The Methods Lego

Collecting enough Legos to build a dissertation is the ultimate goal of this blog, but I have a more pressing issue at the moment. That issue is the "externship."

The externship is a vague and shadowy requirement. The student receives 9 hours of credit and can either work as an intern and write a paper about the experience or, as most student do, write two full papers for submission to conferences or journals. I believe the expectation is that they be submitted to journals so that the student has a (required) shot at getting a publication or two before hitting the job market. My primary intention is to use it as an opportunity to break ground on the dissertation with any publications being extra fruits of my labors.

Like other independent studies, theses, and dissertations, it requires a proposal and some sort of approval by a faculty member. In my case, I won't actually be enrolling for the credit hours until Spring 2011, but want to at least have an approved proposal before registering in December.

My externship started as a proposal to explore Internet privacy policies. At the time I had it all cooked up (December 2009), I was actually enthusiastic about it. I had read a good deal of new media literature, various articles on privacy, and even had a sample for a content analysis. The idea was to measure various aspects of it and determine whether it fit in with the FCC's recommendations, etc., etc. It seemed like all was well with the world and I'd be ready to go in June of this year.

Things didn't work out as planned. First, by the time I had read 3 or 4 of these incredibly boring documents, I had come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. If you give out any personal information to anybody online, you really have no control over how that information is used. The idea of online privacy is an illusion created and maintained by the mere existence of some document claiming to be a policy. The truth is, the privacy policies I read basically say the provider of a service can and will use your information any way they see fit. A common statement goes something like this: "We will never ever ever ever ever share your data with anyone except our partners and we have no control over what they do with it. If our company is bought, the data we have stored goes to the new owner, and we can't control what they do with it."

On top of that, I lack the mettle to slog through these things. I literally have a ream's worth of privacy policies printed out but I can't bring myself to dig in and actually read more than a page at a time. It became apparent very quickly that 1) there's no such thing as online privacy, 2) reading about the illusion is a waste of time, and 3) I can't crank 2 research papers out of something so -- disengaging.

So, just as any other good grad student would do, I panicked. No longer did I have a proposal for an externship. I was dead in the water.

But fate was on my side: I still had plenty of time. Over the years I've also absorbed a good deal of cognitive dissonance, selective exposure theory, mood management, and the like. I find these types of theories interesting and enjoy working with them. In today's information-rich world, selective exposure is particularly relevant -- not so much as a means of alleviating cognitive dissonance, but as a means of information processing.

Then, as luck would have it, The Psychology of Entertainment by Bryant and Vorderer (2006) fell from the sky like a beam of sunlight. I have spent the past month poring over this book, among others, reading it in excruciating (probably way too much) detail, and have come up with an annotated bibliography upon which I can base a decent review of the literature.

I'm now at the point of trying to develop some good research questions, find gaps in the literature, etc. Unfortunately, entertainment theory isn't as developed as other theories, such as diffusion of innovations, social learning theory, etc. Instead, it is more of a collection of hunches, models, observations, and ideas rooted in other theories. A Lego box is the perfect analogy for the current state of the theory -- a collection of vital parts that haven't been put together very well. (If I'm mistaken about this, I may be in a good deal of trouble!)

The challenge at hand is in developing research questions whose answers can bridge those pieces into something more coherent. To do that I need to narrow my focus, zero in on a topic or two. Hopefully once I do that, the rest will fall into place, and I'll have not only an externship to complete, but the beginnings of a dissertation as well.