Jesse Cowley - Research Methods/English 6401

Designing a sound research study takes patience and creativity. If you'll network and explore the literature, you can find amazing ideas that you hadn't previously considered. Research is ultimately a team sport. This class has opened up my imagination to the possibilities for research that are out there. Coming from different background outside English or technology, it has been interesting to learn what types of things are studied in the field of technical communication. I realize now that nothing is off-limits for research, and that I'll want to stay acquainted with the tech comm journals so I continue to use best practices in my work. Thank you all for your insights and recommendations. You all have great minds and are working hard. It's great to learn from you. It's been an awesome class!

My biggest need right now might be to nail down how to select participants. I'm planning on using purposeful sampling, but I still need to define the criteria that I'll be using to decipher which participants truly fit into the study. I've found some farmers' market organizations with lists that will certainly be helpful, but I'm also trying to consider other ways of locating participants. It seems that if I only draw my sample from online sources, I'm likely to find a bias toward using online tools--given the fact that most of that sample would probably be using them already. I would like to find as diverse a population as possible, in terms of current farm-related online-tool use.