Data from the Archives Listserv

I performed a search by the topic of “government secrecy” at the Archives & Archivists Listserv archive to look how this topic is discussed by the users. The findings were not surprising, and are explained below.

More than for doing an in-depth analysis of the discourse, I performed this search because of two main goals. First, by using quantitative data, show that in fact the issues on government secrecy does not generate extensive discussion in the listserv. Indeed, the data shows that the majority of the postings related to secrecy are links or texts of news from the press or other organizations. Second, although the discourse does not see extensive, with the compiled data I was able to identify specific topics which generate some discussion in the listserv and I will compare the discourse of these discussions with the press discourse about these issues.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of hits resulting from searching the listserv archive with the topic “government secrecy.” With the exception of the category “Archivists comments,” the rest of the categories are just links to news, text of bulletins from other organizations (like “Secrecy News”) and announcement to events, like talks that covers issues of government secrecy. Only on 19 of the 69 hits, or 27 percent, there are discussions about some news related to secrecy and archives. It is important to point out that the search I performed was using the specific phrase “government secrecy.” I also performed a Boolean search (government AND secrecy) that generated over 500 hits. However, because the search engine was retrieving data that included both words in any part of the text, many of them were not really related to what my research is intended. Furthermore, randomly looking at the hits, I believe that the statistics, in terms of percentage, were not going to be significantly different.

Starting the literature review

I'm starting to write the draft for my literature review and I have found usefull to write few paragraphs to explain where I'm going with this project and how the literature review fits into the my research project. In the final version this will be part of the introduction, which will be the last section I will write. This is part of what I have written so far:

During the two terms of President Bush administration government secrecy has became a continuum topic that has raised questions even on the foundations of the country. Just as the moment I’m writing this paper, there’s a clash between the White House and Congress asking White House top officials to testify about the firings of U.S. attorneys, an investigation that relies also in the release of documents. While critics have been warning about the damage that secrecy does to democratic governments, supporters defend secrecy on the ground of the so-called “war on terror,” and the argument that the attacks on September 11 2001 “changed everything.”

This period of time calls for a better understanding on the concept of government secrecy, which should be studied from three different perspectives: historical background, theoretical framework, and a qualitative analysis of how this issue is viewed from the general public perspective. In this paper, the first two perspectives will be discussed in the literature review. Because the third perspective is broad and researcher can utilize a variety of approaches, I will concentrate on applying discourse analysis and content analysis to study the concept of government secrecy from the perspective of the press. As part of this analysis, I will apply the theoretical framework discussed in the literature review.

In terms of the data, I have been able to gather a good amount of articles from the Washington Times. A also found articles from other conservative periodicals like The Weekly Standard and Human Events. However, there are not many articles about secrecy from these publications, compared to the "liberal" newspapers like NY Times and Washington Post.

Reading response: Week 10

The Interpretive Process (The Qualitative Research Companion, Chapter 14)

While I was reading Norman K. Denzin’s essay about interpretive process I used my research project to go through the process. This helped me have a clearer idea of where I’m right now in the project and how I will develop it.

Although Denzin explains that “the subject matter of interpretive studies always biographical,” (p. 364) I believe it can also be applied to non-biographical studies, like analyzing text and any other kind of research. Like for every research progress, this process implies doing literature review, gathering data, analyzing data and writing a final report. I will mention the different steps of the process and I will relate it to my project.

1. Framing the research question

Denzin states that for the interpretive process the research question should be a how question instead of a why question. This is because “interpretive studies examine how problematic, turning-point experiences are organized, perceived, constructed, and given meaning by interacting individuals.” (p. 351) In the case of my project, I came up with two main how questions.

How different is the discourse in the press about government secrecy before and after 9/11?

How the importance of records is discussed in the discourse about government secrecy in the press for the past 14 years?

