659 project update, week of Feb. 4

I have been working on two aspects of my project over the last two weeks: conducting in-depth, unstructured interviews with literacy teachers and exploring the case study literature.

Interviews
Last night I completed another interactive interview/dialogue with a teacher from the reading specialist cohort that is the subject of my study. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have not been systematically reflecting on these unstructured interviews as they have been happening (four in the last two weeks, two face-to-face and two using Skype). I am at a point now where I am beginning to see connections and patterns, and, it's crucial I start documenting.

There are three levels of documentation I need to make: connections and patterns I am noticing across the content of the conversations themselves, ideas on how to improve the course experience for future reading specialist students (many of which can be implemented now, with the new cohort that just started the program), and my experiences with online interviewing. Unfortunately, all of my energy and attention seems bound up in ensuring a good online interview experience and quality recording. The participants have been positive and cooperative, but I am troubleshooting audio problems and getting poor sound quality, which is going to impinge on my transcription process.

In one failed interview attempt last week (this one using Collaborate -- the participant's preferred mode), the participant finally said she would prefer a face-to-face interview. So, I am now making plans to travel to her campus in a rural county, one hour northeast of Knoxville. (The technical difficulties with Collaborate had to do with a conflict between a Mac OS system update and Java, causing Collaborate not to launch properly. This conflict has been resolved.)

The case study literature
I have gathered texts by Yin and Stake as well as some miscellaneous articles and chapters on case study. I will be supplementing these with readings from Cresswell's Five Approaches. I began with Stake's The Art of Case Study Research, as this was recommended by one of my committee members. At some point before next week, I would like to balance out readings from Stake with some selected chapters from Yin's 4th Ed. of Case Study Research because this came highly recommended by another committee member.

My goal for the end of next week is to be able to say with some measure of confidence which of the two approaches -- Stake's or Yin's -- is the best one for an activity systems analysis, which is my ultimate purpose. In other words, I would like to build a logic-of-justification for a perspective on case study that aligns with my CHAT study. I know it's a backwards approach....

My initial impressions of Stake included some apprehension about his background in program evaluation, a perspective I thought would be ill-suited for the kind of work I do. I am encouraged, however, by his preference for instrumental case study work organized around issues, not  individuals per se. This aligns nicely with the tradition of case study within the literacy field, which has mostly been of the instrumental sort, according to Barone's (2011) historical review.

References

Barone, D. M. (2011). Case study research. In N. K. Duke & M. H. Mallette (Eds.), Literacy Research Methodologies (2nd ed., pp. 7–27). New York: The Guilford Press.

Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Yin, R. K. (2008). Case study research: Design and methods (4th ed.). Los Angeles: SAGE.

659 project update, week of Feb. 4