My two wonderful colleagues, Kris
Brancolini and Marie Kennedy, and I wrote a book together based on our
experience with the Institute for Research
Design in Librarianship (IRDL), an IMLS-funded program that provides
professional development opportunities for academic librarians to improve their
research skills. The book is titled “Enhancing Library and Information Research
Skills: A Guide for Academic Librarians”, in which we covered the whole
spectrum of being a practitioner-researcher in the academic library setting.
It was a great experience working with
Kris and Marie on this book. They both are strong advocates for academic
librarians’ engagement in research and use of research evidence to inform
decision making. We truly hope that this book will help academic librarians
around the nation to become more aware of the value of research to academic
librarianship, develop a solid understanding of the research process, and ultimately
improve their confidence and competency in conducting and applying research in
their professional practice.
I love visiting local libraries when I travel. This summer, I came to Guiyang, China to see my aunt and uncle. They live in an area with a population of 300,000 and yet there’s only one public library in that area. The tiny community library is a 600 square-foot room containing a few shelves of magazines and books, a reading area, and two small staffed desks. Most readers there are senior citizens (the only young reader there is my daughter).
Even though the physical space is limited, the library provides a wide array of electronic resources, which are displayed on a big touch screen. The e-resources include eBooks, eJournals and videos. Each title has a QR code – people can scan it and then access it on their mobile devices. How convenient!
Last week I went to the beautiful campus
of Loyola Marymount University for IRDL 2017. I’m glad that this wonderful
research methods training program received funding to continue for another
three years – more academic librarians will benefit from it and gain important
skills to become more competent and confident practitioner researchers. I had
great conversations with the participants this year. They were all working on
interesting projects – e.g. how ARL libraries design their fundraising page on
the library website, how students understand or misunderstand library jargon,
how students’ interpretation of research differs from faculty’s expectation and
observation of their research behavior, just to name a few. I can’t wait to
read more about these great projects in journal publications.
In the past week, I taught during the
day, and worked on other projects at night (yes, it’s a productive week for
me!). Particularly, I took full advantage of LMU library’s subscription to SAGE
Research Methods, and read a number of articles about the research method –
interview. There are different ways to use interview in gathering qualitative
data. Here’s a summary of them from the SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative
Research:
Convergent
interviewing – a technique that aims to collect, analyze, and interpret
people’s experiences, opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge that converge
around a set of interviews. It was created primarily to address issues in under-researched
areas. It permits in-depth interviewing by promoting a cyclical research
process that requires ongoing analysis as part of the overall strategy. Interviewers
engage in a constant comparative reflexive process that permits detailed rich
content and theoretical sampling as researchers seek to continuously test
emerging interpretations from early interviews in subsequent interviews.
Cognitive
interviewing – it encompasses a variety of approaches for eliciting qualitative
data on how participants interpret and respond to a wide variety of situations.
Cognitive interviewing increasingly is used in the evaluation of technology
interfaces such as websites and tools for informatics. It is used in education
to understand how students think about content and respond to test items and in
marketing to understand how to evaluate products better.
Conversational
interviewing – an approach used by research interviewers to generate verbal data
through talking about specified topics with research participants in an
informal and conversational way. Interviewers and interviewees rely on
taken-for-granted assumptions about how everyday talk occurs and how speakers
make meaning of one another’s utterances. In emphasizing features of mundane conversation,
conversational interviewers strive to facilitate a research environment in
which participants feel free to participate in extended discussions of research
topics in a less hierarchical environment than that convened in structured
interview settings.
Narrative interview
– an interview that is organized to facilitate the development of a text that can
be interpreted through narrative analysis. Narrative analysis is guided by a
theory of narrative, and these theories of narrative vary in the influence of
the reader, the text, and the intent of the author on interpretation. For this
reason, the content and structure of a narrative interview will depend both on
the theory of narrative being used in the analysis and on the research
question.
Interactive interviewing
– an interpretive practice for getting
an in-depth and intimate understanding of people’s experiences with emotionally
charged and sensitive topics such as childbirth, illness, loss, and eating
disorders. Emphasizing the communicative and joint sense-making that occurs in
interviewing, this approach involves the sharing of personal and social
experiences of both respondents and researchers, who tell (and sometimes write)
their stories in the context of a developing relationship.
The critical
incident technique (CIT) – originally, it refers to a set of procedures to
collect direct observations of human behaviors in a way that facilitates their
use in solving practical problems and developing broad psychological
principles. Over the years, it has been increasingly applied to studying psychological
states or experiences, and emphasis has shifted from direct observation by
experts to retrospective self-report in interviews.
