Use of incentives in social research

Recently I have had some interesting discussions with my students in the Research Methods class about the use of incentives in research studies. We all know that incentives help recruit and retain study participants, but some people consider them a form of undue influence or corruption of judgment, which may lead to biased data and damage the validity of the study. This makes me wonder, in what circumstances incentives are just innocuous incentives, and in what circumstances they morph into a temptation that attracts people to participate in a study against their better judgment?

I heard a program on the radio the other day, and it was about Amazon.com’s exclusive invitation-only club called Vine. Members of Vine are the top-reviewers of Amazon, and Amazon sends them freebies ranging from earbuds to color printers. A professor from NYU believes that such a program would lead to biased product reviews, because “as humans we are hard-wired to give in to this sort of, you know, enticement where if you continuously get things for free, then you’re more likely to be biased positively than biased negatively”. However, a spokesperson from Amazon claimed that Vine reviewers are not positively biased – they actually give lower star ratings that the average reviewers on the site. Her theory is that “it’s because they take that role so seriously to give as much sort of unbiased perspective on reviewing that product”.

This was quite an interesting story. So I dug around a bit more to find some scholarly literature about using incentives in research studies, and stumbled upon this article “Ethics in Human Subjects Research: Do Incentives Matter?” The authors stated “incentives become problematic when conjoined with the following factors, singly or in combination with one another: where the subject is in a dependency relationship with the researcher, where the risks are particularly high, where the research is degrading, where the participant will only consent if the incentive is relatively large because the participant’s aversion to the study is strong, and where the aversion is a principled one”.

This article is quite helpful to inform decisions concerning incentives. But we first have to be able to offer incentives before we consider how to offer them. I guess this means I have to get back to grant-writing now. 🙂

Talking about publishing (2)

2. Developing a strategic publishing and presentation plan

To me, being strategic about publishing means being prepared in every step of the process.

Identify the potential publication venue.
As mentioned earlier, it is important to develop a list of key journals in one’s field of research. To consider what journals to include, here are a few ideas discussed in the Webinar titled “SIG III: Getting Published in Reputable International Journals and Other Publications”: which journals do you consider prestigious; which are highly cited in your specialization; where do your senior colleagues present and publish; and what is the journal’s impact factor. Once you narrow down a few choices, for each journal: read the table of contents of the journal where you want to submit – at least a year’s worth (who and what they’re publishing, there may be a special issues); check to see if your key terms are indexed by the journal and check to see where the journal is indexed; and check the background of the editor and the editorial board. When the list is complete, you may choose one journal from it as a target venue for each manuscript you start working on.
Prepare the manuscript.
A research project, especially a complex one, may produce more than one publication. As we complete the project, we need to think about how to carve out the different pieces and turn them into multiple publications. Then, we can set a timeline for writing the manuscripts one by one. Writing is often the most difficult part in the process. It takes time, discipline and persistence. The aforementioned Webinar had a few suggestions on honing one’s writing skills: avoid jargon, define major terms and concepts, use terms consistently, ask trusted colleagues for feedback, consider hiring a proof reader, read about writing, e.g., Virginia Tufte (Artful Sentences), Gopen & Swan (The science of scientific writing), practice writing, keep a journal (or a blog), and take advantage of the writing support provided by one’s institution.
The publication decision.
There are usually four decisions – accept as is, minor revision, major revision, and rejection. The first two are practically good news, so we will just talk about how to deal with the latter two. Major revision can be a mixed bag. Sometimes the editor can decide whether to accept your revision, and sometimes the revised manuscript has to go out for another round of peer review. As for the reviewers’ comments, we may not agree with all of them, or be able to address all of them. When deciding whether to continue with the revision or withdraw the submission, we need to consider how well we can address the reviewers’ comments in the revision, and whether it’s worth the time and effort. If we do decide on revising, we need to document how each point in the reviewers’ comments was addressed – if we couldn’t fully address a particular point, it’s necessary to provide a detailed explanation. Such a document is often required when resubmitting the revised manuscript. If the publication decision is rejection, we can still recycle the manuscript and find another venue to submit it. Handling major revision and rejection can be frustrating – the key is not to take it personally and develop a thick skin for criticism.

