Anecdote

An anecdote is a short story. I like those and find myself telling them, because they usually illustrate a point I want to make. Where have I found this?

Anecdote: The difference between a sound argument and a good story

Perhaps it was on the web site of the company called Anecdote See http://www.anecdote.com.au/index.php [1], which is an Australian based organisation that seems to specialise in story telling for business reasons. Their front page seems to relate to collaboration and for that reason I want to investigate them a bit more. But also I like the technique of storytelling and I have to think of some way of narrating the findings from my case studies.

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I can't get the link to work - it gives me a 406 message saying that the link is not acceptable. Sorry.

Free writing

I'm always writing blocked - anything seems more important, but there's a fun blog at One Minute Writer that gets at least a minute's worth of writing out of you - perhaps a better transition activity (what you do between doing things that you should be doing) than jigzone or playing cards.

However, as I wrote a month ago I need to write as inquiry so I need a load of prompts that are relevant to what I'm researching, like:

• engagement,
• knowledge management,
• Foucauldian analyses,
• trust,
• power
• transaction costs,
• collaboration.
• social capital
• communities of practice
• intellectual capital
  

But I don't have relevant prompts that are also easy to write freely about.

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Transition activity: what you do between doing things that you should be doing

PhD comics lecture

Poking fun at a PhD student's life is what PhD Comics is about, so I'd have liked to attend the Comics lecture at Oxford. It was the same time as they were voting in USA for Obama, so this is the artist's take on the Oxford experience. I like it because it is so true.

Access

I've been offered access. Hurrah!

The disposition effect in the Chinese stock market

We OUBS students do these seminars for each other. Presenting to each other has benefits:

• it's friendly so less scary than for real
• your colleagues might give you some good ideas on how to develop your research
• it's one of the PhD skills you have to have (E3: Constructively defend research outcomes at seminars and viva examination - see joint skills statement)
• it's good practice
• it builds up the student community

Today one of our first year student's presented on

The disposition effect in the Chinese stock market.

Each PhD student has a web page, but she hasn't got hers yet, so I'll try to write up something of what I think she said.

Aim: find out how demographic factors influence individual investors disposition effect in China.
Research questions: there were three; the first two are about what the effect is and the third is about the reasons for that effect.
Methodology: Odean's model (1998) on the disposition effect can be measured by PGR- PLR (proportion of gains realised and the proportion of losses realised.

She's going to use quantitative data from a survey of 10,000 to answer the first questions, using factor analysis, and also qualitative data to address the reasons why. She'll use thematic analysis like Braun and Clarke (2006).

We asked her questions about her theoretical framework, about comparison with the western world and why she was using both quantitative and qualitative. We asked her who the research would be useful to. One student suggested a variation to her survey that would simplify and perhaps reduce her qualitative work.

Insecurity

This is such an insecure activity – looking for access.

The ethics committee told me to create an information sheet, which I’ve done, and my supervisors weren’t interested immediately but now have commented that they wouldn’t have written it like this, so I’ve got amendments to make. and my supervisors say that they’d write the email differently and so on.

I'm finding complying with the OU ethics committee on one hand and the need to get access on the other sometimes incompatible. On the one hand, I find example information sheets that cover everything, but on the other hand, such sheets might

1. scare off potential participants
2. be too simplistic for the intelligent business people that I hope to speak to.

For example, my supervisor found the wording that

"researchers are not allowed to persuade people to participate"

'rather bizarre'. And I agree. Why shouldn't I try to get people to participate? In the long run, the research should benefit more than just me.

Six Characters

What's reality? What exists and how can we tell the story of what exists? Can we tell a story truthfully?

That's problem is at the heart of Pirandello's play "Six Characters in search of an Author" now at the Gielgud Theatre.

The six characters have developed a life of their own, and have a story that they insist on telling. But this is a play within a play, because the six characters interrupt a rehearsal of a film documentary on assisted suicide in Denmark.

Each of the six characters wants to give his or her version of the reality that happened to them, in their life. Each has a different take on their lives together. Each constructs the same story according his/her own perception and personality.

• The Father - guilt ridden
• The Step-daughter - haughty, sexy
• The Mother - distraught, weak and weepy
• The Son - arrogant, distant
• The silent Girl and Boy - why are they silent?

Then the actors attempt to reconstruct their story, putting a different angle to it. And here is yet another production of this play, with a different take from the one that Pirandello first produced - I think he might have liked this one.

Why am I so interested?

Because the problem of reality haunts me; it comes up in the way I approach and write up my research. Because this is a post-modern view:

• of a world made up of people by people,
  
• knowledge constructed through six characters, and reconstructed through producer and actors,
  
• multiple knowledges: six characters and six knowledges,
• knowledge contingent on time (now, in London or early twentieth century Sicily?)
• knowledge that is not objective - who can be objective about assisted suicide

This play is so relevant to my philosophy.