🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello everybody,
I am trying to review an article methodologically. I don't know much about
Qualitative Research and I desperately need help. If you can, please help me
with my questions:
The study is a multiple  case study, describing two elementary school
teachers practice in order to understand their teaching philosophies.
Classrooms have dramatically different number of students(18 to 33) with
completely different backgrounds. The class of 18 students are native
English speakers, while for the class of 33 students English is a second
language.  I understand that it is a descriptive study and I should not try
to make any comparison between groups. The only thing this article do is
describing two teachers' teaching practices and combining them with their
philosophies.  It is kind of strange for me just to go a school and do some
observations and interviews for a month and make some generalizations out of
it.  I am really quantitative oriented person and it is my first Qualitative
course.

I did not understand why they use multiple case studies, if they don't want
to make comparison between the teachers' practices and philosophies.
Another problem, I assume the researcher knows every philosophy because the
teacher practices are categorized into different teaching philosophies. I
don't think we should test this hypothesis, even though I know that we
cannot test it. Or if the researcher is on this list, we can test him/her to
see how much he/she knows about teaching philosophies.

In the article, there is no information about how the researcher decided
how, where, and when the study is carried away. I guess this is another
problem with the study.  Five interviews and class observations are
collected both from teachers and a group of students from each class. They
don't mention how they selected the students for the interviews, neither.

Last thing, teachers know that the researcher observing them to seek their
teaching philosophies from their teaching practices. Come on, if they knew
what was this study all about, how can we believe that what they were doing
was real in the classroom?

I know it is too much for a Sunday, however, it will be a good start for me
to understand the qualitative researches.  So, I kindly ask your help.  I am
also open to your suggestions about the criters you have to review a
multiple case study?

Thanks you so much for your time,

Gulsah Gocmen PhD candidate
Ohio University
College of Education

-----Original Message-----
From: Sylvia J. Ansay <ansay@nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
To: QUALRS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU <QUALRS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
Date: Sunday, January 31, 1999 10:42 AM
Subject: Re: ethographic research


Hi Cleveland:
Two words of your question scare me-- "ethnographic interview".  For a
start, try reading _Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes_ by Emerson, Fretz, and
Shaw (1995).  There is an extensive reference section with some great
background stuff.
Sylvia Ansay
Ph.D. Candidate
Dept. of Sociology
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL  32607

At 10:18 PM 1/30/99 EST, you wrote:
>iam looking for any sites or article on how to conduct a proper
ethnographic
>interview, if anyone can help me out i would appreciate it
>thanks
>Cleveland Hayes
>PhD Student University of Utah
>UTPhD2B@aol.com
>
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