Talking about publishing (1)

I will be joining our Gateway PhD Program’s residency in the upcoming ASIS&T annual conference in Montreal, and I have been asked to talk to the doctoral students about publishing. I’d like to use this blog post to clear my thoughts and figure out what I’m going to say. I was given a couple of specific topics that need to be covered, which is helpful and I can organize my thoughts around them.

1. Selecting publication and presentation venues

There are usually two kinds of research journals – scholarly and professional. Both publish peer reviewed articles, written by and for people who have experience or expertise in a particular field, and both are respected for the research and information they provide about the topics they cover. The difference lies in the community of author and readers – for scholarly journals, author and readers are scholars and academic researchers, and their articles mostly serve the purpose of theoretical, methodological and knowledge advancement in a specific domain. Therefore, scholarly journals can be quite demanding when it comes to the rigor of a study’s research design. Professional journals focus more on the practical implications of research – how the published research can inform actual practice. Authors of professional journals are usually practitioners, who conduct research to address actual problems they encounter at work and publish about it.

Whether choosing a scholarly journal or a professional journal as the potential venue for publication, it’s important to have a clear idea of what our research is about and who we want to share this research with. It would be helpful to establish a list of four or five core journals that often cover our research areas and become familiar with their style and requirements (reviewing past issues would help). Before we start writing up our research, we can scan the list quickly and decide which journal we’d like to submit it to, and then complete the manuscript according that journal’s guidelines.

Conference is another venue where we can disseminate our research – there are also scholarly conferences and professional conferences, and the difference is similar to what’s discussed above. For conference presentations, some conferences require submissions of full papers that go through the peer review process, and some only require a proposal or an abstract to be viewed by a committee instead of peer reviewers. In some fields, conference proceedings have the same status as journal publications, while in some others, presenting at conferences is not valued as much as publishing in journals. Despite all the differences, conference is a great venue to have interactions with people who share our research interests and can offer us feedback on expanding/refining/improving our own research. Again, it’s important to identify one or two key conferences that welcome the types of research we do, and become familiar with their submission deadlines and requirements.

(to be continued)

Oct 18-19, Library 2.013 Conference

Since 2011, SLIS has been organizing an annual online conference that goes on for two full days (24/7) in October. This year, the conference is called Library 2.013 (it’s Library 2.011 and Library 2.012 in the previous two years). It is scheduled for October 18-19, 2013. Since it is to be held entirely online around the clock, the conference presentations are in multiple languages and time zones. Participating in the conference is completely free, and its goal is to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among information professionals worldwide.

This year’s conference has eight themes (strands):

Digital Services, Preservation, and Access
Emerging Technologies and Trends
Learning Commons (for school libraries and/or academic libraries)
Management of Libraries and Information Centers in the 21st Century
User Centered Services and Models
Library and Information Professionals – Evolving Roles and Opportunities
Doctoral Student Research
Library and Information Center “Tours”

A total of 146 presentations will be delivered during the conference, covering a wide range of topics. I browsed the abstracts of these presentations and found some quite interesting ones – Librarians without borders: the International Librarians Network (ILN) experience, Build Curriculum for any Mobile Device – Build Once, Learn Anywhere, Army libraries from Kansas to Korea and all points in between, and Reducing suicide risks of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender library users in the library, especially adolescent and young adult patrons.

All of the conference presentations will be recorded and archived, and freely accessible to anyone. I think this is also a networking and professional development opportunity for librarians, and for students too. There’s much to learn from these presentations. I have discovered several presentations that I could potentially use in my classes. For example, “Using Gimlet to Impact Reference Communication in Your Library” might have useful information for my Reference and Information Service class.

Finally, my colleague Van and I are also presenting at this conference – we will be talking about the findings from our grant project on how to prepare public librarians for consumer health information service. Looking forward to it!

Content analysis of LIS journal articles: What kinds of research are LIS practitioners engaged in

Over the years of teaching LIBR 285, Research Methods in Library and Information Science, I have always wanted to do one thing – to look at the journal publications of practitioner researchers and see what kinds of research they are producing, and how their research is informing the decisions they make in their practice. This will help my students better understand and appreciate the value of the research methods course, and therefore embrace it more willingly and enthusiastically. So I developed a grant proposal based on this idea and submitted it to the SJSU Research Scholarship and Creative Activity (RSCA) Program, and luckily it got funded, which means I will spend my next summer working on this project.

