Collecting Data: How are we going to do it?

One of the first things we needed to decide was whether this was going to be assigned to one person within the group, or divided up between more of us. Upon discussion, we’ve decided that it is fair that we should all acquire at least one piece of data each, and that we are going to go through what we collect at a group meeting to refine what we intend to use.

Because we are using data that is already written, we do not need to consider when we are going to collect it, more so what we are going to collect. We have decided that Lauren will acquire the love letters sent between her grandparents, Jordyn will collect correspondence between her friend and her friend’s boyfriend in Afghanistan, Olivia will provide love letters between herself and her boyfriend, and Jodie will source some historical love letters.

Ethical Issues

Sealey (2010, p20) explains how ‘the practice of social research has... become increasingly constrained.’ This is because ‘the privacy and rights of anyone who participates in a research study’ must be treated sensitively.

Sealey (2010, p21) then goes on to explain how ‘you must usually ask people for permission to observe them.’ Although Sealey gives the examples of audio and video recording, we also need to take into consideration that we are studying private correspondences, and must acquire permission to study and indeed publish these seemingly private documents. To do this, we will write out a written form for the owner’s of the texts to sign (where applicable, as some of the historical ones may be deceased) as a way of giving us permission to use their property in our research project. Sealey also suggests that although our work will not actually reach ‘the public domain... the principles of confidentiality are the same.’ It is because of this that we will do our upmost to adhere to confidentiality regulations. Similarly, we may also consider keeping the identity of the writers anonymous to avoid any feelings of embarrassment.

If we choose to carry out our video interviews, we will have to get any participants to sign a declaration saying that they agree to be filmed and that they are not averse to having the video published and, in turn, viewed by others.

House-keeping issues

Most of our written work will be posted on the blog, so there will always be access to it if we were to lose any files. However, any files that are not posted but will still be needed will be backed up on to at least one of our USB sticks. We are also going to make several photocopies of each of our hard copy texts – if it were to get lost we will need to be sure that we will have access to another copy.

We will also keep an ongoing bibliography of our references as we go along so that we do not find ourselves with any plagiarism issues. This will be kept on all of our computers so that it definitely will not get lost. This list will be published on the blog at the end of the research project.

How are we going to present/summarise the data that we use?

An example of how to lay out data was provided in the Data Collection Virtual Lecture, where the researcher presented the name of the data and how many words it consisted of in a clear and concise table. We intend to use a similar format to provide a summary of our data. To keep things easier, we will probably number our data, rather than giving each one a long-winded name. For example, rather than ‘Love letter from Lauren’s Grandmother to Lauren’s Grandfather’ we may prefer to refer to it as ‘Love Letter 3.’ This will keep the word number down and make it easier for the reader to follow.