For the first question, the events of 9/11 can be established as the “problematic” and “turning-point” experience, this time not just in some individuals, but to a whole society. This question drives me into a lot of interest because of what I have found in the literature and by what is generally discuss in the media about 9/11, which is the comment that “9/11 changed the world,” using this as a justification for more secrecy. That’s why I’m splitting the research before and after 9/11. In terms of the second question, my main purpose is to interpret how archives, records, and recordkeeping systems outside the archival profession, in this case by the media. It has the purpose to call archivists about the importance of understanding how these aspects are viewed outside our profession.

2. Deconstructing prior conceptions of the phenomenon

This step is basically the preparation of the literature review for the research project. It should involve looking about prior conceptions of the topic, interpreting these conceptions and looking for gaps in the literature that need further research.

3. Capturing the phenomenon

Denzin indicates that “capture deals with what the researcher is doing with the phenomenon in the present, in his or her study.” (p. 354) I relate this step with data gathering, which in my case is retrieving editorial pieces from 6 major newspapers about the topic of government secrecy.

4. Bracketing the phenomenon

Once the researcher has captured the phenomenon, or gathering the data, it moves into defining and analyzing its structured. I related this step with the process of coding. When the researching is coding, he/she is restructuring the data in common concepts that would help him/her find trends and to better analyze the data. Which is the next step in the interpretive process: constructing the phenomenon.

5. Constructing the phenomenon

6. Contextualizing the phenomenon

Here is where the researcher interprets what he/she has constructed trough coding, in my case. This contextualization is finally redacted in a final report, which should includes (as explained by Silverman in chapter 10): introduction, literature review, methodology, data chapter and conclusion. (Silverman, p. 338)

Open government

David L. Hudson, Jr., ed., Open Government: An American Tradition Faces National Security, Privacy, and Other Challenges (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005)

Richard A. Chapman and Michael Hunt, Open Government in a Theoretical and Practical Context (England: Ashgate, 2006)

Reading the foreword and the introduction of David L. Hudson’s Open Government offers high expectations about the content of the book. The book is structure in a way that present a point and a counterpoint about specific issues related to open government. Alan Marzilli states in the foreword that “[p]erhaps more important is that listening to the other side sometimes helps one to see an opponent’s arguments in a more human way.” (p. 6) In the introduction is stated that the book examines four specific issues on open government: 1) should cameras in be permitted in courtrooms?, 2) whether FOIA’s privacy exemptions balance open government and privacy, 3) whether the press should have the right of access to the battlefield, and 4) whether the government is properly balancing open access and security during the “Age of Terror.” (p. 15) I’m interested in the last three issues.
These high expectations came to an end when I started reading the rest of the book. Basically the points and counterpoints are developed by using specific examples, sometimes just one example, that gave me the impression were used to just accommodate the authors’ personal opinions. These discussions are not accompanied by reference to past literature about the corresponding issue. In sum, by reading the book I just concluded that there are cases that demonstrate both opposing aspects about open government. Nothing new.
What I liked about the book is that is easy to read, and that within each essay it includes questions for the reader that can help to develop a more in-depth discussion.

Chapman and Hunt’s Open Government in a Theoretical and Practical Context, in the other hand, offers a broad and useful discussion of the concept of open government and its implications. In chapter 1, Michael Hunt and Richard A. Chapman discuss the concepts of open government and freedom of information. They point out that the discussion about secrecy and access to information is centered. They indicate: “The debate has therefore focused on the appropriate balance between these two sets of demands with the government slowly conceding ground in the face of increasing public awareness of both the limitations of closed government and the benefits to be derived from greater knowledge about the way that decisions are taken in government. What has not been discussed in this debate is the meaning of secrecy, its purpose in government or the related issue of privacy.” (p. 1) Hunt and Chapman argue that open government and freedom of information are not necessarily the same. In one hand, openness is limited in terms that offers what the government wants to make available, while freedom of information reflects a right of members of the public to access whatever information they wish.
Geoffrey Hunt makes an analysis of freedom of information, public accountability and whistleblowing using the Principle of Complementary (Chapter 5). This theory means the following: in a relationship between authority A and client C, A should provide account when C asks for it. If A do not comply, then C has the right to hold A accountable. Applying this theory to government, Hunt indicates that “freedom of information embodies the idea that since democratic government is accountable to citizens it has a moral duty to provide information about its activities to citizens on demand unless there is a good reason for not doing so.” (p. 44)Robert Behrens’ essay “Openness: A Perspective from the Committee on Standards in Public Life” called my attention for the use of quantitative and qualitative methods for the committees’ reports. The committee prepared a survey and conducted focus groups to study the public attitudes to openness. The focus groups, 15 in total, were used to attend the lack of research from the Commission regarding public standards of conduct in public life. These focus groups were then complemented with a survey conducted to a sample of 1,097 adults aged 18 or over. This study shows the advantages of triangulation on research.

