Step One: Think about a question you have regarding gender or sexuality–what’s something that you’ve encountered in your everyday life that you’d like to know more about? Based off of your interests, this assignment asks you to conduct original, qualitative research. You have several choices, including:(choose one of the following)1.) Interviews: choose at least 3 people (even better to get 5, but no need to do more than 10) to whom you will ask a predetermined set of questions (prepare about 10 open-ended questions, but know that you probably won’t get to all of them). Interviews should be fairly short, about half an hour. You should ask permission to record these interviews on your phone or another device, and then it will be up to you to listen to the interviews later and transcribe relevant parts that you want to use.2.) Survey: design a short survey (shouldn’t be more than 10 questions) that you can give to at least 10 people. Google Forms is probably the easiest way to do this, but you can use something else if you prefer.3.) Archival research: you may use the New York Times archives search or another similar media archive search tool to research how a topic has been covered over time. For instance, you could search “transgender” and see how this term has evolved in its media use over the last few decades. If you’re unfamiliar doing this type of research, I would recommend coming to my office hours so I can show you how to do it in more detail.4.) Ethnography/participant observation: choose a field site. This can be a coffee shop, a church, a park, etc.–it should be somewhere public where you can observe without intruding on anyone. Alternatively, you could observe in a more private setting like an organization’s meeting, but you would need to gain permission before this. You should observe for at least an hour at a time, at least 2 times but preferably 3-5 times. The most important part of this method is writing fieldnotes–as soon as you leave your fieldsite, you should write down everything you remember (how you felt before you started, how loud the surroundings were, if you got distracted by anything, how did people move and talk, were there any strong smells, did you talk to anyone or order a coffee or participate in any way, do you feel invisible or like you were in the way). These field notes will be what you use to do your analysis later.Step Two: write a summary of what you found. This should be about two pages double-spaced. This is what you will turn in to me. It must include:Your research question (examples: How do people perform gender in a Catholic church? How do women under the age of 30 define feminism compared to how women over 30 define it? How has the New York Times covered transgender issues from 1990-2019?)A thorough description of your methodology. Tell me exactly how many people you interviewed, or how many news articles you looked at, or how many surveys you gave to people, or how long you spent at your fieldsite. Describe the kinds of people you interviewed/observed/surveyed–if applicable, what were their racial and gender identities? How old were they? Etc.At least two main findings. What are the pieces of information you learned that you would want to share with an audience? What will stick with you about this research? What findings would you want to include if you use this data for your final paper for this class? You don’t need to include any raw data (no transcripts, fieldnotes, etc.) but you should include a few quotes from your survey responses, archival materials, interviews, or fieldnotes.
