Journaling - Paper or Electronic?

In my qualitative research class, we learned about journaling. As described, it seemed a little out of control: make the field notes, describe making the notes; analyze the notes; and then review them once a week to analyze those; and then do the same once a month. I'll come back to this in a moment.

Yesterday I ordered a digital voice recorder and software for voice recognition. Hopefully this will make the transcriptions go more quickly. Incidentally, according to the UPS package tracking website, I think this will be delivered today! I'm anxious for these to arrive so I can begin to "train" the software and learn how to use these little gadgets to maximize efficiency.

I'm also reading Writing the Qualitative Dissertation: Understanding by Doing by Judith M. Meloy. I just finished the chapter on journaling. She has excerpts from folks who've done (or were doing) qualitative dissertations. In those excerpts, they wrote about whether or not they kept journals, why that was (or was not) a good decision, and how they were used.

I have this fantasy that I will be able to record my thoughts on my soon-to-arrive digital voice recorder, automatically transcribe them using the voice-to-text software, and perhaps even use Atlas.ti to separate them into broad categories related to emerging themes, methodological notes, and overall insights.

Now, if only the UPS truck would get here!

Bracketing/Reflexivity/Role/Reflection

It seems all the qualitative research books discuss the importance of the researcher sharing her perspective as the study begins. This practice goes by several names, but the general idea is to share your experiences, biases, and assumptions right up front. As I was outlining this section (will it turn into a chapter?) I kept focusing on the things I "ought to" include. I'm not sure when it occurred to me, but the researcher's perspective/bracketing/disclosure (whatever you want to call it) is very much like the Reflective Element in portfolio authoring. Admittedly, the bracketing section is done first where a reflection on a portfolio artifact is typically done at the end. I think I need to make this explicit in my bracketing section - it's like a reflection - but at the beginning. I think it might also help to frame the entire study. Hmmmm....