Research project: some replication

I found two articles written by Jukka Torronen in which he uses the same methodology I’m planning to do for my topic. Focusing on the topic of alcohol legislation, Torronen analyzed editorial articles from six newspapers during the period of 1993-2000 (“The Finnish press’s political position on alcohol between 1993 and 2000,” Addiction 98 (2003): 281-290). He selected approximately 200 articles and used ATLAS.ti to code the texts. He then analyzed the data using theories of discourse analysis and argumentative discourse. The paper includes a table with the terms selected for coding and quantitative data relating the topics to the articles. Torronen used the same approach for another paper, “Finnish newspapers’ positions on drug policy between 1993 and 2000,” Contemporary Drug Problems 31 (Spring 2004): 59-88.

I have also prepared an outline for my literature review and included a bibliography for its respective parts. The outline is as follows:

I. Introduction

II. Government secrecy literature

A. General literature

Feinberg, LE, “FOIA, federal information policy, and information availability in a post-9/11 world,” Government Information Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2004): 439-460

Gibbs, David N., “Secrecy and International Relations,” Journal of Peace Research 32, no. 2 (1995): 213-228

Gleditsch, Nils Petter and Einar Hogetveit, “Freedom of Information in National Security Affairs: A Comparative Study of Norway and the United States,” Journal of Peace Research 21, no. 1 (1984): 17-45

Keen, Mike Forrest, “The Freedom of Information Act and Sociological Research,” American Sociologist 23, Issue 2 (Summer 92): 43-51

Relyea, Harold C., “Government Secrecy: policy Depths and Dimensions,” Government Information Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Oct. 2003): 395-418

Roberts, Alasdair S., Blacked out: government secrecy in the information age (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Roberts, Alasdair, “National Security and Open Government,” Georgetown Public Policy Review 9, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 69-85

Rozell, Mark J., Executive Privilege: The Dilemma of Secrecy and Democratic Accountability (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994)

Sleeman, B, “Recent Literature on Government Information,” Journal of Government Information 30, no. 4 (2004): 490-493

Smock, Raymond W., “Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy? Accessing Government Records in the Wake of 9/11/2001,” The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 123-127

Theoharis, Athan G. (ed.) A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998)

B. Literature from archivists and records managers

Blanton, Thomas, “The World’s Right to Know,” Foreign Policy no. 131 (Jul/Aug 2002): 50-58

Connors, Thomas James, "The Bush Administration and "Information Lockdown"," in Margaret Procter, Michael Cook and Caroline Williams (eds.) Political Pressure and the Archival Record (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006)

Cox, Richard J., "The National Archives Reclassification Scandal," Records & Information Management Report: Issues in Information Technology 22, no. 9 (November 2006)

III. Research literature

A. Discourse analysis, content analysis and argumentative analysis

Kopperschmidt, J., “An Analysis of Argumentation,” in Teun A. Van Dijk (ed.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. II: Dimensions of Discourse (London: Academic Press, 1985): 159-168

Van Eemeren, F.H. and P. Houtlosser, “Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse,” Discourse Studies 1, no. 4 (1999): 479-497

B. The press as a source for qualitative research

Meer, Nasar, ““Get Off Your Knees”: Print Media Public Intellectuals and Muslims in Britain,” Journalism Studies 7, no. 1 (2006): 35-59