I plan to conduct a critical content analysis of the articles published in the core practitioner-oriented LIS research journals in the past decade, identifying the topics, trends, methods, strengths, and weaknesses of practitioner research. The content analysis will (1) determine the topics studied by practitioners; (2) provide a historical view of LIS research; (3) identify what methodological designs have been used and whether they have been used appropriately; and (4) ascertain exemplary areas of practitioner research as well as areas in need of improvement. Hopefully, findings from this study will yield insights for enhancing both research methods education for LIS students and research training for practitioners.

Speaking of content analysis, a book that has helped me a lot with this methodology is “Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology”, by Klaus Krippendorff. Especially the chapters on evaluative techniques offer some good ideas of addressing issues related to reliability and validity. Maybe it’s time to revisit the book before I start this project of analyzing journal articles.

(reposted from SLIS CIRI Blog)

Ideas for the Research Methods course

I’m the course coordinator for LIBR 285 “Research Methods in Library and Information Science” at SJSU SLIS. As mentioned in a previous post, there are a variety of special topics that LIBR 285 covers, giving students a wide array of choices. Recently, I have been reviewing the 285 curriculum, trying to come up with ideas for new topics that students might need. Here’s what we have offered since 2008

General introduction of the frequently used research methods in LIS.
A particular research method, including action research, historic research, ethnography and survey research
Research in a particular research context, including youth service, school library, reference service and information literacy instruction.
A particular research purpose or perspective, including evaluation research, needs assessment, reading research and post-modern perspective..

For future planning of LIBR 285 offerings, I have two ideas. First, it might be helpful to look at the career pathways that are popular among students, and consider offering 285 sections that focus on the methods, contexts and purposes useful for those pathways. For example, as more and more of our students are considering jobs in non-traditional environments (e.g. the information industry), it could be beneficial to offer a 285 section focusing on that (e.g. methods for user experience research).

Another idea is preparing students with the necessary research skills if they are interested in academic librarianship. Research and publishing is a required component in most academic librarians’ job description. It might be helpful to have a 285 section dedicated to research and academic librarianship, talking about the research culture, research process, publishing opportunities, and other related topics for academic librarians. Our partnership with Loyola Marymount University Library’s research institute for academic librarians can be quite useful in developing such a course.

If readers of this blog have good ideas of what should be covered in a research methods course, I’m all ears!

A grant project to help academic librarians improve research skills

I mentioned in the first post of this blog that in March I attended the “Research Day” event organized by Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Library and Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), the purpose of which was to promote practitioner research and cultivate a research culture among academic librarians. Another important purpose this event served was to be a component in the grant application LMU submitted to IMLS to seek funding to create a learning opportunity and a support system for academic librarians who want to improve their research skills and increase their research output. Recently we learned that the project has received full funding from IMLS. How exciting!

SLIS is a partner in this grant application, and I will be involved as one of the project’s lead instructors. My responsibilities include developing, assessing, and refining Institute curriculum, identifying and addressing sustainability issues, and sharing project findings. The project will be three years long, and each year, LMU Library will host a nine-day Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) in the summer, supplemented with pre-institute learning activities and ongoing support for the year following the institute to help participants conduct their research and share their findings. This means I will be going to LMU every summer and talk to librarians about research. I’m so glad to have this opportunity to work with practitioners about the research problems they encounter at work, and explore with them how to conducting research studies to solve the problems. Of course before the first institute, we will have to do a lot of work developing the curriculum. I can’t wait to get started!

Conference trip to Mexico City

Last week I went to Mexico City to attend the AMIGOS conference, the bi-annual conference for the Network of Mexican Institutions for Library Cooperation (Red de Instituciones Mexicanas para la Cooperación Bibliotecaria). I was invited there to give a talk about my IMLS-funded research project about the best practices of providing reference service via texting. It was a great experience.

