As a young adult I often journeyed back ‘‘home’’ from New York City (NYC) to visit my parents and... more As a young adult I often journeyed back ‘‘home’’ from New York City (NYC) to visit my parents and siblings, travelling on an inexpensive commercial bus known as Greyhound. The bus would rumble out of one of the large, busy, central transportation hubs in NYC and begin its halting 4 or 5 hour trek (depending on the number of stops), toward my hometown of Ithaca, New York. Ithaca is situated at the tip of Cayuga Lake, the largest of 11 long, slender bodies of water known collectively as the Finger Lakes. Ithaca’s business district is nestled snuggly at the southern base of the lake surrounded on three sides by steep hills. If requested, the Greyhound driver would discharge a passenger at an intersection on the West Hill, before descending downtown. I often got off here, making the rest of the way on foot to my parents’ house. Stepping off the bus, I always entered a liminal space, requiring recalibration of my senses. NYC never sleeps, even if its residents do. Cacophony is the city’s sound track, varied and layered. Sometimes it is discordant, other times harmonic, but there is a perpetual baseline of noise. For example, vehicles respond to traffic lights, ordering them to stop, warning them to slow down, or releasing them from idling. On command, brigades of cars, buses, and trucks, screech, squeal, grunt, hiss, and rumble in response to these signals in metered rhythms. Layered atop the traffic track, are brassy sounds—proximal or distant—as horns toot or blare, depending on the frustration level of the driver. A police car might blast its siren, in rapid staccato, to nudge aside a car, or a fire engine’s might wail with impatient urgency, parting rivers of vehicles. Overhead you may hear the rhythmic whirling of a traffic helicopter, hovering in place, or the roar of an ascending airplane, a sound which quickly dissipates only to be replaced, minutes later, by another plane. In short, sounds come from above and below, near and far, but they play on in the continuous loop of the urban soundtrack. Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(4) 447–452 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015588856 qsw.sagepub.com
An editorial is presented to the article the World Health Organization (WHO) starts timeline of e... more An editorial is presented to the article the World Health Organization (WHO) starts timeline of events associated with the Covid-19 global pandemic with an entry on 31 December 2019 Topics include Chinese officials imposed a lockdown and surrounding areas in a desperate attempt to control the growing epidemic;and the final product imposed additional labor on wonderful production team in India
Reports a study of the development of social science research methods from the 1960s to the prese... more Reports a study of the development of social science research methods from the 1960s to the present; charts the emergence of postmodern methods, globalization and internet impact on methods, and the troubling role of the researcher, of theory, and of technology in methods; discusses the blurring of the lines between humanistic and social science approaches
Questions about sample size have crossed my desk several times of late. They come posed in differ... more Questions about sample size have crossed my desk several times of late. They come posed in different forms. How many do I need? Do I have enough? Is 11 okay? These are not unusual. Emmel (2013) points out that among” the most frequently asked questions” are “how big (or small) does a sample have to be in qualitative research?” Significantly, I have never been asked: do I have too many? In any case, Guetterman (2015) observed the size question “seems to plague new qualitative researchers.”
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2016
This essay is based on a paper delivered in 2014 as part of a panel celebrating the 10th annivers... more This essay is based on a paper delivered in 2014 as part of a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and discussing critical pedagogy and qualitative research methods oriented toward social transformation. In this essay, I briefly examine the history of social work and its relationship to inquiry and pedagogy, my own academic biography, and the twinning of two scholarly initiatives, ICQI and the journal Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice. I argue that the individual transformations and networks that have been nurtured in a decade of ICQI gatherings—taken as a collective whole—offer an exemplar of social transformation grounded in critical pedagogy and qualitative research methods.
Societies greatly vary in how social ills or conditions are framed and addressed. What is sociall... more Societies greatly vary in how social ills or conditions are framed and addressed. What is socially problematic and why specific societal responses are developed depends on competing social values in social, political, and historic context. Social constructionists examine how some social behaviors and conditions come to be publicly viewed as social problems and how these views shape policy and practice. Recent studies document two contemporary trends—the medicalizing and criminalizing of behavior for labeling problems and subjecting them to institutions of social control. Analyses of the social problems process (Best, 2013; Staller, 2009) allow social workers to consider how power, politics, fears, prejudices, and values “create” what is problematic about a variety of social conditions.