Co-constructed
narratives – this refers to stories jointly constructed by relational partners
about epiphanies in their lives. This approach offers a way for participants to
actively construct a version of a relational event that provides insight,
understanding, and an in-depth and complex reflection on what occurred. As
such, this mode of doing research provides an alternative to traditional interviewing,
especially when the topic under consideration is emotionally charged, personal,
and sensitive.
In library research, an important source
of data is input from the community of library users. How are users using
library collections/services/facilities? How satisfied are they with their
library experience? What are the inadequacies in meeting their needs? User
input is critical in helping library professionals understand how successful
the library is in serving the user community. Traditionally, librarians gather
user input through survey, in-depth interview and focus group. To make the
research process more engaging to both the researcher and library users, they
may consider more creative alternatives, such as the photovoice method. Through
the utilization of photographs and stories, this method allows community
members to identify and represent issues of importance to them, enabling policy
makers to develop a greater understanding of the issues, and formulate
effective and comprehensive strategies to address them in a way that is also
meaningful for the community.
Photovoice is a qualitative method often
used in community-based
participatory research (CBPR), where community members take photos related
to a particular issue and tell their stories behind the photos in a facilitated
discussion. Community members are believed to be more imaginative and observant
of community issues than the most experienced photographers and photo
journalists. In library and information science (LIS), photovoice is still
relatively new and not widely used. Recently I wrote an article to review this
method and discuss its implications for LIS research. The article is published
in Library Hi Tech, titled “Photovoice:
A Creative Method to Engage Library User Community”.
Since Photovoice is a CBPR method, it is
often applied in action-oriented projects, where a partnership among the key
stakeholders is established and all partners are equitably involved in the
process with the aim of combining knowledge and action for community
improvement . The key stakeholders include researchers, community members and
decision makers, and they participate in the photovoice process collaboratively
to explore community issues and produce an action plan to address them. However,
photovoice projects are known for being time consuming as they usually extend
over several weeks, which can be burdensome for some community participants and
lead to high attrition rates. The cost related to photography and exhibition
can be a concern too. Without community members’ sustained commitment and
adequate funding, it is unlikely for the photovoice project to succeed.
Photovoice provides an engaging way for
libraries to examine user needs, perceptions or behavior in order to provide
better services to them. Combining visuals and narratives, this method may help
capture a nuanced view of topics that are sensitive, vague or difficult to
articulate verbally, and thus may generate data unexpected when using
interviews or focus groups. The collaborative nature of the photovoice method
allows community members take on the role of co-researchers as they participate
in photovoice projects. It provides an empowering mechanism for library users
to become actively engaged in issues pertinent to the user community and
advocate for their concerns, needs and desires. With active user involvement,
library outreach efforts are more likely to be successful.
A few weeks ago I attended the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL)
in Prague. It was my first time attending this conference and it was a great
experience. Six people (students, alum and faculty) from our Gateway PhD
program were there and it was fabulous to see our program so well represented
at this conference.
The conference covered a wide
variety of information literacy related topics, and what interested me most
were the presentations about methods in information literacy research. Here’s a
summary of them
Autoethnography: Research as
Reflection, Inclusion and Empowerment (by Deitering, Anne-Marie; Schroeder,
Robert; Stoddart, Richard)
The three presenters were involved
in a project where a learning community of librarians developed their
autoethnographies. The provided an overview of autoethnography and discussed
their experience and reflections on this project. It was quite refreshing to me
as because in authoethnography the
researcher is the subject of research. I found an article that provided a detailed
explanation of this method – here’s the link http://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol19/iss37/3/.
Using Phenomenographic Methods to
Support Political Information Use (by Smith, Lauren)
There are quite a few
phenomenographers in information literacy research, including some of my
colleagues in our Gateway PhD program. So I know a little bit about this
method. The presenter talked about her study using this method to examine how
high school students are aware of, acquire, engage with and apply political
information. It’s a comprehensive study and well designed. Her presentation
slides can be located here.
Critical Incident Technique in
Information Literacy Research in the XXI Century (by Cisek, Sabina Barbara)
The presenter shared her review
and analysis of studies that used Critical Incident technique in information
literacy research. This method has not been widely applied to studying
information literacy related topics. It’s more popular in examining information
seeking behavior. Here’s a brief
definition of this method “The critical incident technique consists of a set of
procedures for collecting direct observations of human behavior in such a way
as to facilitate their potential usefulness in solving practical problems and
developing broad psychological principles. The critical incident technique
outlines procedures for collecting observed incidents having special significance
and meeting systematically defined criteria” (Flanagan,
1954). The presentation slides can be located here.
Recently I have been reading “Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide” by Helen Kara. It’s refreshing to read about the various approaches in arts-based research, research using technology, mixed-methods research and trans formative research. It made me think how these methods can be applied in LIS research.
