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    Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders
    29 Oct 2019Working Paper Summaries

    Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders

    by Tarun Khanna, Karim R. Lakhani, Shubhangi Bhadada, Nabil Khan, Saba Kohli Davé, Rasim Alam, and Meena Hewett
    Research on the traumatic 1947 partition of British India has most often been carried out by scholars in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. This article presents mixed methods research and analysis to explore tensions within current scholarship and to inspire new understandings of the Partition, and more generally, mass migrations and displacement.
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    Author Abstract

    This paper examines the role that the two lead authors’ personal connections played in the research methodology and data collection for the Partition Stories Project—a mixed-methods approach to revisiting the much-studied historical trauma of the Partition of British India in 1947. The Project collected survivors’ oral histories, a data type that is a mainstay of qualitative research, and subjected their narrative data to statistical analysis to detect aggregated trends. In this paper, the authors discuss the process of straddling the dichotomies of insider/outsider and qualitative/quantitative, address the “myth of informed objectivity,” and consider the need for hybrid research structures with the intent to innovate in humanities projects such as this. In presenting key learnings from the project, this paper highlights the tensions that the authors faced between positivist and interpretivist methods of inquiry, looks at the difference between “insider” and “outsider” categories of positionality, and discusses the quantification of qualitative oral history data. The paper concludes with an illustrative example from one of the lead authors’ past research experiences to suggest that the tensions of this project are general in occurrence and global in applicability, beyond the specifics of the Partition case study explored here.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: September 2018
    • HBS Working Paper Number: Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders
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    Tarun Khanna
    Tarun Khanna
    Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor
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    Karim R. Lakhani
    Karim R. Lakhani
    Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration
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