As a young adult I often journeyed back ‘‘home’’ from New York City (NYC) to visit my parents and... more As a young adult I often journeyed back ‘‘home’’ from New York City (NYC) to visit my parents and siblings, travelling on an inexpensive commercial bus known as Greyhound. The bus would rumble out of one of the large, busy, central transportation hubs in NYC and begin its halting 4 or 5 hour trek (depending on the number of stops), toward my hometown of Ithaca, New York. Ithaca is situated at the tip of Cayuga Lake, the largest of 11 long, slender bodies of water known collectively as the Finger Lakes. Ithaca’s business district is nestled snuggly at the southern base of the lake surrounded on three sides by steep hills. If requested, the Greyhound driver would discharge a passenger at an intersection on the West Hill, before descending downtown. I often got off here, making the rest of the way on foot to my parents’ house. Stepping off the bus, I always entered a liminal space, requiring recalibration of my senses. NYC never sleeps, even if its residents do. Cacophony is the city’s sound track, varied and layered. Sometimes it is discordant, other times harmonic, but there is a perpetual baseline of noise. For example, vehicles respond to traffic lights, ordering them to stop, warning them to slow down, or releasing them from idling. On command, brigades of cars, buses, and trucks, screech, squeal, grunt, hiss, and rumble in response to these signals in metered rhythms. Layered atop the traffic track, are brassy sounds—proximal or distant—as horns toot or blare, depending on the frustration level of the driver. A police car might blast its siren, in rapid staccato, to nudge aside a car, or a fire engine’s might wail with impatient urgency, parting rivers of vehicles. Overhead you may hear the rhythmic whirling of a traffic helicopter, hovering in place, or the roar of an ascending airplane, a sound which quickly dissipates only to be replaced, minutes later, by another plane. In short, sounds come from above and below, near and far, but they play on in the continuous loop of the urban soundtrack. Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(4) 447–452 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015588856 qsw.sagepub.com
An editorial is presented to the article the World Health Organization (WHO) starts timeline of e... more An editorial is presented to the article the World Health Organization (WHO) starts timeline of events associated with the Covid-19 global pandemic with an entry on 31 December 2019 Topics include Chinese officials imposed a lockdown and surrounding areas in a desperate attempt to control the growing epidemic;and the final product imposed additional labor on wonderful production team in India
Reports a study of the development of social science research methods from the 1960s to the prese... more Reports a study of the development of social science research methods from the 1960s to the present; charts the emergence of postmodern methods, globalization and internet impact on methods, and the troubling role of the researcher, of theory, and of technology in methods; discusses the blurring of the lines between humanistic and social science approaches
Questions about sample size have crossed my desk several times of late. They come posed in differ... more Questions about sample size have crossed my desk several times of late. They come posed in different forms. How many do I need? Do I have enough? Is 11 okay? These are not unusual. Emmel (2013) points out that among” the most frequently asked questions” are “how big (or small) does a sample have to be in qualitative research?” Significantly, I have never been asked: do I have too many? In any case, Guetterman (2015) observed the size question “seems to plague new qualitative researchers.”
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2016
This essay is based on a paper delivered in 2014 as part of a panel celebrating the 10th annivers... more This essay is based on a paper delivered in 2014 as part of a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and discussing critical pedagogy and qualitative research methods oriented toward social transformation. In this essay, I briefly examine the history of social work and its relationship to inquiry and pedagogy, my own academic biography, and the twinning of two scholarly initiatives, ICQI and the journal Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice. I argue that the individual transformations and networks that have been nurtured in a decade of ICQI gatherings—taken as a collective whole—offer an exemplar of social transformation grounded in critical pedagogy and qualitative research methods.
Societies greatly vary in how social ills or conditions are framed and addressed. What is sociall... more Societies greatly vary in how social ills or conditions are framed and addressed. What is socially problematic and why specific societal responses are developed depends on competing social values in social, political, and historic context. Social constructionists examine how some social behaviors and conditions come to be publicly viewed as social problems and how these views shape policy and practice. Recent studies document two contemporary trends—the medicalizing and criminalizing of behavior for labeling problems and subjecting them to institutions of social control. Analyses of the social problems process (Best, 2013; Staller, 2009) allow social workers to consider how power, politics, fears, prejudices, and values “create” what is problematic about a variety of social conditions.
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Papers by Karen Staller