Thoughts on Frake's Push for Frames & Dimensions

When I write, "I spent all day Sunday on the couch dozing and watching tv", it might not seem terribly surprising. Any grad student who has access to a tv on the Sunday of a three-day weekend might be tempted to blow off the whole day sleeping and catching up on crappy broadcasting. But if I add, "when my grandma called to wish me happy birthday at 9am, I couldn't even answer the phone," now you're thinking, sheesh, this grad student is lazy! But when I build another layer to the frame (if I understand Frake's use of the term), and admit that I feared I wouldn't even be able to talk with dear grandma because of my scratchy throat caused by my cold, the extra layer of context should dispell, well perhaps, some of the judgement of laziness. Actually, I was very motivated to anwer the phone and thank my grandmother for sending a card and a little birthday cash, but I wanted my conversation with her, whenever it might take place, to be fairly clear and coherent. She might not care that much whether I sound like a hoarse frog, but because I don't talk to her all that often, not nearly as often as I would like, I want to sound pretty good, strong and confident, for her.
Although Frake's chapter/talk is a bit dated, based on a conference presentation from 1974, I believe the general thrust continues to be echoed in current proposals in the education sciences. Such work addresses how our methods of inquiry might better account for the great variety and depth of contexts within which cultural participants interact, as both interpreting cultural participant-observers, and as those whose cultural interpretations we as researchers interpret and document. For example, in EdInquiry we questioned whether Deering had "gotten in" sufficiently to make claims on the culture of the middle school where his research took place, and part of that questioning focused on whether the researcher was participating authentically enough in the culture to make his claims. Interpretting participants' talk "authentically enough" would involve, as Frake points out, not only addressing how they ask and answer questions, but also how they "propose, defend, and negotiate interpretations of what is happening" (p. 37).
I've been grappling with the relevance and positionality of the survey project I have been working on the last couple of years. I find newly-released peer-reviewed articles all the time that report on research that looks remarkably similar to my project. I feel, however, having constructed the survey, administered it in schools first-hand, entered the complete data set, and analyzed the data by a variety of statistical methods, that there's a lot more that I could have done to more clearly and comprehensivley represent the viewpoints of the students I surveyed, to communicate their interpretations of the school cultures within which they find themselves challenged to learn. I must say, I like the prospects of my being able to do a better job of employing effective methods to represent their interpretations than the sense I got from Shweder's cynicism toward traditional instruction in ethnographic methods (p. 15).
I called my grandmother in the early afternoon. We had a nice chat, and my grandmother, at 73 years, called me, 30, older than dirt.