your research. I completely agree with you that the characterization coding was very subjective, would have been difficult to conduct, and did not add any really interesting insight into your paper. As you mentioned in your blog, even after you had removed the characterization section, you still have so much information to record and discuss.
ReplyDeleteOrganizing the data is the best step forward to understanding what your results tell you. However, I think you should take it one step further than what you said in your blog. You should try organizing all of the data in multiple different ways. Maybe you could try organizing the data based off of the player, the episode, common trends, and the season. This would hopefully give you a multidimensional understanding of what is happening in your data, which will in turn make it easier to communicate the results to the readers.
Other than that, I am confident that you will be able to catch up with the schedule you made. Also, your research is heading in a really interesting and nuanced direction, can’t wait to see it!