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Medical records, MySpace and Facebook, and government are all issues that focus group participants suggested when I asked about privacy. While these issues seem unrelated, privacy is a large and nebulous concept that applies to almost every aspect of life. When asked, almost every person thought of a different facet. This made doing research on privacy challenging. In the electronic database EBSCO Academic Search Premiere, 6,753 results were returned when "privacy" was searched for as a subject. Some of the top results were articles about advertising, medical outsourcing, and Google. Knowing which of these articles would be helpful to post on the Privacy Framing Wiki was tricky. They could all be relevant depending on how focus group participants felt about the issue. I tried to use my best judgment and post articles that were fairly general or could give insight into our process of framing a discussion around privacy. I also worried about posting too many academic articles because they may not be easily accessible to librarians working in other environments. I considered posting the PDF of the articles, but then worried about licensing and copyright issues. Finding resources about the process of framing was also tricky. Most were overly simplistic or about a study where framing was used. Some were also written with a clear political agenda. Again, I tried my best to post potentially helpful articles. I enjoyed researching different methods of clustering ideas from the focus groups. The most simplistic way I found was to use tag clouds, such as TagCrowd, to cluster words from the groups. From this the main ideas of the discussion can be gathered. If this method is chosen for analyzing the content of focus groups, I think it makes the most sense to run a tag cloud for each group, pick out the key ideas from that groups, and then compare against others. This will give a general sense of the issues important to interviewees. Some of the other tools are more sophisticated and may yield greater results, but also require more time to learn how to use the software correctly. Conducting focus groups was a rewarding experience because it not only allowed me to add new perspectives to the mix for the project, but also exposed me to different opinions about privacy. It was difficult to know how much information from the focus groups to post to the wiki. Some people only posted a sentence snippet for each question. I wanted to make sure to post enough of an answer that if clarification or deeper meaning was needed, it could be drawn from the responses. Overall, it was difficult to work on this project without much guidance. I wasn't exactly sure what the other members of the project expected. This could be because the project wasn't far enough along to know yet. This kind of research is constantly evolving especially when relying on public opinion to shape the direction. Additionally, no other members of the wiki posted comments about any of the additions I made. I don't think the wiki was as collaborative as it could have been. Maybe comments and edits will pick up as the project progresses. It would be nice if the group held more regular meetings or more feedback was provided. This would have allowed me to gain a better understanding of the end goals. I hope my contributions to the project add value. I look forward to meeting at ALA Annual, if possible, to assist with the clustering and next steps.


TexasTaylor
TexasTaylor
Latest page update: made by TexasTaylor , Apr 24 2008, 6:54 PM EDT (about this update About This Update TexasTaylor Edited by TexasTaylor

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