engagement: research brainstorm

Feel free to work in groups/ pairs or independently on this. Post your answers to your blog.

1. What questions about writing in the workplace or people who write for a living came up for you while engaging with the readings in the last few weeks? (Think back to Mc Millan Cottom’s take on how the new economy is shaping education, Gregg’s argument about the emotional constraints of white-collar work in conditions of flexibility or Brandt’s discussion of writers as the new mediational tools of the information economy. Or you might consider Bourdieu or Lanham’s ideas and how they might say something about what it means to write for a living). Take a few moments to brainstorm a few ideas of potential interesting strands of thinking of questions.
2. Try to turn one of these ideas into a research question. Remember the parameters of a good primary research question: specific, narrow, and discoverable through primary methods (but not too narrow to be Google-able).
3. Consider each of the data collection methods (interviews, observations, and text analysis) and describe how each method would allow you to find out the answer to the question in a particularly way. What would each method allow you to see? What would be the limitations of each? Which methods would be best for answering your research question?