Spring is in the air...

and with it conference registrations! I found out Friday that the proposal I'd submitted for the Canadian Association for Information Science conference has been accepted. This will be part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held in Montreal this May 28-June 4. The extended abstract I submitted was an overview of the research I have done this far on the information seeking behaviour of leaders seeking the will of God for their churches. It is an ethnographic study which simply means I am creating a description of a particular group of people's way of living and interacting with the world around them. I am trying to understand that world from the perspective of my respondents, the folks I'm interviewing. We do it by talking to people, observing people, and gathering documents and artifacts. Most of the time when people think about ethnography the image is of anthropologists like Malinowski living in remote jungles, writing about the exotic and strange. But ethnography as a research methodology can help us understand ourselves but making us question what we do, why we do it and what does this say about how we understand the world and our place in it.

In my research I am concerned with how my respondents are seeking the will of God for their church. They value the Bible in this process and they believe in prayer. Whether I understand the will of God as they do is not important. It is their world view I'm trying to understand (though it might make me ask important questions about mine.) They believe prayer is important and that it makes a difference. It is important to them so it is important to me as a researcher. Sometimes sharing their beliefs makes the task harder I think. It might be too easy to make assumptions and forget to ask important questions. When it is very different it is easy to come up with lots of questions. So I'll continue to ask questions of my respondents and hopefully of myself. Maybe I'll see my own world a little clearer in the end.