One of the methods is vignettes, which I happened to co-write a paper about with two wonderful librarians, Allison Benedetti and John Jackson. Here’s an excerpt from our paper:
“Vignettes are short
stories about hypothetical characters in hypothetical circumstances, to whose
situation the interviewee is invited to respond. As a
methodological tool, vignettes can be used in focus group interviews, in-depth
interviews, or survey interviews, where the interviewee is invited to draw upon
their own experience, and provide perceptions, opinions, beliefs, attitudes,
and diagnostic predictions about how the fictional character in the vignette
will behave. When
observing or placing an individual in a particular context would not be
possible for logistical or ethical reasons, vignettes are often considered. Approximating a real-world situation, vignettes
allow for features of the context to be specified so that the interviewee can
make normative statements about a set of social circumstances rather than
provide their responses in a vacuum.
Vignettes
are often presented as a written narrative that the interviewee can read. Vignettes
must carry sufficient detail to allow the interviewee to visualize the
hypothetical circumstances as an actual situation. Particularly, the
situational elements of a vignette need to be carefully specified and the main
characters in the vignette are usually given names. Following each vignette,
the researcher may ask an open-ended question or a closed question with a set
of response categories from which the interviewee can choose. Probes are used
when necessary for the interviewee to elaborate on their responses.
In LIS research, vignettes have not been widely used. Given that vignettes
are helpful to depersonalize sensitive topics and encourage respondents to talk
more openly, they could be potentially useful for researching the attitudes and
behaviors of scholars related to publishing, copyright, open access practices,
and practically any area in which libraries are curious about the behaviors and
habits of users. Vignettes could also be used with students to teach about or
demonstrate concepts related to plagiarism and academic integrity. User
experience and web design practices have long been utilizing personas or
archetypes to evaluate designs and functionality of interfaces; there may be a
place for vignettes to augment these practices, perhaps with remote or online
usability studies.”
I would like to continue explore the use of creative methods in LIS research. Writing a blog series about this would help me document my exploration. So this post would be the first in this series. The next method I hope to explore is photovoice. A member of the 2016 IRDL cohort is considering using it. How great is that!
The third and final Institute for Research Design in Librarianship
(IRDL) took place in June. IRDL is an IMLS-funded
project that seeks to create a learning opportunity and a support system for
academic librarians who want to improve their research skills and increase
their research output. Twenty-one librarian scholars gathered at the beautiful
campus of Loyola Marymount University and went through a 9-day intensive
research methods training program. This year, quite a number of librarians were
working on topics involving populations that are understudied in library
research. Here are a few examples:
1.
How international students use the library and
how does the library contribute to their success and growth in life
2.
How Chinese international students interpret
“Authority is constructed and contextual”
3.
How scholars who study materials in non-English
languages but publish in English use citation management software
4.
What is the experience of librarians of color in
residency programs
5.
What are the barriers for women to seek
leadership positions in libraries
During the Institute, there were
two hours scheduled each day for the participating librarians to consult the
instructors and IRDL directors about their research projects. I enjoyed these
consultations immensely. It is always pleasant to chat with people who are
enthusiastic about their research. The projects about understudied populations
reinforced my idea of offering a research methods course that focuses on
researching special populations. Every semester there are always students in
our MLIS degree program proposing to conduct research about the library and
information needs/behavior of a population that is traditionally underserved or
understudied in libraries. For instance, in the past semester, a student
proposed a survey study to examine the library needs of people who are
quadriplegic. As our libraries strive to meet the needs of diverse user populations,
it would be helpful if our librarians know how to properly design studies to
generate practice-informing evidence about different populations, especially
the underserved or less privileged ones.
See, IRDL always gives me new
ideas and refreshes my perspectives as a researcher/educator. Two weeks flew by
very quickly. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this great effort that
seeks to enhance the quality of scholarship among librarians and foster a
culture of research-mindedness. Marie and Kris, the two wonderful IRDL project
directors, are truly insightful in making IRDL happen, and I’m sure that the
IRDL participants will make them proud by raising the bar of library research.
[The photo was actually taken during the first year of IRDL in 2014 – Greg, Michael and I were the instructors. It was so nice to see Greg and Michael every year at IRDL (and Emily this year). We make a great team 🙂 ]
Last week I attended the 2016 conference of Qualitative and Quantitative
Methods in Libraries, and presented a paper I co-authored with two wonderful
colleagues from Loyola Marymount University (LMU), Marie and Kris. In this presentation, we talked about the
mapping between librarians’ research confidence and the curriculum of the Institute of Research Design for Librarianship (IRDL), a
federally funded program that provides research methods training for
librarians. For each topic covered in the training program (e.g. research
question development, research design, data collection, data analysis, research
dissemination), librarians’ confidence was measured before and after the
program, and increase was detected across the board. This was consistent with the
preliminary findings of another study we are conducting. In that study, we seek
to understand the long term impact of IRDL by asking the participants to
describe three incidents where they strongly felt the benefits of IRDL in their
work or research. So far we have seen quite a number of narratives about how
they felt more confident when working with faculty, talking to people at
conferences and interpreting the published literature.
