Monday, November 1, 2010

interpretation and coding

I found that Thomas' 'Artifactual study in analysis of culture in the postmodern age' was very useful in clarifying the distinction between the limits of communication and interpretation as an extension of those limits. He questions how direct any method is in the debate between artifactural analysis vs. methods that have been perceived as more direct; such as interviewing and ethnography. He thinks that verbals responses are also texts to be subject to inference and interpretation. This does not mean that they cannot have validity, which is why he makes the important distinction between coding and interpretation. This will be a helpful way to think about validity in the article i chose for my peer review assignment because coding is an important way in which many people organize data so to not risk 'interpretational pluralism'. It doesn't mean that coding will always be done well or that it shouldn't be assessed on an individual basis, but it certainly increases the validity of a study if there are many people who can agree that particpants(' responses) fall into certain categories without dispute.

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