That bit about the Research Mojo* was not entirely a joke, it seems. I have had some trouble, shall we say, maintaining focus this semester.
The projects that I'm working on are good for me, from a learning-growing point of view, but I feel like something is holding me back from really investing in them, in terms of energy (emotion?) and time. I've been struggling a lot with the tension about what "counts" as science, both in a general sense and within our field. Struggling to believe that discourse analysis and grounded theory -- or at least the analyses I'm doing -- are anything other than made up. Struggling to remain convinced that simply being smart, more or less, is a worthwhile way to make my living. Oh, melodrama.
A friend of ours suggested the other day that the real goal of science, even social science, is determinism: that what psychology really, truly, deeply wants to be able to do is to predict the behavior of every individual in every situation, the way we know that every ball will roll down a given plane at a given angle in a calculable way. A very depressing thought that, so far, I have been unable to refute with anything smarter than "Nuh-UH." I prefer to think that the goal is more closely tied to things like risk analysis and probability theory (even quantum physics), and that what psychologists want is principles: in this situation, 8 out of 10 people behave like this, and here is what it means for law enforcement or schoolteachers or whatever. This friend (or rather, Todd by proxy) argues that this is the goal only because the REAL goal of saying "In this situation, John Smith will behave like this" is currently unattainable... but that it doesn't mean it's not still the real goal. If that's true, then I guess the goal of information science is to always return the most relevant hits for every individual information seeker. Or something. I just have trouble accepting that these scientists believe, or even hope, that this is theoretically possible.
Painted into a corner by a faith that is usually kept locked in a deep, dark closet, but that creeps up on me when I least expect it. Wired has a great section in the December issue about the tempestuous marriage of science and religion.
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Well. So I'm working on analyzing the interviews from my study of collaborations between historically black colleges and major research universities. I'm also analyzing discourse from the annual reports of several human rights NGOs to see whether and how they differ (without being sure yet how I can convincingly argue either way -- or rather, how I could *fail* to convincingly argue either way). I'm crunching fake data about the relationship of system use to perceived computer self-efficacy. And then, of course, there's statistics.
I've also had some good conversations with professors around campus who may or may not end up being helpful to my general dissertation research. Mort Webster deals with uncertainty and risk in public policy, and Michael Waltman in Communication Studies looks at social cognition. I think I'm heading in the direction of arguing something like "Information systems are a form of social cognition that allows groups to reduce and codify uncertainty and make policy decisions, but at what cost? How do values get incorporated into system design, and how do they overtly or covertly affect what comes out of the system at the other end?" Or something.
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*On an amusing side note, that entry forced me to realize that my readership is more international than I imagined! An acquaintance wrote to ask what mojo was, which of course led to an hour of web research. (Oh, the things that actually DO motivate me.)
Posted on November 18, 2002 at 08:53 AM
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