[sageofages]

Didn't you know...being in the same room/house/campus/town/state counts as an interview!

Originally posted by navane
Hrm...ok, math was never my strong suit; so, someone please help me out on this.

"Thousands" is plural, meaning 2,000+. If she interviewed 2,000+ women, wouldn't some of us know about it?? I mean, I doubt she interviewed 1-2 women at each chapter of a sorority at each university in the US. It just seems that, statistically, a couple of women here at GC should have been approached by her, or know of sisters in their chapter who had been approached for an interview.

Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that she interviewed "thousands" of sorority members and yet no alarms were raised by national HQs? That is, ALL 2,000+ participants gave interviews without telling their chapter presidents or anything like that?

Can someone confirm that she actually said she interviewed "thousands"?

I'm also confused about this "research" she claims to have done. Generally, someone who conducts qualitative research does NOT conduct personal interviews with THOUSANDS of participants. In general, qualitative samples tend to be smaller and more detail-oriented. For example, my own master's thesis research involved personally interviewing 30 university administrators and then looking for patterns among what was said via the tape recorded sessions and my field notes.

On the other hand, if she gave out surveys to thousands of people, translated the answers into numbers and crunched them on a computer using statistics software...then that would make more sense and her study would be quantitative in nature. Since it sounds like she does not present her statistics, or refer to them in such a way that shows she did some, then this work is not likely to be quantitative research.

So which is it? How could a "researcher" possibly interview thousands of women in such a short period of time? Is she lying? Has she actually interviewed that many but has done so over a decade (and not one year)? Did she log in to GC, read thousands of posts and then decide to call them "interviews"?

So which is it? Is she a sociologist? A researcher? A journalist? Was this a research study? Or was it "just" meant to be a book?

Researchers normally intend to publish their work in a professional research journal in order to present new information for the benefit of the community. In other words, if this was a proper study, she could have submitted it to the NASPA Journal which is published by the National Association for Student Personnel Administrators in order to encourage university administrators to take a more active role in assisting with the problem areas of Greek Life.

But, no, this lady wrote a book for sale on the mass market. So that, combined with the fact that her research methods sound awfully sketchy, makes me uncomfortable. She better not be passing this off as "research".

.....Kelly