Fieldnotes: Reflection 1

I've decided against posting my fieldnotes here, for several reasons. First, I want to keep this blog public and accessible to everyone. Even if I remove all identifiers from my fieldnotes, I think that anyone who is reasonably familiar with me or the program could accurately attribute statements that I have recorded. In the interests of protecting anonymity, I can't post the fieldnotes.

Second, though the lines among data types are fuzzy (at least to me) in qualitative research, I still am making a differentiation between fieldnotes and this research journal. I have conceptualized this journal as a tool for reflection on the research process, on my struggles, and as a way to realize what my biases are in this research project. This journal will eventually be a data source unto itself, but I do not want to muddy the waters with other types of data. Frankly, doing so would make me lazy...I could just cut and paste my notes or transcriptions into this blog without actually sitting down and thinking about them. The way I have set up this blog requires me to reflect on my data gathering and to actually write down those reflections for later analysis. Posting other data seems to be "cheating."

I will, however, begin to post entries I typed into my Word files before I thought to start this blog. I'm trying to decide if it is ethical to backdate these entries. By "backdate" I mean post them now but date the posts for the day that I originally wrote down the content and saved it in a word file. I have an uneasy feeling that this would be cheating...I think I should just put the date of original writing in the body of the post and leave the HTML dating as-is. I know it doesn't sound like a huge deal, but it makes me feel more honest. Really, that is what this blog is all about--it's a way to keep me honest and thinking about the ethics of research in general as well as my study in particular.