Spying on Students at the Cafeteria
If you happened to see two women in the cafeteria staring with eagle eyes, holding a deck of cue cards, pen in hand, and jotting down incessantly. No, they weren’t undercover spies. They were just simply completing an observational assignment.
Nowadays, people are so consumed by what is contained in their small devices that they often overlook the power of doing research in the most simple way. The Internet is a wonderful resource; but its greatest asset can often become an annoying liability when it becomes a black hole with no beginning or end.
What was our observational assignment about?
For our Emerging Trends class we were asked to sit in the cafeteria with our working partners and perform an observational assignment. Our task was to record how people were using technology. We had the power of deciding how and what exactly we were recording. Much to our surprise, we quickly realized that many people were showing very similar behaviour patterns. People were using their laptops, talking on their phone, listening to music and every now and then some people used the microwave to heat up their food.
What was our data sorting process like?
When it was time to share our findings, we all laid out our cue cards on the table and began to read our recordings. People started to point fingers at and laugh at some of the cue cards. Some were as vague as “female 1 MAC laptop” and others as detailed as “ Girl (30s) working on her laptop while friend is sending a message on her phone”. These two observations could have been of the same person yet the way these were recorded was greatly different. Julia Koller, a learning solutions lead developer (as mentioned by Anderson & Rainie) states, “Information is only as reliable as the people who are receiving it. If readers do not change or improve their ability to seek out and identify reliable information sources, the information environment will not improve”. As readers of the cue cards, we had to rely on our judgement to find patterns in our observations.
There is a lot to observe in 20 minutes at perhaps the most frequented room in a college environment, and part of our job was then to work together to find patterns. Some of the patterns we identified were, “using a laptop”, “using a camera”, “talking on phone”, “using the microwave” and “taking a selfie”. We were then clustering our data.
We were already exhausted and we had yet to find some trends. We gathered again and went through the cards one more time, this time trying to identify more characteristic behaviour. The common procedure was to start counting the number of times these trends appeared on the cards. The higher the number the more secure the trend was. This most likely reflects a quantitative analysis approach.
We all know that technology use is pervasive among younger individuals and among students. We observed this, we recorded this. However, our annotations were often so vague and so repetitive that we barely could single out an explanation for some of the behaviour. As reported by McLeod, “Research following a qualitative approach is exploratory and seeks to explain ‘how’ and ‘why’ a particular phenomenon, or behaviour, operates as it does in a particular context”. Perhaps, if we had been more keen on capturing nuances on behaviour we could have understood why technology is so ingrained in the student life.
What did I learn from this assignment?
There are three main takeaways that this intense research session taught me:
- Observations are much more than just observing. To observe is not to look, but to approach the task with an unbiased, objective and receptive attitude.
- The more detail the better. Information is precious and when one prioritizes quality data by going into detail, the revelations are much more insightful.
- It is time consuming but rewarding. Observational projects are a process and often this may require some adjusting time; but without an efficient data sorting process it will all remain convoluted.
Will I do it ever again?
Oh, this is just the beginning.
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References
Anderson, J. & Rainie, L. (2017). The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online. Retrieved February 23rd, 2018, from http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/19/the-future-of-truth-and-misinformation-online/
McLeod, S. (2017). Qualitative vs. Quantitative. Retrieved February 23rd, 2018, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/qualitative-quantitative.html
