Becoming a student: research in an academic environment

In the spring of 2002, Professor Cathy Small, an anthropology professor at Northern Arizona University, applied, as a student, to a university. She was accepted. She did not apply because she wanted to return to school; it was because she wanted to gain a better understanding of what college life means in this day and age. Her approach was as a participant observer in the truest sense of the word: “I opted for a more daily immersion, in which I actually took courses, lived in the dorms, and encountered students as an older but fellow student” (Nathan, 2005, p. 5). Her book, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, is a wonderfully crafted retelling of her time as a student, and the insights she gained into American student life. It is clear by the end of the book that without complete immersion in student culture it would have been impossible to capture all of the nuances associated with this unique environment. Small’s data collection during her time as a college student included focus groups, interviews, activity diaries, observation (for instance, monitoring of eating/seating arrangements in the college cafeteria), a dorm activity log, and a survey of informal conversation topics (Nathan, 2005, p. 15).

Although Small’s approach was novel, and unusual, using ethnographic approaches to study students within the context of higher education is not a recent development. In 1989, Michael Moffatt wrote Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. This book is frequently referenced as one of the premier studies of American college life. Moffatt, an anthropologist, did not “become” a student—he studied students in the more traditional sense to pen this interesting ethnography. Around that same time, Helen Lefkowitz-Horowitz published Campus life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (1988); Barbara Miller Solomon wrote In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education (1985) and Averil McClelland wrote The Education of Women in the United States (1992). Certainly, these ethnographic writings were and still are of great value in learning more about college and university student culture.

A.C. Nielsen Company as an example of rich media research

Within business settings, market research is often the key to understanding ways to improve profit. One of the more interesting examples of a research-driven industry is the entertainment industry—specifically, broadcast and cable television, and web-based, on-demand, and mobile entertainment. In the United States, people may be familiar with the A.C. Nielsen Company, perhaps the best-known marketing and audience measurement firm in the world. The company was started in 1936 by Arthur Nielsen, an engineer, with the initial creation of the Nielsen Food and Drug Indices, which provided sales data. The Nielsen ratings box, first known as the Audiometer (Nielsen, 2010), was later procured by Nielsen and used to record radio and television viewing statistics. At present, Nielsen provides market and research data on everything from broadcast and cable television to consumer internet behavior to mobile device use. Their strength, according to the company website, is the provision of data to help businesses understand the customer better, and in turn create better products (Nielsen, 2010). The company emphasizes the connection between understanding user behavior and profit. They also emphasize the idea of segmentation—all products and services are not created equal—and their research illustrates this (Nielsen, 2010). The company has several methods for collecting and sharing data related to “mobile consumer behaviors, attitudes and experiences” (Nielsen, 2010), including:

The other research areas of focus are mobile devices, wireless, Internet, radio, and something the company calls “three screens,” which is described as program-watching “via the Internet and on cell phones, in-home and out-of-home, live and time-shifted, free and paid, rebroadcasts and original program streams” (Nielsen, 2010). According to their website, Nielsen measures 40 percent of the world’s television (Nielsen, 2010). Measurement for television viewing includes electronic metering technology—which features two types of in-home meters. The set meters “capture what channel is being tuned,” and the People Meters “gather information about who is watching” (Nielsen, 2010). Diaries, one way to collect qualitative data, may also be used in some homes selected as samples for viewers to record additional information about what they are watching. These various data are collected in a large database, which subscribers access to examine valuable information about the preferences and viewing habits of viewers. The television ratings that Nielsen publishes are a way to express how TV shows fare in certain markets, with certain demographics, in certain time slots, and against other shows. These TV ratings play a major role in the decision-making process for broadcast television, cable, and internet TV in terms of which shows will be renewed or cancelled, and even more importantly, which content will be the most lucrative in terms of advertising.

Nielsen is also in the business of consumer research: “Nielsen measures product sales, market share, distribution, price and merchandising conditions in tens of thousands of retail outlets such as grocery stores, drug stores, mass merchandisers and convenience stores” (Nielsen, 2010). This means that broadcasters are able to connect television programming, product commercials, and buying habits using Nielsen data. Certainly, this level of detailed and targeted research is far beyond the scope of what any library needs, but it provides an interesting lens through which to view the role of research in today’s consumer and technology-driven culture. Nielsen capitalizes on the fact that patterns and habits are connected to the type of experiences users prefer, and data can highlight this interconnectedness. These data have great value—the fees that companies pay to access Nielsen datasets are a testament to that fact.