Interestingly, the library of Bank of Mexico is a member of the network, so they invited Greta Ober, a librarian from IMF as a guest speaker. Greta and I spent quite a bit of time together during the conference, and I got to know the various kinds of things that librarians do at the IMF library. The library at the US Embassy in Mexico is also a member of the network, so the director of that library was also there. We had a nice conversation over lunch and he told me about the wide range of services their library provides – believe it or not, there’s children’s story time at the Embassy library. My host, Teresa Myscich, Library Director at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economicas, was originally from the US, but she has been working in Mexico for twenty years. Every time I talked to her, I thought to myself, Teresa would be a great guest lecturer for the international librarianship course at SLIS. 🙂

Meeting people from diverse library backgrounds was definitely a highlight of this trip. It made me think about how we can introduce our students to such career pathways – non-traditional library environments (e.g. international organization and embassy libraries, and libraries in other countries), and hopefully spark their interest in pursuing these careers.

Books about Research Methods (4)

If you are a LIS practitioner interested in learning more about qualitative research methods, G.E. Gorman and Peter Clayton’s book, “Qualitative Research for the Information Professional: A Practical Handbook” might be a good choice. It is a comprehensive manual of how to conduct qualitative research, and covers a variety of methods for qualitative data collection, analysis and reporting.

For researchers who know which specific qualitative research method to use, but aren’t sure about how to exactly go about it, this book would come in very handy. For example, we want to conduct a case study, but we don’t know the detailed procedures of using this method, reading Gorman and Clayton’s book will be quite helpful.

However, I find the book a little week on the research conception aspect. It talks little about how to identify research problems that could benefit from qualitative research. In order for people to truly understand when to use qualitative research to address a research problem, it would be helpful to provide more examples. The authors did provide a table outlining the distinctive features of qualitative research (e.g. the purpose is to contextualize, interpret and understand participant perspectives), but for each feature, it would’ve been helpful to use an existing study or two from the literature to illustrate it. Maybe for their next edition, they may consider incorporating more examples, so readers will have a more concrete idea as to how to determine whether qualitative research is appropriate for a particular research inquiry.

Overall, the book is written in a clear and concise fashion, and it’s a fast read too. I’d recommend it to people who want to know more about the technical details of using a specific qualitative method.

2013 IFLA

Last week I went to Singapore to attend an IFLA satellite meeting, titled “Global Collaboration among Information Professionals”, where I presented my paper about iSchool faculty’s interdisciplinary engagement in teaching and research. It was a great meeting hosted by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Thirteen papers were presented at the meeting, and I was particularly interested in the ones about a particular LIS school’s effort in collaboration:

1. Shigeo Sugimoto (dean of the LIS school in University of Tsukuba, Japan) gave a talk about CiSAP, which stands for the Consortium of iSchools in Asia-Pacific. CiSAP is like a regional iSchool caucus, except that their schools don’t necessarily meet the iSchool criteria. There is no membership fee, and any LIS school in the Asia-Pacific region can join if they have five or more full time equivalent academic staff members. CiSAP was formed in 2008, and they host an annual meeting every year.

2. Rae-Anne Montague from Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave a talk about their schools’s recent efforts to advance international collaborations in teaching, research and service. She also highlighted the lessons learned in establishing and cultivating fruitful international collaborations.

3. Wooseob Jeong (interim dean at UW Milwaukee) gave a talk about their school’s international collaborations, such as the 1+1, 2+2 degree programs, summer internship programs, study abroad programs, and other active student recruitment efforts. He also talked about the challenges based on their experience with international collaboration.

4. Caroline Haythornthwaite (dean at British Columbia) gave a talk that outlined the aims and experiences at their school in joining the iSchool caucus.

5. Tom Denison from Monash University gave a talk about how they developed the masters of Information and Knolwedge Management degree at their school, and how it is informing further community engagement, collaboration, and innovation in curriculum development and delivery.

6. Gayner Erye from Aberystwyth University in UK gave a talk about the development of “Pathways to Information Leadership”, which is a professional development program to appeal to information managers in all sectors globally, by combining coverage of traditional library areas of expertise with courses covering subjects such as information governance, information strategy, risk management and information law and ethics. This program is completely online.

Among them, #4, #5 and #6 were most insightful – they gave me much to think about regarding the direction of the LIS field and the kind of education we should provide for future information professionals. As the number of jobs in the traditional library setting is decreasing, we need to seriously broaden our purview of what it means/takes to be an information professional in this day and age. I think we have to go through some sort of transformation to redefine the roles of LIS schools in preparing talents to meet the evolving needs of the society. Much is to be done, and it would be great if we could have more meetings like the IFLA satellite meeting in the future to exchange ideas and have a discussion about this important topic.