Sorry, folks. Better late than never, I hope.
1) Charney mentions how false perceptions of scientific research may be perpetuated by more mainstream, popular genres that reduce complex scientific research findings to simple, determinate answers and clear, immediate applications (578). This also seems to be a common problem for scholars who wish to share their scholarship with a much broader audience in order to share useful knowledge with everyone, instead of just those inside of the academy. Since the average person is not interested in wading through volumes of academic discourse and citations, the research discussion may be revised to fit the needs of a more mainstream audience – which has led to some scholars being criticized for “watering down” their research or abandoning legitimate scholarship for the sake of increased revenue from popular presses. If we want to engage in meaningful work as public intellectuals, how do we avoid this criticism – more specifically, how can we preserve the complexity and rhetorocity of our research while also making it accessible to those who may benefit most from our research?
2) Kirsch and Sullivan claim that “a high reliability rating [...] suppresses the subjective, interpretive nature of coding and endows the systems with the appearance of impartiality” (283, emphasis mine). Is it possible to achieve high reliability ratings while also acknowledging the fact that research is never completely impartial and objective? Is “reliability” synonymous with “impartiality”? Is the perceived binary between “reliability” and “subjectivity” a false one?
3) According to Charney, while it may be true that “scientists are not as self-conscious of their methods as they should be,” it is also true that scientific research practices “engage them more deeply in collective knowledge construction than ours do” (591). Really? It seems that Charney takes issue with the subjectivity of individual case studies and ethnographies and does not see these as being as “deep” as our research could be. Why not? Is reliability and validity the issue here? And if so, how might Kirsch and Sullivan respond, in light of their challenge to the concept of “reliability”?
