Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Examples from two ethnographic studies illustrate how reflection is essential in order to perceive the truth of others. The first example describes how cultural misunderstandings between Moroccans and Canadians living in a small Israeli village engendered arguments, and how the author strived to gain greater objectivity and to examine the meanings she was imposing on events. The second example describes an interview study with Israeli Arab and Jewish educators, and the author's attempts to externalize and examine her own feelings, values and opinions in order to achieve greater objectivity and stronger internal validity. Introduction As a Canadian living in Israel I have become more and more aware of how culture, values, insider and outside knowledge and personal influence the ways qualitative researchers analyze and present their data. The journey from Canada, where I shared the mainstream experiences and values (and thus seldom reflected on them) to Israel, where I am an outsider in so many ways, has immeasurably sharpened my sensitivity to the workings of culture. As Fetterman (1998) writes, the concept of culture becomes immediately meaningful after cross-cultural ... Attitudes or habits that natives espouse virtually without thinking are distinct and clear to the stranger (p. 17). This is certainly true, but in order to ascribe proper meanings to the attitudes or habits of those in a strange culture, the researcher must externalize and evaluate her own attitudes and habits. My values and experiences are those of a Canadian, an academic, a woman, a grandmother, a Jew. As I have sought to understand the experiences of Jews, Arabs and Christians in Israel I have discovered as never before how one's native culture works as a set of tinted glasses through which the world is perceived. Through vignettes from two ethnographic studies (Court, 2002; Court, 2004) I will illustrate how reflection is essential in order to see beyond personal to perceive the truth of others. The goal of many qualitative studies is to arrive at a 'true' description and interpretation of the lives of the people studied. This means identifying norms and values that underlie participants' actions in a particular setting and reaching understanding of the meanings they ascribe to their actions, rather than imposing external meanings. A study's internal validity is dependent on the extent to which the researcher succeeds at these tasks. Together with rigorous application of traditional methods of reaching internal validity, the qualitative researcher is called on to do continuous self-checking about her interpretations. In the end, the way the researcher interprets and presents her carefully collected data is dependent also on who she is, what she values and the extent to which she is willing to externalize and critique her intuitive understandings. Denzin (1997) writes that the most important criterion of internal validity is verisimilitude, a text's ability to reproduce and map the real (p.10). A research report with high verisimilitude provides the reader, through vivid description and extensive narrative quotations, with the opportunity for vicarious experience (Stake, 1995, p.86) and allows the reader to make naturalistic (as opposed to propositional) generalizations. Naturalistic generalizations are conclusions arrived at through personal engagement in life's affairs or by vicarious so well constructed that the person feels as if it happened to themselves (Stake, 1995, p.85). Traditional methods of reaching internal validity include triangulation of research tools (seeking information through interviews, observations and document analysis) and informants (interviewing people with different roles, viewpoints and backgrounds), spending long periods in the field and inviting reliability checks from other researchers. These methods are essential, but they are not enough. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.622 | 0.618 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.129 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.034 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".