Surviving Generalizations and Making Them

10/29 Response

Graham Oliver

Surviving Generalizations and Making Them.

I read the transcript instead of watching the video as I was in a place that listening to it wasn't feasible, so my first question is why they bothered inserting the pauses and such into the transcript?! Very annoying, and I can't imagine what purpose it served since it seems like the transcript is mainly there for accessibility purposes.

A lot of what this talk covered was stuff that we've seen in other classes, common topoi, but he really sums it up and ties it together in a very concise way while not losing too much. I liked how he flew through the damage done by both positive and negative stereotypes so easily with his own school experience, and how that negativity echoed against and impacted his parents despite them not being involved in the original situation. His explanation of why he talked to the boys that made fun of him while he was running (might not change them, but self-empowers and allows him to be more comfortable with his integrity) can carry over into a lot of other arenas in life. His advice to think about the implications of asking a Native American student (also carries over to any non Western-Europe student, in my opinion) if Columbus discovered America is important, although I had hoped this “fact” was already being reshaped in curriculum. I know that by high school I was being taught that Columbus didn't discover America, that instead either he or a group of vikings were the first Europeans to discover America. I am not sure what is being taught in elementary schools, but I had hoped it was being framed in a similar fashion. Finally, his call to minority parents to not overly shelter their children from racism was at first thought touching and practical, but really has deeper implications when you consider that the talk started off with Sue's very negative experiences with racism as a child.

Moving on to how to make a good generalization...

Most of the practices laid out in this chapter were also covered in the final words on qualitative research in the Creswell text. The biggest thing that came to my mind while reading this section were the parallels between case studies and more controlled quantitative experiments. In both cases you are using a limited set of actions/experiences/information to draw bigger conclusions. A hardcore quantitative researcher would argue that their experiments are repeated enough times or controlled well enough that they have a more valid claim to far-reaching implications, but I think you could make a very similar argument about case studies as well, as to why they can represent a bigger picture. I would have liked a little bit more about how it's not entirely necessary to draw generalizations. As a researcher, we can zoom in on a small bit of something and do qualitative analysis and present our findings and the research itself can push the reader to think about the broader implications, I don't think it's necessary to provide that leap within the research itself. At least, that's what I've taken from our narrative research class.