Knowing a little bit about what Nielsen does, one might think: Well, why not have a Nielsen-type data-mining outfit for libraries, based on all sorts of user data that would be continuously collected and mined? If one looks at libraries in subsets, for instance, all the libraries in the United States, one of the major constraints that libraries have in terms of understanding user patterns and behaviors is the fact that libraries very seldom share the data that they do have and collect, with other libraries. Certainly, users are very different from one another, whether they are using the same library or using libraries across the country. On the other hand, Nielsen captures data from incredibly diverse samples, and, despite the fact that those television watchers are very different people, similar patterns tend to emerge. A number of research studies have investigated the impact of the Internet on information-seeking behavior of users. If, as Nielsen suggests, users are now “three-screen” savvy—that is, they look for information and access media and entertainment on their mobile devices, television sets, and their computers—it stands to reason that there is also within this matrix a place where physical and virtual library spaces also play a role. One could ask, how do the changing mobile behaviors of users impact their library use? Or changing Internet behavior? Or television viewing? There are some very intriguing questions out there. One thing is for certain: the environments (virtual or physical) that users operate in are becoming less important, while their preferences and habits become more so.

Qualitative research in nursing

Nursing is one area that has embraced the application of qualitative research to understand patients, patient care, treatment environments, administrative matters, and psychological concerns related to healthcare. A review of the nursing research literature reveals numerous examples of qualitative research studies (Holloway and Wheeler, 2002; Bowling, 2002; Greenhalgh and Taylor, 1997; Brookes, 2007; Munhall and Oiler-Boyd, 1997; Streubert and Carpenter, 2010). The primary objective in using qualitative approaches in the field has less to do with proving cause and effect, and more to do with investigating patient experiences. “Qualitative approaches are necessary in primary healthcare when researchers want to ask questions about behaviour and to focus on participants’ experiences” (Brookes, 2007, p. 32). The use of qualitative approaches in nursing has been met with the same skepticism at times as has its use in other disciplines, mainly based on the belief that qualitative research is inherently less rigorous (Sandelowski, 1986) and less reliable than its quantitative counterpart. Regardless of this, the literature provides a variety of studies which have used qualitative approaches successfully. A good example is a study done by Sharif and Masoumi (2005). The researchers investigated nursing students’ experiences of their clinical practice activities. Focus groups were used to collect data from a subject pool of 90 students, and the data reviewed and coded for patterns and themes. Four themes emerged that were deemed as being important components of the students’ clinical experience: initial clinical anxiety, theory-practice gap, clinical supervision, and professional role (Sharif and Masoumi, 2005). Collecting and coding data from focus groups is a common qualitative approach, and can often be combined with other methods to provide a more comprehensive picture of the phenomenon being studied. In Spoelstra and Robbins (2010), the researchers examined the transition from registered nurse to advanced practicing nurse by collecting data from nursing students enrolled in an online course. A qualitative thematic analysis (Spoelstra and Robbins, 2010) produced both important themes and sub-themes that highlighted the students’ feelings about making this transition. The insight provided by way of the students’ thoughts and ideas about this transition was greatly facilitated by the use of open-ended questions and dialogue.

Nurses deal with a diversity of patients, diagnoses, and situations in their work, and it can be difficult to capture these experiences and make sense of them so that they can be shared to improve and understand the demanding role of the nurse in patient care. A number of studies have used qualitative strategies to explore the perceptions of nurses about the work they do. Georges et al. (2002) collected qualitative data to explore nurses’ perceptions about their work on a palliative care ward. Kerr (2002) observed and videotaped nurses’ shift handover practices, then coded and studied the data to determine best practices, and the resulting areas for improvement. Owen (1989) explored the role of hope in severely ill cancer patients by “eliciting vivid descriptions of hopeful cancer patients from clinical nurse specialists” (Owen, 1989, p. 75). This process allowed the researcher to then develop sub-themes from the contextual analysis, followed by a conceptual model of hope (Owen, 1989).

The nursing literature provides just a glimpse of the many ways qualitative approaches can be utilized within a field to explore complex phenomena and foster greater understanding between practitioners, patients, and organizations.

Qualitative research in medicine and mental health disciplines

Qualitative studies are frequently found in the medical and mental health literature. Psychology is a discipline in which researchers have explored a wide range of phenomena using qualitative approaches. As with nursing, the research focus varies widely. In Rabinow (2010), bereavement of parents by children was explored using content analysis to examine interview transcripts where children described how they felt before, during, and after the loss of a parent. Butler et al. (1998) studied doctors’ and patients’ beliefs about the prescribing of antibiotics for sore throats, in spite of the fact that research has demonstrated that they often have no effect, while Eyler et al. (1998) used focus groups to study physical activity in minority women. Explorations of psychological and sociological phenomena such as group norms, identity, and cultural roles, can be found in the work of Syed (2010), who used narratives to study students’ perceptions of ethnicity, and in the work of Nagata et al. (2010), who studied Chinese American grandmothering also by way of the narrative. Gone and Alcantara (2010) solicited stories from participants in order to examine ambitious achievement in a Native American community.

The use of qualitative approaches for data exploration is relevant across any number of disciplines and subject areas. It is easily adaptable and can be used to aid in-depth exploration of many research problems. Like the application of qualitative methods in other fields, information science and library studies can greatly benefit from its use.

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