Examining my own prejudices…

As I’m weeding through my survey data and thinking about which participants to recruit for the ethnographic phase of the project, I find that I have to examine some of my own assumptions.  I’m sorting blogs into three categories: “large public” (large, probably fairly heterogeneous/unknown readership), “small public” (smaller, not entirely known readership), and “private” (folks who are using access controls and know exactly who their readership is - Friends Locked LJs, for example).  And as I page through them, I find myself having to combat the assumption that LJs and blogs hosted at a commercial site (rather than having their own URL) are more likely to fall into the “small public” or “private” categories and, conversely, that those that aren’t blogging-service hosted are more likely to fall inot the “large public” category.

Dragging on…

The problem with a project that has been percolating in my mind for FIVE DAMN YEARS (and perhaps a quirk of my own personality as well) is that I have been through about a MILLION organizational schemes for it.  I have kept lists of thoughts in Word, in VoodoPad, in OmniOutliner.  I have taken notes on readings in one document or in multiple documents.  I have annotated lists of sources in Word (why?  I was using EndNote before the project started…).  It’s a mess.

How much does it cost to do research?

I’m in the process of applying for a dissertation fellowship… for which I have to itemize my research costs.  So far I’ve got:

• Continuing enrollment fees for 1 year
• SurveyMonkey hosting for 1 year
• Childcare for 1 year
• Internet access for 1 year
• SkypePro for 1 year
• Travel to BlogHer to do interviews
• Parallels and qualitative analysis software

Am I forgetting anything?

Bumping up my numbers…

My survey has been in the field for several months now (four and a bit, to be precise).  At the moment, I’m sitting at a very lopsided response rate in terms of the blogging service that my respondents are using - we’re talking 75% LiveJournal users, 7% Blogger/Blogspot users, 5% WordPress users, 3.2% “other” users (which includes a lot of people who use multiple services, and many of them reference LJ in their comments), and 2ish% Xanga, WordPress.com, MovableType/Typepad, and MySpace users.

So… if you have suggestions for how to bump up participation from other services, I’d love to hear them; I am not above spamming all sorts of places to get more responses.  And if you’re a blogger using another service, I’d love to hear from you!

For those who are curious about more numbers, 1460 people have begun the survey and 808 have completed it (and my committee was concerned about me having a big enough n!) for a 55.3% response rate so far.  I need to figure out what exactly SurveyMonkey considers “completed”, though, because on the order of 890 people have answered the closing questions on the last page of the survey.  (In any case, I feel save in saying that 800 < n > 900.)