Peer's Blogs About Qualitative Research

The first peer blog i looked at was Kaitlyn's blog. Kaitlyn started a focus group of students up at the York Hill campus of QU to find out how everyone is liking it. I had interest in this because I live at York Hill so these are issues that I deal with too. These issues included the dining options, shuttles, and nursing situations up at the campus. These have been hot topics all year among my friends and hopefully the school will do a real focus group soon to get criticism so they can make good progress going forward.

The second peer blog i looked at was Lisa's blog. I enjoyed it because she talked about the MTV show 'World of Jenks'. Lisa showed us a clip in class about this show and I was very interested in it. I have seen commercials before for it but never been able to catch an episode yet. I think Jenks is a genius for putting together this show. He lives the lives of so many different types of people. It is very fascinating and original. The ethnographic research he does is top notch.

Qualitative Research in the NFL

It is said that the NFL is the most popular sport in America. After the steroid scandals and lockout of 1994 in Major League Baseball it won fans over all over the country. The NFL wanted to know more about their fans. Their likes, dislikes, etc. In 2009 during the Super Bowl week, the company Experian Simmons surveyed as many fans as possible to get as much information as possible.

Through this survey Experian Simmons was able to find out the percentages of anything you could think of. How much is the household income for the average fan? How old is the average fan? What race or ethnicity are they? Do they smoke? How often do they use the internet? How much alcohol do they drink or fast food do they eat? Plus much, much more.

As long as the NFL cuts down on hits like this, they will be able to keep there spot on top of the sports world in America.

Peer's Unobtrusive Research Blogs

Unobtrusive research is happening around us all the time. We take part in this nonstop because we are always observing others and coming to conclusions about them. Lisa Perez made great points about this in her blog from last week. She uses the paparazzi as a very good example. She explains how they are able to follow around celebrities every move without being caught (for the most part). Another student who's blog i enjoyed was Christina Heilman's. She wrote about the presidential election of 2008. Since everyone is obsessed with social media now, Obama and his campaign knew that they had to get involved with facebook, twitter, etc to win the younger votes. And when McCain admitted "he didn't know how to work a computer" I am sure many younger, first time voters didn't like that too much so that gave Obama alot more votes. The unobtrusive research that Obama did to find out that they needed to get on the social media scene led him to the victory. Unobtrusive research is very important. You are doing it all the time, even if you don't even know it.