Writing a blog

The activity of documenting my learning by writing down ideas and insights, questions and recording the ‘aha’ moments in this blog seemed daunting at first, but I am really glad I did it.It is a testimony of my personal learning journey; going back to my written ideas and understandings at various times is very helpful. There is a Latin saying- 'vorba volent, scribum manent'- which translates as 'the spoken word flies, but the written one remains'- what best way to summarize how I feel about this blog! It is in a way a reflective professional journaling that I should get in the habit of keeping. Although the information on this blog was public only for the participants in the Advanced Qualitative class, I often wondered at what point I would feel ‘safe’ enough to open up and become vulnerable to the criticism, feedback and input from a wider audience. As it stands today, I received feedback and entered a cyber-dialogue only with two people that I trust professionally and personally: one is my professor from whom I did expect input, and one is a classmate (Sandra) with whom I am developing a strong friendship and camaraderie in scholarship. In a way this could be a taste of what it means to be published (in a journal, in an edited book, an article); if I am to be political within my scholarship and continuous learning, I need to build the courage of standing behind what I say and opening myself up for a public dialogue and criticism. More than often critical discussions are conducive to more learning and positive growth. I wonder how other people feel about publicly blogging on their learning journey...

I like the format of this blog because it keeps a nice timeline of my entries and reflections (somehow it resembles the format of an online class with everybody’s input nicely and timely recorded).

Interpreting and Presenting Data


Interpreting data (especially in qualitative research) is influenced by the researcher’s positionality within theory, practice, ethics, biases, epistemological and ontological views, and the study itself(research questions, methodology, data gathering, etc). In addition to the researcher’s positionality (just mentioned) influencing interpretation, presenting data is influenced by audience to which the results are presented. For example, if data is presented within a research journal, a researcher will most likely follow the style of presentation upheld by the journal and its editors (e.g. abstract, introduction, literature review, etc) Likewise, presentation of data for a professional conference may take on a different display style, maybe focusing more on audio, visual, or dramatic styles.(Grbich, 2007).

I really enjoyed reading “Writing and Retelling Multiple Ethnographic Tales of a Soup Kitchen for the Homeless” (Miller et al., 1998). Aside from the fact that this article brought to the forefront issues related to homelessness and the social/civic response or non response to this situation, I appreciated the researchers’ transparency and testimony in describing their journey of retelling and writing the story of homelessness as they studied/encountered it. The retelling of the story through realist tale, confessional tale and critical tale created space for deep reflections on research such as ‘The retelling of an ethnography may be as important as the initial writing of it..., [we] learned that research is dynamic rather than static, causing ethnographers to reflect on how they write and present their studies to different audiences..., when we were challenged to interrogate our own text, the critical tale took shape, and the issues of access, equity, positionality, investment, accuracy, and truth surfaced”(p.489).

Grbich, C. (2007). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. London: SAGE Publications.
Miller, D. L., Creswell, J. W., & Olander, L. S. (1998). Writing and Retelling Multiple Ethnographic Tales of a Soup Kitchen for the Homeless. Qualitative Inquiry, (4), 469-491. doi:10.1177/107780049800400404