Dyson and Genishi

The first chapter of the Dyson and Genishi text was eye-opening and oddly relevant to events in my own life. The chapter touches on how we as qualitative researchers offer questions (typically in the form of an interview) that are imbued with meaning—but we are the ones who assign them that meaning, and our subjects/interviewees may not always share in the understanding of that meaning. Dyson and Genishi give one example featuring Madlenka, the little girl who loses her first baby tooth. Her joyous, celebratory shrieks are appropriate in the context of her community, where it is understood that the loss of a baby tooth is grounds for celebration; it implies growth, excitement, and prosperity (via the tooth fairy). However, there are those for whom losing a tooth is not a joyous occasion but quite the opposite—losing a tooth can imply poor dental health and the lack of economic means to see a dentist. Another example features a researcher determined to study the relationship of youth to popular media; however, the combination first and second grade classroom she visits is not prepared to answer those questions because she failed to formulate her questions in such a way that they would be accessible to that age group. In other words, her meaning did not translate. Onto the relevance of these examples in my own life, as embarrassed as I am of this example: a group of students I know went to the reading of a Hispanic author last week, where apparently a woman raised her hand and inquired about the author’s writing process. She said something along the lines of “Do you work best at a coffee shop with a café con leche or at home, at your desk?” …something like that. Apparently this caused an uproar with both the author and the other members of the audience, who interpreted the woman’s remark as blatantly racist. I was discussing this occurrence with a friend of ours who happens to be from Africa; he was of the mindset that this woman was in fact racist, and I was trying to convince him that the simple acknowledgement of a person’s race, which I interpreted this woman’s question to be, is not racist. The more I argued, however, the more my friend became silent. I came to realize later the meaning that the topic of racism contained for each of us; for me, it was an objective topic to be discussed and studied. It doesn’t hold any emotional weight for me because it is not something I have experience with. For him, however, racism meant something more, likely because it is something he has experienced. I was asking him questions and trying to make him see my side when we were not on the same page. Dyson and Genishi reminded me of the implications and consequences of the meaning with which we imbue our qualitative research, and how we need to be cognizant of the fact that our subjects may not be on the same page as we are. We must be careful not to make assumptions about how our questions will be interpreted.