A Preliminary Inquiry into the Methodologies Employed in Research on ICTs and Society: Prologue (“An Alternate View of Knowledge Negotiation”)

Abstract

This paper originates in a commitment to write a panel presentation on the methodologies employed in pub- Keywords: conduct of research inquiry, methodology, bibliometricsAcknowledgement: This essay is a product of the "water cooler effect," the well-known and essential process of arriving at (or negotiating) an understanding of what you "really" intended to research. Your informal social networks remain invisible unless you recognize this principle of research problem identification and knowledge discovery (citation of their published work is typically inadequate for acknowledging this form of contribution). Many thanks for the H20 stimulation go to my SLIS colleagues Blaise Cronin and Lokman Meho. [are] about how to connect evidence to our theories…There is a continuous interplay between theoretical assumptions and the objects of inquiry. "Theory" and "method" form moments, as it were, within the process of inquiry. (Alford, 1998, pp. 12, 13) Method broadly viewed, is a series of strategies for finding a way to associate the abstractions of theory with the actual social relations [evidence] being mapped, interpreted, or explained by the theory… Techniques for collecting, verifying, and evaluating the validity and reliability of specific kinds of evidence constitute the narrow meaning of "method" and comprise the skills usually taught in a methods course… [Instead, we should consider that] methodological discussions