Mixing It Up: Using Mixed Methods Research to Investigate Contemporary Cultures of Reading
Loading...
Date
2012-08
Authors
Fuller, Danielle
Rehberg Sedo, DeNel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Massachusetts Press
Abstract
Description
Excerpt from introduction: "Understanding complex cultural phenomena such as the widely
adopted “One Book, One Community” (OBOC) model
demands a methodology that can generate a series of standpoints
on the social, ideological, material, economic, and political aspects of
what we might term “formally organized” shared reading, or mass reading
events (MREs). How, then, might reading studies researchers attend to these
standpoints and the relations between different agents—readers, event organizers,
institutions including libraries and schools, publishers, and the media—
to produce a nuanced account of contemporary shared reading as a situated
social practice? The investigative methods we used for the Beyond the Book
project help us to understand what happens when people come together to
share reading, and can be categorized as mixed methods research. This chapter
examines our use of mixed methods in our multisite project, including an
intentional mixing of language and concepts from realist and interpretative
paradigms,1 and a combination of quantitative survey methods alongside qualitative
focus group and individual interviews, participant observation of mass
reading events, and textual and content analysis of promotional materials and
event ephemera. We make a case for the employment of similar methodologies
within reading studies scholarship, particularly in the study of shared reading
as a situated social practice in the northern industrialized countries of the early
twenty-first century."
Keywords
one book project , shared reading , mass reading events , reading communities
Citation
Fuller, D., & Rehberg Sedo, D. (2012). Mixing it Up: Using Mixed Methods Research to Investigate Contemporary Cultures of Reading. In A. Lang (Ed.), From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (pp. 234-251). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.