I don’t have any real progress work wise to report to you. Like last week, I’ve been busy mostly with fellowship applications and what not. I am also running into the familiar problem of not getting any responses to my interview requests. As usual, I keep sending off missives into cyberspace I’m starting to get a little worried, especially with the writers because I think they’re going to be key in my analysis.

In any case, I’ve been organizing some of my thoughts and looking through the transcripts and reading, and I’ve come up with somewhat of an issue concerning Bill James. For those of you who don’t know, Bill James probably one of the most important people in the history of sabermetrics. He is generally credited with popularizing sabermetrics with the publications of his baseball abstracts. His name comes up more than any other name both in my reading and in my interviews. This, in and of itself, is not surprising. And I’m sure I could write a lot about how Bill james has influenced sabermetrics through the tone of his writing as he did through his actual research matter.

The issue that I’m struggling about is how to write about an individual in the context of a sociological research project. Like I said, clearly, he is an important figure…actually the important figure in sabermetrics, Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to the qualitative part of this project, I am considering adding a quantitative component to my research as well. This is actually something that I’ve been struggling with for some time now. You see, the substantive questions that I am asking do not necessarily lead me to quantitative methodology. My questions are more qualitative in nature and not something that is developed enough to be able to test quantitative hypothesis. However, while at UCSB, I’ve taken quite a few quantitative courses. Seeing as how I’ve always been good with numbers, it just made sense to develop that skill in order to make myself more attractive as a job candidate. It would be almost a waste of my training and my particular set of skills if I didn’t do something quantitative in nature. At the same time, I’ve been trained, as everyone should be, that you really shouldn’t let the method drive the research. In other words, I shouldn’t be trying to shoehorn a statistics project in just because I want to do statistics.

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