Overall design - Method for empirical research

2.2. Method for empirical research

2.2.1. Overall design

For an appropriate method to look into mobile phoning, it is very important to recognize the dynamics and multiplicities arising in the course of the interactions

between the mobile phone and its users. As mobile phoning is not a matter of representation, signification, or containment, theoretical attention to it should be focused on the relational and processual happenings, rather than the instrumentality of the device or the autonomy of the user. The aim of this research is to understand communicative human practice with the mobile phone, an evolutive onto-genesis of a subject and an object in real situations, providing rich descriptions on the emergent and processual practice of mobile phoning. To serve this purpose, the empirical data should be ―raw‖; it should be the original language of the respondents which ―tells a story.‖

This means an engagement with raw phenomena, rather than with idealizations, so as to encompass the concreteness of the experience of mobile phoning in its everyday ins and outs.

This study thus primarily focuses on the analysis of individual cases. Rather than a cross-examination or a categorization, this study aims to provide vivid

illustrations for each of the specific cases. It follows an ethno-methodological perspective, in the sense of prioritizing the people‘s ordinary, routine, and detailed pieces of everyday life, to understand their ―methods of making sense of their social world‖ (Wallace and Wolf 1991: 295). Furthermore, in appreciating the complexities and unexpected bifurcations of the experience, this study considers the experience to be like ―walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with every step you take‖ (Gleick 1988: 24). The purpose is therefore to describe the specificities of mobile phone users‘ experience in those steps that constitute the real world they are living in. It is also a strategy of pragmatics (James 1978), towards a proper recognition of

emergence that precedes any evaluation or judgment, and towards an achievement of incisiveness and a delicacy of actuality in everyday human practice.

The spirit of ―re-envisioned ethnography‖ (Schlecker and Hirsch 2001: 69-87) has provided an important methodological background for this study. The adoption of ethnographic methods in the fields of Media and Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies has been especially extensive, engendering more fundamental changes than in most other fields of the human sciences. The turn towards ethnographic methods in the two fields can be seen as a response to the increasing difficulties in coping with a seemingly boundless unfolding of complexity. In Media and Cultural Studies, the move towards ethnography occurred when researchers began to

contextualize the media experience in everyday settings; in Science and Technology Studies, on the other hand, ethnography was utilized when scholars began to engage

with detailed investigations of laboratory practices.

In both fields, the increasing use of ethnography was thus in response to the recognition of ever more contexts. The theoretical background of this turn were assumptions that more contexts could procure more knowledge, and that meaning is accomplished through the merographic exercise of making things part of a context, a whole. In both fields, the merographic relating of, for example, television viewing or laboratory research, to various contexts, for example, advertising industry or human rights activism, was thus always bound to be insufficient to constitute the wholeness of these actions. With ―re-envisioned ethnography,‖ however, each description is

understood to contain within itself that which it describes. Part and whole collapse into one; another context does not yield more knowledge, but it is an alternative description or described unity.

Appreciating the spirit of this perspective, the empirical method of this study has been designed to investigate open-ended responses from mobile phone users.

Findings from such an approach will be longer, more detailed, and variable in content.

Analysis will be complicated because the responses will be neither systematic nor standardized. Yet the open-ended responses allow us to understand the world as it is seen by the respondents. The purpose of gathering responses to open-ended questions is to understand and capture the points of view of respondents without predetermining those points of view through prior selection of categories. Indeed, the first principle of the design of the method for gathering empirical data in this study is to capture the respondents‘ experience ―in their own terms,‖ and to learn their categories for rendering explicable and coherent ―the flux of raw reality‖ (Patton 1990: 24; 31). There will not be involved in any part of this study pre-categorizations or judgments about whether what occurred was good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate; the data will simply describe what occurred.

Open-ended responses generate more information that is more detailed and varied. There are surely quantitative studies that also have a large volume of

information in that they involve collecting lots of numeric data. In those quantitative researches, however, the data themselves tend to both shape and limit the analysis, because the ultimate goal for them is a fairly straightforward endeavor towards a generalization. No matter how large their sample size is and how vast the volume of their information is, all they need to do in the end is to apply some aggregate and analytic statistics and to generalize the result towards an explanation of the whole. In

contrast, open-ended responses contain ―raw‖ data, allowing an almost infinite number of ways to be organized. They describe the phenomenon of interest in great detail in the original languages, telling a story of their own which provides rich description of the phenomenon.

