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.

Week 8: Readings response

I will like to comment on Gorman and Clayton’s explanation of the nominal group technique (NGT).This technique is given following a number of steps which includes: participants writing down silently their responses to a question, brainstorming, discussion and a final vote to rank the importance of the ideas. Although it seems that this technique offers an advantage to the researcher to develop a group discussion on a better organize way, I wonder how much this could affect the data gathered for qualitative analysis. One of the main characteristics of qualitative research is its flexibility in the way the researcher gather data by doing in-depth interviews and focus groups. Does NGT limit the participant’s explanation of his/her views? Gorman and Clayton indicate that one of the disadvantages of NGT is that the researcher can only address one issue at a time (p. 154). Can this be a limitation to analyze the participants’ opinions in a broader sense?

Some light at the end of the tunnel

One of my main struggles in my project is the difficulty to find articles about government secrecy which present a theoretical framework and empirical evidence to explain the theories. I finally found a very good article which addresses these issues. David N. Gibbs’s article titled “Secrecy and International Relations” (Journal of Peace Research 32, no. 2 1995: p. 213-228) explains three theories to analyze government secrecy, focusing on foreign policy. These theories are: External Threat approach, Bureaucratic Politics approach, and Internal Threat approach. External Threat means that government use secrecy when concern with national security, specially to conceal information they don’t want other countries to know. Bureaucratic Politics suggests that information is classified because of arcane feuds or operating procedures. Finally, Internal Threat indicates that secrecy is used to mislead the public of their policies. The latter is the theory more vastly explained by the author and it uses the crisis at Congo in the 1960s as an example to support this theory. Relating this article to my project, I’m looking into more literature about these theories, with emphasis on more recent publications. In addition, some questions have come into mi mind related to the data I’ll be analyzing. Which is the approach that better explains the press discourse on government secrecy? What about the discourse from archival professional organizations, political scientists, and historians?

Regarding the data, I already started saving newspaper articles from different sources dating from the early 1990s. I will be analyzing only editorial pieces, which would present a better opportunity to analyze the arguments of the press, instead of looking at news events.

Some notes about this week's readings:

Hammersley indicates that “the goal of ethnographic research is to discover and represent faithfully the true nature of social phenomena.” (H&M, p. 66). To reach this goal, researchers use ethnography to submerge into in-depth participant observations, fieldwork, and in-depth interviews. What is different from other methodologies is that in ethnography the researcher experience the setting firsthand. In other words, the researcher role in the setting is much more than an outsider writing observations. Hammersley states that one of the most valuable features of ethnography is “its commitment to seeking to understand the perspectives of others, rather than simply judging them as true or false.” This approach is not exempt, however, from the debate on whether this methodology can be used to develop a strong theory, or if it is just an approach to present a descriptive story of a particular setting.

How ethnography is placed into practice? The descriptions given in John Van Maanen’s essay (H&M, Ch. 5) and Silverman’s chapter 3 basically calls for paying careful attention to details, which can be accomplish with discipline and practice. Specifically on fieldnotes, both Van Maanen and Silverman indicates that at the same time the researcher is making observation, he/she is also analyzing the data collected.

Week 6 Readings Response

The concept of qualitative research is mostly related to doing interviews and observations. Indeed, most of the discussions on the literature about this methodology give emphasis to these techniques. However, the analysis of texts from documents at the archives, or the internet or other mediums also offers a strong tool to develop qualitative research.

Chapter 10 in Gorman and Clayton explains how to do historical investigation and how this methodology can be applied to qualitative research. Although sometimes historical research is wrongfully related to just doing a description of events, its real value relies in that is a strong tool to answer the questions of why and how. In addition, it helps to study the context in which events took place. (see p. 173).

Just like other methodologies, doing historical investigation requires discipline and organization. In particular, emphasize is given in the importance of critically approaching historical sources and note taking. A critical approach of historical sources requires, among other things, analyzing the authenticity of the documents and its reliability. Finally, I will like to point out the fact that doing historical research does not mean that the researcher will not be able to study all the sources available, or even be able to find all the evidence (p. 168). About the latter, this is one of the mayor obstacles that researchers using government records face when dealing with issues of classification and government secrecy. Athan G. Theoharis explains how the study of the cold war era is adversely affected by the culture of secrecy indicating that “classification restrictions in effect ensured a distorted understanding of presidential decisions and priorities.” Because of this, researchers face the following dilemma: “how to interpret a knowingly incomplete record?” (Theharis, A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know, p. 4)

From Silverman’s chapter on texts I found very useful his explanations about content analysis, both from and quantitative and a qualitative approach. This is form special interest of me because good part of my project will involve doing this type of research. What I see as essential for this type of analysis is the process of establishing categories, coding data, to be able to group the data in an organize way.

Some notes on my literature review

Looking into the literature about government secrecy I have found some interesting descriptions that will help me establish a broader background on the topic. This will lead me eventually to have a better understanding on the specific issues I will be analyzing. So I decided to post some comments on what I have found so far. Eventually I will post a most formal annotated bibliography, so this is a starting point.

Harold C. Relyea presents a very good overview of the history of government secrecy within the federal government in his article “Government secrecy: policy depths and dimensions” (Government Information Quarterly 20 (2003): 395-418). With this overview from the beginnings of the republic, when there were no specific policies for secrecy but where it “was sometimes exercised as a practical necessity,” to the policies established after 9/11, Relyea calls for more in-depth research. One of the events that called my attention was the signing by Pres. Truman of E.O. 10290 on September 24, 1951. This order strengthened the President’s discretion to make secrecy policy and created broader concepts that could led the creation of more official secrets. The consequence of this order was widespread criticism from the public and the press. Relyea does not goes into the specifics of this criticism, but it could be interesting to study it and compare it with the current discourse.

Relyea also argues that the government must keep in mind that secrecy they impose is momentary and that “the citizenry, in turn, accept such secrecy only in limited instances and on a momentary basis in order to have the confidence that their representatives are making decisions and policies acceptable to them.” (p. 412) However, he fails to be more specific in this argument. Because he concentrates on presenting a historical background, he does not show evidence in this regard. It is true that society accepts secrecy in limited instances, or are they willing to let the government be more secret (without holding it accountable) in the name of national security? Which are the bases of this argument?

Most of the literature I have found comes from political science journals like Government Information Quarterly. So far, I haven’t found significant literature about government secrecy from archival journals, which does not surprise me. In fact, this is one of the reasons I want to do this project. These are other articles I have found:

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

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

Perritt, Henry H., “Open Government,” Government Information Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1997): 397-406

Lewis, Jeremy R. T., “Reinventing (Open) Government: State and Federal Trends,” Government Information Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1995): 427-455

Rieder, Rem, “Hold That Obit,” American Journalism Review 27, no. 2 (Apr/May 2005): 6

I will like also to find literature using qualitative research to study government secrecy, like case studies or articles on how to apply qualitative research to analyze topics on government issues. Any recommendations are welcome.