Natural Inquirers

Non-academia laymen usually think becoming quantitative or qualitative researchers demand relatively long-time well-structured training. Having received strictly structured training in both quantitative and qualitative research methodology in the past five years, ironically, I observe these skills, particularly qualitative analysis, have been used by everybody in our daily life.

Qualitative analysis skills include a variety of skills such as establishing connections among available data, comparing and contrasting, and soliciting abstract and generalized meanings from big amount of concrete and detailed information, and sometimes searching for more useful inforamtion to support a conclusion, researchers need to master to make sense of social phenomena. Regardless of how skillful an ordinary person is, he or she is constantly using one ore more skills to understand people and his/her surroundings. I didn't realize this until some dramatic stories happened on some of my friends here.

Over a regular weekend-gathering dinner, one of our long-term single friends informed everyone that she had obtained her marriage certificate with a guy she has been Internet-dating for merely three months. Everybody was deeply shocked. She has been single since we got to know her five years ago and has never been seriously considering dating any guy. Now she was telling everyone she had married to a guy she merely met for four times. After she left the party, stunned friends that stayed couldn't help tougue-wagging about her sudden marriage. EVERYBODY enthusiasticly provided their understanding about the reasons this female friend got married so unpredictably soon. Interestingly, everybody not only provided the reasons that they think triggered this sudden marriage but explained how they discovered those factors. More interestingly, the information based on which they concluded about the factors can be traced back to years ago. While contributing to the heated discussion, I observed how amazingly everyone was presenting their "research" process and their "findings"like skilled natural inquirers.

Despite the fact that qualitative "research" is used by people every day, qualitative research paradigm was not accepted as a solid research paradigm until 1980s. Quantitative research paradigm has been considered the orthodoxy for more than one century. Even recently, qualitative researchers still have to defend the value of qualitative research in front of some die-hard quantitative research proponents. What an irony...

Cyber Citizens...

A saturday night talk with my friends brought up one interesting topic. When we were criticizing the clumsy social skills of a guy who just moved to our area and came to our party last week, a friend pointed out those were his "cyber-social" rather than real-life skills. The idea of interferring role of cyber-social skills in normal social life didn't come to my mind until the next day when I was reading articles on contextual influence on human mental development.

Internet, paricularly online community, seems to have become a main living space for many people nowadays. Because of the number of people and the interaction time they spend in various online communities, special culture, such as linguistic and pragmatic patterns, has been formed in each community. Some people, particularly those who are willingly or unvolunterily lack of face-to-face social interaction, have gradually been acculturated into these cyber cultures. Before they realize it, they start to use the lanugage patterns within the online community in normal social communication. Apparently, the online interaction is quite different from normal social interaction, which causes normal people think those cyber-citizens are insane... Interestingly, these cyber citizens may not realize the weird impression normal peole have on them until some day someone cannot stand their self-claimed jokes any more...