To achieve this openness, the design of the empirical method used in this study turns to four important points as Woods (2006: 2-6) has advised: a focus on natural settings; an interest in meanings, perspectives and understandings; an emphasis on process; a concern with inductive analysis and grounded theory. It is above all interested in ―life as it is‖ lived in real situations, making as few assumptions as possible in

advance of the study. ―Natural experiments‖ (ibid), which are events that occur naturally but interrupt ordinary courses of life, are of prime importance for this method. There are things to be found out, without giving a clue beforehand. It also pays great attention to how respondents think about their situations, and what meanings they attach to their behavior. It seeks to be sensitive to the perspectives of all respondents and the interaction that is occurring between their perspectives and situations in order to see how they bear on each other. In other words, it focuses on process—on how things happen and how they develop, on the becoming of the technology and its user. As the basic assumption of this study is that everyday life is an ever-changing picture, a continuous process, which is always emerging in a state of flux, and subject to change, it is very important to reveal it in a fine detail to see how changes are occurring in day-to-day activities, negotiations and decisions. This approach requires theory to be

―grounded‖ in the data, in ―thick descriptions,‖ which go beyond mere fact and surface appearances. Such data presents detail as well as context, and the webs of relationships that connect the technology and the people. In thick descriptions, the voices, feelings, actions and meanings of interacting individuals are heard (Denzin 1989: 83).

Being a ―discovery-oriented‖ approach (Patton: 1990: 39), the method based on these points is thus naturalistic; it contrasts with experimental research in which, ideally, the investigator attempts to control the conditions of the study or to manipulate external influences as completely as possible. By exploring genuinely open questions rather than testing theoretically derived (deductive) hypotheses, it immerses in the details and specifics of the data to discover the important dimensions and interrelationships; it is thus inductive. It also has a ―unique case orientation,‖ which is being maintained alongside ―context sensitivity‖ (ibid 60): it assumes that each case is special and unique and thus the first level of inquiry is to capture the details of the individual cases being

studied. Cross-case analysis follows from and depends on the quality of individual case studies. Though the findings are to be considered in a broader socio-cultural context, the possibility or meaningfulness of generalizations across cases or time and space will not be a concern of this study. Instead, it is based on what Patton (1990: 60) calls ―empathic neutrality‖; the aim is to understand the world in all of its complexity.

2.2.2. Sampling

Respondents were chosen by purposive sampling because proportionality or representativeness is not the primary concern of this study and it makes easier to reach a targeted sample effectively and quickly. It is typical for qualitative studies to focus in depth on relatively small samples, even a single case, selected purposefully. On the contrary, quantitative methods typically depend on larger samples, selected randomly, because of their very purpose of generalization. The logic and power of purposeful sampling is in selecting information-rich cases for the study in depth. Information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the research (Patton 1990: 174). As the strategy for selecting

purposeful samples, this study firstly looked for critical cases, which are those that can make a point quite conspicuously or are, for some reason, regarded as particularly important for the topic of mobile phoning.

To locate critical cases, or, in other words, information-rich respondents, the method of chain or snowball sampling has been utilized. The process begins by asking well-situated people: ―Who knows a lot about this?‖ or ―To whom should I talk on this?‖ (ibid 176) With the repetition of this process, the snowball gets bigger and

information-rich cases are accumulated. This study has found five service providers and three software developers to be key informants as they were willing to give support while sitting for preliminary interviews. According to their information, the age group of the most avid users of the mobile phone in Korea is currently between the late-teens and the thirties. From five mobile phone service retail shops, five critical cases have been chosen, being recommended by each of the shops as the most information-rich person in mobile phoning. Then the five has been extended to thirty people, by a

process of snowballing, that is, by enlisting further respondents by the initial five people.

Ten people in their twenties and twenty people in their thirties have participated as respondents in this study. Teenagers are excluded because in Korea it is at the age of twenty that people graduate from high school and the everyday life of a high school

student in the country has a lot of particular characteristics due to the fierce competition for college entrance examinations. To address teenagers‘ practice of mobile phoning properly, a full separate study would have to be undertaken.

The sample size may seem small in comparison with the sample size needed for representativeness. But it should be emphasized again that the purpose is not a generalization from a sample to the whole of which it is a part. The logic of purposeful sampling is different from that of probability sampling; and therefore purposeful samples are to be judged in context, on the basis of the rationale and strategy of each study (Patton 1990: 185). The validity, meaningfulness, and insights generated from this study have more to do with the information-richness of the cases selected, rather than with the sample size.

2.2.3. Diaries

Having been chosen, thirty people, divided into two groups, were asked to keep a record of their daily use of the mobile phone over a period of one week during

September 2006, and later they were invited to in-depth interviews. The younger group consisted of ten people in their twenties; they were eight college students and two who were preparing for college entrance exams. The elder group consisted of twenty people in their thirties. Among them twelve people have full-time jobs, and three are self-employed, and the other five are full-time housewives.

The ―diary-interview‖ method where self-completed diaries are followed by interviews asking detailed questions about the diary entries was chosen because it is considered to be one of the most effective and reliable methods for obtaining

information in qualitative research (Corti 1993: 1) as it has a number of advantages over other data collection methods. Self-completion diaries are particularly strong when used in conjunction with other methods, as in the ―diary-interview,‖ where the diary is made the basis for an interview to check for clarity, completeness, and validity (Woods 2006:

16). In particular, self-completion diaries have the following advantages to serve the purpose of this study: firstly, they can provide a reliable alternative to the traditional interview method for events that are difficult to recall accurately or that are easily forgotten; secondly, like other self-completion methods, diaries can help to overcome problems associated with collecting sensitive information by personal interview; and finally, they can be used to supplement interview data as they provide a rich source of information about respondents‘ behavior and experience on a daily basis.

