Acquiring the Skills for Professional Academic Writing: Methods
Pecha Kucha presentation given at the 8th Information Science Doctoral Colloquium, Edinburgh Napier University, 3rd May 2018. Acquiring the Skills for Professional Academic Writing Using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), this research explores how academics acquire the skills to write and publish. A mixed methods approach of in-depth qualitative interviews and social network analysis of participant publication portfolios is used. This approach combines the advantages of participant narratives, visualisation of co-author networks and descriptive structural analysis to locate and understand formal networks in their social and cultural contexts (Bellotti, 2016). Combining narrative accounts of writing with data of the structural properties of publication portfolios facilitates in-depth understanding of writing experiences and changes in writing patterns over time. It is also possible to distinguish similarities and differences in network typologies and structures that superficially look identical. Themes from participant interviews together with graphical representations of types of publications and author collaborations will be presented. Data are used to construct an understanding of common attributes of a successful professional academic writing career and the events which facilitated academics’ professional writing skills development. The intended outcome of this research will be a model of writing experiences and practice from which evidence based structures will be developed to support academics throughout their professional academic writing careers. References Bellotti K (2016) Qualitative methods and visualizations in the study of friendship networks, Sociological Research Online, 21 (2), 2-19. Charmaz K (2014) Constructing grounded theory, London, Sage. 2nd Ed. Keywords Grounded Theory Professional Academic Writing Social Network Analysis
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Acquiring the Skills for Professional Academic Writing: Methods
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Editor's Notes
- Grounded theory is an inductive research methodology Likely to begin with a general area of interest The data collected and through a process of line-by-line coding, codes grouped into concepts and eventually categories Categories form the basis of a new theory Different from the traditional model of research, where an existing theoretical framework is chosen and data collected to show how the theory does or does not apply to the phenomenon being studied Various schools of Grounded Theory It has previously been noted that the philosophical positioning of a Grounded Theorist defines how grounded theory methods are used (Ralph, Birks, & Chapman, 2015). With this in mind, Grounded Theorists are encouraged to develop a strong ontological awareness, adopting an epistemological perspective appropriate to their data Constructivist (video)
- Won a bursary to attend a Methods@Manchester week long course on SNA At the Mitchell Centre, Manchester University – named after the reknowned sociologist & anthropologist James Mitchell who championed the use of social network analysis – the observation of regular patterns of social relations that are persistent over time