I’ll be talking about triangulation and…

I’ll be talking about triangulation and the group leadership survey, feel free to start another thread or add to this one! First off, I think that triangulation is a really interesting method of research that addresses some of the problems of various scales– either aggregate data that says very little about each individual, or smaller-scale research that does not illuminate the bigger picture. The differences between Craig’s survey and focus group data was striking, and it seems likely that many of us may encounter this effect as well if we are using more than one data collection method. Craig’s differing results did not invalidate any of his findings, but they did give him a perspective that he could not have gotten elsewhere. It was a good reminder to me that even though we use empirical methods and work to find the “truth”, this truth is almost always going to be framed differently by different people or kinds of data, and we should be aware of this in our research.
The leadership survey would be such an interesting place to use triangulation– while the researchers collected the survey results, I imagine that an interview or focus group with the participants might produce a different picture about their views of masculinity and femininity, and could get into some of the issues we discussed, like how personal experience shapes opinions. A further angle might be to interview someone about their combined choices of traits for an ideal leader, because the holistic picture could be different than each trait individually. If anyone wants to talk more about the gender associations, I think they’re equally fascinating and frustrating! I was surprised at how some of the traits were gendered– any particular surprises for you?