Richardson, John E., “’Now is the Time to Put an End to All This’: Argumentative Discourse Theory and ‘Letters to the Editor’,” Discourse & Society 12 (2001): 143-168

Rojecki, Andrew, “Media Discourse on Globalization and Terror,” Political Communication 22 (2005): 63-81

Torronen, Jukka, “The Passionate Text: The Pending Narrative as a Macrostructure of Persuasion,” Social Semiotics 10, no. 1 (2000): 81-98

Torronen, Jukka, “The Finnish press’s political position on alcohol between 1993 and 2000,” Addiction 98 (2003): 281-290

Torronen, Jukka, “Finnish newspapers’ positions on drug policy between 1993 and 2000,” Contemporary Drug Problems 31 (Spring 2004): 59-88

IV. Conclusions

Reading response: Week 9

Ethics in qualitative research

On Silverman’s chapter about research ethics I came across Table 9.3 (p. 327) and though about answering these ethical questions relating it with my research project. These are my answers:

1. What is the purpose(s) of your research?

My main purpose is to preserve an archival perspective to the issue of government secrecy and advocate for the importance to archivists to understand it ramifications. It also have a self-advancement purpose given that this is a topic that probably will be part of my dissertation topic.

2. Which individuals or groups might be interested or affected by your research topic?

I hope archivists and records managers became more interested in the topic.

3. What are the implications for these parties of framing your research topic in the way you have done?

I see this in some way as a call for archivists to a more proactive attitude on issues of secrecy and access of government records. But because of the type of project and I see that it will have more direct implications to myself, not only on understanding better this topic but also on me been a more active archivist. I relate this with what Silverman points out when indicating that “[i]nevitably, your personal biography will be involved in topic selection.” (p. 327)

Silverman talks about research ethics focusing on the relationship between the researcher and the subjects. Indeed, it seems that he undermines the ethical issues when studying texts for qualitative research. Talking about Max Weber, he says: “From an ethical point of view, Weber was fortunate in that much of his empirical research was based on documents and texts that were already in the public sphere.” (p. 316) Even if the documents are public, I believe there are ethical implications, specially on how the researcher use the data to come to his/her conclusions. Is the researcher willing to accept that he/she was wrong after studying the data? Or will he/she interpret the data in a way that will accommodate his/her personal beliefs and hypothesis? Documentary editing is a good example of this kind of actions.

Interviews

Regarding Gorman and Clayton’s chapter about interviews, the discussion can be summarized in two main aspects: preparation and control of the interview process. On preparing the questions it is important to ask ourselves if the questions relate with what the researcher is looking for and if it will offer the opportunity to obtain information that he/she doesn’t know (p. 129). With good preparation the researcher will be better equipped to control the interview process and face any situation that arises from it. I think this is important when conducting open-ended interviews, which in one hand offers the opportunity to gather a broader spectra of data, but in the other hand it presents the risk of causing a discussion not related to the research topic.

Research project: gathering data

The main data for my research project will come from newspapers. I started gathering articled from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. I will also analyze data from the Wall Street Journal and other conservative newspapers. I have been doing searches on the topic of “government secrecy” looking at articles dating from 1992. One advantage of looking at articles dating back to 1992 is that I will be able to analyze the press discourse during two different presidential administrations, one democrat and the other republican. To limit my search, I’m concentrating on looking at editorials. This is because editorials will offer me a better perspective on the discourse about secrecy given that editorials are opinions about the topic, instead of just describing the news. In the case of the Chronicle of Higher Education, it will be useful because many of the articles include the opinions and perspectives from historians, political scientists and other researchers.

For what I have been looking so far, it seems data from the archives listserv and the records managers’ listserv will not be as useful as expected. This is because the vast majority of posts are just links to other news. So in this case I will use this for quantitative purposes to demonstrate one of my impressions that archivists and records managers are not engaged in discussions about the role of archives on government secrecy. So I think this part will lead me to present questions that should be addressed in the future, and that will need further qualitative research.

The aspect in which I’m struggling is on how I’m going to code the data. I’ll need to look for more information about this aspect of research.