======= Date Modified 29 23 2009 12:23:53 =======
Ok, a bit tongue in cheek...but rather than stare at my literature |review, I thought I'd have a bit of a GedankenExperiment...what if our research WAS based in fairy-tales?


Ethnography:

You observe a troll living under a bridge. You join them, living like a troll for six months, and then keeping in close contact with them for the remainder of your project. You wear troll rags and become proficient in the art of clubbing billy goats to death, as part of a cultural perspective. You try and distance yourself from your work, but not as much as your family now try and distance themselves from you, as you’ve unwittingly picked up many habits from the field and are now a public embarrassment at barbecues. Your thesis is titled: Goats and Glory: The Acts and Arts of the Troll Hunt”, and you have a strong likelihood of becoming a telly don…as soon as you stop smelling of pondweed.

Action Research:

You form a cohesive network group which involves trolls, billy goats and other members of the fairy tale community to produce a rich picture diagram and holistic view of the problems that billy goats face whilst in a community. You have to write off one of your focus groups after a troll eats three other participants in quick succession, an act which inspires hostility and anger in the group. After performing one to one evaluations of the other participants, you find that videoconferencing might be a better option, as there will be no constant trip-trap noise to agitate the situation. Three billy goats present a short mime about their community difficulties, after which one troll and a couple of enterprising wolves present an interpretative dance which turns into a brawl, during which the entire focus group is eaten. Your thesis is coughed up by one of the participants six months later, and published.

Case Study:

You ask to meet with a representative of a troll, who luckily turns out to have a timeshare under a bridge close to your University. After agreeing to take part in the study, your supervisor thinks you may have a valid standpoint to collect evidence from, and sends you out to find fifty other trolls in similar circumstances. After putting an ad out on TrollBridgeForum.Net, sending out countless questionnaires, bribing friends and family to find other trolls who might be willing to participate and then finally emailing the whole University, you have two more participants.
After six months of trying to arrange interviews standing up to your knees in dank cold riverwater, your supervisor suggests you should also arrange interviews with billy goats.
After six months of trying to interview billy goats before, after and during their trip-trapping across little wooden bridges, you begin to understand the meaning of masochism, and wonder if you weren’t better trying to interview the bridges.
You suggest this to your supervisor. Worse still, they agree.
You spend the remaining six months of your field work interviewing bridges about their perspective on being trip-trapped over, and publish a thesis titled “Bleats, Boredom and Bridges: Multiple Perspectives in a Case Study”.

Quantitative Research:

You count the number of billy goats per quarter that have gone missing over N number of bridges in a specified locale. You end up with a graph indicating a point where if trolls = N, then N=Goat-5. You have a beer later on with the researchers who are doing actual field work, but don't linger too long as they smell of pondweed.

Empirical research:

You are a professor with a departmental RAE coming up. You have decided that a project on troll habits is fairly timely, and once you have the research, you will get your postgrad/s to write a paper, which you can get it into a journal as soon as possible. With your name on it as first author. You design a simple research instrument, which consists of a 'Little Billy Goat Gruff' costume, a clipboard and a biro. Oh, and a postgrad.

You have WAY too much time on your hands, get back to your literature review pronto!!!!!

The three little pigs, each with regard to the environmental impacts building their houses caused! Normally I prefer human-environment interactions, but deforestation and industry with making the bricks could be an interesting twist!

Has anyone read the comics that are are based on fair tale characters are living in our world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables_(comics)

Yes, and I'm a fan too :) Bigby ftw ;)