Self-completion diaries are ―natural‖ and ―processual,‖ as they contain personal accounts, meanings and understandings. Therefore, the format of the diary has been designed to be as open as possible, keeping pre-fixed questions to a minimum, so that the respondents could write about their activities and events in their own words. There were basic questions they could answer by simply checking over their call logs and message boxes—when, to whom, and for how long they made/received calls and sent/received texts on that day. And in the open space they were encouraged to write down other activities they have done with their mobiles—alarm call, picture taking and sharing, mobile Internet surfing, or whatever. An A4-sized booklet of twenty-five pages has been given to each of the thirty respondents. It contains an inside cover page with a clear set of instructions about how to complete the diary followed by the second page featuring a model example of a completed diary. Long lists were avoided since they could be off-putting and confusing to the respondents. At the end of the diary pages, a simple set of questions has been included to ask the respondents whether the diary keeping period was atypical in any way compared with their usual daily life. The respondents were also encouraged to add their own comments or clarifications of any peculiarities relating to their entries.

The period over which a diary is to be kept needs to be long enough to capture the behavior or events of interest without jeopardizing successful completion by

imposing an overly burdensome task (Corti 1993: 3). The diary keeping period has thus been established as one week for two reasons. Firstly, considering that it is common for the average person to organize their activities on a weekly basis, one-week period would be long enough to capture the ordinariness of the respondents‘ mobile phone use

without imposing an overly burdensome feeling. Secondly, it would help to minimize the so-called ―reporting errors‖: it has routinely been found that the first day and the first week of diary keeping shows a higher participation in reporting than during the following days (ibid 3-4). The respondents have been invited to a placing interview firstly; the aim was not only to explain the diary keeping procedures but also to emphasize that they could contribute to making their mobile phones more serviceable and fun by participating in this research. To maximize the effectiveness of the data, it has also been brought into consideration that not all respondents would be diligent enough to keep diaries every day. Thus an intermediate call has been made to all respondents in the middle of the diary keeping period to prevent ―recall errors.‖

Moreover, to appeal to the respondents‘ altruistic nature and to ensure their co-operation,

incentives have been offered—a coupon with which they can purchase various cultural products (books or tickets for movies, plays, exhibitions, and other events) roughly equivalent to the cost of five new books.

2.2.4. Interviews

The interviews started with the most general question possible in the hope that it would be sufficient to enable the respondents to talk about their experience with their mobiles. When the talk did not flow smoothly the interviewer moved either to a more general topic or to a more specific point, depending on the situation. This was enough to get the respondents talking. It has always been kept in interviewer‘s mind that a

successful interview includes questions and answers at both general and specific levels and moves between the two fairly seamlessly (Smith 1995: 15). Smith‘s advice on the

―prompt,‖ ―pointers,‖ and ―tips‖ (Smith 1995: 13; 15; 17) has been applied to these (semi-)open-ended interviews. It was very important too for the interviewer to orchestrate an interaction so as it moves easily and painlessly between topics and questions (Mason 1996: 45).

The combination of questions for ―topic-initiating‖ and ―following-up‖ was the central way of these (semi-)open-ended interviews: basically topic-initiating questions introduced topics of talk on which the interviewer would like the respondents to focus;

the follow-up questions provided the possibility of gaining very detailed and

comprehensive talk on those specific topics. The following questions constantly aimed to ―unpack‖ the earlier talk, and to allow for a multiple number of ―mentionables‖

(Rapley 2001: 315) to be followed up or explored further. Knowledge about mobile phoning could be locally produced in and through this process, in which large numbers of mentionables became resources. To prevent the respondents from being led too much by the interviewer, prompting or initiating has been kept to as little as possible, so that it could be no more than a gentle encouragement.

As this study aims to address multiplicities and specificities of each

respondent‘s experience, no set of standardized questions was given, nor were any rules about the wording or sequence of questions given. The interviews relied, as far as possible, on the spontaneous generation of questions in the natural flow of the

interactive conversation, so that the respondents may not even have realized they were being interviewed for the collection of data. Obviously, this open-ended, unstructured, informal, and conversational interview required a greater amount of time and the data

collected as a result was difficult to pull together. But it is exactly what this study wants to achieve; a deeper understanding of the multiplicities of experience.

In order to tap into the depths of the respondents‘ everyday experience, it has also been regarded as essential to develop empathy with them (Woods 2006: 11). The interviewer tried to appear as someone engaging with the respondents on a personal basis rather than having a special role. The purpose was to form an engagement of

In document Communication as Symbiogenesis – On the Relationality of Mobile Phoning in Korea (Page 61-71)