According to Bandura, mastery experiences build confidence through
success and provide an individual with the ability to persevere in the face of
obstacles, which is especially important in performing difficult tasks, such as
conducting research in the traditionally practical library profession (lack of
confidence is often cited as a barrier to librarians’ research engagement). I’m
glad to see that IRDL has been able to improve librarian’s research confidence
and help them become more confident and competent practitioner researchers. The
third cohort of IRDL will gather in LMU for their training in less than a week,
and I look forward to meeting them!
Last week I had the pleasure of
going to Doha, Qatar to give a workshop at the Research-based Library Practices
Summit. The Summit was organized by librarians from University College London
and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and attended by librarians from
multiple countries in the Gulf region. My workshop focused on providing an
overview of the frequently used quantitative and qualitative research methods
in library and information science such as survey, focus group interview,
in-depth interview and content analysis, and explaining the process of making a
methodological decision based on the research question. The objective of the
workshop is for participants to gain knowledge and skills to determine which
qualitative and quantitative methods are most appropriate to address their
research questions. I used the following questions to help them analyze their research
question and make the methodological decision:
·
Are qualitative research methods appropriate for
your research question?
a.
How much previous research exists on your topic?
b.
Do you intend to capture a nuanced, in-depth
view of your topic?
c.
Do you intend to describe your observations via
the identification of themes/patterns?
d.
Is there existing qualitative content you can
analyze, or do you have to collect original qualitative data?
e.
Which qualitative data collection method do you
plan to use – focus group interview, in-depth interview or field observations?
·
Are quantitative research methods appropriate
for your research question?
a.
Is your research question a relationship
question or a causality question?
b.
Has there been extensive research conducted on
your topic that the range of Reponses or variations of behavior are already
known?
c.
Do you intend to quantify your observations and produce
generalizable conclusions?
d.
Is there existing statistics you can analyze, or
do you have to collect original quantitative data?
e.
Which quantitative data collection method do you
plan to use – quantitative content analysis, quantitative observations, or
survey?
Overall the workshop went pretty
well. We had a lot of good discussions. I was impressed with the participants’
eagerness to conduct research to improve their practice. This kind of “research-mindedness”
is exactly what we need in the profession.
During my stay in Doha, I had the
opportunity to visit the state-of-the-art Qatar National Library. It’s still
under construction, so we had to wear safety hat and vest on the tour. It’s an
amazing building. I loved the open design and the high level of automation.
There is even a restaurant in the library – a real one with a kitchen, not just
a café where you can only get sandwiches. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to
take pictures inside. But here’s a picture of us in front of the building.
Here are a couple of pictures I
took of a gorgeous corridor in the Education City, where the Summit was taking
place. Gorgeous view, isn’t it?
Quantitative research has always
been a challenging topic in my teaching of research methods. Quite a number of
my students are innately disinclined to deal with numbers and find statistical
analysis uninteresting and even unnerving. So every time I cover quantitative research,
I always start with this quote from Earl Babbie’s The Practice of Social
Research:
““Empirical research is first and
foremost a logical rather than a mathematical operation. Mathematics is merely
a convenient and efficient language for accomplishing the logical operations inherent
in quantitative data analysis. This textbook is not intended to teach you
statistics or torture you with them. Rather, I want to sketch out a logical
context within which you might learn and understand statistics.”
It is important that students understand
statistics are just a means to an end – a tool that we can use to help us accomplish
our research objective by making sense of quantitative data. In my teaching, I
focus primarily on the conceptual understanding of statistics. Students are
expected to master what the frequently used statistical measures are, when to
use them, for what types of variables and what kinds of analytic objectives, and
don’t have to worry about the computational process. They can explore that on
their own – there are many tutorials on YouTube.
At this year’s SCELC Research Day, I gave a
workshop on quantitative data analysis, and this “conceptual understanding”
strategy seemed to have worked well. We had interesting discussions around the
tables and it’s great to see how the librarians planned to use the statistics
covered in the workshop in the analysis of their existing data sets. I just
wish there were more time for us to do some hands on exercises. Nonetheless, it
was a great experience talking about research methods with librarians, as always.
Formalized Curiosity 